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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Tolkien insisted that he did not consciously invent many of the details in his stories, including most famously the Ents. These characters, he insisted, were compounded of “philology, literature, and life,” drawing on particular words from Old English, stories like Shakespeare, and the actual differences between “male” and “female” attitudes towards gardening. In this episode, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown explores the roots of the Ents in the Old English poem “The Ruin,” Tolkien’s work for the Oxford English Dictionary on words beginning with “w,” the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the song Frodo sang at the Prancing Pony—and its “Mannish” predecessor about the Man in the Moon. What do giants have to do with towers and the “stain” on the Moon? It is all part of the mystery of “asterisk reality” and the love of Logos.