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Nick Katsiadas and Carl Sell eds., "Tolkien's Medievalism in Ruins: The Function of Relics and Ruins in Middle-earth" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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Nick Katsiatis
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Stentor Danielson
You're listening to New Books and Geography, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host for today, Stentor Danielson, Associate professor of Environmental Geoscience at Slippery Rock University. Today I'll be talking to Nick Katsiatis and Carl Sell, editors of Tolkien's Medievalism in Ruins, the Function of Relics and Ruins in Middle earth, published in 2025 by Bloomsbury Press. Doctors Catziada Sancel, welcome to the show.
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Nick Katsiatis
Thank you for having us.
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Carl Sell
Agreed, thank you.
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Stentor Danielson
To start off, why don't you tell our listeners a bit about your backgrounds and how you came to work on this book.
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Nick Katsiatis
Okay, I can go first. So I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Writing at Slippery Rock University and I teach a variety of classes up to and including science fiction, British Literature 2, which is from the Age of Enlightenment till. I teach first year writing, first year reading, humanities, inquiry, film classes, Asian Film, Asian literature and Graphic novels. And Carl, go for it.
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Carl Sell
I am the Associate Director for McNairan Undergraduate Research Programs at the University of Pittsburgh. I am also a part time instructor in the English department there and my work primarily is reflects in my teaching my last courses that I've been teaching are Arthurian fantasy courses. So we sort of run the gamut from medieval Arthurian sources up into modern pop culture and comic books. So I'm a medievalist at heart, an Arthurian scholar primarily. And we sort of meet in the middle, I think, between the two of us with our interest in Tolkien.
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Stentor Danielson
Okay, yeah. And Carl, I was saying before we started that the listeners are missing out on seeing your impressive bookshelf. And you mentioned Arthurian. Am I right? Am I seeing the Mary Stewart Arthurian series there behind you?
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Carl Sell
100%. It is one of my favorites. It has been surpassed as my favorite by Bernard Cornwell's trilogy on King Arthur, though.
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Stentor Danielson
Okay, I'll have to check that one out. But we're not here to talk about Arthuriana. We're here to talk about soulking. So how did the idea to do this book come about and how did you two end up taking charge of this, producing this book?
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Nick Katsiatis
Well, first, Carl and I actually met in our very first class when Carl was entering the master's program at IUP and I was entering the PhD program at IUP and the masters and the PhD students come together. And Carl and I both recognize that we both have Tolkien tattoos. And so I turned to my left and I was just like, that guy's going to be my best friend. I know this. And my conceptual imaginings of this volume stemmed from my work with 19th century women writers in Britain, because I was doing a summer course with Dr. Mike T. Williamson at IUP, and he had us focus on Madame de Sta's career, Italy, and the representation of Roman ruins within that text and the ways that characters approach ruins and their psychological experiences when reflecting upon ruins. And so, you know, this was back in 2016, 2017. And so that was the nascent stages of when I started to focus on ruins and their representation within literature. And it eventually evolved into the project that we have today, which we'll discuss in a little bit. But I'll let Karl take the reins with this one now.
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Carl Sell
Yeah, for sure. Unfortunately, we are going to keep talking about Arthur, Rihanna, because that's my entry point into Tolkien, particularly too, when I have a super, like, firm in my mind memory that Nick and I both looked at each other at one point and said, we are not going to do studies in Tolkien because we don't want to ruin it. And then both of us did that. And so my approach to it essentially came through my dissertation right about that time, a book by, edited by, but also, you know, heavily written in by Serena Higgins. Manklings and King Arthur really jump started my thinking on, you know, maybe, maybe Tolkien didn't not like Arthur. Maybe he just didn't know what to do with Arthur because he spent so much time translating Sergiway and the Green Knight and writing his own unfinished account of Arthur's death, the fall of Arthur. And he sort of spoke not disparagingly of Arthur in his letters, but didn't necessarily have a good concept of how he saw Arthur fitting into his mythology for, you know, England, because Arthurian or Arthur is primarily a British hero. And that's slightly different, of course, in ethnography as. As England with the Saxons. So this book kind of jump started. What if he actually did know what to do with King Arthur, and what if he knew exactly what to do with Excalibur? And so my examination of Aragorn as Tolkien's King Arthur and of course, Andoril as his Excalibur kind of started with my dissertation and then moved progressively through stages of, like, conference papers that kind of started out going nowhere. And then eventually Nick and I ran a couple of panels together, at first at the Mid Atlantic Pop Culture Conference and then at the Northeast Modern Language Association. And then we thought, hey, maybe this is a good idea.
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Nick Katsiatis
And in fact, I'll jump in there real quick because I text Carl this morning a Facebook memory. And it just so happened that today, three years ago, we proposed our first panel on Tolkien and ruins. And so this is the third anniversary which eventually culminated into our publication this month.
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Stentor Danielson
Yeah, so I think that's a really interesting story of getting into it through the. The idea of the connection to Arthur. Yana, are there other things that particularly interested you about the idea of ruins to make that the theme of the book?
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Carl Sell
I was the relics guy, because the way we in medievalism approach relics, it is often thought of as, you know, saints items, you know, holy relics, but also there's familial relics, things that mean a lot to certain families, certain nobility. I mean, there's a. There's a branch to heraldry in that as well, but it tends to be things passed down to other people. So my contribution to the larger element of this was the relic of the sword, but also I took ruins to be the ruins of the. The line of Numenor. So Aragorn both represent someone who wields a relic of the past, but also contains within him sort of the ruins or remnants of an entire bloodline of Middle Earth that, other than the Rangers of the north, doesn't exist anymore. And has sort of petered out almost the whole way up into the Third Age. So I was sort of the other half of this and tweaking myself into sort of a. The ruins aspect of it, but CE ruins, not as necessarily physical remains, but people remains. And Nick, of course, was more the landscape style, ruins. I'll let him talk about that.
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Nick Katsiatis
Yeah. My interest in ruins specifically, like, as I said, came from my studies in Romanticism. And it evolved into a project that. That. Where I had reviewed Julian Eilman's J.R.R. tolkien, Romanticist and Plain Poet. And there's a section within that book where he discusses very, very briefly, he discusses the idea of nostalgia and how it pervades the entire legendarium. And when he focused on ruins, for one paragraph, he addressed Aman Sul and the Numenorean realms in exile being Arnor and Gondor. And so when, you know, Aman Sul being one of the. One of the ruins of Arnor. And so it got me interested in looking at the ways that ruins are represented within the legendarium and also relics with, you know, especially the Troll horde.
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Stentor Danielson
And I have the.
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Nick Katsiatis
The Troll horde swords right right behind me right here with Orcus, Sting, and Glamdring. But then I started thinking, like, okay, so here's something that I can. That I can latch on, something that I can grasp of, you know, what Tolkien is doing and represent. Representing ruins. Let's see what these others. What other scholars have to. So when I started looking through databases and I started reaching out to people in the Tolkien society and on academic communities, on social media, there was very little. There was very little work in Tolkien's representation of ruins. And the three scholars who we primarily evolve from or come from are Deborah Sabo, Michael D.C. drought, and Tom Shippy. But by and large, those are some of the main contenders with ruins. And so because there was so little information on this, Carl and I discussed how we could first pitch a conference panel. And the very first conference panel that we had pitched to Nemla, we had so many submissions that the NEMLA area chairs wanted us to hold not one panel, but two panels. And so we said, okay, there's enough interest in this topic, so let's go ahead and do two panels and perhaps we could evolve this into an edited collection. And that conference was actually when we started talking or were solicited by both Kent State University Press and Roman and Littlefield before Bloomsbury had acquired Roman and Littlefield. And so after we had committed to Roman and Littlefield, we started going through the process of book proposals and things of that nature, and they had great interest in it, and the rest is really history. We just started evolving it, started soliciting people at both at local, regional, national and international levels. And so we have a very inclusive anthology in that respect, too.
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Stentor Danielson
Yeah. So there are 12 regular chapters within the book, and I was looking through the biographies, and you've got quite the range of people, from very established scholars to some people who are still graduate students. So it gives quite the range there of perspectives. So, you know, I don't want to go, like, chapter by chapter through this, but, you know, maybe as I try to ask questions about the larger themes within the book, and then, you know, you can reference particular chapters and particular people's work to kind of illustrate it. So first I wanted to ask about the cultural and historical context that Tolkien was writing in. How did that shape his view of ruins and relics?
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Nick Katsiatis
I really like this question because it really speaks to the ways that what we. What Carl and I had found in me as a romanticist. And, you know, I was always told that if you're a romanticist, you have to be a Victorianist, and if you're a Victorianist, you have to be a modernist. And so modernism is uniquely where Tolkien is situated culturally and historically. But what we had found is that scholars have this tendency to be pretty myopic whenever they are approaching Tolkien's work. And so they take what we call a synchronic approach to Tolkien and try to find the, you know, the parallels between Tolkien the medievalist and medieval texts. And Carl and I both come from a background where we studied a man named Michael Saylor who discusses, you know, Tolkien as, you know, uniquely situated within modern. And so he said, well, there's a little bit more going on than, you know, these medieval source texts that. From which Tolkien is drawing inspiration. And so there's hardly any scholarship that's on Tolkien as a modernist, let alone, you know, engaging in Catholic praxis and ethics within his work. And so, again, like, that was another motive for us to actually name the book Tolkien's Medievalism in Ruins, because it's a double entendre. Because, yes, Tolkien was a medievalist, and he is. There's. There's the obvious parallels with, you know, the Ruin and the Wanderer and so many other Anglo Saxon texts and other medieval texts. But Tolkien is also uniquely within a literary history that evolved from romanticism, the Victorian period, and modernism. And so that was kind of our motives that are pushing us towards this.
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Carl Sell
Yeah, I mean, so obviously the medievalism is still strong in the book. Right. Like myself included. I like to think of myself as being transgressively medieval in this situation because I am aligning myself with the folks who are saying, actually Tolkien probably really, really liked King Arthur, but wasn't sure what to do with him. Whereas we have Angela folk, Joe Burton. These are folks who have, you know, medieval backgrounds, but also are looking at it as well. Just looking at medieval solely isn't the right answer, because, yes, that is obviously what he's influenced by. Tolkien himself obviously was a professor of Anglo Saxon. So everyone seems to really hone in on that part and think, well, that's the, the background he had. Ergo, that is what is in his. His work. Yes, but he also, you know, just like us, had friends, scholars, colleagues who also influenced, you know, his thoughts and decisions. There are elements of all of the inklings in there that I think the, that our book in particular brings out across many chapters. But there's also personal, ideological and contemporary issues at play. And particularly Tolkien as a critic himself is affected through almost every little bit of, you know, our collection. Because he was not a hunt. Like, just because we think he, he himself, you know, worked with medievalism. He's not 100% medievalist. I mean, I'm not certainly. I work with comic books, too. There are things that enter into our consciousness as scholars, as teachers, and all of this also goes into Tolkien's work. It is not a one to one ratio of medievalism in England. The book, you know, that's not what Lord of the Rings is. That's not what the Hobbit is. It's certainly not what the Silmarillion is. It's an encompassment of all of those things and all of his other influences and the literary history of which he is entering into, to use one of Nick and I's favorite buzzwords, literary history. Yeah.
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Stentor Danielson
So one of the things that I think is really great about studying Tolkien is that beyond his published books, like, you know, the Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, we have such a wealth of other material like drafts and incomplete. You know, there's half a dozen books that he started to write and never finished, but we now have access to them because various people, including his son Christopher, have been putting those out there for people to access. And it seems like a lot of the authors in your book are drawing on that extra material that is, you know, it's almost like a relic of Tolkien's own racing writing process. So could you talk a bit about how you and the other authors in the book make use of this extra material that we have about Tolkien's writing.
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Carl Sell
So I can lead in too, with a lot of our first few chapters, the ones that seem heavily medieval but are medieval, through the lens of Tolkien as a critic, particularly through his commentary on Beowulf, the monasteries in the critics, which is one of his large scale, I would argue, non, non, not widely accepted at the time, views of Beowulf as itself being a ruined tower, in which case people just add layers to it and add things that weren't necessarily part of the cultural epic itself. We are kind of doing a similar thing across the span of our chapters with Tolkien's Middle Earth. We're seeking to look at what the extra bits, you know, whether that's Tolkien's letters, whether that's the Tolkien reader, which a lot of our folks have used both the letters and, you know, the works containing the Tolkien reader. But even myself, most of my evidence is actually not even from the text of the Lord of the Rings. Sure, I have some. I'm primarily looking at the timeline that Tolkien creates in. In the appendices, because that is him creating the world from start to finish of Middle Earth. And while everything else, you know, all the stops and starts have filled in those gaps, he had a very linear idea of what his world looked like. But obviously with the completed works, not all of that is familiarized to your average reader or even average audience. You know, the Lord of the Rings that we get in Jackson's films, which we don't even really touch upon too much, based on the pop culture zeitgeist around that. Right. But we're looking specifically at Tolkien's Middle Earth. Those are two vastly different texts to begin with. So you then have to nail into, okay, what are we looking at? And what it really is is those extra relics of, in some cases, forgotten texts, some cases, sadly, you know, the man's life itself could not encompass all of his works. We take those bits and we almost try to shed light onto them and say, it's really hard to read the Lord of the Rings without reading those other bits. And Nick can say all about the Silmarillion, which he is more drawn to than myself. I'm a Third Age guy, which is what I always say. But I think the Silmarillion also adds a key element to both Nick's work, but also a lot of the philological works that we have in the book, too.
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Nick Katsiatis
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Nick Katsiatis
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org Jack Daniels and Old Number 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey 40% alcohol by volume Jack Daniel Distillery Lynchburg, Tennessee yeah, that's a good side, Carl, because, you know, into my perspective on some of the posthumously published works, because my chapter and chapters that come before and after me tackle, you know, some of the works that were started within there that Christopher Tolkien had drawn from in order to create, you know, some not. Not to create, but to finish some of his father's works. And so what I and a few other scholars in the book do is that we draw upon what we reference as his notes, but were published posthumously in order to make inquiries into the historical conditions of Tolkien when he was writing. Specifically, like Carl mentioned, looking at from conception of Middle Earth until Middle Earth's end. And what I try to do is that I actually look at the Lost Road, which is his abandoned time travel story. And in that story, there is an Oxford graduate, just so happens, who starts having these visions of Numenor and starts having these. These flashbacks of. Of. Of worlds that he otherwise would not have any knowledge of. And considering that this is an Oxford graduate who is, you know, having this deep, deep nostalgia for this past that he's never been to, I make the argument that coming from a scholar named Thomas Fau, he says that within these imaginative exercises, it takes one to no one when you're looking at a character who's having this deep nostalgia that Tolkien himself has a connection to, because Tolkien himself being an Oxford graduate, what's really interesting, or at least I find very, very interesting, is that by the time the character in the Lost Road, named Albuin, by the time that he starts having these visions of Numenor, everything from Middle Earth cease to exist. There are no ruins at all. And so the abandoned time travel narrative of the Lost Road was Tolkien's effort to make the connection or to connect Middle Earth to our contemporary society into, you know, into the real world. And so what I find interesting is that while Albuin has such a nostalgia for this imagined past, golden Age, this poetic age, I make the argument that this is Tolkien's thoughts himself, that he has this nostalgia to go back to a time that he could never get to. And so my argument is that this sheds light on the psychological and historically distinct conditions of Tolkien's own nostalgia that evolved from what the Romantics had done. And so what, you know, tying this all together is that not only I, but a few other scholars within our. Within our. Within our book really get to the heart of the historical conditions of Tolkien's creativity. And we make the argument that if we can have a more comprehensive scholarship on Tolkien in this respect that we can actually better understand our own world because some of those representations of ruins and that nostalgia are also within, say, PJs or Peter Jackson's trilogy, or even like even the Rings of Power. We have chapters on the Shadow of War and Shadow of Mordor games where that nostalgia is present. We have the nostalgia present within, you know, within the death metal band Summoning, you have nostalgia within the the Two Towers Mud or multi user dungeon. And so we saw this consistency not only within Tolkien's published works and his posthumously published works, but also in adaptations. And I think that is the unifying thread within all of our chapters. And I think it's just really cool and sheds light on. On Tolkien as, as a writer and also Tolkien as a human individual.
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Stentor Danielson
Yes, that actually makes a great segue because the next question I wanted to ask was about how your book addresses some of those adaptations, like the video games, and how the makers of those adaptations have built on or rethought the role of ruins and relics in Tolkien's work.
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Carl Sell
Yeah, I mean, Seth Lee's chapter, I think, gets to the heart of sort of what that question is working towards, which is ultimately within Tolkien's own world. Obviously there are ruins, but they're not all explained. Some of them have very small explanations. There are whole ruined worlds. Again, seeing that with the creation of Mordor in the Rings of Power, that's great. But what does Mordor look like other than just the parts we see in the Lord of the Rings? Whether that's the visual depiction of Peter Jackson or whether that's the written depiction of Tolkien himself. Seth kind of looks at the two games that take place in Mordor and show us the vestiges of the once livable places for humans that are now overrun by orcs or much different things. Not to spoil games for, for people who haven't played them, though I suppose the games have been out for almost 10 years now, so I feel like if you haven't played them yet, that's might be on you. But at this point he's looking at the ways in which in the first game, Talion, the Ranger who also is inhabited by the Wraith of Celebrimbor, recreates towers in sort of this Wraith world. And then in the second game sort of builds new strongholds to hold against the tide of the returning Dark Lord to varying degrees of success, if you've played the games, you know. But I think Seth's work really is sort of like the entry point for Most like modern gamers, I would think, because Lowell is the other one I'm thinking of. Yes, with the multi user dungeon that is text based, so the text is reliant on described images, described ruins and the mentions of the Lord of the Rings online in particular are also rely solely on familiarity with the things in the Lord of the Rings. So you always have that recollection of it is a path that you almost have to have access to to understand how and why these various adaptations are playing with or playing on or adding to the existing knowledge of Middle Earth.
- [30:11]
Nick Katsiatis
Yeah, I think that's a really smart way to look at it, Carl. Absolutely. Because what else we do or what our authors do is that they look at the fidelity that some of these adaptations have to Tolkien's own aesthetics. And what they have found is that these creators that are taking up Tolkien's works and recasting them in various ways, like the death metal band Summoning, picking, you know, drawing from representations of ruins in Mordor, Barador and, or Isengard or whatever it is. And so they're, they're approaching these creative works with the lens of whether or not the creators have fidelity with the, with these new works. And you know, aside from say like, you know, in the Shadow of War, Shadow of Mordor games, like, aside from like, you know, Sexy Shelob, you know, what Seth has actually done is that by and large he's exposing how well read these creators are and how much fidelity they actually in fact do have with Tolkien's work with obvious creative liberties at some points. But what our authors do, especially within that adaptation section, is appreciated what and how people are compiling these images. And in short, I know I've said it a couple times so far, but in short, recreating it with a respect and a fidelity and a consistency with what we see within Tolkien's work. And I think that's something that a lot of Tolkien readers can appreciate, especially either casual fans or just fans of the works and, or fans of the adaptation. And I think that, you know, that's what makes this volume pretty unique in that we have written in an accessible way and very intellectually rigorous way, you know, our authors have done, but also an accessible way where not only academics but other people can pick up this volume and actually. And appreciate what we're doing with it.
- [32:16]
Carl Sell
Yeah, there's definitely an echo. Oh, I'm sorry.
- [32:18]
Stentor Danielson
No, go ahead, go ahead.
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Carl Sell
I was going to say. So that is also in part why we don't go in depth into Jackson's films. That is because we are trying to bring to the fore some of the. The less well known or less scholarly looked at elements of the legendarium. And that includes some of the, you know, whether it's audio, whether it's video game. I think Jackson has sort of not taken over pop culture consciousness, but certainly that's the first thing you think of. And we're trying to sort of not just get past that as far as, okay, there are other things, but also you can almost write off. And they have written entire books on Jackson's trilogy with all of this as well. But as a good jumping in point for scholars and for pop culture audiences, you almost needed to not to sort of take them as red, I guess, and look more into what it would be like for someone approaching, you know, a student, for example, a graduate student, who at this point may have been very young or even not. Not necessarily born yet when Jackson's films came out. But they're maybe gamers and they're aware of these games or they've definitely seen the Rings of Power and that's maybe how they got into Lord of the Rings. There's a whole new audience now where we need to start thinking about not necessarily moving past Jackson, because I don't think you can do that, but there is a new sort of touch point, and we're trying to sort of bring about that touch point back to the realm of Middle Earth, however you get there with our collection.
- [34:05]
Stentor Danielson
Yeah. Okay, so then I wanted to ask maybe a more fun question for both of you, which is there are a lot of different ruins in Middle Earth. And so I was wondering if you could each pick out kind of your favorite and tell me what you think is particularly interesting about it based on either your own work or the work of the other folks who contributed to this book.
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Nick Katsiatis
That is a really good question. Yeah.
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Stentor Danielson
Well, you two think I'll just mention, I think my favorite ruin in Middle Earth. Yeah, the one that sort of fascinates me is Tharbad, because it's right there in the middle of everything. But you only get just this very brief mention that Boromir's like, yeah, my horse drowned when I was crossing there. And you get so little about it, but it's right there in the middle, connecting what used to be two parts of the kingdom. And I was always hoping, as I read History of Middle Earth and all this other stuff, I was always hoping there'd be more from him about it. But I was just sort of hung there as this fascinating mystery.
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Carl Sell
I'm gonna cheat A bit. It's. It's two separate ruins, but they're part of the same kind of network. And that would be Amansul and Dolledur, the two sort of outpost style ruins we get. And Dolledur, of course, we just get his references. You get them in the appendices saying like outpost occupied by the Necromancer. In this here Necromancer cast out of Dildor by the White Council. That's it. But seeing Amon Soul in the Fellowship, I think you kind of get a sense of what at least that was probably like. So I think Dull Door, it fascinates me because other than of course, the Hobbit films, you don't see it. It's never introduced to us in person, you know, via its closeness to Mirkwood or anything, even in the Hobbit. But Amon Sol is Weathertop is visually and thematically and plotline important in the Lord of the Rings. And I'm really interested in the two connections between those places. So I have to say, if it's one, it's obviously Weathertop. I'm also a huge fan of Aragorn, so seeing him shine at a place like Weathertop is peak for me. But it's really, I think, the one we don't know about as far as what we can think of, which is Duldur.
- [36:36]
Nick Katsiatis
So this is a hard question for me because as Carl rightly said, I'm very much a First Age person. I'm very much like, you know, First Age Elves are. It's my favorite era. But you don't really get any ruins because they're completely gone. Like, you know, Thangorodim and Gondolin are completely gone by the time time that the Lord of the Rings happens. And we don't really see much of it. But I'd have to say if I was going with the Third Age, it would have to either be the Dome of Stars at Osgilia or, and. Or Moria. And the reason being is that, like, I know Moria might be like, you know, the go to for a lot of people. It's certainly within our represented within our text. At least two times I represent it once. So that's a third. I don't really focus on it. But the reason why is because what I find so fascinating about this, the psychological experiences that characters have with the perceiving ruins is that it reminds them of some type of art. It reminds them that of an age that was so worthy and so great in such a golden Age, that it is still producing art. And so when, when Gimli perceives, you know, the minds of Moria and, and he's walking through it, he starts to sing the, the song of Durin. And so because it was such a wealthy time, like, not only in terms of like, material wealth, but also immaterial wealth that it was so worthy of. Oh, not worthy. It was just, it was such a time of beauty that it's, it's encouraging and energizing the active production of art. And so when, you know, when Boromir and Faramir are, are in Osgilia and fighting to, fighting to take back the city, they look at the ruins of the Dome of Stars with such nostalgia and it reminds them of the, of the, of the height of, of the Gondorians. And so it actively is energizing them to have a psychological experience that, that where they could be hopeful to restore the beauty that once was. And I think that that is one thing that I appreciate, not only with ruins, but also the relics. And it's literally the reason why whenever I started collecting swords from the Lord of the Rings, I wanted to make a point to, to get Sting, Glamgreen, Orcris, just because of, you know, the. Tolkien's description of, of Gondolin and the battle that happened there. Side note, which is, you know, kind of going, going a little bit away from this with the relics. But what's so, what I think is so cool and so fascinating about Gondolin is that it's the first battle when Balrogs were slain and it. And the First Age elves. It's the Elves of the Hammer of Wrath. You know, unfortunately, we don't see any of them in the Third Age, but what they did was not only were they the first elves to slay Balrogs, but they took the flaming whips from the Balrogs and whipped them with their own whips. And so that image is so cool. And that's why that cultural memory of the First Age elves is contained within those relics. And so again, it's just really, really unfortunate that we don't see any ruins of the city of Gondola. And otherwise that would be my go to. Sorry for the cop out, answers Dunner.
- [40:12]
Carl Sell
But I had to get Nick. I cheated and did too.
- [40:16]
Stentor Danielson
And so like, yeah, but I will say Moria I find fascinating too. And I have mixed feelings about the Rings of Power series, but I do love getting to see Moria at its height and, you know, a vision of what that place was when it was fully inhabited. And, you Know, running on all cylinders as then compared to the way that we see it in Lord of the Rings as a ruin.
- [40:43]
Nick Katsiatis
Yeah, I have to agree with the, with, with the kind of mixed feelings about the Rings of Power, but I completely agree that. I think that Moria is perhaps the best part of that series of seeing it at its height and knowing like, you know, exactly like what I just said, like knowing why Gimli was singing about the time of Dora and when he revolved, inhabits that space in place.
- [41:04]
Stentor Danielson
Okay, so as we're moving towards the end of our time here, I wanted to give you an opportunity to give a shout out or a thank you to anyone whose help was important to you as you were working on this book.
- [41:14]
Nick Katsiatis
Well, first I would like to thank my wife, Rebecca Bochter Katsiadis, because she has been my number one fan and number one supporter ever since, you know, we, we, we began this. I also need to thank my advisor, Dr. Michael T. Williamson, when I was studying at IUP. But probably most importantly, I need to thank my high school English teacher, Ms. Laura Vogel, because she was the first teacher who took an interest in my interest in the Lord of the Rings. You know, back in the early 2000s, when the movies were coming out, I had read the Hobbit, I had started to read the Lord of the Rings. I was getting really into like, you know, going to see the movies. And so, side note, she actually let my friends and I skip class to go and see the movies on the opening days because she said it was educational. And so she showed me that, that, you know, being, you know, a quote unquote nerd or geek wasn't something to disparage, but was something to encourage. Because when you're encouraging someone who has passion, you know, you, you achieve, you can achieve really anything. And so I'd have to say, like, those are the three people who I really, really must sincerely thank.
- [42:34]
Carl Sell
I also got to thank my wife, Sarah Sell, because first and foremost, marrying a PhD student after their first year of PhD coursework is a wild thing, particularly when all of the really frustrating parts about writing a dissertation haven't happened yet. And my chapter was first thought of in my dissertation as a, as a part of a part of a chapter. And to that end, I mean, I'm also going to have to shout out Mike T. Williamson at IUP for being on my dissertation committee and really encouraging that part. My dissertation director, Chris Kuipers, also for basically telling me, write the dissertation you want to write, not the one that you think I Want you to write. That was amazing. I have dual editions again because of course, I can't decide. The one major influence being my grandmother who taught me how to read. She was an English teacher and the joke in my family was I could read before I could walk. That's obviously not true, but it's not far off to the point where by the fifth grade, my fifth grade teacher was so frustrated with me just finishing everything in our fifth grade library in our very rural elementary school that she's just like, here and slaps down a copy of the Fellowship of the Ring. So Miss Goku, shout out to you, I don't even know your new married name, but you know who you are somewhere. I devoured it and then was hooked ever since. And then the rest is history. But also, you know, in. In progress too.
- [44:17]
Stentor Danielson
All right, well, speaking of in progress, then that leads us to our final question that we always ask, which is what are you working on next?
- [44:25]
Nick Katsiatis
So I will be proposing another edited collection. And so another area of expertise of mine that I kind of married in my dissertation, which ended up evolving into my first sole authored book, was that I look at the ways that romantic writers continue to have an influence in contemporary graphic narratives and graphic novels. And so a person who I met at the national popular culture association, Dr. Matthew Brake, he and I will be proposing an edited collection on the works of Alan Moore, who wrote Watchmen and V for Vendetta and Promethea and From Hell, Saga of the Swamp Thing. And the tentative title right now is going to be Esotericism within the Works of Alan Moore because Moore is well known for incorporating mystical cabalist belief systems within his work. And similar to. To what Carl and I did, Matt and I are finding it very difficult to find many articles about esotericism and mysticism within Alan Moore. And so we're thinking that it's about time that someone proposed a collective edition on the topic. And so that CFP will actually be coming out towards the end of December 2025 or early January 2026. So if anyone is interested, we will be posting it on the University of Pennsylvania listserv for the. Or the call for papers rather. And so that's what people can look forward to.
- [45:51]
Carl Sell
All right, I have a couple of things going on. The first is probably my next publication that's coming out more towards the end of the year, which is a post apocalyptic View of Robin Hood. So I'm actually stepping away from. From King Arthur for a bit. Stepping away and foraying into Robin Hood. I'VE got two more minor projects, one about vampiricism. Vampirism is actually the word. Let's. Let's use vampirism and the Holy Grail and the relationship between the aspects of the Grail and vampires in pop culture, as well as my other project, which is merely a 200 word abstract currently, which is representations of the whole ural in comic books. Not just traditionally Arthurian comic books, but any comic books that we've got. But my biggest project is of course, coming in December as well, when I will be embarking on fatherhood, which is why the other two projects are very much in the early stages.
- [46:56]
Nick Katsiatis
All right, and then one last thing, sorry, stunner. Is that Paul and I have agreed that when and if our volume is successful at Bloomsbury, we would love to love to propose a sequel volume. Because of the lack of representation of both the Rings of Power and PJs Lord of the Rings trilogy, we thought that there's much more room for studying representations of relics and ruins within other adaptations. And so again, when and if our volume is successful, we hope to propose a sequel volume.
- [47:33]
Stentor Danielson
All right, so everybody go check this book out so that they got a chance to do a sequel, because that sounds great to me. I would love to read a second volume of this. So thank you both so much for.
- [47:46]
Nick Katsiatis
Coming on the show and thank you for having us. For sure.
- [47:49]
Carl Sell
Thank you.
- [47:50]
Stentor Danielson
Hey, this has been a conversation with Nick Katsiatis and Carl Sell, editors of Tolkien's Medievalism in Ruins, the Function of Relics and Ruins in Middle earth, published in 2025 by Bloomsbury.
- [48:07]
Nick Katsiatis
Sam.