
“And they’re off!” This is how I am feeling about the new year and the work of the Boethius Institute. 2024 had its trials, but we ended well, and have had a strong beginning to 2025. It began on January 3rd and 4th in Pasadena at the Adeodatus Winter forum, which was entitled Canonizing Tolkien. This was not declaring him a Catholic saint, but about making the case that Tolkien has reached the status of a “canonical author” – one respectable enough to be read and studied in a serious way, even one that all educated people should have read thoughtfully. (Boethius Senior Fellow Dr. Erik Ellis explains more about what this means in one of this bulletin’s feature articles.)

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with other serious students of Tolkien’s works, such as Brad Birzer, author of Sanctifying Myth, and Holly Ordway, author of Tolkien’s Modern Reading and Tolkien’s Faith. Boethius Fellows contributed to event: Dr. Ellis explained how Tolkien as scholar “canonized” Beowulf (through his influential article “The Monsters and the Critics”) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (Both essays, along with his famous “On Faerie Stories” can be found in this volume.) My talk was entitled Educating for Greatness: The Lord of the Rings as a Cultural Epic, a portion of which is our second feature article. We also include Gimli’s praise of the Glittering Caves of Aglarond from The Lord of the Rings, a moving example of Tolkien’s power, who, like the Elves of Lorien, put the thought of all he loved into all he made.
The new year has also brought the good news of our first major grant. The St. John Henry Newman Institute has committed $100,000 to help us launch our quadrivium project, the goal of which is to help educators understand the importance of the quadrivium formation in liberal education, and to provide the training and resources to make it effective in the classroom. You’ll have more news about this in future bulletins.
We’re also about to begin the final semester with our first cohort of fellows. This semester we will study the principles of music and astronomy as liberal arts, as well as consider the importance of all the liberal arts for a life ordered to wisdom. As a taste of the success of this program, I am delighted to share this account by fellow Lucas dos Santos, who is already sharing the fruits of his study with educators in Brazil.
More is already underway. So stay tuned for more great news about our work this year.