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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“I’m always looking for something I can’t find… Something like what I wrote myself. There’s nothing like being vain, is there?” In his letters to publishers and publicists, Tolkien alternately apologized for having to write his own stories because (in Lewis’s words) there was “too little of what we really like in stories” and expressed the hope that others would be inspired to write stores within the “majestic whole” he sketched in his legendarium. Why was it so hard for Lewis and Tolkien to find stories that they liked when, as we saw in our previous episode, Tolkien drew constantly on other people’s stories in crafting his own? Was Tolkien, after all, simply writing fan fiction? In this episode, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown explores further the question of Tolkien’s creativity by reading from her own fan fiction written on the model of Alexander Pope and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If “a little learning is a dangerous thing,” what happens when a band of modern poets sets out to write a heroic satire using contemporary figures as its main characters? You guessed it: mayhem ensues!