JRR Tolkien taught in the Department of English at Leeds University from 1920 to 1925. He was made the first Professor of English Language in 1924.

During his time in Leeds Tolkien produced a revised version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with his colleague EV Gordon, worked on his translation of Beowulf which was not published until 2014 and developed his Lost Tales, the stories of the proto-Silmarillion which he had begun in the trenches of the Great War, besides setting up a curriculum for his departmental students which substantially remains the same to this day.

In this lecture Claire Rae Randall will explore the imagination of Professor Tolkien, how he turned his experiences into fantastic mythologies which resonate with the archetypal psyche and the rich abundance of source material for his world of Middle Earth which can be found hidden in plain sight here in Leeds and more widely abroad in Yorkshire, from Treebeard the Ent in Headingley to Helm’s Deep in the glacial landscapes of the Dales.