ENGL375 J.R.R. Tolkien: Middle-earth and Beyond

Welcome to Tolkien: Middle-Earth and Beyond! During these six weeks we will engage with Tolkien’s richly layered works from a variety of themes and perspectives. Prepare to grapple with the big and small questions Tolkien raises about friendship, beauty, healing, love of other, and perseverance, while exploring his metaphysical symbolism, the grand vision of a cosmic struggle, and the intertwining of transcendent and immanent, physical and spiritual, linear and cyclical, seen and unseen, old and new. At the end of the course, we will read and compare the themes of story-telling, “true myth,” and the power of language between Tolkien’s trilogy and the contemporary Russian novel Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin.

Texts: The Lord of the Rings; The Silmarillion; selected essays by J.R.R.R. Tolkien; Beowulf and the Sellic Spell Laurus, by Eugene Vodolazkin

Section(s):
0101 -  Vessela Valiavitcharska