Arda’s Entangled Bodies and Environments

The Tolkien Society is co-partnering with the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic & the Medical Humanities Research Centre at the University of Glasgow for the Tolkien Society Seminar 2025 with the amazing theme of Arda’s Entangled Bodies and Environments.

The deadline to submit proposals is Friday, March 28, and the free online seminar runs Saturday-Sunday, July 5-6, 2025.

Teasers: (Go! Read! the call to learn how to submit an individual paper proposal or a group panel proposal!)

The relationship between the body and the environment is at the heart of Tolkien’s writing. He even called his secondary world “Arda Marred” after Melkor’s discord led to all matter, vegetal and organic, having a “Melkor ingredient”. Yet even as early as ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ and in his writings not related to the legendarium, Tolkien shows a keen interest in the connection and ongoing relationship between the body and the earth, often linking the land’s health to the beings that inhabit it. Frequently the environs within his writing indicate they might be sentient, suggesting possible greater agency in Arda and his other worlds beyond his humanoid characters. Likewise, over the course of his writing career, Tolkien developed his ideas concerning the body, which play out in complex and even contradictory ways in his metaphysics and within his narratives.

Building on a strong tradition of scholarship on embodiment and ecology in Tolkien’s writings and their adaptations, this seminar invites new and innovative readings of the entangled body and earth across Tolkien’s oeuvre and its adaptions.

Papers may address but are in no way limited to the following topics as they pertain to Tolkien’s writings and their adaptations:Bodies (physical, mental, emotional) and the environment;The built environment;(Non) Anthropocene and the biosphere;Medical studies (e.g. disability, ageing, motherhood/reproduction, trauma) and Environmental Bioethics (e.g. environmental law, ethics of the body and earth, climate change, pollution, agricultural practices, biodiversity);Temporality and spatiality;Intersectional studies (e.g. gender, race, sexuality, religion, disability, age, ethnicity, nationality) of the body and the earth;Liminality, borders, and boundaries;Travel and ecological symbiosis;The body, food, agriculture;Technology and industry;Enlightenment (e.g. rationality, categorisation, progress, science) and Romanticism (e.g. sensibility, sensation, subjectivity, earth as mental symbol, sublime, beautiful, picturesque, vast and minute);Historical perspectives; andLinguistics, philology, and ecology.