The Tree
of Tales
MAIN SPONSORS
TEAM
More than 100 people involved
A project of the University of St Andrews, in collaboration with the Rimini Meeting, the University of Oxford, the King Edwards School in Birmingham, more than 60 volunteers, and a committee of 20 Tolkien experts, including Martin Simonson, Guglielmo Spirito, Michaël Devaux, Alison Milbank and many others.
THEMES
Collaborating with Creation
For Tolkien, artistic creation, and, more generally, any aesthetic commitment of language and human imagination, are gifts that help recover an attitude of wonder in front of reality. This is the discovery at the heart of Tolkien’s work, that all humans are called to collaborate with their own desires and thoughts to a greater design, to contribute with their own individuality to the great polyphony of creation, and thus to graft their own particular story into the great ‘Tree of Tales’.
(…) he saw the King’s Tree springing up, tower upon tower, into the sky, and its light was like the sun at noon; and it bore at once leaves and flowers and fruits uncounted, and not one was the same as any other that grew on the Tree. (Smith of Wootton Major)
J.R.R. Tolkien
