Ross Raymond Nunamaker

Professor Giuseppe Pezzini presented, “Who Wrote the Lord of the Rings?”, which focused on the meta-textual framework Tolkien utilized in the presentation of the Lord of the Rings. This was from his recent book Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation, Cambridge University Press, 2025, which is now on my list of books to purchase.

He opened with the obvious Frodo giving Sam the Redbook and then talked through the ideas of editor and compiler, translator, transference, all of which allow space for error. He shared where the information came from and kept it primarily to the prologue with some reference to the appendix as our reading was up to chapter five.

The topic was of great interest to me, as I have a section in my Turin biography titled, “The Evolution of Story” which engages what stories serve as source material, who wrote them, and the challenges presented, or in other words, the meta-textual framework Tolkien used in writing the Children of Hurin and how I attempted to resolve or codify them to create the biography. 

There were around fifty participants in the U.S. session I attended, and my break out group had five people, I did not get locations of where everyone was from, but we talked about the framing, his taking the medieval approach similar to scribes who may have missed, miss spelled, or embellished as they went. One person mentioned a Welsh Red Book as a possible inspiration. 

Given my particular interest in the topic and enjoyment of the presentation I did email the professor to thank him for his time in making the presentation and explained my interest to which I received a nice email in return. It may not be the same as a handwritten letter, but in the age of text messages and emoji’s it sure felt like an exchange of letters of old.

All in all, another wonderful evening of engagement by fans of Tolkien who got to meet one another, talk, and engage more deeply in the stories we all love so much.