Video at Into The West: Fantasy Festival in Salt Lake City

Two weeks ago I was honored to be invited to give a keynote address and a talk on Beowulf at Fantasy Festival, an event organized by the non-profit charity Into the West. My talk was about finding ways to judge Tolkien's and Rowling's work, coming up with fair criteria by which we might rate them in comparison with each other and with other works of literature (I believe I snuck Joyce in a lot, as well as a fair bit of Hemingway and Toni Morrison). iSCIFI.tv was there and did a quick interview about the relationship between Science Fiction and Fantasy. It was fun, and now it's on YouTube: at this link (I will work on embedding it, but piles of papers call).

There is also some commentary on the event, and pictures, by writer Paul Genesse, the author of The Golden Cord, which I am bringing with me to read on the plane to Kalamazoo when I'm not grading papers. Paul has a good blog entry on the conference here, with pictures.

I am going to be at Kalamazoo, but doing only medieval things, not Tolkien things. Then there will be trips to NYC (Recording another Recorded Books course, this time on poetry) and, in November, to Bergen, Norway, to talk about my technical meme research, but only one other Tolkien-related event, the Long Expected Party at the Shaker Village in Kentucky, which has the most beautifully done website I've ever seen (designer, would you re-do my web sites? Pretty, pretty please?).