Fellow Inklings Blogger Brenton Dickieson has a post up today entitled “The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth… Or At Least Pass the Pepper,” about his experiences at Mythcon 45. Here are a couple of my favorite paragraphs; please click on the title above to read the whole post on his blog, A Pilgrim in Narnia.
Chris Gaertner as the wounded King Arthur
…I attended great talks on Neil Gaiman, Harry Potter, H.P. Lovecraft, Beowulf, Terry Pratchett, C.S. Lewis & Carl Jung, and various Tolkien topics. The panels were real features. I was on the “Inklings and King Arthur” panel, and realized I was the least among greats in the weekend panels, with topics like “Faith and Fantasy” and “Teaching Tolkien.”
There are different kinds of folk at Mythcon in sometimes overlapping groups. There was a pretty hardcore Tolkien contingency. I had lunch with someone who was fluent in Tolkien’s languages, and was amazed that whenever someone quoted an obscure passage from the legendarium, heads nodded throughout the room. There was a large Christian contingency, folk who feel that fantasy helps capture the basic existential fact that the universe is made up of more than matter. There were subcultures of neopagans, professors, fantasy writers, theologians, grad students, linguists, and philosophers. There were probably some attendees that were all of these.
…There was a general medieval feeling to the weekend conference. There was always a sword nearby (when needed), and one could often see a Mythcon participant having to sweep back his or her robe sleeve in order to tap out a text message. I heard renditions of “Edge of Night” (Pippin’s song) and the Last Unicorn song. I sat in a room as dozens of people recited the first 18 lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales by heart (a useful skill I discovered) while a friend texted an alluring photo of himself as King Arthur to his wife….
The Oddest Inkling 