Two abstracts submitted to K'zoo!
If you were thinking about submitting to the conference, the deadline is 9-15-2025!
The CFP for the Tolkien at Kalamazoo (the International Congress on Medieval Studies) can be found here: the deadline for submitting to the Congress is September 15 (how the HECK are we in September already?).
Below are the two proposals/abstracts I sent in for consideration—they are part of my Webs project although one may spin off into a separate longer essay because I’m not sure it will fit into the existing book. Both are drawn/developed from earlier Substack posts.
The conference portal at Western Michigan asks for a 50-word short description (to be used if proposal is accepted), and a 300-word abstract (not a single word more in either case). So both are included below.
For a paper session (four people presenting for 15 minutes each, usually) on the topic of “Queer and Feminist Medievalisms in Tolkien's Legendarium” (a hybrid session).
Title: Wanted: More Feminist Queer Medievalists in Tolkien Scholarship1
50 words: Tolkien studies would not exist without work by medievalists and folklorists who first took take his work seriously. After ten years of bibliographic research, I see a relative paucity of feminist queer medievalist scholarship and consider why that may be, given the forty years of feminist medieval scholarship that exists.
Abstract: J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction was identified with medieval England and with medieval studies from the beginning. Given Tolkien’s medieval scholarship, the identification is hardly surprising. Given the uniqueness of his fiction which transformed many of the medieval texts he studied (Chance, Brust), the fact that the earliest academics to take his work seriously were medievalists is also not surprising. Modernist critics such as Edmund Wilson and Burton Raffel were unfamiliar with Tolkien’s medieval sources or his medieval aesthetic which Elizabeth D. Kirk, a medievalist, analyzes in her 1971 essay on Tolkien’s writing style. In this presentation, I acknowledge the extent to which Tolkien scholarship is indebted to medievalists who established the cornerstone of the field. Then I discuss what is currently missing in Tolkien scholarship which is, based on bibliographic scholarship I have done in the past ten years, work by feminist medievalists, including feminist queer approaches. The questions I consider for this presentation concern the gap in feminist queer medievalist scholarship in Tolkien studies, a gap that I do find surprising given the forty-year history of feminist medieval scholarship. I review the history of feminist medieval scholarship as first being formalized in 1984 when three feminist medievalists met by chance after that year’s Congress and ended up creating the Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality. The first issue of the journal was published in 1986, and the journal is still being published today, forty years later. I review, briefly, the feminist medieval work in the journal in multiple disciplines that could be applied in Tolkien studies and then include feminist medievalists in history and literary studies who are currently active on Substack, in order to consider the ways in which feminist scholars trained in other periods can make use of this valuable feminist medievalist scholarship.
For a roundtable (more people presenting for a shorter time with more time for Q&A) on “Adaptations of Tolkien: Medieval Traces in Movies, Games and Other Transmedial Texts “ (Virtual)
They don’t want titles for RTs, but my working title for what I’m pretty sure will end up somewhere is Medieval and Modern Rape Cultures.
50 words: Drawing on medieval scholarship on rape and Kristine Larsen’s presentation on the language of rape in Tolkien, I analyze how the scene between Grima and Éowyn in the extended TT draws on two scenes in LotR (TT III, vi, 515 and RK, V, vii, 867) for Grima’s dialogue.
300 words: My proposed contribution to the roundtable will analyze how the film adapation of The Lord of the Rings handles the planned, though unsuccessful, rape of Éowyn by Grima Wormtongue. Drawing on the extensive medieval scholarship on rape culture and Kristine Larsen’s analysis of Tolkien’s language in “The gift which was withheld I take”: The Rape of the Sun Maiden in Tolkien’s Legendarium,” I focus on Scene 20 (EE, The Two Towers) in which Grima corners Éowyn in the bedroom where she mourning Théodred whose body is laid out on the bed. While this scene is technically original, meaning created by the three filmmakers (Jackson, Walsh, Boyens) for the film, since there is no equivalent scene between the two characters in Tolkien’s novel, comparing the scene’s dialogue with two scenes from LotR show that it is one of a number of instances where the screenwriters adapt language from other parts of the novel (TT III, vi, 515 and RK, V, vii, 867). Grima’s dialogue uses quotes from the third-person objective narrator and from Aragorn and Gandalf’s dialogue. Both the novel scenes include a group of men who talk about Éowyn who has been sent away (TT) in the first scene or is unconscious (RK) in the second. In neither scene in Tolkien’s novel is Éowyn allowed to speak, nor is she given any agency. I would argue that Tolkien’s handling of this part of her story reflects not only medieval but modern rape cultures which is why the screenwriters’ decision to use language from the novel for Grima’s attempted rape works so well. What is also worth noting is that the film adaptation gives Éowyn a chance to speak and agency: we see casting off Grima’s poisonous rhetoric, rejecting his words and him, and walking away.2
This is a virtual event, and a broad topic, so I suspect they may receive more proposals than they can fit into a roundtable slot. But as always, if one or both of my proposals are not accepted, there are other conferences that I can submit to!
This developed from an earlier post on the importance of contemporary feminist medieval scholarship to Tolkien studies (since as far as I can tell, and I do bibliographic essays), it’s definitely NOT happening (despite, as I point out above, the forty-year history of feminist medieval scholarship!).
I did a fairly extended rant on and about this scene and its sources in my adaptations series. Since this proposal is for a roundtable, I’ll have much less time to rant, and I suspect that it might eventually become a stand-alone longer paper (especially after checking out the extensive scholarship on rape culture in medieval studies, and Kristine Larsen’s fantastic presentation).
Reading your notes on the rape aspect of your submission made me realise I may have something to contribute to this discussion so I'm glad it's a virtual session. Best wishes for getting this accepted!
Fascinating analysis of the film treatment of Grima’s attempted rape — and I’ve just realized how much the Witch-king’s contemptuous words to Eowyn are the words of rape (an echo to her, perhaps, of Grima’s intentions): “Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.’” And she was not silent that time!