Hobart and William Smith Colleges

5 July 2012 Talking Tolkien

Class based on Lord of the Rings languages helps give a weighty college subject more pop

The Dallas Morning News, Dallas, Texas

01/26/2003

AUSTIN The University of Texas students scribbled their names in a strange language. The As looked like Fs, the Ps resembled gibberish.

They were in their second day of learning Old English runes, the writing system used by author J.R.R. Tolkien to invent the languages Elvish, Orcish and Dwarvish for The Lord of the Rings.

At UT, the tongues revived by the hit film trilogy are being used to teach the millennial generation this semester. Already, students are raving about the new course, titled The Linguistics of Tolkiens Middle Earth. Both sections of the class are full, and hundreds of students are on waiting lists to get in.

So far, I love it. I like the visual, seeing the runes on the board, said Elizabeth Nelson, a 19-year-old UT senior who has three fairy tattoos. A tattoo of the Lady Galadriel is on her midriff. I like being able to say that I know how to write my name in runes. Lots of my friends are jealous.

UT isnt alone in jumping on the Tolkien bandwagon. This fall, three Dallas-area universities will team up to teach a literature class about the trilogy for students from the University of Dallas in Irving, Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Dallas.

The trend isnt new. For at least two decades, some professors have taught popular culture classes about film and TV shows and at times faced ridicule from colleagues. The difference now is that more professors are unabashedly linking movies and books their students adore with traditional, often weighty subjects, from physics to philosophy. Pop culture is no longer viewed as a nonsensical subject.

The idea of connecting traditional classes and popular culture grew rapidly the last five years, said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of media and popular culture. Textbooks such as The Simpsons and Philosophy: The Doh! of Homer and Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing helped move the trend along, he said.

College students know an enormous amount about television, about popular music, Dr. Thompson said. If we can use that knowledge to invite them into other kinds of work, itd be silly not to.

But professors cant simply show film clips and play sound bites of popular music.

If youre trying to teach Plato using Seinfeld and Simpson, thats a fine thing to do, he said. But if you never get around to reading Plato, youve failed.

At Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., students have been able to sign up for Beam me up, Einstein: Physics through Star Trek since 1997. Don Spector teaches the course every other year for nonscience majors.

Dr. Spector shows bits of Star Trek episodes based on whether theres a physics principle he can teach. Students, for example, watch a clip about a cloaking device. (Translation for nongeeks: a gadget that renders objects, typically spaceships, invisible and undetectable.) Then the class talks about what principles could be used to create the device.

I have fun with it. I like teaching in this way better probably because they are more engaged with it, Dr. Spector said. Physics always has this reputation of being so hard and so out there. It helps the physics to bring something thats so accessible.

Lyrical literature

David Gaines, chairman of the English department at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, teaches a literature class based on Bob Dylan.

Its not, Lets just listen to Tangled Up in Blue 70 times and go home and listen to it more, Dr. Gaines said. Its a way to engage students with materials theyre interested in and urge them to take that a little further.

Using the work of Tolkien as the focus for linguistics makes perfect sense, he said. The students think critically about a book they have read for pleasure in the past.

The three Dallas-area schools teaming up for the class this fall will link the Tolkien trilogy to religion, medieval philosophy and other areas, said Dennis Kratz, a UTD professor and dean who will help teach the course.

Whats really happening today is the old notions of pop culture and high culture, except for the extremes, have blurred, Dr. Kratz said. When you redo La Boheme as Rent, is that high culture or middle-brow culture?

The Lord of the Rings is a bit of both, he said.

I just think its such a very deep, satisfying, intellectually pleasing work of literature, and yet its fun, Dr. Kratz said.

UT instructor Fred Hoyt, a graduate student, created the Tolkien course to meet a requirement that he create an introductory linguistics class. Both sections of his classes, one with 30 students, one with 70, filled immediately; he would have been able to fill each class 10 times over, based on waiting lists.

Linguistics link

Mr. Hoyt said theres a logical connection between the famous author and linguistics. Mr. Tolkien was a linguist before he was a novelist. One of the required texts in the new UT class is The Languages of Tolkiens Middle Earth, another authors interpretation of the invented tongues. Mr. Tolkien based the languages on Old Norse, Old English, Gothic, Welsh and Finnish.

Mr. Hoyt, like many of his students, began reading the authors books as a child. He said the work gave him a love for new languages, though he didnt know about linguistics at the time.

Part of the reason I wanted to offer this course was when I was an undergraduate, I wish I had known about linguistics, he said. In my department, theres more focus on teaching. Linguistics is hard. Its more like were realizing we always couldve gotten to more people.

His hope is that some students will want to study the discipline after taking his class.

Its not about the movies. The stuff were interested in is the stuff left out in the movies, he said.

Students must read The Lord of the Rings and familiarize themselves with the appendix that explains the development of the languages. Theyll study Old English runes, but theyll also learn Angerthas Daeron, the Elvish runes that Mr. Tolkien created, and Angerthas Moria, the Dwarvish runes.

Theyll talk about how Elvish sounds melodic and the Black Speech in the trilogy sounds harsh.

The good guys in his book speak beautiful languages, and the bad guys speak ugly languages, Mr. Hoyt said.

Students said professors are right to find ways to connect teaching to students lives.

If its interesting and relevant, youll learn it better, said Alex Hancock, a junior.

Professors, even when they include popular film or books, are careful to teach in depth, said UT senior Travis Lara.

Its not more bells and whistles, he said. Its more involvement with students.

Eric Lee, an engineering major, never intended to study linguistics until he saw Middle Earth in the course title.

I saw it advertised on the front page of the UT Web site, Mr. Lee said. I was like, Cool. I have to take this class.