The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2004

Tolkien scholarship in 2004 was dominated by two themes. One, study of Tolkien's oeuvre as a mythology and of its mythological source materials—principally but not entirely in Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, edited by Jane Chance (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004)—demonstrates the continuing assimilation by scholars of the complex body of Tolkien's posthumous work. The other theme, the beginnings of widespread literary study of the Peter Jackson film cycle of The Lord of the Rings, was due to the release in December 2003 of the final installment in that cycle. Comparison with Jackson permeates many articles on Tolkien, and a few writers begin to emerge who consider them interchangeable.

Some articles comparing popular and critical receptions of The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling were inspired by the presence of simultaneous film versions of both works. Some close analyses of Tolkien's prose in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion by Michael D. C. Drout and Gergely Nagy testify more, as the mythological studies do, to the continuing maturation of Tolkien studies. But though many scholars, following Tolkien's own advice regarding Beowulf, treat his work as worthy of study without special pleading, some others feel obliged explicitly to disavow any personal taste for Tolkien or belief that his works have value before delving into studies whose mere existence tends to dispute this expressed conclusion.

Nearly as many books on Tolkien (24) were published in 2004 as in 2003. The most significant single-author works are Fleming Rutledge's religious-literary study, The Battle for Middle-earth, and Janet Brennan Croft's War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, a survey of a topic also touched on by other authors this year. Croft's book received the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies in 2005. The Science of Middle-earth by Henry Gee is more a popular than a scholarly work, but it is also of considerable interest. Of the collections of original essays, Chance's Tolkien and the Invention of Myth is the second volume on Tolkien to emerge from the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Many of the papers in this volume deal directly with the elusive topics of the conception and purpose of Tolkien's legendarium, comparing his work with the creative scholarly projects that preserved Norse and Finnish mythology. The papers, though written separately, are often so close in subject as to form a kind of connected web. Translating Tolkien: Text and Film, edited by Thomas Honegger (Zurich: Walking Tree, 2004), yokes several translation studies (in the mode of Honegger's 2003 collection Tolkien in Translation) with critiques of Jackson's films on the premise, more effective in theory than in practice, that film adaptations are a kind of translation. Further comparative studies of films and book appear in the remaining collection, Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, edited by Janet Brennan Croft (Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 2004).

The year brought the publication of Volume 1 of the journal in hand, Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review, plus three other full journal issues on Tolkien, Mallorn 42 from The Tolkien Society, Parma Eldalamberon 15 from The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, and a special Tolkien issue of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, volume 50 number 4. In his introduction to the MFS issue, editor Shaun F. D. Hughes declares that Tolkien's work continues to flourish despite the dismissal of fantasy by Leavisite critics and the dismissal of Tolkien by some critics of the fantastic ("Postmodern Tolkien," 807-13). Caroline Galwey (see below) addresses the same subject.

Many of this year's works discuss both mythological resonances and sources, or religion as both spiritual guidance and literary content, or both the text and its reception, or both Tolkien's book and Jackson's films, so classification is in some cases arbitrary. But categories in Tolkien studies exist even if individual works cross them, so classification may still be useful.

Works by Tolkien

The 50^th Anniversary Edition of The...