Reno E. Lauro

From Tolkien Gateway

Reno E. Lauro is a researcher and independent scholar. His unpublished PhD thesis from the University of St Andrews was a treatment of J.R.R. Tolkien's philosophy of Mythopoeia [1] as a response to Jean Baudrillard's Hyperreality. His work makes connections between Tolkien, the medieval aesthetics of light, and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Reno contends that Tolkien modified Barfield's notion of Ancient Semantic Unity and developed his own Ontological Semantic Unity in the Legendarium. Rather than a literary endeavor, Tolkien applied the Medieval aesthetics of light to an already involved asterisk history of Elves and Men. Tolkien can only be understood, he says, by taking his cosmological ontology at face value as a true recovery of enchanted forms of life for an Age of the Machine.

Reno has run the substack page Tolkien's House of Being since 2019, and its associated Facebook page.

Bibliography[edit | edit source]

Articles[edit | edit source]

Lectures[edit | edit source]

  • February 24, 2006, University of St Andrews
    • "Panning the Semantic Trace: language, imagination and reality in the works of Owen Barfield & J.R.R. Tolkien"
  • March, 2006, University of St. Andrews Institute of Theology, Imagination and the Arts colloquium 'Patterns of Promise: Art, Imagination, and Christian Hope'
    • "Tolkien’s Nostalgia: Recovering the Reality of Christian Hope through Imagination"
  • March 1, 2008, Dallas Baptist University Pew/Paideia Conference
    • "Magic, Craft and Poïesis: Modes of Imaginative Resistance and Revealing in J.R.R. Tolkien and Martin Heidegger"
  • July 31, 2021, MythCon 51
    • "Philology and the Lived Imagination: Vico, Collingwood, and Tolkien"
  • October 22, 2022, Tolkien Among the Theologians Conference at Houston Christian University
    • "Tolkien, St. Maximus, and the Anglo-Saxon Theological Tradition"

External links[edit | edit source]

References