Michael Drout on Tolkien's The Hobbit

Monday, December 10, at 7 PM in the Performing Arts Center

How to Make a World Worth Saving: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth 

Drout’s lecture examines how Tolkien came to create a “secondary world” that readers care about as much—or more—as the one in which they live. The literary techniques that Tolkien began to play with in The Hobbit, which began as a children’s story, became fully evolved and mature in his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings.

Michael Drout is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of the Medieval at Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses in Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Fantasy Literature.  Drout is the author of How Tradition Works and Tradition and Influence. He has also edited Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics and the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, and is co-editor of the journal Tolkien Studies. Drout has produced 10 college courses on CD for Recorded Books; most recently, Tolkien and the West. 

Learn more at http://michaeldrout.com

The Tolkien lecture is free and open to all, and is sponsored by Student Life & Activities (732) 224-2500.