1968 Belknap College Tolkien Conference

The first scholarly Tolkien conference held was held October 18-20, 1968 at Belknap College in Center Harbor, NH. It was organized by Ed Meskys and held under the auspices of the American Tolkien Society. It was not as dry as conferences later became, but it was not a fannish convention, either. The 90 attendees were mostly fans with a serious interest in Tolkien.

Conference highlights included a display of Tolkien manuscripts from Marquette University, paper presentations and a performance of Farmer Giles of Ham.

Unfortunately, the conference also acquired the name of Flycon. It was held in a newly-finished college building and for some reason, enormous quantities of flies hatched in the hall each day -- contemporary reports indicated a five-gallon can of dead flies were swept out each day.

A con report:

After the president of the college welcomed the conference and Fred Lerner had keynoted and intro­duced it, the program began. Leading off the scholars, George Thompson spoke on Tolkien criticism. Nan Braude, a grad student from U.C. read a paper by Wayne Schumacher, an English professor at U.C. and then gave a paper of her own called "Why Frodo Lives" She was followed by Cory Seidman who presented a paper entitled "Old Irish Influences Upon the Language and Literature of the LOTR. This was the best of the scholarly papers.

The second session opened with Nan Scott’s 'War and Pacifism in LOTR". Mrs. Scott read well and was interesting but made her point so many times that this reporter was forced to re­treat and thereby missed the first part of Marion Zimmer Bradley's talk on folk music and LOTR. Marion was followed by Ivor Rogers who spoke on'Cinematic Tolkien or Why Movies of LOTR Should Never Be Made'. The third session started with Dainis Bisenieks presenting a paper on "Power & Poetry in LOTR." This was followed by Grace Ann Elwood’s "The Good Guys Against the Bad Guys", an excerpt from her soon to be published book NEWS FROM MIDDLE EARTH.

The piece de resistance of the day was Lester del Rey's talk titled "The Truth About Gollum." Lester has developed a logical and consistent theory explaining the stylistic changes that occur most frequently in the last third of LOTR. He theorizes that Sam Gamgee has altered parts of the Red Book of Westmarch, predominantly the section dealing with the events on Mount Doom to conceal the fact that Gollum, whom he hated, was really the hero and that he did not die on Mount Doom hut lived to eventually sail over the sea to the West as was the right of him who had been the strongest of the ring bearers.

Sunday’s program contained a talk by Professor Nancy-Lou Patterson on "Tolkien in the Visual Arts", followed by Fred Lerner reading Sigurd Fowler's paper "Speech Patterns in LOTR". John R. Spellman presented a paper titled "The Missing Link in the Chain of Being" and Dr. Burton W. Randolph spoke on "A Chronology of the Events of the Elder Days of Middle Earth".

Five papers were sub­mitted but not presented because the authors were unable to attend the conference. These will be included in the proceedings and will probably be presented at one of the next TSA meetings. Some of the papers given at the conference will be printed in the Tolkien Journal but as soon as all of the papers have been edited a complete proceedings will be published.

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Convention
	1968

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