Reno E. Lauro

Reno E. Lauro is a researcher and independent scholar. His unpublished PhD thesis from the University of St Andrews was a treatment of J.R.R. Tolkien's philosophy of Mythopoeia as a response to Jean Baudrillard's Hyperreality. His work makes connections between Tolkien, the medieval aesthetics of light, and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Reno contends that Tolkien modified Barfield's notion of Ancient Semantic Unity and developed his own Ontological Semantic Unity in the Legendarium. Rather than a literary endeavor, Tolkien applied the Medieval aesthetics of light to an already involved asterisk history of Elves and Men. Tolkien can only be understood, he says, by taking his cosmological ontology at face value as a true recovery of enchanted forms of life for an Age of the Machine.

Reno has run the substack page Tolkien's House of Being since 2019, and its associated Facebook page.