Literary Worldbuilding – International Conference at Augsburg University on Tolkien, Jordan, Williams, Lovecraft, George R.R. Martin

Augsburg Dom by Matthew Black

I am en route to the 14th Tolkien Seminar by the German Tolkien Society hosted by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Augsburg. Augsburg Uni has been holding lecture series on Tolkien and fantasy literature on a wide range of topics in recent years and it was only natural for the German TS, Walking Tree Publishers and the organisers at the University of Augsburg to work together on a larger venture. “Literary Worldbuilding” will be a conference with 30+ lectures in the course of this weekend dealing with a number of influential fantasy writers and I am looking forward to excellent talks

If you need any further information the program is being presented on the German Tolkien Society’s website including a downloadable flyer. The talks are mainly in English (only five are in German) so no worries about ‘Zem Germans only speaking German ;)’

The German Tolkien Society has continously improved on its Seminar over the course of years. The fruitful collaboration with the chair of Professor Thomas Honegger at the University of Jena offers has made sure it has a base of operations from which it has built cooperations with many other universities such as Hannover, Mainz, RWTH Aaachen, Potsdam and now Augsburg. Now, in its twentieth year the German TS is holding its fourteenth Seminar including two keynote speakers (John Garth, author of Tolkien and the Great War, and Gergely Nagy, University of Szeged, Hungary) and has given out stipends to junior Tolkien researchers. This conference certainly will be worth anyone’s time and I highly recommend you have a look at the publication of the talks next year!

Picture credit, license.

Marcel R. Bülles

Marcel R. Bülles is the author of thetolkienist.com, a specialist blog centering on worldwide Tolkien fandom, geekdom and research. He works as a freelance translator, journalist and writer and is the founder of the German Tolkien Society as well as a co-founder to RingCon, Europe's formerly biggest fantasy film convention. You can find him in cafés all over the world sipping an espresso blogging, writing, reading. At one point he was married to an extremely lovely French lady by the nickname of Sauron. Yes, that Sauron. He is also active with the International Tolkien Fellowship on Facebook and the Tolkien Folk on Instagram.