Tolkien

Forthcoming talks and lectures: Glasgow, Kalamazoo, Essex, Oxford and North Wales

The next few months are going to be a bit hectic! If you are attending any of the conferences or events below, don’t hesitate to come and say hello!

26-27 April – Keynote for GIFCon (Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations) 2018: ‘In the blood and in the landscape: escaping (into) the “Celtic” past in contemporary children’s fantasy’

10-13 May – paper for Tolkien sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan: ‘“Queer” Border, “Hidden Kingdom”: Perceptions of Wales in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work’

24 May – seminar for the Centre for Myth Studies (University of Essex), Myth Reading Group: ‘“The Battle of the Trees”: from medieval Welsh legend to modern fantasy’

5 June – panel discussion on “Mythopoeia: Myth-creation and Middle-earth” for the Bodleian Library’s “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” exhibition, alongside Professor Dame Marina Warner, Professor Verlyn Flieger, and moderated by Professor Carolyne Larrington. You can book tickets here: https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/whatson/whats-on/upcoming-events/2018/june/tolkien

23 June – public lecture for the Story Museum and Royal Entomological Society exhibition “Insects Through the Looking Glass” titled: ‘Wings, Antennae, and Stings: Tolkien’s Creepy Crawlies’. This is a free event, but please book via this link: http://www.storymuseum.org.uk/whats-on/wings-antennae-stings-tolkiens-creepy-crawlies/

20-22 July – course for Tŷ Newydd (the National Writing Centre of Wales) on ‘(Re)telling traditional narratives: myth, legend, fairy tale’, alongside Catherine Fisher

In-between the above, I will also be in Leeds on 1st July for the Tolkien Society Seminar, and then will remain in Leeds from the 2nd till the 5th of July for the Tolkien sessions I have organized for the International Medieval Congress.

By Dimitra Fimi | April 23, 2018 | Academic Teaching, Books, Celtic Myth, Children's Fantasy, Conferences, Fantasy Literature, Folklore, Irish myth and folklore, Literature Wales, Myth and Folklore, Public Lecture, Tolkien, Welsh myth an folklore | No Comments |

New journal article: J.R.R. Tolkien and early 20th-century radical linguistic experimentation

Last month I had a new journal article published in the Open Access Journal of Tolkien Research:

Fimi, D. (2018) ‘Language as Communication vs. Language as Art: J.R.R. Tolkien and Early 20th-Century Radical Linguistic Experimentation’, Journal of Tolkien Research, 5(1), pp. 1-28. Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol5/iss1/2/

The article was an outgrowth of the research I did for A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages, co-edited with Andrew Higgins.

One the one hand, I have always wondered about one of Tolkien’s rather pointed remarks when referring to International Auxiliary Languages:

At present I think we should be likely to get an inhumane language without any cooks at all – their place being taken by nutrition experts and dehydrators. (A Secret Vice, p. 5, italics added)

Who were these “nutrition experts and dehydrators”? My article offers a potential answer to this question, by tracing the history of language invention, and the idea of sound symbolism, and then placing Tolkien’s comment within the exact historical and intellectual moment of the delivery of “A Secret Vice”.

On the other hand, Tolkien’s manuscripts edited and presented in A Secret Vice revealed unexpected links with Modernist and avant-garde movements of the time, including James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. The article traces the remarkable parallels between Tolkien’s theorizing of imaginary languages and the radical linguistic ideas of Modernist and other avant-garde writers of the early 20^th century (not only Joyce and Stein, but also the zaum and Dada poets). The article shows that, despite political and ideological differences, Tolkien and experimental writers engaged with current linguistic research and came to similar aesthetic and imaginative responses.

As an overarching argument, the article claims that at the heart of Tolkien’s exploration in “A Secret Vice” (and its accompanying papers) is the question of language as communication vs. language as art. It argues that Tolkien’s language invention navigates the (perceived) binary between a utilitarian aim for language invention (contemporary International Auxiliary Languages) vs. an aesthetic linguistic pursuit (contemporary Modernist and other avant-garde linguistic experimentation), by choosing a third (middle) way.

You can read the article here

By Dimitra Fimi | April 21, 2018 | A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages, Invented Languages, Journal Articles, Tolkien | No Comments |

New article on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters in The Conversation

I had a new (festive) article published yesterday on the The Conversation, titled: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christmas letters to his children bring echoes of Middle-earth to the North Pole”. In this article I discuss the letters from Father Christmas Tolkien sent to his children, and the creation of an entire parallel Christmas mythology (alongside his Middle-earth legendarium) which appropriated American popular culture about Santa Claus, but also added new characters, details and even invented languages and scripts! Some of the research that went into this piece is also included in my first monograph, Tolkien, Race and Cultural History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

You can read the entire article here.

By Dimitra Fimi | December 22, 2017 | Children's Fantasy, Children's Literature, Christmas, Invented Languages, Myth and Folklore, The Hobbit, Tolkien | No Comments |