The Worlds Of J.R. R. Tolkien
It was the quiet, pious and conventional Oxford professor, J. R. R. Tolkien, who turned fantasy literature into the most popular literary genre in the modern world, especially with his great trilogy of the 1950s, The Lord of the Rings. This talk is intended to explain what sort of man he was, and what formed his life and beliefs and inspired his work. It also poses the question of how far he can be regarded as essentially a Christian author, as many devoutly Christian commentators have claimed, and how much his fantasy world was a much more complex creation, including both pagan and folkloric themes. In doing so this talk seeks to account for the remarkable public success of his stories and their huge influence among such a varied readership
Speaker: Professor Ronald Hutton is a Professor of History at the University of Bristol. He is a leading authority on history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on ancient and medieval paganism and magic, and on the global context of witchcraft beliefs.
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