Death and Immortality in Middle-earth: Proceedings of The Tolkien Society Seminar 2016 J.R.R. Tolkien deplored allegory and rejected any suggestion that The Lord of the Rings has an inner meaning or message. In reading back the tale, however, he became aware of a dominant motif: 'The real theme for me is… Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race "doomed" to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the...

The papers focus on the theme of worldbuilding in fantasy and science fiction, in all its forms, in different media. Featuring papers from Ricardo Victoria-Uribe and Martha Elba González- Alcaraz, Allen Stroud, Sarah McPherson, Sébastien Doubinsky, Cheryl Morgan, Peter Garrett, Eugen Bacon, Octavia Cade, Enrico Spadaro, Tatiana Fajardo, Claire Burgess, Ellen Forget, Kevin Cooney, Jyrki Korpua, Rachel Jones.

The First and Second Ages within Tolkien's legendarium feel like a time far removed from that of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings even though they constitute the underpinnings of J.R.R. Tolkien's entire mythology. This book explores those underpinnings and in particular the nature of good and evil, creators and destroyers, and the very foundations of the world itself. It is a diverse collection of four articles, which will no doubt cause the...

Poetry and Song in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien: proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar 2017. J.R.R. Tolkien regarded himself 'chiefly as a poet' (Carpenter, The Inklings, p. 29) and the importance of poetic diction and its most potent form, song, provides a powerful leitmotif to his mythological universe. Following the publication of Tolkien's two verse works: The Lay of Atrou and Itroun (2016) and Beren, and Luthien (2017), the Tolkien Society...

A newly married couple surrounded by the beauty of Paris, each in their own way struggling to define what marriage could and should look like. A high school teacher confronting echoes of his past as his current love negotiates the place of art in her own life. An artist explaining why the work that should have been the pinnacle of his career fell unexpectedly flat. A rich young man exploring and painting a new landscape and perhaps creating an alternate...

Few twentieth-century authors can compete with J.R.R. Tolkien. More than three-quarters of a century after the publication of The Hobbit in 1937, his works continue to captivate millions of readers across the world. As a collection of papers delivered in 2012 at the Tolkien Society's international conference of the same name, The Return of the Ring is representative of the wide and varied responses Tolkien's works have generated over the decades....

Few twentieth-century authors can compete with J.R.R. Tolkien. More than three-quarters of a century after the publication of The Hobbit in 1937, his works continue to captivate millions of readers across the world. As a collection of papers delivered in 2012 at the Tolkien Society's international conference of the same name, The Return of the Ring is representative of the wide and varied responses Tolkien's works have generated over the decades....

Blade Runner 2049 is a 2017 sequel to the 1982 movie Blade Runner, about a world in which some human-looking replicants have become dangerous, so that other human-looking replicants, as well as humans, have the job of hunting down the dangerous models and "retiring" (destroying) them. Both films have been widely hailed as among the greatest science-fiction movies of all time, and Ridley Scott, director of the original Blade Runner, has announced that...

Hosted online, the Tolkien Society 2021 winter seminar sought to explore how J.R.R. Tolkien has been received in the twenty-first century. With a broad range of Tolkien's writings being published in the last twenty-two years, adaptions embellishing on Tolkien's stories, and new philosophies offering innovative ways to read Tolkien, the twenty-first century continues to bring us revised visions of Tolkien. This proceedings offers a range of insights...

Now in Paperback! Between an ancient Roman's trip to the moon and the fantastic tales of H.G. Wells lies a journey through time and space and an awesome evolution in scientific thinking. From Gilgamesh's search for immortality to Lucian's odyssey on the moon; from Jonathan Swift's hilarious satire on scientists in Gulliver's Travels to Mary Shelley's horrifying description of a scientist who has gone too far in Frankenstein from Edgar Allan Poe's...