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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What did Frodo mean when he said that returning to the Shire at the end of the hobbits’ journey through Middle-earth felt “like falling asleep again”? What kind of journey had the hobbits been on? In this episode, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown reads Night 61 of The Notion Club Papers, following Ramer as he describes his experiments with time-travel—and dreams. Ramer’s exercises are shown to have a curious similarity with T.S. Eliot’s invocation of time in Burnt Norton (1936): “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future,” raising the question of what Eliot and Tolkien had been reading about the nature of time. As a bonus, we learn what meteorites remember—and why it is dangerous to dream-journey without a guardian.