The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow is holding a special event to celebrate the 70th anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight lecture. It will be held on-campus and online on Thursday 27 April 2023, 5-6:30pm BST. Attendance is free.
On 15 April 1953, Tolkien delivered the W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture, on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to an audience of 300 at the University of Glasgow. The essay was published posthumously, in 1983, in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien.
Join us at Glasgow on Thursday 27 April 2023, 5-6:30pm BST, on-campus (Joseph Black Building) or online, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the lecture and its significance, Tolkien’s links to Glasgow, and the importance of the Sir Gawain text in Tolkien’s creativity.
The panel of speakers:
- Professor Jeremy Smith, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Glasgow
- Dr Lydia Zeldenrust, Lecturer in Middle English Literature, University of Glasgow
- Dr Andoni Cossio, Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow
- Chair: Dr Dimitra Fimi, Senior Lecturer in Fantasy and Children’s Literature, and Co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic
For those attending on-campus, there will be an opportunity to see a pop-up exhibition with documentation related to Tolkien’s appointment as the 1953 W.P. Ker Memorial Lecturer (including a hand-written letter by Tolkien), in collaboration with Archives & Special Collections, University of Glasgow.
Register your attendance here.
