Tolkienists.org

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies launched a new era of adaptations of fantasy. The resulting adaptations — of the works of J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, George R.R. Martin, the Marvel superhero tradition and much else besides — now have fan bases often wholly separate from those of their literary source texts. Rather than dwelling on what any given example gets ​‘wrong’ or ​‘right,’ this panel discussion will consider this bifurcation of the audience of a popular literary genre. If, as Tom Shippey suggests, fantasy deserves to be taken seriously because of its popularity, what are the ramifications of atomising the popular followings of these texts into ​“book-readers” and ​“showwatchers”? How has this division altered the experience of being a fan, scholar or teacher of such texts? And do the adaptations offer the same Tolkienian Recovery that make the source texts as resonant as they are?”