This course will look at Tolkien's weaving of myths into a vision of a cosmic structure that is at once fantastic and profoundly philosophical. Be prepared for many nights reading by the fire! We will read the complete texts of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, an academic essay written by Tolkien ("On Fairy-Stories"), a short story ("Leaf, by Niggle"), and a smattering of his letters. To further contextualize these, we will also read brief excerpts from the Voluspa, the Volsunga Saga, and the Silmarillion.
Novels authored by J. R. R. Tolkien may be found in the General Stacks at PR6039.032.
Here are some example searches on your class topic in the library catalog. To conduct your own searches, go to the library homepage.
Click on this link to search for books and articles on your topic. Type keywords relating to your topic in the box under "Search Everything."
Check out these books in print and/or online for further reading on your topic.
Use broad reference materials to find out background information about your topic - this will help you narrow your future searches and will also give you keywords that will help you find the most relevant sources. Credo can be a good place to start for that first step in research.
Credo Reference provides access to a large number of encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and other reference books. Subjects covered include art, biography, history, literature, music, religion, and science and technology.
Multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. Includes searchable PDF content going back as far as 1887.
Provides articles from 1,900+ scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, and sciences and around 5,000 ebooks. Coverage dates for journals are from the very first issue of each journal (the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries for many) and continues to 2 – 5 years prior to the current year (moving wall).
L'Année philologique covers 89 years of classical bibliography from 1924 to the present day. This database contains scholarly works relating to every aspect of Greek and Roman civilization.
Provides a broad spectrum of information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and time-frames—to give students, professors, and researchers a foundation of literary reference works to meet their research needs.
The MLA International Bibliography is a subject index for books, articles and websites published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. It is produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), an organization dedicated to the study and teaching of language and literature.
Below is a sampling of scholarly articles written about Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.