Tolkien's Originality
Programming 3 (Westminster 1)
Sunday October 7, 2018 - 4:00 pm to 4:50 pm
Tolkien's name tends to get used as shorthand for ubiquitous fantasy features we find boring or flat: "a dwarf, an elf and an orc walk into a quest" gets called "Tolkienesque." But what about Tolkien's melancholic affect, or the quiet introspection, or the broad spectrum of masculinities and centring of friendships between men? Let's discuss what features of Tolkien's work are now rare or unusual, what "Tolkienesque" means to us, and what we'd like to see more of.
