OzMoot 2025 Registration
Tolkien’s love for language greatly influenced his storytelling, giving Middle-earth a rich linguistic variety and sense of history. But the power of his languages goes further than this, with the flowing phonetics of Elvish tongues bringing a musical quality to his poetry and prose. Tolkien claimed that, from a young age, any musical knowledge or talent was “transformed into linguistic terms,” giving his language creation and his writings in English a uniquely musical flow.
He also had an academic interest in song-literature and the transmission of culture through the oral traditions of story, song, and verse, with his love of classical literature and the Norse sagas. To Tolkien the philologist and historian, it would have been natural that story and song blend so well together in giving meaning to his created universe. Even the creation of Arda by Ilúvatar involved taking the beauty of music and giving it a physical form upon which his mythology could play out.
At OzMoot 2025 we seek to explore how music, poetry, and language shape and enrich Tolkien’s works, and the many resulting adaptations in film, theatre, and song. We also encourage exploration of how music, language, and stories demonstrate diversity of cultures, both in Middle-earth and in the primary world, as well as how music and stories are universal and bring many cultures and languages together with no barriers.