Professor Rachel Fulton Brown takes you on a journey through the creation of JRR Tolkien’s legendarium, from its origins in Tolkien’s conversations with C.S. Lewis about the power of myth to its realization in the stories of the Silmarillion. Extended version of the course that she teaches at the University of Chicago.
Episode guide: https://fencingbearatprayer.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-forge-of-tolkien.html
Syllabus and course blog: http://tolkienmedievalandmodern.blogspot.com/
Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where she teaches courses on the history of Christianity, medieval European religious, cultural, and intellectual history, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. She blogs as Fencing Bear at Prayer, and she lectures on Logos, Tolkien, and medieval history at UATV. The Dragon Common Room is her online classroom for training poets in the arts of the Christian imagination. She and co-creators KJ Crilly, Kilts Khalfan, and Mel Wiggin host the Mosaic Ark on her UATV Logos and History channel.
Website: https://www.dragoncommonroom.com
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In 1938, Tolkien gave a lecture at St. Andrew’s University on the topic of “fairy stories,” ostensibly meaning to explain what “fairy stories” were. In the course of the lecture, however, Tolkien spent more time explaining what they weren’t—travelers' tales, beast fables, dreams, children’s stories—than, it would seem, explaining what they were. Why did Tolkien find it so hard to define fairy stories other than in the negative? What was he thinking of when he defined them not as stories about fairies, but as stories about “Faërie,” aka the Perilous Realm? In this episode, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown reads the published version of Tolkien's lecture for clues about what Tolkien intended his own fairy stories to achieve. We pull back the veil of Fantasy to learn why real fairy stories have happy endings—and why our reading of Tolkien's own stories has only just begun.