Oxford is a natural home to fantasy literature with those who worked or studied here having written so many famous and influential texts (e.g. Lewis Carroll (C.L. Dodgson), C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Susan Cooper, Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner, and Philip Pullman to name but a few) — leading to the notion of an “Oxford School of Fantasy.” These lectures, short talks, and interviews seek to take listeners into these works and these writers and beyond.
… Interview with Catherine McIlwaine, Tolkien Archivist at the Bodleian. This second part deals with the 2018 exhibition itself, putting it together, and feedback from visitors.
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… Interview with Catherine McIlwaine, the Tolkien Archivist, by Stuart Lee on the Tolkien archive at Bodley. Part one contains details about the history of the archive, its relationship to the collection at Marquette University, how the collection came to be at Oxford, and what it contains.
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This lecture is an introduction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s third major work, The Silmarillion (1977), and considers its lengthy development in numerous prose and verse texts over fifty years.
This lecture offers a guided tour through the development of J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Silmarillion’ corpus, inclusive of The Silmarillion (1977) and the earlier versions of the same work published in the History of Middle Earth series (1983−1996). The most mythological and magisterial of Tolkien’s major works, the 1977 Silmarillion (and its antecedents) gives the reader a very different experience and perspective than his more famous and widely read works, The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954 – 55). A mythology in the true sense, the ‘Silmarillion’ corpus is peopled with gods and other preternatural beings and represents the earliest comprehensive work of Tolkien’s imagination. Since it was begun in earnest in the middle of the First World War, one of the most turbulent periods in modern history, its tone is more sober and its events more tragic than those of his other classics, but its powerful messages of nobility in the face of defeat and courage in darkness resonate with the world events of the time in which it was produced.
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