Oxonmoot 2024

Tolkien fans are famous for annually re-reading The Lord of the Rings. What are we seeking when we re-immerse ourselves in LotR, and what do we find? From 25 December 2023 to 25 March 2024 I re-read LotR through an autoethnographic lens, placing personal experience into conversation with existing Tolkien scholarship and theories of narrative identity. Taking extensive field notes on my reading process, I reflexively documented my responses to the text and the memories it evokes. I thereby identified five core themes that keep me coming back to LotR: imaginative co-creation; emotional catharsis; nostalgia; the hard necessity of letting go; and what Verlyn Flieger has called double exposure, as LotR has ceased to be merely a story to read and enjoy and become a narrative framework by which I make sense of my life. I conclude, not by making claims to generalizability, but by offering my experience as an invitation for others to tell their own stories of what Middle-earth means to them.