The Mythical World of Middle-earth – online conference
On the occasion of Tolkien Reading Day, the Department of English and American Studies organized the fourth annual series of events dedicated to Tolkien’s work.
One of the events was an academic online conference entitled “The Mythical World of Middle-earth,” featuring presenters from various European countries who explored how real-world mythologies influenced Tolkien’s mythopoeia, as well as how his authorial mythology shapes modern myth-making and readers’ lives today.
The conference opened with a presentation by Marek Jastrzębski (University of Siedlce, Poland) titled “Symbolic Portals of Middle-earth: Two Complementary Movements of Living Tolkien’s Myth (Transmedia and Tourism).”
Racha Yamouna Frioukh (Badji Mokhtar – Annaba University, Algeria) presented “Mythopoesis and Cultural Memory: A Comparative Exploration of Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Amazigh Oral Tradition.”
Alexandra Filonenko (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) delivered the paper “‘…the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic’: The Sovereignty Goddess Figures in Tolkien’s Legendarium,” which was thematically followed by Giovanni Carmine Costabile, an independent researcher from Italy, with “Lúthien Gita: Tolkien and the Supreme Goddess.”
The conference concluded with a lecture by another independent Italian researcher, Luisa Paglieri, titled “Tolkien and the Myths of Trees.”
A recording of the conference is available at the Department’s Youtube.
Both events were organized as part of the project VEGA 1/0236/26 – Axiological Updates and Reconfigurations in Contemporary Mythopoetic Narratives.