More Tolkien at Kalamazoo

John Rateliff has kindly posted a list of all of the Tolkien presentations associated with the Tolkien at Kalamazoo sponsoring organization — something I normally do too. Rather than duplicate all of that information here, I will just point you to John’s post. But since John hasn’t had time to search the program book for other Tolkien-related presentations, I am happy to add those additional papers below.

The Festive Video Game Workshop session contains one Tolkien-related presentation: “A Narrative of One’s Own: Finding a Spot for Player Heroes in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings”, by N. M. Heckel of the American Military University.

And the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Deptartment of Comparative Literature is sponsoring a session on Tolkien and the Medieval Mediterranean, with the following three papers:

• “Gondor’s Debt to Byzantium”, by Christopher Livanos
• “Crossing the Borders: Unconscious in Dante’s Inferno, Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and Wood and Burchielli’s DMZ”, by Faith Portier
• “The Presence of the Middle East in The Lord of the Rings”, by Marryam Abdl-Haleem

Livanos’s paper sounds particularly interesting to me, since I have an essay on the same subject in my own forthcoming book, Tolkien and the Study of His Sources. Abdl-Haleem’s paper also sounds quite fascinating. But alack, once again I will not be at Kalamazoo. I do hope to attend the event someday.