As we celebrate World Poetry Month this April, we wanted to bring attention to one of McGill’s own worldwide poetry endeavours.
Founded in 2010 by McGill alumnus Asa Boxer, the Montreal International Poetry Prize is an annual global poetry competition. With a prize of $20,000 awarded to one poet for a poem, the competition is judged by a jury of award-winning poets from all over the world, including Lorna Goodison, Heather Christle and Tanur Ojaide for the 2022 competition.
Since 2019, the Montreal International Poetry Prize has been overseen by McGill University’s Department of English. The following year, the international competition received nearly 5,000 entries from more than 100 nations around the world. Of these thousands of submissions from 2020, a select few were shortlisted and were combined to create The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2020, available to students through the McGill Library.
With the 2022 competition having recently ended, the next competition of the Montreal International Poetry Prize will open for entries in January 2024.
For more great poetry check out our collection and the Redpath Book Display which has a great selection of poetry you can borrow. This display will be up for all of April 2023.
March 25th is Tolkien Reading Day – a day significant for marking the vanquishing of the Lord of the Rings (Sauron), the destruction of the ring, and the completion of Frodo’s quest. In honour of Tolkien Reading Day, check out the March Redpath Book Display, Talkin’ Tolkien, located in the Humanities and Social Studies Library! There you’ll find curated picks about Tolkien and linguistics, mythology, religion, and more.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 in South Africa, moving to Birmingham, England at 4 years old. Tolkien, a name of German origin, means either foolishly brave or stupidly clever. Tolkien’s childhood home backed onto a railway yard, where his curiosity for linguistics took root as he saw trains bound for South Wales bearing names such as “Penrhiwceiber” and “Senghenydd.” At the very start of his career, Tolkien worked for Oxford English Dictionary – contributing to the definitions for “walnut,” “walrus,” and “wampum.” Throughout most of his adult life, Tolkien taught English literature and specialized in Old and Middle English. He studied and produced publications on works such as Beowulf andSir Gawain and the Green Knight. Along with C.S. Lewis, Tolkien was a part of the informal literary discussion group called the Inklings, which met at Oxford University over the course of the 1930s and 40s. He is most famous for being the author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion (published posthumously by his son Christopher).
One of Tolkien’s earliest ambitions was to create a body of myth and legend for England. Being a devout Roman Catholic as well as a passionate scholar of world mythologies, he uniquely married Christian theology with paganism in his legendarium. This extensive collection of writings evolved over six decades of his life and the scope of his work is truly unparalleled.
Many of the names and story elements within the legendarium were influenced by Norse, Germanic, Finnish, and Celtic mythologies. The ring in the Norse Völsunga saga and the medieval German poem the Nibelungenlied are said to have inspired Tolkien’s one ring. However, the battle between good and absolute evil and the Christ-like sacrifice of Frodo are all thematically Christian. Although Tolkien avoids any explicit reference to religion or religious practice in the legendarium, he admits that the work is fundamentally religious and Catholic, but the religiosity is absorbed into the symbolism and grander story.Perilous Realms andThe Ring and the Cross explore how Tolkien reconciled these two dichotomies amongst other complexities.
Tolkien was not only a prolific author, but also a linguist, and philologist– that is, a specialist in historical texts and languages. These academic interests informed his literary output: for instance, both the story of Isildur and the idea of the ‘Ring’ exist in 13th-century German literature, and the Rohirrim language is close to both Icelandic and Old English. Tolkien was fascinated by the construction of languages. He conceived the term “glossopoeia” and developed not one, but fifteen (15!) of the languages of Middle Earth. All of these languages are articulated together historically, and in Middle-Earth canon, all descend from the language of the Valar, the Gods. Tolkien put a great deal of effort into not only building structurally and grammatically cohesive languages but also creating the internal narratives and legends associated with these languages. He coined this idea “mythopoeia” (or “myth-making”): an invented language, to live, must be created alongside its history and stories.
An interesting tidbit here (for all the copyright enthusiasts in the room!) is that Tolkien’s languages – Quenya, Sindarin, Adûnaic – are his intellectual property, the rights of which passed to his estate. This means that Middle-Earth languages are copyrighted by the Tolkien Estate and can only be used with permission from the Tolkien Estate. There is an argument, however, that languages – once they are commonly used- cannot be copyrighted, and indeed a legal opinion published in 1999 noted (though not in a court of law) that under US copyright, systems cannot be copyrighted, and that an alphabet is a system. That being said: there has (so far) not been any court case where the Tolkien Estate has attempted to assert their rights to Elvish use, and there is a shared agreement that scholars and enthusiasts can disseminate information about Elvish, as long as no profit is being made, on sites such as elvish.org.
Many younger fans may have been introduced to Middle Earth through Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit – did you know that the library not only has DVD/Blu-ray copies of these, but they are also accessible (except the third Hobbit movie) through the free streaming service Criterion? Must be time for a movie marathon! If you’re interested in the reception of The Hobbit trilogy, you can check out Fans, Blockbusterisation, and the Transformation of Cinematic Desire: Global Receptions of the Hobbit Film Trilogy available by eBook through McGill Library.
Indeed, the world’s love of Tolkien is alive and well in the 21st century – there’s a (paid) app called Walk to Mordor that allows you to track your steps as you recreate Frodo’s journey to Mordor. For further immersion, check out the fan project “Minecraft Middle Earth” which has ambitiously set out to produce a faithful reproduction of Middle Earth in the hit videogame Minecraft. That’s a lot of blocks!
The book display and this blog post was curated by the Graduate Student Reference Assistants: Jenna Coutts, Lise Bourbonniere, Marianne Lezeau and Sarah Wood-Gagnon
February is just around the corner, and with it comes the annual celebration of Black History Month (BHM). The month marks a time of honouring the legacy and stories of Black Canadians and their communities around the nation.
The McGill community takes this opportunity to engage in not just celebrations, but moments of acknowledgement and introspection on what it means to be part of a diverse community by coming together in love, support, and learning. In anticipation of BHM, the Humanities and Social Studies Library (HSSL) has curated a virtual display, bringing from deep within our collections, titles both old and new, literary masterpieces, and contemporary podcasts. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the titles on display:
BHM would be incomplete without an ode to Angelou’s best-selling debut memoir of growing up black in the 1930s and 1940s.
Sent by their mother to live with their devout grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man — and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, and the ideas of great authors will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated.
With spellbinding lyricism, they tell a moving and deeply profound story about how one boy is able to maintain his humanity and fight for the truth, in a system designed to strip him of both. A young artist and poet’s prospects at a diverse art school are threatened by a racially biased system and a tragic altercation in a gentrifying neighbourhood.
Few hold a place in the Black feminist canon like Lorde, a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” who “dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.”
In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.
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Other notable mentions include Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son; Nathan Harris’ The Sweetness of Water an epic whose grandeur locates humanity and love amid the most harrowing circumstances, and; Octavia Butler’s Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, which offers an unflinching look at our complicated social history, transformed by the graphic novel format into a visually stunning work for a generation of new readers.
Keep an eye on our socials (Instagram: @mcgilllib, Facebook: McGill Library and Twitter: @mcgilllib) for more exciting events and news related to BHM.
