The conferences of the 29th Hobbiton, held on 12, 13 and 14 September 2025 in Gorizia, are available on the YouTube channel of Circolo Culturale Eureka; to keep up with future uploads you can subscribe to the channel and stay always updated.
đź“š Index of conferences
Tom Bombadil: the mystery of the character missing from the film – Paolo Gulisano, Matteo Sarcinelli, Giulio Leone
The Norse myth in Tolkien: Arda and Midgard at the last frontier – Manuel Massimiliano La Placa
A journey through the languages of Tolkien in his writings – Gianluca Comastri
The trees of The Lord of the Rings – Andrea Cosma
And Creation Fell Silent – The fall of Númenor and the breaking of the pact with Nature – Luisa Rainer Chiap
The hidden origins of Middle-earth. J.R.R. Tolkien and the unconscious – Claudia Giordani and Luigi Zumbo
Tolkien: father of modern Fantasy – Shaun Gunner
Mediterranean Resonances in Middle-earth – Mina Lukić
To amaze without overstepping, to interpret without reinventing. Vittoria Alliata di Villafranca’s Italian translation of The Lord of the Rings (1967) – Marco Leonardi
Wizards, wild men, trolls, agane, elves and krivapete – a comparison between European magical creatures and their counterparts in Tolkien’s worlds – Nataša Cvijanović
Tolkien-economics: the market of J.R.R. Tolkien in the world – Alessandro Stanchi
Tolkien and the mos maiorum: universal values and traditions of Middle-earth – Mario Polia
Whispers from Middle-earth – Compagnia de’ Viaggiatori in Arme and Shaun Gunner
Music and tales from Middle-earth – Aryan Lindir & the Baggins and Paolo Paron
The Slovenian Tolkien Society Gil-Galad – Blaž Berlec
Paolo Gulisano, Matteo Sarcinelli and Giulio Leone present the opening conference of the 29th edition of Hobbiton, dedicated to one of the most enigmatic and fascinating characters of The Lord of the Rings: Tom Bombadil. The event, in collaboration with the Gottardo Tomat Musical Association of Spilimbergo, anticipates the opera “TOM” staged the same evening at the Kulturni Dom in Gorizia. Paolo Gulisano, physician, writer and expert on Tolkien and Celtic culture, explores the mystery of this character, absent from Peter Jackson’s film yet central to Tolkien’s work. Gulisano examines different interpretations of who Tom Bombadil truly is: a self-portrait of Tolkien himself, an incarnation of IlĂşvatar, or an inspiration linked to St Francis of Assisi, to whom Tolkien was deeply devoted. Particularly compelling is the “Irish” reading of the character, compared to leprechauns and to the joyful spirit of Celtic tradition, a theme Gulisano explores in his recent book on Tolkien’s links with Ireland. Tom’s secret lies in his inner freedom: he is unaffected by the power of the Ring because he attributes no value to it, embodying an authentic and disarming happiness. Composer Matteo Sarcinelli recounts the genesis of the opera “TOM”, born three years ago as a conservatory thesis and grown into a work blending opera, theatre and musical. Director Giulio Leone illustrates the handcrafted work on costumes, sets and direction created together with his assistant Erica, a grassroots project that bears witness to the passion and the “sacred fire” of Italian culture.
A conference by Manuel Massimiliano La Placa, author and passionate scholar of traditions, mythology, history, literature of the fantastic and Tolkien. The world of Arda created by Tolkien stems from all the studies of the Oxford Professor, a great connoisseur of European cultures.
Gianluca Comastri, scholar of Tolkien’s languages and consultant for Amazon Prime dubbing, takes the audience on a journey through the languages of Tolkien in his writings. The speaker traces the three compositional phases in which the author continuously revised Quenya and Sindarin over more than sixty years, clarifying what it truly means to “study” these languages as opposed to the phenomena of neo-Quenya and neo-Sindarin. Space is also given to questions from the audience on the language of Gondor, the Tengwar writing system and the Black Speech of Mordor.
Andrea Cosma, expert speaker and enthusiast of history and mythology, offers an original reading of the trees in The Lord of the Rings, showing how Tolkien makes them silent protagonists of the struggle between good and evil, from the Shire to LothlĂłrien and Fangorn. The speaker delves into the symbolic meanings of willow, ash and oak in Indo-European and Norse traditions, from Yggdrasil to Gandalf’s staff. The conference closes with an ecological, psychological and Dantesque reading of the “dark wood” as a place of fear, catharsis and rebirth.
Luisa Rainer Chiap, archaeologist, anthropologist and history teacher, offers a reading of Tolkien’s myth of the fall of NĂşmenor as a mirror of the breaking of the sacred pact between humankind and creation. The speaker interweaves Tolkien’s tale with the great mythologems of the universal flood, the Ragnarök and the Aeneid, also drawing on the apocryphal Book of the Watchers from Enoch. A journey that, from geological discoveries about the flooding of the Black Sea to the collapse of 1200 BC, reaches up to our own time, inviting us to recognise the possibility of bringing back to life what has been lost.
Claudia Giordani and Luigi Zumbo, moderated by journalist Francesca Sturaro, present in preview their book published by Lindau, which proposes an original reading of Tolkien as a visionary author in the experiential sense of the term. Drawing on sources often unavailable in Italian, the speakers reconstruct the author’s visionary period from 1912 to 1925 and show how Tolkien found in Jung the tools to interpret his own experience of the collective unconscious. A reading of The Lord of the Rings as a portrait of the Jungian Arcanthropos and a reintegration of the Self.
Shaun Gunner, CEO of the British Tolkien Society, builds a comprehensive analysis of why Tolkien can be considered the father of modern fantasy: from his philological training with Beowulf, the Norse sagas and the Kalevala, to the experience of the Battle of the Somme, from his Catholic devotion to his love for the English countryside. The speaker shows how Tolkien invented an unprecedented model of worldbuilding that defined all subsequent fantasy, from Ursula K. Le Guin to George R.R. Martin, from Harry Potter to Star Wars, from The Legend of Zelda to Led Zeppelin. Quoting Terry Pratchett, Tolkien is “a mountain that appears in all subsequent fantasy”.
Mina Lukić, President of the Serbian Tolkien Society and art historian, explores the Mediterranean resonances in Middle-earth, showing why Gondor and Minas Tirith feel so familiar to us. The speaker retraces the geographical coordinates set by Tolkien himself (Minas Tirith at the latitude of Florence), the NĂşmenĂłrean funerary legacy read through an Egyptian lens, the seven-tier structure of the White City and the visual language of the citadel between Romanesque and Byzantine. Particular attention is given to Tolkien’s admiration for Venice, which he described as “like a dream of ancient Gondor”.
Marco Leonardi, researcher in Medieval History at the University of Catania and collaborator of the Tolkien Society, offers a documented defence of the historic Italian translation of The Lord of the Rings by Vittoria Alliata di Villafranca (1967). Starting from Umberto Eco and Tolkien’s letters, the speaker compares three versions of the famous Ring-verse to demonstrate how every lexical choice entails a precise adherence to values. The discussion broadens into a reflection on translation quality in the era of globalisation and artificial intelligence.
Nataša Cvijanović, graduate in Italian studies and scholar of the Slavic world, offers a fascinating comparison between European magical creatures and their counterparts in the worlds narrated by Tolkien, opening a precious window onto Slavic mythology and demonology. The speaker connects Tolkien’s elves, wizards, dragons and trolls with Balkan vilenjaci, Friulian Aganis and Krivapete, Romanian strigoi, Slavic kresniki, benandanti, zmaj and Norse dvergar. A conference that restores to Tolkien his deep rootedness in European mythologies.
Alessandro Stanchi, teaching professor of Statistics and Mathematics for Economics and Business at ESCP Business School, explains the global market of Tolkien starting from a provocative question: how much would it cost to buy the Tolkien brand today? Stanchi reconstructs the complex architecture of rights between Tolkien Estate, Middle-earth Enterprises, Warner Bros Discovery and Amazon, providing data on box-office takings, book sales, merchandising and tourism. The final estimate of the brand’s value: between 2 and 4 billion dollars.
Introduced by Paolo Paron’s intervention on the thirty years of Hobbiton, the conference features Mario Polia, historian, anthropologist and ethnographer, Professor of Anthropology at the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome, who offers a profound meditation on Tolkien as a witness to primordial tradition. Drawing on the Völuspá, Beowulf, the Edda, Islamic mysticism, Andean shamanism and Greco-Latin classics, Polia shows how Tolkien did not invent but saw, lived and remembered a world accessible to those who are called. A conference-song that culminates in the poem “Su me è disceso amore” (“Love descended upon me”).
In the evocative setting of the Public Gardens of Corso Verdi, the Compagnia de’ Viaggiatori in Arme presents an evening of readings from the writings of JRR Tolkien, accompanied by the Irish bouzouki. Gianfranco and Rossella read “The Flight of the Noldoli and the Oath of FĂ«anor” from the History of Middle-earth and the AinulindalĂ« from The Silmarillion, the Tolkienian cosmogony that tells of the creation of the world through the music of the Ainur. The evening closes with a moment of great prestige: the Song of Durin read in the original language by Shaun Gunner, CEO of the British Tolkien Society.
The closing evening of the 29th edition of Hobbiton at the Public Gardens of Corso Verdi, entrusted to the elven-hobbit trio Aryan Lindir & the Baggins with songs and music of harp, violin, choirs and flutes, accompanied by Paolo Paron’s readings. The evening offers a journey through the most celebrated moments of Tolkien’s work: the Ring-verse, Tom Bombadil, the Ents, the departure from the Grey Havens, the house of Beorn and ThĂ©oden’s charge. A powerful finale that culminates in the verses “Ride, ride, ride to Gondor!”.
BlaĹľ Berlec, founding member of the Slovenian Tolkien Society Gil-Galad, presents in English a rich overview of the Tolkien fandom in Slovenia, retracing the history of translations from the first Serbo-Croatian edition of 1981 to the most recent works by Sergej Hladnik. The second part is dedicated to the Gil-Galad Society, founded in August 1998, with its annual gatherings, the “Shining Star” magazine and participation in the early editions of Hobbiton in Gorizia. A precious testimony to how Tolkien’s passion has crossed borders across Europe.