Get ready, dear readers in the United Kingdom, for the erudite nerdiness of Signum University and the Mythgard Institute to finally come to YOU! Later this month, on April 28, Signum U. (digital disseminators of some of the best and most accessible learning and teaching in imaginative fiction studies anywhere) will host its first London “moot” at the Sir David Davies lecture theater, Torrington Place.
A “moot,” of course, is a meeting of Ents (tree-people) in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; Signum’s version promises to feature few talking trees, allowing proceedings to be held at a slightly hastier pace. Signum/Mythgard has been hosting such moots around the US for a few years now, with their main gathering, Mythmoot, held annually over a weekend in Leesburg, Virginia.
LondonMoot will be a one-day conference featuring talks and discussion in the fields of sci-fi, fantasy,
fairy tales, medieval studies and classical literature. Excitingly, Dr. Beatrice Groves, Oxford lecturer, author of Literary Allusion and Harry Potter and friend of this blog, will be featured as a keynote speaker, giving a talk with the drool-inducing title (at least for me) of “Potter’s Progress: Christian Myth in Harry Potter”. (Let me tell you, if I didn’t have a final exam to give, I’d have bought my ticket already.) The other talks look rather wonderful as well, with topics ranging from Shakespeare to philology to world building and much in between. You can browse the full schedule here.
Registration is still open; visit the Eventbrite page for LondonMoot here. At an admission cost of only 30 pounds for a day packed with great scholarship and engaging discussion, LondonMoot promises to be well worth a trip, however “hasty”. (Sorry, Entish humor.)
If you are lucky enough to be able to attend, I hope you’ll be in touch to share the highlights. (You can find me on Facebook and Twitter (@ekcstrand).) I’ll try not to be too jealous…
How’d it go? I wish I could have been there, but it didn’t work out….