Tolkien’s Green Knight

Project: Tolkien’s Green Knight

Tolkien’s Green Knight  

Led by Ian Blyth 

An exploratory project in Arthurian Literature centred on two main areas of discussion:

a) How the very significant socio-cultural and demographic changes brought about by the successive waves of the Black Death inthe second half of the fourteenth century impacted upon Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1390s).

b) How J.R.R. Tolkien's work on Gawain in the early 1920s and again in the early 1950s, and the socio-cultural and demographic changes brought about by the two twentieth-century world wars, can be read into the character of Tom Bombadil in The Fellowship of the Ring (1954).