Tolkien biographer John Garth is set to teach a course on “Tolkien’s Wars and Middle-earth” at the Mythgard Institute this Autumn.
Garth is the author of the award-winning Tolkien and the Great War, and is the Humanities Fellow for 2015–16 at the Black Mountain Institute.
Mythgard Institute classes are based online, and can be taken for MA-level credits or just for fun as auditors.
Course Description
A century after Tolkien began crafting his legendarium, it’s time to ask what it had to do with the cataclysmic changes of his times. What did he do in the First World War, and how did it change him? What became of his first “fellowship” of friends? How does the trench experience infuse The Lord of the Rings and other works, and how does all this relate to his other passions – myth and fairy-tale, the medieval, and the invention of languages? What about the Second World War, and Tolkien’s famous denial of allegorical reference to it? Throughout, biographer John Garth will draw from the on-going research that produced his award-winning book Tolkien and the Great War – much of it previously unseen. You’ll never look at Tolkien and Middle-earth in the same way again.
To find out more, and to enroll in the class, visit the Mythgard Institute website.