Using School as an Excuse to Study Tolkien

[Brinniel]

The topic says it all. Maybe your teachers haven't taught you Tolkien specifically, but have you ever worked around that to learn more about him and his works? For example, have you ever used one of Tolkien's books for a book report? A research project?

Back in my sophmore year, my Accelerated English teacher had my class pick a book of choice to read and then do a major project on it. Basically the project involved creating our own cliff notes. My obvious choice was a Tolkien book: The Return of the King. It was a lengthy project that included:

1) A brief analysis of all the characters (there's 51 in RotK, btw)

2) A summary of every chapter

3) A biography of the author

4) An essay on characters or places from the book (I chose to write about the Southrons and Easterlings)

5) A list and description of ten recommended websites (I included the BD of course)

6) A list of fifteen discussion questions with answers

Though the project took a lot of time and effort, it was definitely one of the most enjoyable projects for school I have ever done. Not only did I get to research an area of my interest, but I also learned much more about Tolkien and his writing. Not to mention, I got a high A on the project, so according to my teacher (who is also a LotR fan), I really do know my Tolkien.

So my question for all you current and former students is, have you ever used school as an excuse to research and learn more about Tolkien and his books?

[Glirdan]

Yes!! Three times in fact!!

First up, Grade 9: When I first fell in love with Tolkien's works. I had actually just got the set (including "The Hobbit") and read them all at least twice in first semester. Then, secnd semester comes along and my English teacher gave us our indpendent reading assignment. I took this opportunity and asked her if it would be alright if I did mine on "The Hobbit", and she approved. This is when I delved deeper into the life of Tolkien, doing research on the beloved professor himself.

The next one was actually in first semester of this year: Once again, our English teacher gave us our independent reading assignment. The only difference this year was that it was more than that: we had to do a book fair. What it was was that we had to take three books that went along with the unit we were doing. Then we had to go and compare and contrast them. My first choice (don't worry, all this has a point) was the recent Harry Potter book (The Half Blood Prince), the second was The Diary of Ann frank and the last was The Return of the King. I chose these three because they appealed to me the most and there was one major thing they had in common: war. So this enabled me too look even deeper into the works of Tolkien (as well as Rowling).

The last time was second semester of this year, and I actually started a thread to here to help me out with it. Another independent reading, except this time we had to do an analysis of the book. So, i chose The Silmarillion, probably one of the hardest books to do an analysis of. However, after reading it a second time, this opened up new questions in my head which led me to create four other threads: Maiar or Man, Who's King Now, Symbollic Representations In The Lord of The Rings and Numenorean Likenesses.

As you can see, doing all that work has really broadened my understanding of Tolkien's works and really makes me look at it with a different persepective.

[Lalwendë]

Brinniel - that sounds like a mammoth project! I'm glad I didn't have that much school work back when I was there or I'd never have had time to read any Tolkien!

Anyway, I managed to pull off this feat myself. We used to write little reviews in the backs of our English books of any new books we'd read. Of course I wrote my little bit about The Hobbit and LotR way back then. I've still got the books somewhere so I'll have to look up what I wrote!

Now, I didn't get much chance to study Tolkien, but he was certainly an inspiration for my other work. Of course, Art brought the opportunity to create pictures of characters, scenes and places from Tolkien's work, and I of course drew the obligatory picture of Boromir, stuck full of arrows (with a bit of red pencil to represent the blood) and Aragorn crouched over him. Then there were of course drawings of ethereal Elves with pointy ears, big upward slanted eyes and impossibly long and thin bodies.

In one year we were given a scenario each week in English lessons which centred around a fantasy story line - we came up with characters and had to write about what they did to get out of the situation for homework. the next week we would receive info on the next obstacle. A few pages of story would have sufficed but I filled up one whole exrecise book with each bit of the story, embellishing with backstory, history and random fragments of weirdness. I had a slightly surly Wizard, a brave and sensible Dwarf, a gobby Hobbit, an Elf who cast a lot of spells and a broken sort of a Man with a violent streak for my characters and invented my own Dark Lord. Poor English teacher. I wonder if she read it all? I do still have those books somewhere, too!

Later on during my time at school this Dark Lord I had invented would pop up in random stories I had written at random moments just for the fun of it. So as a 17 year old I might be writing an earnest tale about urban life and the Dark Lord would suddnely pop up in a cafe or something and turn the plot on its head. Very post-modern. My teacher at the time used to look forward to this and ask what he was going to do next and when I'd use him again, but I kept her in suspense.

Finally I even managed to write about Tolkien in Oxford entrance exams as from one of the essay papers I chose to answer a question about sense of place in literature. I looked at how writers constructed imagined places and made them into characters in their own right, using Egdon Heath from Return of the Native, the Bronte's Yorkshire Moors and Tolkien's The Shire.

[yavanna II]

Only thrice have I had the opportunity to make JRRT's works into book reports: first, in my sixth grade, I made one for Smith of Wooton Major; my second year high, The Lays of Beleriand; fourth year, the Silmarillion which I must say was Morgoth-centric.

But I have a really big crime: I made other people's book reports during my fourth year high, and I used RotK on one of them. THe teacher never traced the sold projects to me, though she had a hunch that some of the reports were not genuine. I had a very low profile, until I became e-in-chief of our paper, where I snitched in some Tolkien in the Literary Page (our school did not recognize Tolkien the way they recognize Rowling).

[Rune Son of Bjarne]

Actually I did that in my first year of Gymnasium where I wrote about the inspiration sources of Tolkien. It was my 1 G assignment, the one big assignment of the year.

Actually it was making that paper that got me really hooked on Tolkien, I liked it before, but there was no turning back after making that paper.

I had a lot of focus on Norse Mythology, but I covered quite a lot of different sources. It was a pretty good paper, but nothing extrodinary.

[Thinlómien]

Well, I have done this twice recently. Last week we had a really short french essay about either some important person or our own relationship with computers. I did about a person, I'm sure you never guess who. (I admit, that computer-thing could have been interesting too... )

I also had a project work in Finnish. There was no limits to the topic, except it was to be a fact text. (sp?) I did it about the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (been intrigued by it for a while now), and you can guess 100 times whose translation of it did I use.

A long time ago we had to write about our favourite object (in the English lessons) and I wrote about my old, finnish copy of LotR.

That's all of it, I guess.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Of course you could always have mentioned this place, which combines an important person, computers and your relationship therewith.

I managed to write Tolkien into two essays for my Master's course: one on The Battle of Maldon and the other on the difficulty of analysing lost texts from later copies. In the latter I just dropped in a quotation about using personal theories to emend the Finnsburh fragment, but my whole reason for wanting to look at Maldon was to check Tolkien's conclusions and see what later scholars had to say about him. Naturally I gave his opinions on the subject an airing. I also managed to arrange to be the person who gave a synopsis of 'Beowulf:The Monsters and the Critics' to my Old English Texts seminar.

The great thing about medieval studies for one of us is that a significant number of lecturers in the area are not-so-secret Tolkien fans, and his academic work is in any case relevant to most discussions. The enthusiasm for his writing goes right to the top of the discipline, people like (Professors) Tom Shippey and Michael Drout, so it's an unlucky student who finds themselves losing marks for admitting their interest. I'm not sure it would be as wise in mainstream English Lit. courses, but the more courageous might consider giving it a try.

I should point out that most people who rise high in academia do so because they have enough interest in and love of their chosen field that they would study it anyway, given half a chance. Everyone has their favourite subjects, to which they return in later arguments, so that it can be seen that Tolkien repeatedly returned to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Donald Scragg did a lot of work on Maldon in the early 1990s. Now that Tolkien Studies is itself becoming a discipline, albeit slowly, I can see sneaking him into academic work forming the basis of a career for some. Probably not so much on this side of the Atlantic, though, at least not yet.

[ninja91]

Wrote me sophomore high school research on Tolkien, I did. And by the looks of it, I've never been the same...

[Sir Kohran]

I've never done anything as big or as good as some of you guys have, but in Year 9 we were studying 'tyrants', and I wrote a small essay on Denethor. In hindsight, I don't suppose he was really what we'd call a 'tyrant', but I did receive praise for it.

[Salacia Deloresista]

My freshman year in Hon. English I wrote a paper about how Tolkien's linguistic background and love of Anglo-Saxon culture influenced the books. It was hugely fun to research, but much to short because I'm a procrastinator

[yavanna II]

I just finished a paper on the physics concepts involved in the movie version of RotK. Twas maddening, having to do a physics approach to a movie that you have to read as a text--and grr! It is a fantasy movie, how could any physics aply there? But hey, I managed to do it with help from people here. There's a thread I started (I don't know how to post a link) in The Movies called Physics and RotK??!

[Aganzir]

I read The Lord of the Rings for a first time when I was 10. Almost immediately after that we had to do a paper about something at school (10-year-old children do not have a proper topic for a paper; at least not in Finland), and I chose Tolkien. By then, I had read the Lotr twice and The Hobbit once, but I didn't know much about Tolkien (of course, there was a friend of mine who wanted to make sure I'd fall in love with the Lotr, and maybe it was partially her fault that I decided to choose Tolkien). That was how I got to know Tolkien, not only his work.

In secondary school we had to do a book review each month, and I used three months to write about The Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately my Finnish teacher didn't appreciate Tolkien, and I'm afraid she couldn't completely understand why I was writing so pathetically.

This year I had a course of art. The assignment was to choose an artist, reproduce a painting by him, write a short essay about the artist, and analyse the painting. To nobody's surprise, I chose Tolkien. The picture I reproduced was a watercolour painting called "The Halls of Manwë". I wasn't very content with my work, but the teacher seemed to be, since I got an excellent grade. Anyway, it was easier to choose someone about whom I knew even something beforehand.

The brother of my friend once told us about his philosophy teacher. On the first philosophy lesson he taught them how to say "A fat dwarf fell through the floor" in Elvish (after hearing that, I stopped regretting I hadn't applied to that school). I've also heard he gave Quenya lessons to volunteers during lunch breaks. Of course it would be nice to learn Quenya, but I don't want to be taught by a person who seems to despise dwarves.