English Language and Literature Commons^™

Mythic Roads: Tolkien's Literary Network And Cosmopolitan Imagination, Hayden Bilbrey

Mythcon

Journeys and roads are central to J.R.R. Tolkien's stories in Middle-earth, but the significance of these pathways extends beyond physical landscapes. This paper argues that Tolkien's legendarium constructs a network of texts, cultural traditions, and temporal frameworks. Drawing on concepts from Caroline Levine's concept of literary networks, this paper examines how Tolkien integrates elements of Christianity, Norse, and other mythological systems to create a cohesive mythopoetic structure. Not merely just coexisting; these influences form interconnected nodes with a larger network that readers traverse through the narrative. Thus, Middle-earth becomes not only a setting but a cosmopolitan mythic space shaped by …

No Body, No Sacrament: Tolkien’S Route From Children Of The Valar To Marriage As An ‘Association’ In The History Of Middle-Earth Drafts, Nicole Duplessis

Mythcon

Rather than overt religious symbolism or over-reliance on the trappings of Catholicism, like Marian or Eucharistic imagery, that also appear in his works, Tolkien infused Middle-earth with his own sacramental imagination, possibly through both conscious and sub-conscious creative choices. This sacramental imagination helps explain how obvious pagan influences and seemingly contradictory readings of Tolkien’s works can coexist with his assertion that the work is fundamentally Catholic. One area in which this sacramental imagining can be followed, as a route through his drafts, is in his development of the Valar as non-corporeal beings alongside his alteration of their marriage relationships from …

Spacing Out Of The Shire: Spatiomagus And Spatial Nomadism In The Lord Of The Rings, Kieran Strand-Leeds

Mythcon

As a text, The Lord of the Rings is obsessed with the natural and the magical in the mundane. However, what is often neglected in Tolkien studies is the idea of the space in which the natural and the magical exist. Here, I present the theory of spatiomagus to help us understand space in fantasy literature. Building off the Deleuzoguattarian theory of smooth/striated space, spatiomagus asserts that space in fantasy texts is influenced physically and/or created virtually by the magical “light” and “dark.” This intersection of magic and space can create, destroy, and alter places via metaphysical means, and spatiomagus …

Eucatastrophe: J.R.R. Tolkien As A Christian Apologist, Donald T. Williams

Mythcon

Williams will explore the ways Tolkien defined eucatastrophe, and also provided numerous examples of eucatastrophe in his legendarium. In doing so, Tolkien develops a Christian apologetics.

Orc Road Trip; Or, We’Re Taking The Hobbits To Isengard!, Robert T. Tally Jr.

Mythcon

“Leg it!” Ever wanted to “foot it through the Horse-country” with Uglúk? Cross the Great River with Grishnákh? Travel with goblin messengers “to and fro between all their cities, colonies, and strongholds,” by “tunnel or under dark,” to “Gundabad of the North,” their “capital”? Or perhaps you can “slip off” with Gorbag and “a few trusty lads” to places “where there’s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses”? It might be enough to join those who’ve just “come all the way from the Mines” to “avenge our folk” and “then go back north”? And if you’re feeling a …

Fundamentally Linguistic, John Rosegrant

Mythcon

We know that although Tolkien wrote that his legendarium was “fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. . . To me a name comes first and the story follows”, in fact legendarium content preceded Tolkien’s invention of Elvish languages. I will argue that nevertheless the first part of the quotation is true: the legendarium was fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. Tolkien used symbolic language to access the musical and body-related aspects of language that the symbolic has distanced us from, simultaneously uniting two aspects of our nature while recognizing their inevitable separation. When we as children master the symbolic function of language we lose …

Fangorn Forest As A Rerouting To The Ecological Contemplative In The Two Towers, Nicholas Birns

Mythcon

In The Two Towers, Fangorn Forest initially appears as an uncanny diversion when Merry and Pippin flee into its shadowy depths to escape Saruman’s Uruk-hai. Their encounter with Treebeard awakens the Ents, providing unexpected and devastating flow to the power of Saruman the White. Far from actually being scary or horrifying, though, the forest is actually the gateway to two very important qualities in The Lord of the Rings: a sense of deep psychology, of caring for the land so much that sentient being has become actually bound up with natural entities, and of contemplation, as Treebeard Who …

Continuing Christopher Tolkien’S Work In A Digital Age, James K. Tauber

Journal of Tolkien Research

Christopher Tolkien’s 12-volume History of Middle-earth is a remarkable achievement, yet Christopher repeatedly acknowledged how difficult the material was to present in print form and that “that there was no really satisfactory solution”.  This paper contends that a printed book is not scholarship but just one way of presenting its results. It explores how digital philology can overcome some of the limitations of print, giving examples from the Digital Tolkien Project. It shows how structural markup, version alignment, parallel reading environments, and other approaches can make relationships between drafts and published texts clearer. Importantly, these methods do not replace Christopher’s …

Local & Experiential: Exploring Embodied Ethnogeomythology Through Ttrpg, Gregory Fields, Teagan Brady, Dakota Dalota, Claira Hickman, Gina Manygoats, Donovan Mcbride, Ryan Pillmore

Mythcon

The panel will focus on an interdisciplinary pedagogical approach anchored to research applications of AAC&U High Impact Practices in integrative learning, learning communities, place-based writing, project-based learning, and gamification studies (Chou). Framed through a synthesis of ethno-geology and mythology, I developed a collaborative assignment that asked my intro to mythology students to develop their own mythologies based on Arizona specific cultures or geological features and oddities. After conducting their own background research, undergraduate students developed locally-based mythologies that answered at least one of the four big questions of existence. Then, they anchored those mythologies within one of the more readily …

The Future Of The Mythopoeic Society, Megan Abrahamson, Mythsoc Stewards

Mythcon

As technology and membership patterns change, what do you want to see in the future of the Mythopoeic Society? What do you want to get out of your membership? How do we want to bill ourselves to younger generations? This panel, made up of the Stewards, will be a discussion for members of the Society or those looking to become members and will serve as a preliminary conversation to the Members Meeting on Monday. The Society’s new AI policy will also be discussed.

Opening Ceremonies / Scholar Guest Of Honor Keynote - The Rhetoric Of The Road: The Romantic Journey As A Map Of Myth, Memory, And Majesty, Joe R. Christopher

Mythcon

OPENING CEREMONIES and SCHOLAR GUEST OF HONOR KEYNOTE ADDRESS: The Rhetoric of the Road: The Romantic Journey as a Map of Myth, Memory, and Majesty

New Info On The Hunt For The Ring, Chad Bornholdt, Bill Fliss

Mythcon

With Bill Fliss's assistance, Chad plots the paths of all characters, including individual Nazgûl, throughout Book 1 of The Lord of the Rings.

From Dust Bowl To Digital: Fueling Your Research In The Mythsoc Archives, Phillip Fitzsimmons, Janet Brennan Croft, Victoria Gaydosik, Brice Odom

Mythcon

The 5,122 posted works in the Mythsoc digital collections have been downloaded 1,560,574 times from July 2017 to June 2026. These usage statistics show that scholarship posted on the Mythsoc digital collections serves the research needs of scholars internationally, provides free and easy discoverability to authors’ works, and usage reports to contributors that provide evidence of the impact of their work. The Panelists will present on the success of the first eight years of using the SWOSU Digital Commons as the platform for the Mythopoeic Society Archives. This presentation will introduce you to the Mythopoeic Society Collections page of the …

Haunted, Will Travel: “Divided, Fractured, And Barely Legible” The Nightmare-Self In Harrow The Ninth, Atiyana Ringling

Mythcon

My research intends to bring Mark Fisher’s 2012 definition of Hauntology into conversation with the sci-fi journey in Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth and its titular character. Using the lens of this Mythcon 54 to focus on the physical and parallel mental journey of Harrow, the physical journey traveled tracks and maps the “lost future” of the world’s inhabitants and questions the extent to which the physical road traveled can mask or hide its destructive inception. “The River” and road traveled in the novel are the result of catastrophic consumption and transformation of the Solar System by the novel's Emperor. …

How To Use Your Mythsoc Membership Online, Megan B. Abrahamson, Alicia Fox-Lenz, Sean Marlow, Grace Moone

Mythcon

Panelists Grace Moone, Sean Marlow, and Alicia Fox-Lenz will give a tutorial on the new Mythopoeic Society membership platform. Now up and running and attached to our website, the new Membershipworks platform allows you to view your membership, getting us off a 30-year-old spreadsheet and into the 21st century! Bring your computer, phone or tablet as the Stewards showcase the uses of the platform and help you with any login issues.

An Infinite Number Of Roads Diverged In A Wood: Robert Heinlein’S Maximalist Road Trip In The Number Of The Beast, Patrick Julian

Mythcon

Robert Heinlein, Grand Master of Speculative Fiction, was born in Butler, MO (one hour north of Route 66), raised in Kansas City, and lived much of his early adult life in Los Angeles, the westernmost terminus of Route 66. Given this proximity to the Mother Road, it’s no surprise that Heinlein spent a considerable portion of his career writing about various versions of the Road Trip, whether it was taken via foot, horse-drawn carriage, automobile or spaceship. The Roads Must Roll, his 3rd published short story (1940), name checks Route 66, while many of his early works of juvenile …

The Road Goes Ever On: Teaching Tolkien In Colleges Today, Leslie A. Donovan, Megan B. Abrahamson, Cami D. Agan, Katherine Wyma, Joseph Rex Young

Mythcon

As Tolkien studies has evolved, Middle-earth no longer needs to be defended as a legitimate academic subject. Today, Tolkien’s works are commonly taught as literary classics in colleges and universities alongside other mythic traditions such as The Odyssey and Beowulf. For students, however, the meaning of “classic” can be complicated. Many students encounter Tolkien long before entering college through popular media, films, games, and digital fandom, while the historical, linguistic, and cultural contexts that informed his writing (war, philology, faith, and medievalism, among others) can feel increasingly distant. As a result, Tolkien’s works may seem both deeply familiar and …

The Scholar's Journey: The Limits Of Academic Discourse, Katherine Mcloone

Mythcon

Indrapramit Das's The Devourers (2015) follows a Kolkata historian who encounters a werewolf with a complicated past. As Alok learns more about the vibrancy of that past, he discovers truths about himself and about the mythic traditions still alive in the remote Sundarban forest.

Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) portrays a historian from a culture of mermaid-like creatures descended from the pregnant women thrown overboard in the Middle Passage: She must leave her people so she can grapple with the weight of her profession. In R.F. Kuang's Katabasis (2025), two post-graduate students studying magick travel to the underworld to rescue …

Shared Trauma, Shared Drama: Faërian Drama In Russian Doll And Elsewhere, Janet Croft

Mythcon

In his seminal essay “On Fairy-stories” (1939), J.R.R. Tolkien introduces the concept of Faërian drama: experiences with a “realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism,” where the viewer feels he is “bodily inside [a] Secondary World” but instead is “in a dream that some other mind is weaving.” This framing structure is used, though not called by this name, in many other texts. In a series of four previously published essays, I have attempted to explore and codify this concept. Picking up a theme hinted at but not explored in my previous papers, what happens when the …

Travel In Ryan Coogler’S Sinners: The Going-Ons Of The Smoke Stack Twins And Remmick, Mena Nizam

Mythcon

This paper explores the adventures of the Smoke Stack Twins, Remmick the Vampire, the themes of travel (via walking, running, driving) their jukebox joint, its placement in a sawmill along the Mississippi Travel/black issues/the character of Remmick. The theme is purely on travel and the symbolism of traveling while experiencing racism.

“He Had Named Himself The Stranger”: From 'Germanic' Heroic Hospitality To Elvish Memorial Mediation In Tolkien’S Book Of Lost Tales, Paolo Pizzimento Dr.

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article examines the narrative functions of strangeness and hospitality in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Book of Lost Tales, focusing on Eriol’s transformation from foreign traveller into listener, witness, and transmitter of Elvish tradition. Through a comparative reading of selected Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon texts—particularly Hávamál, Gylfaginning, and Beowulf—it identifies recurrent literary configurations in which hospitality regulates admission, identity, reciprocity, danger, and access to knowledge. The comparison is morphological rather than genetic: it does not posit direct derivation or a uniform Germanic code. Drawing on Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory, the article argues that Tolkien redirects …

Eschatological Echoes: Reading The Bible And The Harry Potter Series, Athira Mohan Dr

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Death has been a major topic in children’s and adolescent literature , which has invited scholarly discourse over different ages. While death was very commonly featured in the puritanical texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was also deemed to be a subject too sensitive for the genre of children’s literature in the early twentieth century(Aries 1975), due to a combination of factors such as lowered child mortality rate and heightened concern for childhood as a special social category. However, contemporary children’s and adolescent literature focuses on death as an important part of human life, and invites discussions on …

From The Forests With Hopes Of Paradise: Malay Muslims In The Victorian Imagination In Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, M Irfan Zamzami, Rifka Pratama

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

This article examines how Lord Jim constructs and reconfigures Muslim identities within the discourse of British imperialism. While previous scholarship has explored the novel’s colonial politics, less attention has been paid to how its representations of Malay Muslims reveal the instability of Orientalist categories. Using Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism and Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial ambivalence, the study applies close textual analysis of two key narrative moments: the omniscient narrator’s description of the Muslim pilgrims aboard the Patna and the depiction of Malay Muslims in Patusan. The analysis demonstrates that the Patna pilgrims are initially represented through familiar Orientalist …

Vibe Coding: Ai, Digital Text Recycling, And The Remediation Of Digital Poetry, Yohanna Joseph Waliya

ELO (un)supervised 2026

This paper theorises Vibe Coding as a novel method of AI-assisted creative practice within electronic literature. Vibe Coding describes an affective mode of communication with AI that enables coding via natural-language prompts, in which the author collaborates with generative AI systems to recycle, remediate, and reconfigure existing digital texts into new poetic forms, including interactive animations. Rather than treating code as a fixed procedural logic, Vibe Coding focuses on rhythm, intuition, and affect as central compositional forces shaping both textual production and computational interaction. Relying on theories of remediation, digital recycling, and posthuman authorship, the paper examines how AI functions …

A Modest Proposal For Discourse Analysis In Nonbinary Communities: Method And Case Study, Nikoli Michael Daigneault

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While linguists have long used discourse analysis to study language variation in binary and nonnormative gender groups, nonbinary people have often been excluded from analyses or treated without a nonbinary-informed framework. Nevertheless, nonbinary language use can provide key insights into the relationship between gender and language. In this thesis, I propose Nonbinary Discourse Analysis, a set of recommendations and best practices for conducting discourse analysis in nonbinary communities. These methods are informed by previous empirical research on nonnormative gender identities and theoretical work in trans linguistics (Zimman, 2020) and trans epistemologies (Nordmarken, 2019; Raclaw, in press). To demonstrate the methodology, …

Compressed Cinema As A Study In Llm Latent Spaces, Mallen Clifton

ELO (un)supervised 2026

In his article “Spec Acts” (2021), Matthew Kirschenbaum analyzes the AI-generated novel 1 the Road to develop his titular concept of the spec act, “the future in its multitudes collapsing into an actionable present.” With the proliferation of texts produced by generative AI and subsequent critical analyses of them, one element in particular calls for further theorization: “the future in its multitudes,” or more directly, the latent space. This echoes arguments by critics such as Antonio Somaini, who offered his own “Theory of Latent Spaces” last year. However, where Somaini’s attention is towards visual culture, I turn mine to the …

The Viewing, Chloe Appert

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

No abstract provided.

America The Monstrous: The Birth Of American Horror Fiction In The Long Nineteenth Century, Rachel Kietzman

Dissertations

American gothic works that center the affect of horror explore themes of abjection, inhumanity, and monstrosity that impede a coherent expression of American identity. By approaching these works through the lens of horror rather than only as Gothic works, a picture ofa visceral, embodied becoming takes shape: America is a monstrous birth in the most literal sense of the word, a sign and demonstration that unity and uniformity are not the same, that wholeness does not require conformity, and that political choices are paid for in flesh. In short, American horror fiction is the head of Medusa, an apotropaic sign …

The Music Of The Spheres In The Western Imagination (2022), By David J. Kendall, Brad Eden

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Bradford Lee Eden, of The Music of the Spheres in the Western Imagination (2022), by David J. Kendall

Arda Notebooks: The Best Of I Quaderni Di Arda (2026), Ed. By Roberto Arduini, Claudio A. Testi And Wu Ming 4., Andrew Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Andrew Higgins, of Arda Notebooks: The Best of I Quaderni di Arda (2026), ed. by Roberto Arduini, Claudio A. Testi and Wu Ming 4.