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First live session January 7, 2027
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Course includes weekly sessions with the instructor from 5:00 to 7:00pm Eastern U.S. time.
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All sessions are recorded and available to view for up to 2 weeks after the last live session
Session 1
LOST TALES AND PERILOUS TALES
We begin with a broader introduction to Tolkien’s life, the literature he loved, and the languages he created. We will touch on some of the subjects covered in Part 1, but in this class we will focus more on his first fictional forays like the Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Lost Tales, and The Silmarillion, as well as the linguistic inspirations for his legendarium.
Session 2
THE KALEVALA
This 19th century Finnish epic first captured Tolkien’s imagination when he was a young man and inspired him to learn Finnish, which opened the door to other, earlier medieval languages. This week will be devoted to a discussion of the Finnish epic, its context and creation and how it influenced Tolkien.
Session 3
DWARVES, GOBLINS, ELVES, ENTS, AND MEN
So many of the peoples of Middle Earth were drawn from medieval literary texts. This class looks specifically at the origins of those people from Old Norse and Middle English poetry, including poems of the Poetic Edda. We will go into more detail about those poems and discuss how references to supernatural creatures and very natural creatures inspired Tolkien’s world.
Session 4
FASHIONING FANTASY
While Tolkien is credited as being the “father of modern fantasy” he was inspired by a host of non-medieval fantasy stories, as well as the medieval ones. This class considers works like Frank McDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and The Golden Key alongside medieval works like the Middle English Sir Orfeo and how they influenced different parts of the legendarium like Goldberry the River’s Daughter and The Adventures Tom Bombadil.
Session 5
THE FALL OF ARTHUR AND TOLKIEN’S TRAGIC HEROES
Tolkien was massively influenced by English Arthurian literature. In Part 1 we discussed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the origins of Arthur in depth, touching on texts like the Alliterative Morte Arthur. This class builds on that and examines other Arthurian texts like the Alliterative and Thomas Malory’s Mort Darthur in tandem with Tolkien’s stories like The Fall of Gondolin.
Session 6
TOLKIEN'S RETELLINGS
Tolkien worked on his legendarium most of his life, but, as a perfectionist, he published very little of those works outside The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He wrote his own version of Volsungasaga as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, his own Fall of Arthur, and, of course, his own translation of Beowulf but they were only published after his death. This class ties all the threads together, including some from Part 1 of this course, and delves into Tolkien’s own adaptations of the medieval texts he loved and elements of popular culture.
More about this course
Most people are aware that J.R.R. Tolkien was inspired by medieval literary texts in crafting his Legendarium about Middle Earth. As a professor of Old and Middle English, he also produced important scholarship that furthered the study of his beloved texts. While the first installment of this course, Tolkien and His Medieval Sources, considered major influences like Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Volsunga saga, the Mabinogi, and various other Irish and Welsh texts in conjunction with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, this class explores other texts and traditions from which Tolkien drew. Part 2 also looks at other aspects of the Legendarium—The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, including the longer versions of the Fall of Gondolin, Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Children of Hurin—to delve more deeply into the origins of one of the most popular fictional series ever written.
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 1
Course begins November 12, 2026
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