Course spotlight: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Roots of Modern Fantasy

Each Monday and Wednesday morning this past fall, more than 100 students from across the College of Arts and Sciences gathered in Ballantine Hall on the Indiana University Bloomington campus for a unique and engaging course, “Critical Approaches to the Arts and Humanities: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Roots of Modern Fantasy.”

Students Feb 29, 2024

Still photo of title card of video, saying: Course Spotlight: Tolkien and Modern Fantasy.

Each Monday and Wednesday morning this past fall more than 100 students from across the College of Arts and Sciences gathered in Ballantine Hall on the Indiana University Bloomington campus for a unique and engaging course, “Critical Approaches to the Arts and Humanities: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Roots of Modern Fantasy.”

The course, taught by Joey McMullen, a medievalist and an assistant professor in the College’s Department of English, required students to create their own fantasy worlds and elucidate how those worlds work—what rules, characters, and characteristics they would have—and that culminated in a final project where students developed and ran their own role-playing games (RPGs).

“I’m a medievalist, and medievalists often like fantasy, such as Tolkien’s landmark Lord of the Rings (LOTR) series,” said Professor McMullen. “Students often tell me they love those books and movies, and I thought it would be fun to teach an introductory-level course because there’s so much going on in LOTR, offering many interesting issues to probe, from gender, to race, to courage, to conquest.”

McMullen’s class is one of the College’s Courses in Critical Approaches (CAPP), designed to help faculty impart to first- and second-year students an understanding of how what they are learning in the classroom will be of great use to them in their post-college careers.

McMullen is part of a cohort of College faculty members who are Career Connection Fellows, an initiative of the College’s Walter Center for Career Achievement and supported through a major grant from the Lily Foundation. (To help the College continue the program beyond the initial grant funding, the Provost has committed to continuing support for the program for the next three years.) The Fellowship offers faculty the opportunity to workshop with colleagues a course they are teaching, focusing on how they can make job skills they are already teaching in their courses more legible to students. Career Connection Fellows also contributed to the identification of the College’s 12 crucial career competencies taught throughout the curriculum, and which were infused in McMullen’s fantasy world project.

“One the most exciting aspects of these faculty workshops is you get to talk about teaching with colleagues from other disciplines,” said McMullen. “Ahead of teaching this course I was workshopping it with colleagues from Chemistry and Mathematics, so I got perspectives from different disciplines, which helped me think about things I hadn’t before.”

In addition, teaching assistants Joshua Pontillo and Mikaela Renshaw, both Ph.D. candidates in the English department, played a significant role in the course, including the final project.

So, what would students get out of a course on Tolkien and developing RPGs?

“I sought to bring the creativity of the genre and of Tolkien’s Middle-earth and tie it in with career skills, such as creativity, critical thinking, innovation, and ethical reasoning—with the added benefit of students finding it a fun and compelling experience to create their own fantasy worlds and then play it as an RPG.”

McMullen explained: “In the course, students develop their critical thinking and communication skills through writing papers and responses, but we also practice ethical reasoning through the novels, questioning Tolkien on why, for example, there are almost no female characters in The Hobbit. Or, is his depiction of the relationship between Sam and Frodo classist? These are questions that may jar students at first, who mostly have seen the movie adaptions of the books.”

McMullen and his students examined the rules of Tolkien’s world, and in creating their own, McMullen asked students to step back and ask themselves, what should I do differently? Could I make my world potentially more equitable, or, could certain voices that we’re not hearing in Middle-earth be heard in what I create?”

By taking the course, “My critical thinking and creativity got much better,” said Prabhvir Lakhan ’24, a Neuroscience major in the College who will start medical school this fall. With the final project, he noted, “You have to be really creative in terms of creating your own world, but then thinking, OK, how does this one change I make affect the rest of the world? And that almost leads to a domino effect. And then, you can take that to real life, too. If you want to apply it to medicine, let’s say I’m treating the kidneys. How does this disease of the kidneys affect the rest of the body? If the kidneys fail, what else happens?”

“I initially thought it was just going to be, read the books, talk about characters, talk about the plot, but it was a lot more actual analysis of both Tolkien and internal and external factors that create the plot, the tension, the characterization,” said Lindsey Surd ’27, a Studio Art major in the College’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. “That honestly give me a better sense of media literacy.”

The course also had students utilizing AI into their projects to generate images of the characters from their world. “This was a good example of how we can use AI in the classroom, to innovate and improve an assignment or project, that I hadn’t thought of before,” said McMullen.

McMullen decided the course’s four sections would each come up with one world, and that one student from each section would present to their peers, who would then vote on the world that they wanted to role-play. “It was really fun to see students present, some gave really impressive business major-style presentations, others created maps, and so on. It ended up that two students tied, so we decided to role-play both worlds.”

Not being much of gamer himself, McMullen wasn’t sure how students would react. “It turned out to be a fun, culminating experience and students were excited to allow their peers to inhabit the worlds they created. I think it was a fantastic ending and a good memory for students.”

Course spotlight: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Roots of Modern Fantasy