Abruzzo-born musician Pierpaolo Battista set to present Quenya composition at Oxonmoot, the annual gathering for devotees of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
An Italian musician, composer and lecturer is preparing to bring J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented Elvish language to Oxford, where he will present a piece written in Quenya at this year’s Oxonmoot celebration on September 6.
Oxonmoot, held annually at Tolkien’s own alma mater, draws together enthusiasts of the author’s Middle-earth works. Its name nods to the novels themselves — a “moot” being a gathering of the living tree-like Ents.
Abruzzo-born Pierpaolo Battista will open proceedings with a lecture titled “Quenya as an Instrument of Narrative Revelation,” exploring the language’s role in Tolkien’s storytelling. He will then perform his own composition written in Quenya at the university where Tolkien himself studied and taught.
Tolkien’s enduring pull on Italy’s right
The event lands amid long-standing interest in Tolkien’s work within Italy’s governing circles. Premier Giorgia Meloni has repeatedly pointed to The Lord of the Rings as a formative influence on her political values. The saga also holds a particular place within her right-wing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, which has roots in Italy’s neofascist tradition.
FdI’s culture has long drawn on Tolkien’s mythology of Good versus Evil, and many of its members — Meloni included — attended party-run “Hobbit Camps” in their youth, where younger generations of the movement absorbed their enthusiasm for the author’s work.
Reflecting on Meloni’s September 2022 election victory, which made her Italy’s first woman premier, her friend and right-wing intellectual Pietrangelo Buttafuoco — now head of the Venice Biennale — told the liberal daily la Repubblica that the win represented “the Tolkien generation getting into the premier’s office.” Meloni herself described Tolkein’s writing to the New York Times as expressive of conservative belief.
Buttafuoco framed the victory in symbolic class terms too, casting it as the triumph of the working-class Roman beach town of Coccia di Morto over Capalbio, a favoured retreat of the liberal establishment.
