The Tolkien Society is excited to partner with the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and Medical Humanities Research Centre at the University of Glasgow. The seminar will be co-run by Will Sherwood (The Tolkien Society’s Education Secretary), Clare Moore (University of Glasgow), and Journee Cotton (New Mexico Military Institute).

The relationship between the body and the environment is at the heart of Tolkien’s writing. He even called his secondary world “Arda Marred” after Melkor’s discord led to all matter, vegetal and organic, having a “Melkor ingredient”. Yet even as early as ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ and in his writings not related to the legendarium, Tolkien shows a keen interest in the connection and ongoing relationship between the body and the earth, often linking the land’s health to the beings that inhabit it. Frequently the environs within his writing indicate they might be sentient, suggesting possible greater agency in Arda and his other worlds beyond his humanoid characters. Likewise, over the course of his writing career, Tolkien developed his ideas concerning the body, which play out in complex and even contradictory ways in his metaphysics and within his narratives.

This seminar invites analyses that explore the complexities of bodily experiences and environments. Building on a strong tradition of scholarship on embodiment and ecology in Tolkien’s writings and their adaptations, this seminar invites new and innovative readings of the entangled body and earth across Tolkien’s oeuvre and its adaptions.

Papers may address but are in no way limited to the following topics as they pertain to Tolkien’s writings and their adaptations:

• Bodies (physical, mental, emotional) and the environment;
• The built environment;
• (Non) Anthropocene and the biosphere;
• Medical studies (e.g. disability, ageing, motherhood/reproduction, trauma) and Environmental Bioethics (e.g. environmental law, ethics of the body and earth, climate change, pollution, agricultural practices, biodiversity);
• Temporality and spatiality;
• Intersectional studies (e.g. gender, race, sexuality, religion, disability, age, ethnicity, nationality) of the body and the earth;
• Liminality, borders, and boundaries;
• Travel and ecological symbiosis;
• The body, food, agriculture;
• Technology and industry;
• Enlightenment (e.g. rationality, categorisation, progress, science) and Romanticism (e.g. sensibility, sensation, subjectivity, earth as mental symbol, sublime, beautiful, picturesque, vast and minute);
• Historical perspectives;
• Linguistics and philology;
• Ecology, Dark Ecology, ecoGothic.

How do I write a proposal?

Anyone can submit a proposal for this event. If you have never written one before or would like to learn more about what an eye-catching proposal looks and sounds like, you are welcome to join us for our Proposal Writing Workshop. We will be hosting our workshop online (Zoom) and they are free for anyone to attend. We will be hosting our next group of workshops on Sunday 16th March.

You can expect to learn how to write a well-structured proposal, how to choose a title, what makes a proposal stand out, techniques for getting over writer’s block, and much more. There will be opportunities to have your questions answered by experts.

Book your place now for our March workshops here.

Submit Your Proposal

The CfP deadline is Friday 28th March.

We invite proposals of no more than 300 words for 20-minute papers with 5 minutes of questions and 500 words for 45-minute panel discussions with 15 minutes of questions. Bionotes for all authors should be no more than 100 words each.

Please submit your paper proposal here.

Please submit your panel proposal here.

Attendance

The Tolkien Society’s 2025 seminar will be hosted online on Zoom. If you would like to meet up with other Society members in person, we encourage you to arrange a gathering with your local Smial to watch the seminar. You can find out where your closest Smial is here.

The seminar will be free for all attendees. You will be able to sign up to attend the seminar after the CfP has closed.