LITR354

In medieval England the Anglo-Saxons referred to the world as "middengeard", or Middle-earth, a term better understood today as referencing J.R.R. Tolkien's creation. The equivalence is not a coincidence, as Tolkien drew on Old English conceptions while infusing them with his own 20th century sensibility in creating his fictionalized world. This hybridized sense of Middle-earth as an intersection of the medieval and the modern is the subject of this course. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and well-versed in medieval literature--one could say immersed in it, and his creation of Middle-earth is a direct response to both his love for and intimate knowledge of medieval literature, and a response to what he saw as lacking in both the Old English corpus and the modern world. This course proposes to explore his created world of Middle-earth, primarily his novels THE LORD OF THE RINGS and THE SILMARILLION through the lens of intertextuality. Drawing in particular on Julia Kristeva's notion of the intertext (and through her, Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogue), we will examine the Old English poetry that is in dialogue with Tolkien's modern works, primarily BEOWULF as well as poems such as THE WANDERER and THE BATTLE OF MALDON, along with Old Norse works such as VOLSUNGSSAGA, and early Middle Englsih texts like SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT and PEARL. Tolkien was a medievalist said to describe his task in creating the world of Middle-earth as "creating a mythology for English" and we will explore that world through the medieval works that infuse it.