This course will look at the Oxford scholar and author J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), not solely as author of The Hobbit , The Lord of the Rings , and The Silmarillion , but more specifically from the perspective of his day job: as a medievalist, especially of England and the European North. It will focus above all on Tolkien’s first and primary love: languages – from Latin to Finnish to Old Norse, but especially Old and Middle English and particularly the dialect of his beloved English West Midlands – both as a vehicle for recovering lost pasts and worldviews and as a means for creating them anew when they can be retrieved only incompletely or not at all.