The paper will examine the nature of the damned in Jeffrey Konvitz’s 1970s pulp horror novel The Sentinel by using a framework utilized by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, wherein damnation involves a species of spiritual blindness that masquerades as righteousness and shields the damned (for a time) from an awareness of their ultimate condition. Specifically, the paper will provide a character analysis of the co-protagonist Michael, arguably one of Konvitz’s more complex literary creations, and the role he plays in briefly elevating a generic genre-contrived plot into the realm of true spiritual horror. While making such a claim for a character from a popular horror novel might seem pretentious, it is worth noting that Lewis himself acknowledged the ability of even minor writers and poets to contrive compelling images that expose the deformities of the damned. This paper argues that Konvitz has achieved the same effect—a pulp version of the denizens of Dante’s Inferno that serves as a reflection of the form these deformities may take in the era of postmodernity.

Diane Duane’s ongoing pulp fantasy series The Tale of the Five (1979- ) is set in a world marked by constant bodily transgressions and surprises, where a human and dragon can occupy the same body and become lovers and a one-night stand can bring one face-to-face with God. This essay will argue that Duane’s series articulates eroticism in a manner comparable to Linn Marie Tonstad’s (2016) queer re-visioning of transubstantiation and bodily and spiritual transformation through the Eucharist. Acts of eating and drinking serve to highlight how characters’ pansexual, polyamorous relations with each other and the love of the Goddess spill over into and amplify one another, constructing a theology premised on transformative pleasure. These aspects of Duane’s worldbuilding, however, exist in uneasy tension with the series’ increasing narrative concern with the maintenance of noble bloodlines and divinely sanctioned hereditary monarchies, which transforms a potentially radical queer eucharistic theology into something uncomfortably close to what Jasbir K. Puar (2007) has described as ‘homonationalism’. These tendencies in Duane’s writing highlight the need for fantasy’s queer theological imaginaries to be attentive to the ways religious identity, desire, and nationhood serve as mutually constitutive and socially regulating forces, lest queerness become recuperated as an extension of Western theological triumphalism rather than its dissolution.

Carl G. Jung’s conception of the human psyche as an inner realm that gives access to profound, numinous experiences inspired many artists and popular culture authors to portray heaven and hell as symbolic expressions of the opposite forces within the human psyche rather than cosmological or supernatural regions. In my paper, I will concentrate on how the Hollywood film Jacob’s Ladder (1990) directed by Adrian Lyne, by portraying the main character’s descent into a deathbed vision depicted as hellish reality, reflects Jung’s theory of individuation, a process of self-realization that aims at reconciling various elements of the psyche and achieving wholeness. To this end, I will first demonstrate how the film reflects Jung’s considerations on myths as carriers of the unconscious contents. Next, I will analyze film techniques whereby the narration conveys the infernal dimension of the main character’s vision as a manifestation of his inner conflicts and traumas. In the final part, I will focus on how the protagonist overcomes them and discuss therapeutic aspects of his journey by taking a Jungian perspective.

Hell is traditionally a place of torment, where the young heroine, like Persephone or Eurydice, is kidnapped by the patriarchy, leaving others to rescue her. The last few decades, however, have offered a model closer to Sumerian Inanna, in which the heroine is enlightened by hell or even conquers it. Angela, Queen of Hel: Journey to the Funderworld by Marguerite Bennett (2016) gives its heroine this path. Winning back her beloved, Angela, sister of Thor and Loki, becomes queen of the underworld but then prefers to bring Sera back to earth in a flip on Eurydice. The Xena episode “Fallen Angel” (5.01) has a similar arc. Xena, now an archangel, descends into hell to save Gabrielle. Saving Callisto makes Xena a vicious demon, one who glories in destruction. Only Callisto, like the good shadow within, can manage to redeem her. Likewise, the 2018 French graphic novel Persephone by Loïc Locatelli-Kournwsky shows the heroine discovering hell as her place of power. As Carol S. Pearson writes in Persephone Rising, “Persephone’s ease in moving back and forth between the worlds and the seasons can be a model for our gaining ease in shifting between multiple roles and adjusting to new life stages that require different things from us” (190). All these heroines gain enlightenment and might through claiming hell as their birthright or conquest—the true font of feminine power.

The Arthurian figure of Merlin has a long literary history, but he never seems able to shake off the effects of his parentage. In medieval tradition, Merlin is sired by inhuman powers: first a seemingly benign dæmon and then a decidedly wicked demon. This preternatural aspect to his conception grants Merlin the skills and powers he uses to support the realm, yet it also taints him as someone potentially dangerous. Although Merlin’s background cannot be changed, creative artists often choose to ignore or alter his origins, especially when retelling his story for mass audiences. In contrast, other creators, usually those producing work for more niche markets, have more frequently accepted and/or embraced Merlin’s dark side. Like film and television, the comics industry has explored both of these strategies, and the medium has proffered innovative approaches to the origins of Merlin that deserve further attention.

I explore psychological meanings embedded in the Old Kingdom. Its River of Death is a hell impinging on life: Like Dante’s Inferno it has nine sectors; the dead take hideous Boschian forms; and helped by necromancers wielding “free magic” they often return to life. On this metaphor Nix builds the insight that desiring to live deeply and joyously risks turning hellish if early life was loveless. Necromancers and Free Magic are battled by Abhorsens and others wielding “Charter magic,” Free Magic transformed by symbols. Immersion in the Charter gives a joyous experience of connection to all life. Symbolization must unite with Free Magic to create this experience; symbolization alone is inadequate, as we see in the example of mundanely rational people across the Wall. But the source of joyous access to the Charter is also the source of access to Death, demonstrating jouissance that can provide great pleasure or great horror. Integrating symbolic with nonsymbolic experience is fundamental to humanness, becoming crucial when language develops around year three. The theme of dead mothers indicates how this development can leave gaps that horror creeps through. The mothers of Abhorsens Terciel, Sabriel, and Lirael are literally dead. Other mothers are emotionally dead, particularly Clariel’s, one reason Clariel becomes the Dead arch-foe Chlorr. Desire for joyous connection turns hellish under the sway of the dead mother.

In the early years of Hollywood’s Golden Age, The Hays Code functioned as a rigid morality code designed to shape the norms of Western culture. Its far-reaching impacts remain visible even decades after its enforcement was no longer required. In this talk, we will explore one of the most pervasive elements of the code’s legacy: the prohibition against showing LGBTQ characters in a positive light, and the resulting phenomenon of “queer-coding” characters. The practice of portraying LGBT+ characters through a lens of villainy and stereotype to adhere to the Hays Code requirement that queerness be punished and depicted as undesirable has led to a proliferation of villains, demons, and devils who are coded as Queer. We’ll explore why characters across a broad range of Mythopoeic works and adaptations, from Maleficent to Supernatural’s King of Hell to numerous depictions of Lucifer himself in music videos like Call Me By Your Name or television shows like Lucifer are queercoded, and how these norms have become heuristically embedded in mythopoeic storytelling.

Following the backlash against the Tolkien Society’s “Tolkien and Diversity” seminar and the airing of the first season of Rings of Power, social media fan spaces for Tolkien remain politically charged and reactionary. Building on the foundation of Mythcon 51’s Roundtable “Race, Racisms, and Tolkien,” and Craig Franson’s work showcased there and on the podcast “American Id,” we will discuss the current state of Tolkien discourse on social media and how to navigate the landscape as safely as possible.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake the Romantic, proffers a Romantic vision of hell, and a geographical representation of capacity and scope with an energetic apology. On the other hand, C.S. Lewis’s vision of hell in The Great Divorce is that of a land without substance: a land of addiction to mental maladies, an endless mental substance abuse, an emptying of presence. As one surveys the conversations throughout the book, one gets an increasing sense of the importance of understanding place correctly, as a matter of eternal consequence. One chapter concerns a well-travelled ghost who repeats his conviction that genuine progress is impossible because place, as a principle is empty of substance, “one wall inside another.” Another ghost, a bishop no less, does not realize he is in hell, and mocks his friend for “believing in a literal heaven and hell.” Spiritual beliefs can be summarized as “speculative questions,” and a desire for “real” things is a “hankering after matter.” When he states that he would like to come to an “atmosphere of inquiry,” he does not mean that he is willing to travel to a new place with a new, real atmosphere, of a world that is the answer to inquiry. The ghost understands the phrase strictly as a symbol, and thus commits “substance abuse” to the nature of the spatiotemporal world: he understands “spiritual reality” only as a series of metaphors for psychological states.

Adapting Greek mythology provides a framework to reapproach classic works through a contemporary lens to better understand the present. Of particular interest is the depiction of characters traveling to Hell in search of a better future. Looking at two myth-inspired musicals—The Frogs by Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove and Hadestown by Anaïs Michell—we see two disparate journeys to the Underworld given contemporary relevance. The Frogs (1974) depicts Dionysus’ journey to Hades to bring back a poet (originally Euripides, now George Bernard Shaw). However, it was not until the 2004 Broadway adaptation that overtly anti-authoritarian messages were added, aimed at the Bush administration. Hadestown, first conceived as a 2010 concept album, retells Orpheus’ descent to the Underworld to rescue Euridice. As a “folk opera”, the story becomes a commentary on economic disparity and exploitation: the central couple’s poverty justifies Euridice’s attraction to the industrial productivity of Hell; as a full Broadway musical production, their dilemma is given a counterpoint in the decaying marriage of Hades and Persephone, which itself is reflected in ongoing climate change. The adaptation and evolution of both works reveal how the message of each has been altered through various versions to keep reflecting the culture of the time. While the former is a comedy and the latter a tragedy, both arrive at the same message of endorsing political change and heralding endurance in the face of personal unrest: anyone can find themselves in Hell; it is what happens afterward that is ultimately important.

While different in genre, sitcom The Good Place and drama Lucifer share a certain irreverent tone and a somewhat unique approach to the afterlife. In The Good Place, there is no mention of gods or devils, only demons, a Good Place committee, and a judge. Lucifer, loosely based on Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels, however, features angels, demons, God, and the Devil, providing its own spin on established cosmology with embodied versions of prominent figures such as the archangel Michael and biblical brothers Cain and Abel. Yet what ties The Good Place and Lucifer together is a focus on hell and punishment as a state of mind brought about by one’s moral failings and guilt. For The Good Place, it is focused on learning to do better and thereby becoming one’s “best self,” while Lucifer leans heavily into the way the mind and its psychological tricks and turns can create a hell in both life and afterlife for both human and cosmic beings. Therefore, I will examine the way these two concepts of hell and eternity in both series both play off of and inform the other.

SESSION VI
5:30 PM—6:20 Eastern
4:30 PM—5:20 Central
3:30 PM—4:20Mountain
2:30 PM—3:20 Pacific
9:30 PM—10:20 GMT

In many world mythologies, underworlds are typically subterranean lands that house the dead. Sometimes these underworlds are visited by living heroes who pass trials only to return to the land of the living transformed. Tolkien uses this mythological theme to great effect throughout his legendarium. From The Hobbit to the Silmarillion, Tolkien’s world is littered with underworlds through which characters journey and emerge forever changed. Join us for a lively discussion of Tolkien’s underworlds and how they transform the characters who enter them, as well as the shape the larger events of Middle-earth.

When Gods of Jade and Shadow was published in 2019, it was acclaimed both for its excellent writing and its revisioning of Mesoamerican mythology. While there is certainly a centering of indigenous American myth over the Western religion, depicted as alien and imposed, the novel also belongs to a growing body of feminist literature in the #MeToo era that critiques and reimagines the power structures of the original stories. This paper explores the literary reconstruction of Xibalba, the underworld of Mayan myth, as Casiopea Tun seeks to restore the god Hun-Kame to his rightful throne at great personal cost. The novel offers a dispassionate, even bleak, narrative about the struggle for power in the world, a struggle that Casiopea seems bound to lose as an impoverished female with indigenous ancestry. I argue that her journey is not about restoring a lost heritage, so much as it is about realizing the legacy of that heritage in the world and making the sacrifices necessary to abandon the past and embrace modernity. The survival of the gods lies in their ability to move on from a violent and destructive past and adapt to a world with different values.

Theories about the afterlife have been a constant fixation of humanity throughout history, illustrated through diverse mediums and genres. Literary and philosophical movements reflect and influence the shifts between the worldviews of traditional and modern writers. In comparing Michael Schur’s sitcom The Good Place with Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, this paper demonstrates how the writer’s depictions of torture and punishment reflect their respective positions on philosophical concepts of the human self. Through the lens of the mind-body problem proposed by Rene Descartes, I analyze how the relationship between the mind and body in the afterlife is explored in each depiction. Dante’s Inferno primarily depicts physical torture in accordance with the Catholic belief of the resurrection of the body, inferring the torture of the whole being through the body. The Good Place portrays a dualistic hell that parallels the human experience by including and focusing on the mind and mental states in torture and punishment. The characters are placed in emotionally and mentally stressful situations rather than just physically painful situations. I propose that a dualistic portrayal of hell mirrors the modern human experience, providing a means to express and cope with the fears surrounding the question of what happens after death.

C.S. Lewis depicts “inferno” not only as the otherworldly vision of Hell, but also as how you would choose your life in the present. In Beyond the Shadowlands, Wayne Martindale discussed, in separate chapters, how Jadis and Orual chose Hell. This presentation will add to his research a comparison of the two queens’ choice of “living in the self” and refusal to abandon themselves. In The Great Divorce and The Silver Chair, a protagonist moves out of the present world into a dimension of Inferno or Elysium, while Jadis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Orual in Till We Have Faces persist in their belief in the self. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis translated “living in the self” as “an appendage of the self,“ which can be vindicated by the word habitually used by both Jadis and Orual: “mine.” An analysis of their repetition of “mine” will lead to a response to the question of whether the two queens wished to come out of Hell.

In this paper, I apply the eschatological framework of Michigan historian and Gothic horror writer Russell Kirk to the depictions of Purgatory and Hell in certain novels by Charles Williams and Stephen King. Although these authors represent a wide range of faith traditions, there are a number of surprising similarities between their respective depictions of the afterlife, aspects of which Kirk’s notion of “timeless moments” can help to clarify. All three authors, for instance, characterize the afterlife as a state of mind that is nevertheless closely associated with specific physical locations such as a castle in Scotland, the city of London, or King’s famous Overlook Hotel. In these places, the living and dead work out their salvation or suffer damnation at one and the same time. The timeless nature of Hell, finally, ensures that it is never too late to try to escape from it and seek redemption.

The hero’s journey is one of the most popular narrative patterns in storytelling, constituting a particular bridge between classical mythology and modern fantasy. One of the most captivating and poignant parts of the journey is none other than the descent to the underworld. Since the beginning of time, countless heroes have come and gone, but the underworld stays the same. Or does it . . .? From among the long tradition of classical texts that first helped bring the underworld to life, Virgil’s can be praised for providing some of the most detailed descriptions, as both Orpheus’ descent in Book 4 of the Georgics and Aeneas’s journey in Book 6 of the Aeneid constitute key pillars of the imagery of the Underworld we know today. Likewise, modern fantasy texts that represent this supernatural land continue to inform our perception of it. And while classical texts may have fallen into disuse, retellings of classical myths have found great success. From which, Rick Riordan’s series based on Greek and Roman myth, Percy Jackson and the Olympians and its spin-off Heroes of Olympus, can be highlighted as some of the most popular. As such, this study will look at how the two authors choose to represent the kingdom of the dead with the goal of understanding what the different portrayals can tell us about classical mythology, modern fantasy, their relationship and how they help shape our notions of hell and heroism.

There is almost no reference to our notions of Hell or Heaven in Tolkien’s works. Nobody knows where humans, dwarves or hobbits go when they die, whether they have behaved in a civilized way or spent their lives murdering and stealing. Nevertheless, we can easily find hellish settings in Tolkien at different levels: deep pits of fire and torture, wide barren lands of destruction, and places of otherworldly nature used for incarceration. Hell can suddenly appear in any Middle-earth setting, transforming fertile lands and prosperous realms into haunted places or industrialized barren lands where modest people are cruelly enslaved. The balance between the Christian vision of Tolkien and his secular sub-creation is delicate; and we will find that in Middle-earth, where beauty and perfection dwell, there is also a place for the most despicable evil. Is there a place in his works where evil is punished? Is it possible to experience Hell while being still alive? Are there other Tolkien works related to the afterlife? Come with me, but beware: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.

Tolkien has a wealth of precedents in giving his Orpheus and Eurydice, i.e., Beren and Lúthien, a happy ending. My paper proposes to survey these precedents in the Orphic tradition of Ancient Greece, in its subsequent Christening in late ancient and medieval literature, and in its connections with the Harrowing of Hell. Looking for a female Orpheus, an undiscussed parallelism is found in the figure of Mary Magdalene.

When talking about The Legend of Zelda, “underworld” can have a variety of definitions, from simple dungeons hidden beneath the ground to fully realized parallel dimensions. Since the first entry in the franchise, the subterranean dungeons have been where the player character, Link, learns new skills and battles colossal monsters, honing the player’s skills and advancing the narrative. While not as ubiquitous as dungeons, since A Link to the Past, Zelda games have often included travel to parallel worlds, whether those are parallel dimensions or alternate time periods, where the rules and mores of Hyrule have been upended creating truly hellish environments. This presentation will explore some different types of underworlds present in the Legend of Zelda franchise, including Majora’s Mask, the Arbiter’s Grounds and Twilight Realm of Twilight Princess, and the chasms of Tears of the Kingdom, and examine how these areas reflect larger themes of duality, hidden knowledge, and the power of myth and legend.

In her novels A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves, Naomi Novik constructs a world in which school is Hell and the outside world is Heaven—or so it seems from the inside. From the competition and internal hierarchies that exist between the students, to the monsters, or “mals” that stalk students and devour them for their “mana,” to the brutal lessons, harsh punishments, and presumed Darwinism of the school itself, the inside of the Scholomance seems the embodiment of Hell to the novel’s protagonist and central consciousness “El,” short for Galadriel, even as she struggles to contain her own affinity—or magical strength—which tends to the “infernal.” But this resemblance to Hell is not merely in El’s head; the school is designed in a cone- or funnel-shape analogous to the structure of Hell in the Inferno of Dante: each year the halls of the school rotate downward, space reallocated as the number of students decreases, to the “graduation hall,” which is the final test—and for many the final destination. This paper traces the parallels between the trilogy’s three novels, A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves, and the three parts of the Commedia by Dante Alighieri. It emphasizes the Hell that is the Scholomance itself, the false promise of heaven offered in The Golden Enclaves, and the novels’ Sartrean notion, dramatized though the hierarchies and social Darwinism of the international societies of wizards in the novels, that “hell is other people.”

This project explores the parallels between the journeys of Dante’s Pilgrim in Inferno and Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings. It asserts that these two examples are a variant of the hero’s journey, more akin to a divine pilgrimage. Through this analysis, each author’s use and repurposing of mythology and monsters to fit within a Christian narrative will be closely examined. Following the Pilgrim and Frodo, this project charts their voyages through hell (or hellish landscape) and the effects that has on each of them psychologically and spiritually. In essence, this project seeks to chart both external and internal movement of these two characters as they traverse hellish landscapes. In doing so, it is important to also examine those who seek to guide our characters through their monumental task. Lastly, the taking on of sin, the bearing the weight of the world is a component that plays a major part in each character’s internal arch and through the close reading of this process, gain an understanding of how the authors’ view individual strength, devotion, and the overcoming of evil.

If you know one thing about Persephone, it is that she was abducted by Hades, held captive, and ate pomegranate seeds in the Underworld. Although Demeter rescued her daughter, she had to return for several months each year as a consequence of consuming the “Fruit of the Underworld.” But tasting those succulent ruby red seeds was not the first time she succumbed to desire—according to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter II, the first thing Persephone “bites” is a lure. Hades sets a trap: a flower with “one hundred stems of fragrant blossoms.” When Persephone grasps a stalk of this flower, a hellmouth opens and “the wide-pathed earth yawned . . . and the lord, Host of Many, with his immortal horses sprang out upon her.” Persephone’s story is just one example of how hellmouths and consumption feature prominently in fantastic Ur-texts such as the Aeneid and Dante's Inferno. This presentation will trace the evolution of the Underworld and hellmouths as well as the consequences of consumption therein from the story of the future Queen of Hades through iconic texts including Alice in Wonderland and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and then focus on Miyazaki's Spirited Away, Erin Morgenstern's The Starless Sea, Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic.

From the beginning of Tolkien scholarship Mordor has been analyzed in light of its Hellish iconography; from the perspective of the narrative voice, what constitutes “Hell” in Middle-earth may seem clear. But what is Hell to Mordor’s chief inhabitant? What is Hell in Sauron’s Eye? The Rings of Power has brought Sauron into the spotlight by interpreting him not as depersonalized evil but as a character in his own right. Actor Charlie Vickers has shared how he developed this character for the screen, adapting characteristics taken directly from Tolkien’s own writings: Sauron’s love of order and his desire to “heal” Middle-earth—a goal with its implicit suggestion of utopian vision. Is such a goal even achievable within the theological and metaphysical constraints of Middle-earth? Drawing on Tolkien’s writings about Sauron from the 1950s, the biblical scholarship of Elaine Pagels, and the work of Jonathan McIntosh (among others), I intend to argue that Sauron’s goal strikes at the nature of Arda itself; to Sauron, Hell is Arda Marred, and his struggle to order it is ultimately his own struggle with the Problem of Evil—the very force he, in a feedback loop, comes to represent.

The planes of Oblivion from The Elder Scrolls (TES) series are not explicitly Hell; they are any dimensions of reality which are not under control of the Aedra, the benevolent spiritual entities. As a result, these planes may be totally unknown, pleasant, chaotic, or horrifying, depending on who is in charge, reflecting the personality of its ruler. These planes are at the heart of the franchise, and the intrusion of the planes of Oblivion and its inhabitants is a constant in the series. The planes of Oblivion are a reimagining of Hell as a place of potential, rather than evil. This reimagining calls on the player to use ingenuity or grow in power to a point where they can escape, free others, or even defeat the occupants of certain realms. The metaphysics of TES teaches us that the Aedra are good, but only useful in a very limited sphere of influence. In contrast to The Great Divorce, Hell and its occupants surround the Aedra on all sides. This inversion draws on occultism and New Age spirituality to call the player toward a soteriology of individual transcendence and acquisition of power. TES did not create its mythos in a vacuum but has crafted it in relation and response to a cultural paradigm. We need not be passive observers of spiritual realities, but can be active agents, seizing salvation from and overcoming powers of Hell for ourselves.

In the His Dark Materials trilogy, Phillip Pullman has openly positioned himself as the anti-C.S. Lewis who attempts to embed the gospel of atheism through his fantasy novels. Pullman recasts classics such as Paradise Lost and Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven & Hell so that humans triumph over the oppressive Authority by learning that sinning is simply enjoying life. This paper will specifically explore Pullman’s depictions of the underworld and his alternative vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in The Amber Spyglass, examining Pullman’s attempts to assure readers that by rejecting Christian views of the final translation, one can live more freely and happily knowing that there is no individual afterlife. To help defeat the Authority, Lyra and Will journey through the grim underworld and free the spirits trapped there, allowing the ghosts to dissolve and escape the grim underworld. The ultimate end, and the greatest hope, is that Lyra promises the dead they will become “part of everything. All the atoms that were them” go “into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things” (319). Each soul dissolves, but this is better than an eternal, grim waiting in the underworld. This paper will argue that by denying the reality of eternal souls, Pullman offers pernicious paradoxes (and outright contradictions) in his novels which are puzzling at best and even more frightening at worst than the doctrines he seeks to supplant.

The rising popularity of Greek mythology is due in some part to female authors such as Madeline Miller and Natalie Haynes lending a fresh perspective to the Homeric tradition. However, these female authors tend to actually reduce the importance of one of the most important female characters of the Trojan War: Helen. Helen of Sparta has been an enigma to writers throughout the last 3000 years, her story changing with each iteration and era. Since Homer’s Iliad, the most beautiful woman in the world has been victim and villain, strong and weak willed. She has chosen husbands, and been forced to take them. She has gone to Troy willingly, and was stolen in the dead of night. She has hated the confines of Sparta, and she has missed it desperately. She loved her husband Menelaus, she loved Paris, and she hated both. She wasn’t at Troy at all, and she danced on the wall while it burned. She was Helen of Sparta and she was Helen of Troy. In the past and going forward, writers and creators have to decide who Helen is for the story they wish to tell, even if she becomes a contradiction in the answer.

Now that the first of five planned seasons of Amazon’s big budget Second Age adaptation The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has aired, we will provide a retrospective of Season 1. We will compare Tolkien’s Second Age writings with the realized version in the show, including how the writers and showrunners have interpreted certain specific passages from the texts, and where significant departures were made for sake of adaptation. We will highlight themes of the season, as well as specific characters, relationships, and settings that have resonated with audiences, and speculate on where the series could potentially progress in Season 2 and beyond. From Númenor to Near Harad, Harfoots to High Elves, we will give you the meat, and give it to you raw.

In the Hellblazer and Sandman comic book universes, hell depends on the writer’s worldview and often on the decade in which they are writing, appearing as a twisted version of a dreary regular world. Thus, this hell is often related to the contemporary Western political and cultural landscape as seen through Judeo-Christian conceptions of hell, demonology, and fears of everlasting torment and damnation, just like Dante’s Inferno and many other representations for centuries. In creating a hell that mirrors the modern world and accounts for contemporary folklore about the supernatural, the creators humanize the character’s quests and reify the fruitlessness of their actions against societal and political forces. Guilt and personal action are often more important than God’s judgment as it changes character’s hierarchical positions and reinforces how the trials between characters parallel earthly political processes with protagonists that have motivations or abilities like the souls already in hell. For example, the comic book writer Jamie Delano comments on Thatcher’s England, where Hellblazer’s John Constantine encounters soul-brokering demons from Mammon Investments in a mundanely realistic London. In Sandman, Dream’s trips to hell deal with modernist devices, such as Dream’s Helm, which he must battle the demon Choronzon to regain, that appear as manifestations of science and magic. Damnation can be bartered upon and changed based on transactions that correspond with earthly capitalism and politics.

Over the last few decades, niche publishers have presented several children’s fantasy series marketed as being “in the tradition of Lewis and Tolkien.” These publishers, however, are neither British, nor are they Anglican or Catholic. They are instead American Evangelical organizations, providing a space for faith-informed stories that wander somewhere between allegory and parable. Within the pages of these texts can be found not only the expected Christ-figures, but there are also Satan-figures and hellish landscapes much more likely to reflect concepts from Dante, Milton, and medieval witch-hunting guides than from the Bible, the text that evangelicals claim to be foundational for their beliefs. This paper will explore both the influences on the representation of Satan and hell in these texts, as well as the purpose of these representations. For example, some of these stories are designed to scare children into certain behaviors, others present the hope of an ultimate good as a foil against a (perceived) very real evil. Texts that will be addressed include David and Karen Mains’ Tales of the Kingdom, Jerrel Law’s Spirit Fighter series, and Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga.

Join Nyssa Gilkey on a tour through several different fantasy video game depictions of hell. We’ll spend about seven (-ish) minutes looking around each hell or underworld before moving on, touring Helheim in God of War and God of War: Ragnarok, Hades and Elysium as portrayed in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey DLC, and the Duat of ancient Egypt in Assassin’s Creed: Origins DLC. With sufficient time and interest, we can tour other fantasy depictions of hell. Participants will be able to ask questions and discuss throughout the journey.