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Apr 18, 2024
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ENG 386 - Living Traditions: J.R.R. Tolkien (3)
Perhaps no literature participates in the purely imaginative as much as fantasy, and Tolkien’s important ideas about human co-creation underwrite his work, which continues to cast a long shadow on the genre. Tolkien’s invented realm of Middle-earth is deeply rooted in our actual world, grounded in medieval literature and norse mythology, inseparable from the anxieties of pre-war England, participating in the hopeful realism of his faith. In addition to Tolkien’s own writing, we will delve into his medieval and mythological sources, the work of contemporaries such as C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and of course exemplars of modern fantasy. Tolkien understood the fantastic not as merely “escapist” literature-a derisive term-but as a vehicle for myth, for enduring images and truths that guide us as we escape into imagined worlds in order to better find a place within our own.
Prerequisite(s): ENG 200.
Offered Fall 2022 and Fall 2025.
Living Traditions courses illuminate ways in which writers, writing from within their social milieu and in a given form or mode, use art to explore vital questions of human existence. Starting with a representative figure, these courses explore that author’s historical and literary influences as well as the contemporary legacy, examining ways in which literary artists and their ideas continue to transform culture.
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