We’re pleased to announce Carl Phelpstead as our annual Guest of Honour.
Usually our Guest follows the post-AGM Annual Dinner, and is one of the most prestigious positions within the Tolkien Society’s annual calendar. Our Guests of Honour always do a talk, Q&A session, or, as is often the case with artists, a presentation. Previous guests include Brian Sibley, Priscilla Tolkien, John Garth, Alan Lee, Dimitra Fimi, Tom Shippey and Humphrey Carpenter. The format and the topic is of the speaker’s choosing, but our desire is to share some aspect of current thinking on Tolkien.
Carl Phelpstead is a professor of English Literature at Cardiff University. He was born in south Wales but grew up in England from the age of three. He was educated at the universities of Sheffield and Oxford before being appointed to teach Old English and Old Norse at Cardiff University in 1999. He has published extensively on medieval Norse and English texts as well as on twentieth-century writers influenced by medieval literature.
He has published articles on Tolkien in journals including Tolkien Studies and contributed to J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (ed. Michael Drout) and A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien (ed. Stuart Lee), but is best known in the field of Tolkien Studies for his book Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity, which won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies in 2012.
For more information about Carl, see his profile on the Cardiff University website. For more information about the AGM, and to book the dinner, look at our event page.
