Dimitra Fimi | |
|---|---|
 Dimitra in 2020 | |
| Born | 2 June 1978 |
| Known for | Tolkien scholarship |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Cardiff University |
| Academic work | |
| Main interests | Folklore,Celtic mythology |
| Notable works | Tolkien,Race,and Cultural History |
Dimitra Fimi (born 2 June 1978) is a Greek academic and writer and since 2023 Professor of Fantasy and Children's Literature at the University of Glasgow. [1] [2] Her research includes that of the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and children's fantasy literature.
From the island of Salamis in the Greek region of Attica,the daughter of teachers Pavlos Fimis and Theodora Papaliveriou-Fimi,she attended the 1st General Lyceum of Salamis from where she graduated in 1996. Fimi gained her BA degree at the University of Athens in 2000 before completing her MA in Early Celtic Studies (2002) and PhD in English Literature (2005) at Cardiff University. [3]
From 2009 to 2018 she was among the staff of Cardiff Metropolitan University as a lecturer in English after having previously lectured for Cardiff University and the Open University. [1] [4] In September 2018 she was appointed Lecturer in Fantasy and Children's Literature at the University of Glasgow,the first time the term “fantasy”has ever been used in an academic post title in the UK. [2] In September 2020 she was appointed Co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow, [5] to lecture on fantasy and children's literature. [2] She is a Visiting Lecturer in English Literature at Signum University,an online learning facility. [4]
Her doctoral thesis on the vexed [6] issue of Tolkien and race was published as the monograph Tolkien, Race and Cultural History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). It won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies in 2010, and was shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award. With Andrew Higgins she is co-editor of A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages (HarperCollins, 2016) which won the Tolkien Society Award for Best Book in 2017. [7]
Fimi's other works include Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children's Fantasy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) which was the runner-up for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award. [8] She was one of the judges of the Wales Book of the Year Award 2017 and was selected for the Welsh Crucible in 2017. [3] She has contributed chapters in A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien (Blackwell, 2014), and Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology (Routledge, 2016). She is a member of The Tolkien Society and has written articles for magazines and websites including the Times Literary Supplement and The Conversation; she appears regularly on BBC Radio Wales. [9]
"The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" is J. R. R. Tolkien's imagined original song behind the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle ", invented by back-formation. It was first published in Yorkshire Poetry magazine in 1923, and was reused in extended form in the 1954–55 The Lord of the Rings as a song sung by Frodo Baggins in the Prancing Pony inn. The extended version was republished in the 1962 collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.
The Mythopoeic Awards for literature and literary studies are given annually for outstanding works in the fields of myth, fantasy, and the scholarly study of these areas. Established by the Mythopoeic Society in 1971, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award is given for "fiction in the spirit of the Inklings", and the Scholarship Award for non-fiction work. The award is a statuette of a seated lion, with a plaque on the base. It has drawn resemblance to, and is often called, the "Aslan".
Princess Eilonwy is a fictional character in Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain. She appears in four of the five novels in the series, as well as Disney's 1985 animated film adaptation The Black Cauldron. Eilonwy is a member of the Royal House of Llyr, and the women in her line are formidable enchantresses, including her mother, Angharad, and grandmother Regat. She has inherited this characteristic, most readily visible in her manipulation of a magical item she calls her "bauble", a small golden sphere that glows with magical light when activated by her willpower. Eilonwy's father, Geraint, was a commoner with whom her mother fell in love.
Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson was an English folklorist. She was a scholar at the University of Cambridge and The Folklore Society, and specialized in the study of Celtic and Germanic religion and folklore.
"A Secret Vice", also known as "A Hobby for The Home", is a lecture first presented by English philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien in 1931. The lecture concerns Tolkien's relations with and view on constructed languages, in particular on artistic languages. In the talk, Tolkien discusses the human desire to make languages, and his criteria to create a good language – these include phonoaesthetics and the presence of a mythology to accompany the language. Tolkien's presentation was the first instance of him openly exhibiting his hobby of conlanging, and includes examples of several of his languages.
J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, drew on a wide array of influences including language, Christianity, mythology, archaeology, ancient and modern literature, and personal experience. He was inspired primarily by his profession, philology; his work centred on the study of Old English literature, especially Beowulf, and he acknowledged its importance to his writings.
In J. R. R. Tolkien's writings, Elves are the first fictional race to appear in Middle-earth. Unlike Men and Dwarves, Elves are immortal, though they can be killed in battle. If so, their souls go to the Halls of Mandos in Aman. After a long life in Middle-earth, Elves yearn for the Earthly Paradise of Valinor, and can sail there from the Grey Havens. They feature in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Their history is described in detail in The Silmarillion.
A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien is a 2014 book edited by Stuart D. Lee and published by Wiley-Blackwell. It is a part of the Blackwell Companions to Literature series, which have been described as prestigious reference works, and features authors well-known in the field of Tolkien studies.
J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy writings have been said to embody outmoded attitudes to race. However, scholars have noted that he was influenced by Victorian attitudes to race and to a literary tradition of monsters, and that he was anti-racist both in peacetime and during the two World Wars.
England and Englishness are represented in multiple forms within J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings; it appears, more or less thinly disguised, in the form of the Shire and the lands close to it; in kindly characters such as Treebeard, Faramir, and Théoden; in its industrialised state as Isengard and Mordor; and as Anglo-Saxon England in Rohan. Lastly, and most pervasively, Englishness appears in the words and behaviour of the hobbits, both in The Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings.
Alaric Hall is a British philologist who is an associate professor of English and director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. He has, since 2009, been the editor of the academic journal Leeds Studies in English and its successor Leeds Medieval Studies.
Richard Carroll West was an American librarian and one of the first Tolkien scholars. He is best known for his 1975 essay on the interlace structure of The Lord of the Rings, for which he won the 1976 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inkling Studies.
Stuart Dermot Lee is a British specialist in information technology at Oxford University Computing Services and a Reader in E-learning at Oxford University, but is best known for his scholarly books on J. R. R. Tolkien. He has written several plays, two of which won Oxford Playhouse new writing awards.
Signum University is a non-profit, online graduate school based in New Hampshire, granting the degree of Master of Arts in Language and Literature. Its founder and president is Corey Olsen.
J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the bestselling fantasy The Lord of the Rings, was largely rejected by the literary establishment during his lifetime, but has since been accepted into the literary canon, if not as a modernist then certainly as a modern writer responding to his times. He fought in the First World War, and saw the rural England that he loved built over and industrialised. His Middle-earth fantasy writings, consisting largely of a legendarium which was not published until after his death, embodied his realism about the century's traumatic events, and his Christian hope.
J. R. R. Tolkien was both a philologist and an author of high fantasy. He had a private theory that the sound of words was directly connected to their meaning, and that certain sounds were inherently beautiful. Scholars believe he intentionally chose words and names in his constructed Middle-earth languages to create feelings such as of beauty, longing, and strangeness. Tolkien stated that he wrote his stories to provide a setting for his languages, rather than the other way around. Tolkien constructed languages for the Elves to sound pleasant, and the Black Speech of the evil land of Mordor to sound harsh; poetry suitable for various peoples of his invented world of Middle-earth; and many place-names, chosen to convey the nature of each region. The theory is individual, but it was in the context of literary and artistic movements such as Vorticism, and earlier nonsense verse that stressed language and the sound of words, even when the words were apparently nonsense.
Thomas Honegger is a scholar of literature, known especially for his studies of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth.
Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien's Middle-earth is a 2005 scholarly book about the origins of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, and the nature of his characterisation, by the scholar of literature Marjorie Burns. Some of the chapters discuss "Celtic" and "Norse" influence on Tolkien's writing, while others explore literary themes. The book won a Mythopoeic Award for Inklings' Studies in 2008.
Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits is a 2008 book by Dimitra Fimi about J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings. Scholars largely welcomed the book, praising its accessibility and its skilful application of a biographical-historical method which sets the development of Tolkien's legendarium in the context of Tolkien's life and times. Major themes of the book include Tolkien's constructed languages, and the issues of race and racism surrounding his work.
The English author J. R. R. Tolkien has often been supposed to have spoken of wishing to create "a mythology for England". It seems he never used the actual phrase, but various commentators have found his biographer Humphrey Carpenter's phrase appropriate as a description of much of his approach in creating Middle-earth, and the legendarium behind The Silmarillion.
Best Book WINNER: A Secret Vice, ed. Dimitra Fimi and Andy Higgins
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