Tolkien Professor - podcast review

A new podcast that has many people excited is The Tolkien Professor (feed). Professor Corey Olsen from Washington College teaches the works by J.R.R. Tolkien in a way, as he claims, would have been approved by Tolkien himself.

Tolkien's work not only has no great appreciation among the discerning of High Literature, but Tolkien also opposed to many of the interpretation methods modern literary studies prefer. In the first episode Olsen gives an expose of these methods, psychological, metaphoric and allegorical, what Tolkien thought of these and why these indeed are not applicable to such famous works as The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

The following chapters serve as discussions of Tolkien's work and apply interpretations that find favor in the eyes of Professor Olsen and hopefully, in retrospect, Tolkien's. These take on the stories, first of all The Hobbit, by its language as its narrative and hardly any connection to the person of Tolkien and possible representations in real life or allegoric nature. Keep your Tolkien texts handy when you go and listen to these podcasts.