Sara Brown, a member of the English department at Rydal Penrhos School, has recently been awarded a Ph.D for 
her work on the author J.R.R. Tolkien.
She worked closely with her supervisor, Professor Lucie Armitt at the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences in the University of Salford, to produce a thesis entitled ‘From Abjection to Alchemy: Tolkien’s Middle Earth Legendarium’.
It’s perhaps not surprising that it took six-and-a-half years to complete the Ph.D – all the research and writing was fitted around a full teaching timetable at school, as well as running one of the school’s boarding houses alongside her husband Dr Martin Brown.
A huge amount of self-motivation was needed to fulfill this task, but Dr Brown’s lifelong passion for Tolkien helped to pull her through some tough times.
Dr Brown first took The Lord of the Rings off her father’s bookshelves at the age of eight, and from that moment on she has been fascinated by Tolkien’s fantasy world.
She says that Tolkien’s works remain widely popular because of their universal and timeless themes – loss, evil, power – and she is particularly interested in issues of gender in the books.
At school, Dr Brown passes on her expertise and enthusiasm for fantasy literature to her pupils. As well as writing and studying fantasy texts, pupils are encouraged to explore the thinking of critics and theorists who write about these texts.
This is particularly useful for pupils studying the Theory of Knowledge, as well as language and literature courses.
As part of her research, Dr Brown was extremely fortunate to be permitted access to Tolkien’s private papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which are closely controlled by the Tolkien family.
There she was able to study transcripts of lectures and drafts of some of Tolkien’s essays and literary works, including a small note in the author’s ‘appalling’ handwriting (visible only through a magnifying lens) concerning the character of Gandalf.
Dr Brown has also given several lectures on Tolkien, most recently at the International Tolkien Conference at Loughborough University last year.
She is now looking forward to taking some time out from research, to watching parts two and three of The Hobbit when they appear on the big screen, and then to rewriting her thesis into a book which she hopes to publish in the near future.
‘A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.’ So said J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the best-known fantasy works ever written, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.