Thoughts on how to use Exploring TLOTR material
Hi Tony and all,
Here are some very preliminary thoughts on how the course material might be turned into other products.
The organization of these thoughts is:
- What do we have? Assets and Issues;
- What audiences might we address?
- What structures might we think about? A particular look at mirroring Corey’s ‘Exploring the Hobbit’ structure.
- Formats and Media
- Process
This is intended to spark discussion and contributions.
Well, we have about 292 hours of recorded classes (and far more before we are done.) Tony’s summaries, Synchronous comments and questions scattered across several platforms, and non-synchronous comments, questions and discussions on several forums. That’s a lot of material, and it keeps growing.
Our most unique asset is our very detailed close reading perspective, coupled with a Corey led and guided, but multi participant input approach. As far as I know, this does not exist elsewhere.
We have certainly been covering a large number of recurring themes, we have tackled many interesting questions, both major and minor. We have come up with some interesting insights – probably some that would be novel to Tolkien students and fans. We have covered the poetry more extensively and more in depth than any other study I know. We have gone into incredible depth into the meaning (and possible impacts) of paragraphs, sentences, and even words. This actually is possibly the most unique feature of this class, but also the hardest to capture in some form of product. We have had many jokes and puns, some ‘insider’ and some more generally accessible. A sub-set of these have been hilarious.
Purpose: The first issue is that we have enough material for many different types of product. No derivative product can (or should) try to duplicate the classes. They exist on-line, and anyone who wants the class experience (although a-synchronously, which is not quite as good), can watch them. So, we will need to figure out what purposes we want to achieve through the use of class material.
Perspectives: In Corey’s first book, he stuck strictly to the perspective of the book as written (and read) before TLOTR was published. Our discussions have ranged across multiple perspectives on TLOTR, from the first-time reader, to total lore nerd. We have also never focused on the perspective of other commentators and critics of TLOTR. Our mixed perspectives would be difficult to disentangle, if we wanted to create product with a singular perspective. We would probably need to add the missing perspective of other commentary if we wanted to make any sort of ‘academic’ product.
Frame (or not): A question JRRT and CT thought about. The frame, in our case is the class and the discussions. We could create product featuring the frame, product set within the frame, or product which eliminates the frame.
Data Overload: We have a ton of material. And it keeps growing. Chasing themes, or the development of characters or issues through all this material is likely to be a monumental task.
Always good to have an idea of what audiences we are trying to produce product for. Possible audiences I can think of include: Fans, Academics, Students, New Readers. Fans can possibly be split into literary fans and lore fans. Our close reading, with our often first-time reader perspective, seems more suitable for creating product for literary fans rather than lore fans?
If we wanted to make product for academic audiences, we would need to add multiple references and footnotes, and probably add the perspective of other commentators, which we have not covered. The work involved would be considerable.
There are many ways we could structure the material to create product or products. The first suggestion was to emulate Corey’s ‘Exploring The Hobbit’. Further suggestions might include: The Poems of TLOTR; Themes in TLOTR; New Insights on TLOTR; Questions while reading TLOTR; An annotated LOTR (wow would this be work. All the issues of references , footnotes, the perspectives of other commentators, etc.)
- Structures: Emulating Corey’s ‘Exploring The Hobbit’
Just as a reminder, Corey structured that book to go chapter by chapter, and to focus on 6 recurring themes, 6 additional ‘characters’, 3 Locations, and 2 events. Not all of these were covered in each chapter, and, conveniently each was given a sub-chapter heading when it occurred within each chapter.
There are 19 Chapters. The 6 key themes are: Bilbo’s nature, which appears in 13 chapters; Luck, which appears in 8 chapters; The Desolation of the Dragon, which appears in 7 chapters; Burglar Bilbo, 5 chapters, Bilbo’s Choices, 5 chapters, The Writing of The Hobbit, 5 chapters.
The 6 additional characters are: Dwarves: 3 chapters; Elves, 3 chapters; Goblins, 2 chapters; Smaug, 1 chapter; Gollum, 1 chapter; Trolls, 1 chapter.
The 3 additional locations are: The Wild, 2 chapters; Mirkwood, 1 chapter; Laketown, 1 chapter;
The 2 events are: Homecoming, 2 chapters; Eucatastrophe, 1 chapter.
Corey obviously made a lot of choices when deciding what to focus on. Notable omissions include: Gandalf, Thorin, The Elven King, Elrond, Bag End, Rivendell.
So, if emulating ‘Exploring the Hobbit’, we would need to pick which themes, characters, locations, and events to highlight. Of course there are many more than in The Hobbit. There are also 62 chapters (not counting Appendices, Introduction and Prologue) rather than 19. There was a concept of producing an Exploring TLOTR product for each of the 6 Books. Many of the themes and characters, of course, span across all 6 books. How to write some of them in early books when we might come to new insights in later classes? Easy if we always adopt the first-time reader perspective, but then how do we dis-entangle all the other perspectives which are present in our material?
Format suggestions have included: Books; Essay collections; On-line; Interactive; Wikis, etc. Perhaps best to revisit when more thoughts on Audiences and Structures have been collected.
There are many possible processes for creating product out of the material. Some sort of collaborative process would spread the workload. Tony has created the summaries, which focus on class conclusions, from which themes and characters and key locations can be derived, however, to fully mine the material, probably we should trawl back through the U-tubes to collect the questions, and also mine the various question and discussion forums.
Hope those preliminary thoughts have been enough to kick off some discussion and builds?