This recording from May 30, 2025.

Signum University presents Thesis Theater with Father Andrew Damick on Friday, May 30, 2025 at 2pm ET.

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth legendarium, particularly in The Silmarillion and related material, the reader encounters divine beings, including the Valar, who are called gods in the text and by Tolkien himself in his commentary. Multiple divine beings in addition the creator god Eru Ilúvatar – the Ainur – inhabit Tolkien’s world, both good and evil, and their presence is the primary reason that many scholars and readers have asked: Is Tolkien’s work Christian or pagan? Modern understandings of the divine in religion (both academic and popular) tend to divide religious traditions into monotheism and polytheism, and so Tolkien’s pantheon of gods might seem pagan. What such a reading of Tolkien usually fails to consider is the divine plurality present in the Christian tradition that does not conform to common conceptions of monotheism.

In Biblical scholarship, the divine plurality in both the Bible and other Christian texts, emblematic in the Biblical phrase God of gods (Deut. 10:17; Ps. 136:2; Dan. 2:47, 11:36), may be understood through the lens of divine council theology. Further, a consideration of the Christian tradition broadly (not limiting examination only to the canonical Scriptures) shows divine plurality firmly entrenched. This thesis uses divine council theology in considering both the Bible and other major historical Christian texts to interpret Tolkien’s Valar and Maiar – both fallen and unfallen – as more consistent with a premodern Christian framework, in which there is both a single creator God and many other gods.

About the Presenter:

The Very Rev. Andrew Stephen Damick is an archpriest of the Antiochian Orthodox Church, Chief Content Officer of Ancient Faith Ministries, author of five books (with a sixth forthcoming in 2025), and host or co-host of nine podcasts. His work has been translated into Romanian, Spanish, Russian, Lithuanian, Mandarin Chinese, and Vietnamese. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature with minors in Religion, Ancient Greek, and Classical Studies from North Carolina State University, and a Master of Divinity degree from St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary with Honors in the field of Church History. He served in parish ministry for thirteen years and has worked in Orthodox Christian media since 2020. He is married with four children and resides in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. He believes in both dragons and giants.

About Signum Thesis Theaters:

Each of our master’s students writes a thesis at the end of their degree program, exploring a topic of their choice. The Thesis Theater is their opportunity to present their research to a general audience, and answer questions. All are welcome to attend!

Learn about Signum University’s mission, leadership and more: https://signumuniversity.org/about/.

To learn more about Signum's rigorous academic graduate program: https://signumuniversity.org/degree-programs/graduate/ma-in-language-and-literature/

Want to enjoy Signum’s educational offerings? Start here! https://signumuniversity.org/non-degree-programs/

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This episode contains an interview with author Brad Patty, whose novel Arms and White Samite is posted in the fiction submission hall of the Circulation Library. WE also update new things added to the Collaboratory since the last podcast was recorded.

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This recording from May 24, 2025.

Signum University presents Thesis Theater with Sarah Monnier on Friday, May 24, 2025 at 9am ET.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Classics, which generally means Greek and Latin language materials, are much more advanced in digital scholarship and resources than Germanic languages. While an enormous amount of material exists online to allow research into Biblical and Classical Greek text, for instance, there is less available for the Germanic languages, including Old English. While the digital world is not devoid of quality Old English digital editions (Electronic Beowulf immediately stands out), there is little connectivity between projects, and with the wider world of scholarship beyond the immediate texts. This project takes Widsið as a prototype for the XML-markup of Old English poetry that allows ease-of-reading for scholars of all levels and language abilities. The goal is to give access to original-language texts to scholars who are not fluent, or perhaps are learning the language, as well as to give wider access to additional information about things mentioned within the poem. Chosen because of its plethora of named entities, Widsið demonstrates the broader possibilities of digital editions, and the future of inclusion within the Perseus Digital Library would give still greater reach to its references. This paper discusses the process of creating this digital text, both as a scholarly edition and as a digital edition, and then explores the greater possibilities available in a digital context.

About the Presenter:

Sarah Monnier is a former opera singer who switched paths after having children. Her first course at Signum was Introduction to Old English, where she fell in love with the language and poetry. At Signum she was introduced to working with digital texts, and inspired by the possibilities of Old English in a digital context, she dove headfirst into that side of Old English studies. A mother of four, she lives in Iowa.

About Signum Thesis Theaters:

Each of our master’s students writes a thesis at the end of their degree program, exploring a topic of their choice. The Thesis Theater is their opportunity to present their research to a general audience, and answer questions. All are welcome to attend!

Learn about Signum University’s mission, leadership and more: https://signumuniversity.org/about/.

To learn more about Signum's rigorous academic graduate program: https://signumuniversity.org/degree-programs/graduate/ma-in-language-and-literature/

Want to enjoy Signum’s educational offerings? Start here! https://signumuniversity.org/non-degree-programs/

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In this episode of the Storyweb, host Christopher Bartlett takes the listeners on a tour of what is already in the Fiction Hall of the Signum University Collaboratory’s circulation library. He gives an overview of each of the works one may find there, and urges subscribers to engage with the authors of these works.

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This recording from May 7, 2025.

Signum University presents Thesis Theater with Kimberly McKinney on Wednesday, May 7, 2025 at 10am ET.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s tales about Middle-earth were designed to provide a conceivable mythological history for the existing world. Due to this intentional connection, his secondary, fictional world reflects many familiar primary world experiences in both physical and metaphysical aspects. As a reader and writer of fairy-stories, Tolkien desired to present life as simultaneously touched by grief and joy, thus creating his concept of the eucatastrophe. As someone who loved nature and especially plants, Tolkien infused Middle-earth with a remarkable variety of botanical life, not only to inform the landscape, but also to communicate some of his most significant themes. The high value Tolkien placed on flowers, herbs, and trees moved him to feature them in active roles in his stories and to portray them as independent, influential members of a living world. This paper explores several key ways in which Tolkien used plants in Middle-earth: as setters of environment and mood, as communicators of a location’s good or evil nature, as instigators of joy through eucatastrophic deliverance, and as symbols of abiding hope, which Tolkien called in Elvish estel.

About the Presenter:

An avid reader from an early age, Kimberly studied biology and journalism in college, with plans to become a science writer. In time, however, the writing side won out, and she began pursuing a part-time career as a book editor while embarking on a full-time career of homeschooling her children. In 2021, she joined the Signum family in the MA program to expand her knowledge of language and literature, especially fantasy literature, and to sharpen her abilities to communicate and teach. Her interests span a broad range, including the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, medieval Germanic languages, and modern methods of textual study. Kimberly and her husband have also authored and self-published a growing number of fantasy novels together. She lives with her family and four cats in South Carolina, USA.

About Signum Thesis Theaters:

Each of our master’s students writes a thesis at the end of their degree program, exploring a topic of their choice. The Thesis Theater is their opportunity to present their research to a general audience, and answer questions. All are welcome to attend!

Learn about Signum University’s mission, leadership and more: https://signumuniversity.org/about/.

To learn more about Signum's rigorous academic graduate program: https://signumuniversity.org/degree-programs/graduate/ma-in-language-and-literature/

Want to enjoy Signum’s educational offerings? Start here! https://signumuniversity.org/non-degree-programs/

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Introducing Storyweb, a new series of chats with authors and creators from the Signum Plaza.

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In this inaugural episode of the Storyweb series, Christopher Bartlett interviews Sparrow Alden about her history and process as a writer. They discuss A Flash of Wings, Sparrow’s anthology of flash fiction that appears in the Signum University Collaboratory. https://collaboratory.signumuniversity.org/library/37

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Join President Corey Olsen for a look at the year that has been and a discussion of Signum's direction in 2025 and beyond!

Please consider supporting Signum University.

More about Signum University

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This recording from November 1, 2024.

Signum University presents Thesis Theater with Jay Moses on Saturday, November 1, 2024 at 5pm ET.

M.R. James was recognized and acclaimed for his short stories of the macabre written at the turn of the twentieth century. In the 1970’s the new genre of Folk Horror arose, basing many of its stories within the England countryside, and claiming M.R. James as a significant foundation and forerunner. While setting most of his stories in present day England, several of them are set within 17th Century England. This Thesis explores four of James’ stories with settings in 17th Century England: The Fenstanton Witch, The Ash Tree, Martin’s Close and The Rose Garden and attempts to discern what exactly drew James to this time period, but more importantly, what it was about this time period that lent itself to Folk Horror. It is the conclusion of this Thesis that the great instability of England, combining Puritan beliefs, fanatical authority, and brutal punishments, laid the seeds of paranoia and rural unease from which M.R. James and Folk Horror both created tales of terror.

About the Presenter:

Jay Moses is a pastor at Saint Mark Presbyterian Church in the DC area, teaching adjunct at the University of Maryland. His favorite memories leading to his studies at Signum are finding yellow-worn paperbacks of Ray Bradbury in his sister’s book shelf, watching the Hobbit with cheese popcorn made by his mother, and listening to the many ghost stories told by his father while camping. His wife is the best thing about him, and his children continue to wonder if he really reads his books.

About Signum Thesis Theaters:

Each of our master’s students writes a thesis at the end of their degree program, exploring a topic of their choice. The Thesis Theater is their opportunity to present their research to a general audience, and answer questions. All are welcome to attend!

Registration is open for the Spring 2025 semester (term begins January 13th)! To view our upcoming courses: https://signumuniversity.org/degree-programs/graduate/upcoming-courses/

Learn about Signum University’s mission, leadership and more: https://signumuniversity.org/about/.

Want to enjoy Signum’s educational offerings? Start here! https://signumuniversity.org/non-degree-programs/

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This recording from September 28, 2024.

Signum University presents Thesis Theater with Peter DeVault on Saturday, September 28, 2024 at 10am ET.

Modern metrical analysis of Germanic alliterative poetry (GAP) has invariably proceeded from edited texts in which the poem is represented visually as verses on a printed page or screen. Of course, that is not how these poems came down to us. The manuscript form of a GA poem is

The annotation scheme and processing method outlined in this thesis allow us to create a TEI/Menota compatible xml document based on a medieval germanic poem realized in a particular manuscript. This document can contain several overlapping layers of information: the layout of the words on the manuscript page along with their linguistic and morphological features and decomposition into syllables; the organization of those words into poetic lines and verses; and a projection of metrical features onto this abstract structure. While being itself a data source for further programmatic analytic and comparative work, this document can in turn be transformed into an interactive html representation showing any of these layers of information. In this presentation, you will see how these methods and tools work in the context of selections from five poetic manuscripts including portions of Beowulf and the Poetic Edda.

About the Presenter:

Peter DeVault hails from the upper Midwest of the United States, where he works at a healthcare software company leading a team developing applications for clinical genomics. Having discovered Signum University in 2019 while tracking down linguistic resources for Tolkien’s invented languages, he has since immersed himself in a world of medieval Germanic

Benjamin Bagby's "Beowulf: The Epic Performance": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WcIK_8f7oQ&t=0s

About Signum Thesis Theaters:

Each of our master’s students writes a thesis at the end of their degree program, exploring a topic of their choice. The Thesis Theater is their opportunity to present their research to a general audience, and answer questions. All are welcome to attend!

Registration is open for the Spring 2025 semester (term begins January 13th)! To view our upcoming courses: https://signumuniversity.org/degree-programs/graduate/upcoming-courses/.

Learn about Signum University’s mission, leadership and more: https://signumuniversity.org/about/.

Want to enjoy Signum’s educational offerings? Start here! https://signumuniversity.org/non-degree-programs/.

Support The Signum Scene