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Wykład “Runes of power upon the door”

Wykład “Runes of power upon the door”

Serdecznie zapraszamy na wykład otwarty dra Toma Birketta (University College Cork) pt. “Runes of power upon the door”: Tolkien’s Invented Runic System and Its Cultural Legacy. 20 III 2023, godz. 18:30, online.

“Runes of power upon the door”: Tolkien’s Invented Runic System and Its Cultural Legacy – wykład otwarty dra Toma Birketta (University College Cork)

(Wykład w ramach cyklu: "Wiatr z północy. Spotkania z wikingami")

One of the most recognisable ‘gateways’ to Tolkien’s fiction comes in the form of runes on the covers of the HarperCollins editions of his work – Anglo-Saxon runes in the case of The Hobbit, and his invented Cirth on the cover of The Lord of the Rings. Runes also have a more limited role as a script used within his fantasy world and are built into his history of Middle Earth. This paper attempts to contextualise his invented runic alphabets by reference to the historical runic tradition and to the ‘runic politics’ of the mid twentieth-century, arguing that his history of Cirth maps more closely onto the history of the futhark than previously recognised and that his intervention can be understood as both a reaction to and product of runic scholarship in the 1930s. The paper will also look at the extraordinary legacy of Tolkien’s runes, and suggest that the most recent screen adaptations of his Middle Earth give runes a prominence equivalent to the ‘gateway’ runes of his novels, influenced in part by the role they have now come to play in the popular imagination.

 

Dr Tom Birkett (D.Phil. University of Oxford) is a lecturer in Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork. His publications include the monograph Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry (Routledge 2018) and the co-edited collections Translating Early Medieval Poetry (D.S. Brewer 2017) and The Vikings Reimagined (DeGruyter 2020) as well as articles on early medieval textualities and the reception of medieval literature and culture. He led the Irish Research Council-funded World-Tree Project from 2015-17, which investigated the public perception of the Vikings and Norse culture. His popular retelling of the Norse Myths was published by Quercus in 2018.

 

Wykład odbędzie się online, do transmisji można dołączyć poprzez FB oraz YT Wydziału Filozoficznego UJ