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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Critics from Edmund Wilson (The Nation, 1956) to Andrew Rissik (The Guardian, 2000) and Richard Eyre (The Guardian, 2004) have described The Lord of the Rings as “essentially a children’s book,” a monument to kitsch and Tolkien’s inability to face the real issues that concern adults in the modern world. In this episode, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown contrasts the critics’ insistence that Tolkien was writing for children—or childlike readers—with Tolkien’s own insistence that he was writing for adults, not children at all. What was at stake for Tolkien in writing fairy stories “for children”—and did it have any effect on his “heartfelt loathing” for Disney?