Posted: 18.03.06 19:18. Post subject: The Oxford Tolkien Conference (2006)

The Oxford Tolkien Conference
The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration
21st-25th August 2006

John Garth Tolkien, Exeter, and the Great War

Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, Edmund Weiner Tolkien and the English Language: The Word as Leaf

Wayne G. Hammond Tolkien and Oxford University

For more than thirty years Tolkien lived his life according to the rhythms of scholarship at Oxford. What that meant to him, and the effect it had on both his academic writings and his fiction, is too little appreciated. Although Humphrey Carpenter devotes a chapter of his excellent biography to a typical day in the life of Professor Tolkien, his account greatly oversimplifies the complex and burdensome situation in which Tolkien often found himself while trying to balance responsibilities to students, colleagues, family, friends, and publishers. Recent research into university and college archives at Oxford reveals a fuller picture, which in turn sheds new light on the writing of works such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

(The subject of this paper is tentative, pending permission to quote from unpublished archives.)

Verlyn Flieger Gilson, Smith, and Baggins: Sacrifice and Meaning in France and Middle-earth

One of the most powerful inspirations for creativity is loss. From the Middle English poem Pearl to Tennysons In Memoriam, great works of literature have arisen out of grief and bereavement. This paper will examine the influence on Tolkiens major work The Lord of the Rings, of the loss in war of Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Smith, two of the immortal four (the other two being Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman) that made up Tolkiens earliest and most formative fellowship, the TCBS.

The relevant circumstances are these: on about July 18 or 19, 1916, Tolkien, posted to France with the Lancashire Fusiliers, got a letter from Geoffrey Smith telling him that Rob Gilson had been killed in the first assault of the Battle of the Somme on July 1. Subsequently sent home with trench fever, Tolkien learned in December that Smith had himself died in France on December 3 of wounds from a shell bursting behind the lines.

While still in France Tolkien wrote of going out into the woods to absorb the news of Gilsons death, of not feeling a member of a complete body anymore. A man of deep faith and insidious doubt, Tolkien wrestled with the loss of Gilson and Smith, and with the meaning of such deaths in a war that by that time seemed to many a meaningless stalemate.

Back in England, he began serious work on the mythology he intended to dedicate to England. Mythology is the search for and derivation of meaning from an otherwise chaotic and meaningless world. The Lord of the Rings, Tolkiens masterpiece and the heart of his mythology, is part of his own search. Within it, the story of the sacrifice of Frodo Baggins owes much of its poignance to the deaths of Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Smith. Like them, Frodo is an ordinary man caught against his will in extraordinary circumstances and paying a price he never owed to a world that did not value his sacrifice. In creating Frodo Baggins, whose sacrifice, like Gilsons and Smiths, benefited everyone but himself, Tolkien, perhaps unconsciously, found a way to re-present his boyhood friends and honour the meaning of their lives.

 Posted: 18.03.06 19:19. Post subject: Re:

Father Guglielmo Spirito, OFM Conv. The Influence of Holiness: The Healing Power of Tolkien’s Narrative

In the last years of his life, Tolkien received a letter from Carole Batten-Phelps, who wrote of "a sanity and sanctity" in The Lord of the Rings, "which is a power in itself". If sanctity inhabits an author's work, he replied, or a pervading light illumines it, then "it does not come from him but through him". What does this statement imply? It sounds very much like an authentic synthesis of the inner dynamism of Tolkien's work. But to what type of "sanity" and "sanctity" is he referring? Is he speaking only of a genial literary sub-creation which ultimately can be reduced to "lies breathed through silver" (in C.S. Lewis' s famous phrase)? Or is there really an "invisible lamp" which gives light and inner consistency to everything? And why did he think that to deny this "lamp" would lead us "either to sadness or wrath", while by welcoming it we may become - as Frodo did - "like a glass filled with clear light for eyes to see that can"?

Marcel Bülles Tolkien Studies in Germany

Patrick Curry Tolkien and Enchantment

Taking my lead from Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories", I will explore enchantment as an experience which was an important inspiration in Tolkien's life for his work, and which is accordingly important in that work, perhaps especially in The Lord of the Rings, where it is identified as close to if not at the very heart of Elvendom. I will also look at some of the tensions between this and some of Tolkien's other values and commitments, referring for this purpose to the few other modern writers on the subject of enchantment, notably Max Weber.

Robert Lazu Inside the Belly of the Dragon: Levels of Initiation in Tolkien’s Works

In a 1958 letter addressed to the Jesuit scholar Robert Murray, Tolkien stated that "the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism." The religious element in Tolkien's literary work has been studied by authors such as Pearce, Birzer, and Caldecott, but the symbolism of religious persuasion has been far less addressed. As far as I know there is no monograph about coded symbolism in Tolkien's works, despite the fact that he deployed a wide range of images and symbols familiar to several religious traditions. Mythologic analysis (mythanalysis) is an interdisiplinary method was established and perfected by historians of religion such as Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu and literary critics such as Nicolae Balot, Gilbert Durand, and Northrop Frye. Fields as far apart as theology, history of religion, and comparative literature can be fruitfully brought together, and the topic of religious symbolism (usually associated with classical mythology and the Jewish and Christian traditions) can be also discussed in modern works. The method is also flexible enough to include elements of Christian anthropology.

My paper will focus on a recurring symbolic theme to be found in Tolkien's work: the process of the initiation of the hero, confronted with the dragon. Analysed before by some important scholars of folklore and historians of religion, such as V.I. Propp, M. Eliade, W. Bölsche, G.E. Smith, A.R. Radcliff-Brown, and E.A.W. Budge, the theme of the hero confronting the monster represents one of the keystones in a process of initiation undergone by each and every hero in Tolkien's stories: Beren, Aragorn, Gandalf, and even the little hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Following this hermeneutic path, we see that the religious symbolism is indeed an extremely powerful element in Tolkien's work, and we appreciate better some of the cultural horizons it opens up for the modern reader.

 Posted: 18.03.06 19:21. Post subject: Re:

Christina Scull Tolkien, Kullervo and the Kalevala

As a schoolboy Tolkien was attracted by the Kalevala, the great national epic of Finland. He found the work so impressive, even in translation, that he sought to learn more about the language in which it was originally composed. Later, at Oxford, he was inspired to deliver a paper on the Kalevala to meetings of the Sundial Society at Corpus Christi College and the Essay Club of his own college, Exeter; and he began to write, in a style indebted to William Morris, a retelling of one of the major episodes of the Kalevala, the story of Kullervo. Although he left the manuscript of 'Kullervo' unfinished, the exercise was not wasted: it was his first significant experience of writing fiction in prose, and when he came to create 'The Silmarillion' the story of Kullervo served as one source for the tale of Trin Turambar. A close examination of the original manuscripts of Tolkien's Kalevala paper and his version of 'Kullervo' helps to illuminate seminal activities of his early years as a scholar and storyteller.

(The subject of this paper is tentative, pending permission to quote from unpublished archives.)

Alison Milbank Tolkien, Thomism and Chesterton

Tolkien makes a number of references to G. K. Chesterton both in his essay on fairy stories and in his letters. My paper will examine Chesterton's influence on Tolkien as a fellow (specifically English) Catholic and as a writer of the fantastic. Although Tolkien claimed that his fantasy went beyond the "recovery of a clear view" with which he associated Chesterton's way of rendering ordinary reality strange and bizarre, I shall detect in both writers a common theological realism. This I shall attribute in some part to the revival of the study of Thomas Aquinas amongst Catholics in the early twentieth century, and in particular to the work of Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher whose "Art and Scholasticism" was first translated by Chesterton's model for Father Brown (Fr. John O'Connor) with help from Eric Gill. This will help us to see how the particular "reality effect" of Lord of the Rings is the result of a theology in which the created universe is both utterly real but also utterly contingent.

Michaël Devaux Tolkien and Louis Bouyer: A Friendship Between Writers

We often read that Tolkien was gallophobic. His friendship with the French theologian Louis Bouyer, from the Congregation of the Oratory, which flies in the face of this caricature, is largely unknown. A deep relationship between the two writers is apparent from Bouyer's own writings. Bouyers detailed knowledge of Middle-earth may be deduced from his works, both theological (such as Le mtier de thogien) and imaginative (such as the novel Prlude l'Apocalypse). He came to know Tolkien personally, and wrote the first article in French on The Lord of the Rings in 1958. A comparison with other articles published in France before the French translation of The Lord of the Rings appeared shows the depth of Bouyer's approach.

 Posted: 18.03.06 19:22. Post subject: Re:

Marek Oziewicz From Vico to Tolkien: The Argument for the Mythopoeic Construction of Human Consciousness

While it has not yet been acknowledged, there is a strong parallel between the Italian philologist Giovanni Battista Vico and the English philologist J. R. R. Tolkien. Their work was dismissed by the academia during their lives but rediscovered and enthusiastically embraced as highly important by later generations. Just as the work of Vico stands out as a protest against the predominant rationalism of the eighteenth century, so the work of Tolkien does against the stifling rationalism of the twentieth. Each of them channelled his entire creative power into one big project. For Vico the work of his life was Scienca Nuova (1744) in which he attempted to reconstruct the histories of ancient civilizations known to him and thereby explain the mechanisms on which human societies and institutions are based. For Tolkien the work of his life was the reconstruction of the history of the Middle-earth, spread out among several books from The Hobbit (1937), through The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), the Silmarillion (1977) and works unfinished at the time of his death. At its core, this huge project was not about inventing elvish mythologies; it was Tolkiens attempt to uncover the universal principles which regulate the rise and demise of civilisationsprinciples which, if understood, would suggest answers to who we are and why we are here.

In this paper I shall argue for Tolkien as having embodied in his writing the mythological method that Vico advocated under the name of con-sciencaa type of holistic discourse which integrates the rational and the intuitive in an artistic form. Although Vicos work is commonly classified under history, and Tolkiens under fiction, I demonstrate that these categories blend in their works for they are both in search of poetic knowledge which can shed light on our oldest questions. Just like Vico, Tolkien suggests that humans are traditional beings who live in larger, largely unconscious structures, which it is dangerous or impossible to change. Just like Vico, he asserts that myth is the language of the human psyche which is true even when it is not factual and as such constitutes the main mode of our knowledge of reality. Finally, just like Vicos, Tolkiens oeuvre can be taken as one extended argument for the mythopoeic construction of human consciousness.

Stratford Caldecott Tolkien’s England

Attempting to draw together some of the threads from the conference as a whole, this paper will examine Tolkiens semi-serious, self-proclaimed, and partially unfulfilled intention to produce a mythology for England and will ask the question, What did Tolkien mean by England? It will touch on the Elvish England of the early poetic vision, centred on Warwick, and the ways in which this vision was transformed into something more universal. Was Tolkiens England pagan or Christian? Clearly it was a bit of both, but does this mean the mythology was a failure, or does it point towards a new way of understanding Christianity?

http://www.tolkiensoxford.com/index.asp