From The Washington Post:
Corey Olsen had a lot to say about J.R.R. Tolkien. But it seemed a pity to consign his thoughts to a scholarly journal, to be read by a few hundred fellow academics who already knew more than enough about the author of "The Lord of the Rings."
So in spring 2007, the Washington College professor took his scholarship public, with a podcast called "How to Read Tolkien and Why" and a Web site called The Tolkien Professor.
A million downloads later, Olsen is one of the most popular medievalists in America. His unusual path to success - a smartly branded Web site and a legion of iTunes listeners - marks an alternative to the publish-or-perish tradition of scholarship on the tenure track.
Here that? A million downloads. (Or make that 1,000,001 downloads, as I plan on looking into this myself.) While the WaPo article examines how Olsen's academic career will be influenced by this podcasting foray into public intellectualism (and the article uses a predictable exhultation--'look at this crazy new-media medium he's using!'--to amplify the drama), I'm more interested in the listeners (as well as Olsen's cultivation of fans of medievalism even in the old-fashioned classroom, outside of this Tolkien thing). Are a million people (re)reading Tolkien while they are listening to this podcast? What are they looking for? What are they finding?
Also of interest, from the same article:
"English professors as a group tend to rule Tolkien out of the literary canon without blinking," Olsen lamented in the introductory lecture, "largely because fantasy stories about elves and dragons obviously cannot be serious literature."
Truth. And this is just the right cue for me to urge you, again, to pick up this (and its follow-ups)--because it is excellent, and not enough people who love literature know it.
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