The Great Tales of Middle-earth (V1, V3)
This seminar combines a comparative and genetic critical (the history and stages of creating a text) perspective with close reading and analysis of Tolkien’s four Great Tales.
We will thus study the stages of development of each tale in prose as well as verse forms and examine them against a background of world literature, including Greek mythology, the Bible, Old Norse, and Old English texts, medieval poetic models, Romanticism (including medievalism and the Gothic novel), and literary modernism.
Each student will be involved in group work on a particular tale and will research secondary materials in order to provide an annotated bibliography dealing with the themes, characters, and major events of the tale.
Principle texts include: Tolkien, The Silmarillion (1977), The Children of Húrin (2007), The Lays of Beleriand (2015), The Story of Kullervo (2015), Beren and Lúthien (2017), The Fall of Gondolin (2020). Other texts will be indicated by the instructor.
- Kursleiter/in: Stephanie Glaser