CLT335H1

Tolkien and the Matter of Britain (and Ireland)

This course examines the works of J.R.R. Tolkien through the lens of his usage of Celtic tropes, literatures, mythologies and histories as a testimony to the fortunes of Celticity in Romantic and Victorian Britain. We will read his major works (focusing especially on The Silmarillion, Fall of Gondolin, and Lord of the Rings) as inspired by post-Victorian British and Irish poetics, historiography, and medievalist literature to trace how Tolkien both absorbed and transformed them to build a universe infused with Celtic nostalgia.