Since giving my first talk in 2021, I often begin thinking of my next talk topic immediately after Oxonmoot closes when so many new ideas are swirling in my head. Typically there is a call for papers by the Tolkien Society made in February or March of the year for Oxonmoot that runs through the end of April or May. By that time, I like to have a draft of my talk completed. Announcements are made in the summer with the conference taking place the first weekend of September.
When the session schedule is announced, I first check to see where my talk landed. The past few years it was Saturday at 8:00 p.m. ET and this year it was set at 6:00 p.m. on Friday. In hindsight, this move made the entire conference much more enjoyable for me. I listened to talks Friday morning, had the afternoon break, and the online only evening began at 5:30. I was able to log-in and get a sense of the room, without thinking too much about it, and I was up talking.
I then had the rest of the night and the rest of the event to focus on other’s sessions and not how I should tweak my own based on what I heard from others or questions, etc.
Having my slot when I did worked out well for me. I started reviewing session titles and speakers. As I scrolled the sessions available to me as an online registrant, I did a card sort. I organized sessions into one of three buckets: Project required, Personally interesting, and Why not? (for this post I added LM – presenters with backgrounds more or less, like me, or A – those who were academics or published as an author/illustrator/artists).
Every year things happen, such as timezone issues resulting in missing a talk or a speaker having the same issue, but given everything happening at once by a primarily volunteer organization a small handful of misses is really rather insignificant.
After those related to my project, the one’s that are intriguing are those potentially entertaining regardless of the topic and more due to the presenter, and the final group are all the others. In this group I often am pleasantly surprised by those whose content and delivery I hadn’t seen coming in the best way possible.
Breaking down this year’s program, the Project Required landed me with:
- “A Hutch to Trammel Some Wild Thing in”: Few but Powerful, Wild Women in Middle-earth, Charlotte Brockway (A)
- The Women of the House of Beor: Beauty, Coldness, and the Burden of Understanding, Sara Brown (A)
- Fathers and Sons: The Lost Road, The Notion Club Papers and the Akallabeth, Annamarie Kovacs-Mitchell (A)
- Tree Fiction – Tolkien and the linguistic Tree Model, Maria Zielenbach and Robert Tegethoff (A)
- Tolkien’s Philological Imagination: On Aelfwine’s Spelling, Andrew Higgins (A)
- From Text to Document: Rethinking Textual Authority in Tolkien’s Legendarium, Paula Castagno Ayala (A)
- ‘The VIrtue of His Blood’: Lineage, Legitimacy, and the Limits of Inheritance in Aragorn’s Kingship, Jason Troutman (LM)
Personally Interesting:
- “And when we wished we would drive away the night”: The Disneyfication of Aglarond in Fact and Fiction, Christine Larsen (A)
- Landmarks in the history of the Tolkien Society, Jessica Yates (LM)
- “Of Hobbit-kind” Revisiting Gollum, Dmitra Fimi (A)
- The Stories that Come to Us: Conversations with Verlyn Flieger, Marianne Parke (A)
- Gandalf, Artificial Intelligence, and Leadership: implications from “Magnifica Humanitas” Michael Urick and Justin Petrovich (A)
- Tolkien and the Literary Genres of LoTR and the Silmarillion, Romuald I Lakowski (A)
- A Passport to Faery: Taliesin, Smith, and Tolkien’s ‘Starbrow’ Motif, Erik Jampa Andersson (LM?)
- Journeys in Middle-earth and the odd slight detour! Jay Johnstone (A)
- Then, and Now Back Again: A 45-year Audio Odyssey in Middle-earth, Brian Sibley (A)
- Nine-fingered Sauron and the Ring of Doom: The Evil of Power in JRR Tolkien’s Works, Michael Drout (A)
- Literary preparedness in an insecure age? Nils Ivar Agoy (A)
- Enyalie, Shaun Gunner (A)
And, why not?
- The Great Tapes Never End, David Walker (LM)
- Slavic Influences in the Soviet adaptation of the Fellowship of the Rings, Martina Jurickova (A)
- Beren and Luthien as a Courtly Love Breton Lai, Sophie Harding (A)
- Whose Story is it Really? Emma Bradley (A)
- Happily Ever After: Eowyn and the Hero’s Reward (or, Tolkien’s Genderqueer Fairytale), Emily Sullivan (A)
- “Not a bad fellow”. In Defense of Radagast the Brown, Christian S. Trenk (LM)
- The Professor and the Sensei, The Ringbearer and the Warrior: A Comparative Look at Structure and Character in the Works of JRR Tolkien and Akira Toriyama, Carl Fosnaugh, IV (LM)
- The Mirror of Gimli, Kate Neville (A)
- Mary Fairburn: A life of art, adventure and Tolkien, Rebecca Rose (A)
- An Unalterable Music: Tolkien’s ‘Ainulindale, Schenker’s ‘Ursatz’ and the Metaphor of Musical Determinism, Derek Myler (A)
- Gondor and the Afterlife of Rome: Imperial Decline and Restoration in Tolkien’s Legendarium, Jo Messore (A)
- Shire…Baggins…: From Nazgul to the Sidhe in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, Noelia Ramos (A)
- A rare case of wraithism in a fifty year-old hobbit from the Shire, David Garner (LM)
- Are there any duels in Tolkien’s legendarium? Karolina Firman (LM)
- When Places Answer Back: Reading the Living World in the Lord of the Rings, Farid Mohammadi (A)
- For Your Treasure Went Too: Following grief and loss across time from “GBS” to Smith of Wootton Major, Mercury Natis (A)
The titles are typically, reasonably reflective of the content, but not always. Most of the presentations were done by those in academia, and there were significantly more women than men presenting overall. I’d guess that the gender and fan to academic ratio was more evenly mixed among the audience, but I have no actual evidence to that end.
I think it is fair to say from the titles that the Society did a very good job of addressing a wide range of topics. These were the ones I attended as an online participant. There were some over-lapping activities and sessions, so this is not comprehensive. There were also sessions that were in person only and online only.
One day I will make it to Oxford to attend the event in person, but for the cost of an online registration I don’t know of any event that provides the level of content available here for the price.
My next posts will dive into some specific takeaways from talks.
