• Course begins November 12, 2026

  • Live sessions with the instructor each week from 5:00 to 7:00pm Eastern U.S. time

  • All sessions are recorded and available to view for up to 2 weeks after the last live session

Session 1

TOLKIEN: MEDIEVALIST, AUTHOR, FATHER OF FANTASY

To begin this course, we look at the life of J.R.R. Tolkien—his interests, his influences, the events of his life that compelled him to write his works on Middle Earth, as well as his own translations and adaptations of medieval texts, and their enduring legacy.

Session 2

BUILDING MIDDLE EARTH: NORSE INFLUENCE

As a scholar of Old Norse, Tolkien used the legends and sagas of Iceland to shape his vision of Middle Earth—Midgard. This week, we will explore the Norse origins of The Hobbit.

Session 3

THE REALM OF ROHAN: EARLY MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

The valiant people of Rohan who dwell in Edoras, the hall upon the hill surrounded by burial mounds, are largely based the pre-Conquest English and texts like Beowulf. This week we will look at Old English sources and trace their survival in Two Towers.

Session 4

RIVENDELL, LOTHLORIEN, AND ELVES: IRISH AND WELSH INFLUENCES

Tolkien’s Elves resemble the Celtic idea of the faery who dwell in the Otherworld. This week we will look at some of the medieval Irish and Welsh sources that inspired Tolkien’s ancient and wise Elves in The Silmarillion.

Session 5

CRAFTING GONDOR: CHIVALRY AND CONQUEST

The Kingdom of Gondor owes a lot ot the ideas of medieval chivalry in texts like The Song of Roland, and the stories of King Arthur. This week, we will talk about Return of the King in conjunction with medieval sources regarding chivalry and warfare, and courtly society.

Session 6

MIDDLE EARTH IN POPULAR CULTURE

This week we turn to all the movies, all the popular images of Tolkien’s world and pull everything together in a discussion of fantasy and movie medievalism.

More About This Course

For more than half a century J.R.R. Tolkien has gripped the public imagination with his tales of wizards, hobbits, orcs, and elves. But Tolkien took his inspiration from a far older body of literature, the epics, poems, lais and sagas of the Middle Ages. As one of the premier medievalists of his time, Tolkien edited texts like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and wrote extensively on Old English and Middle English, weaving the essence of these works into his own. This course studies of a selection of Tolkien’s works in concert with his earlier medieval sources in order to trace the transformation of medieval texts in the popular modern imagination and emphasize their relevance to modern audiences. 

Meet Your Instructor

Larissa Tracy

Larissa “Kat” Tracy is faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has appeared in several History Channel, National Geographic, and Discovery Channel documentaries, including Dark Marvels and The Unbelievable! hosted by Dan Aykroyd. Her work focuses on 13th, 14th, and 15th century English literature that looks back to the pre-Conquest period in England and the Viking Age, with cross-cultural contacts in medieval French, Irish, and Welsh and a specific focus on social justice, law, medicine, and judicial punishment. Her publications include Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature (2012) and the edited collections Heads Will Roll with Jeff Massey (2012), Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages (2013), Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture with Kelly DeVries (2015), Flaying in the Premodern World (2017), Medieval and Early Modern Murder (2018), Treason (2019), and Medieval English and Dutch Literatures with Geert H.M. Claassens (2022). She is also the host of the video podcast Medieval Mischief and Mayhem, available on YouTube, Substack, Patreon, and Spotify.

Register for Part 2

Course begins January 7, 2027

  • Continued access to the course materials is available for 2 weeks after the last course session