About Me

My photo
Fellow of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture, University of Southampton. Tolkien Society Education Officer. Facilitator for the Tolkien, Shakespeare, and Poetry Reading Groups hosted by the Central Library Southampton. Contact for Tolkien-related matters: educationATtolkiensocietyDOTorg. For all other enquiries: lynnevdaATclaraDOTcoDOTuk

Current Research Projects

  • Sixteenth-century politics in Shakespeare's The Tempest
  • The Significance of the Matter of England in The Lord of the Rings. Associated with this and with the course on Romances see the link to Bevis of Hampton
  • Poetry and its influence in The Lord of the Rings

Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture

For more information about the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture, School of Humanities, University of Southampton, including graduate seminars and conferences, see www.soton.ac.uk/cmrc/

See also http://www.soton.ac.uk/cmrc/research/fellows.html

Sunday, 25 March 2012

New Course: English Poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries

A new course on developments in the poetry of the British Isles is being prepared.

It will begin with T.S. Eliot and cover poets such as Basil Bunting, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and J.H. Prynne, and Derek Walcott.

Female poets will include Sylvia Plath, U.A. Fanthorpe, and Liz Lockhead.

The course will begin on 10th May 2012

For further details please contact me via the email address given here or see details in Southampton Central Library, where the course will be held.

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

Course: Wordsworth and Coleridge: The First Romantics

When the current course on Shakespeare and Marlowe ends, a new course on Wordsworth and Coleridge will begin in 2nd week of February. It will cover their major poems, and note the forms of literary theory that informed their creativity, as well as outlining their biographies.

Contact details will be available in Southampton Central Library as well as on this web page.

Saturday, 22 October 2011

New Article Online

My latest article 'Bevis and Tolkien; romancing the myth', has been published online only and may be viewed at http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=242515&FID=77&PR=3

It reveals close links between the famous fourteenth-century romance Bevis of Hampton and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

Courses: The thursday course on Milton has restarted. In December we will begin the course on Shakespeare and Marlowe - comparing their plays The Tempest and Dr. Faustus.


Tuesday, 14 June 2011

Courses run on the English in the Afternoon programme

Anglo-Saxon Literature
English Drama Before Shakespeare
English Poetry and History
The Faerie Queene,
The Development of the English Language 600 -1600 AD
Paradise Lost
Introducing Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Medieval Romances (Fourteenth-century Middle English verse romances)
Shakespeare and Marlowe: Introducing late Elizabethan Drama
Women in Medieval English Literature

Forthcoming in 2012:
Wordsworth and Coleridge
Late 20th and 21st century Poetry

English Poetry and History


The Development of the English Language 600-1600 AD


Shakespeare and Marlowe: Late Elizabethan Drama