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Thank you, Jared.

Thank you, everyone, for coming.

Really is it's gratifying to see so many folks here.

I should mention my wife.

She's the one who noticed it was during spring break.

Rob, you better contact them to find out. Okay, I will. So she's ultimately responsible

for this good turnout. So thanks for Debbie. Great. So this is a talk based on some work I've done,

mostly as a teacher at UT. I've taught a course on philosophy and Tolting there, I think,

six or seven times. and it's a pretty

popular course. It goes pretty well. And so it's kind of distilling that whole semester down

to a few crucial points here. So I'm going to look at how my own work, as Jared sort of suggested,

is in metaphysics, so the theory about the world and how it all fits together. So I've been

approached Tolkien mostly from that perspective. Some people approach the philosophy of Tolkien more

from a point of view of ethics or political philosophy and so on, but my own bias is sort of

metaphysics, I'm going to focus on that instead. And how Middle Earth shape the postmodern world.. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how I think Tolkien's, why Tolkien is so significant, actually,

even beyond the world of literature, ultimately.

So here's a little overview of what I'm going to talk about.

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