The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2008

Much of the activity in Tolkien studies goes on at scholarly conferences, and volumes of conference proceedings have often been notable among publications in the field. Such volumes have been important contributions in many years, and they were particularly prominent in 2008. The largest item in the year’s Tolkien studies bibliography was The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference: 50 Years of The Lord of the Rings (Coventry, England: Tolkien Society, 2008), edited by Sarah Wells. This two-volume set, issued also on CD-ROM, includes some 97 papers from an anniversary conference in Birmingham sponsored by the Tolkien Society. Most of the contributions are short—presentation slots at the conference were 30 minutes, and few of the papers are much expanded—and some are notably sketchy in content. A few of the pieces from foreign contributors are, forgivably, in less than perfect English; the collection is minimally edited. The topic spread is very wide and some of the papers are most valuable; altogether, this is the single most extensive multi-author collection of articles on Tolkien ever published. A few of the contributions have been published elsewhere in the interim; most of these having been covered in previous installments of the “Year’s Work,” they are not discussed here.

Four other important collections of the year also had their origins as collections of conference presentations. Tolkien’s Shorter Works: Proceedings of the 4th Seminar of the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft & Walking Tree Publishers Decennial Conference (referred to as “the Jena Conference 2007” on the cover), edited by Margaret Hiley and Frank Weinreich (Zurich: Walking Tree, 2008), brings together papers on Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major, “Leaf by Niggle,” and some poetry. Most of its articles were published in the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft journal, Hither Shore 4 (2007), whose English-language contents were covered in the 2007 “Year’s Work”; the Walking Tree edition’s new contributions, and those first published in English here, are discussed below. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, edited by Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger (Zurich: Walking Tree, 2008), concentrates on biographical, philosophical, and moral influences rather than literary sources. The Mirror Crack’d: Fear and Horror in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Major Works (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008) gets a fair amount of mileage out of what might seem at first glance a limited topic. Lembas-extra: Proceedings of Unquendor’s 5th Lustrum ([Leiden, Netherlands]: Tolkienshop.com, 2008), something between an anthology and a journal issue, published on behalf of the Dutch Tolkien Society “Unquendor,” concentrates on philology and translations.

Significant scholarly monographs of the year include Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits by Dimitra Fimi and The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-earth by Elizabeth A. Whittingham, both of them large-scale surveys of Tolkien’s creative project, both chronicling its transformation from a mythology into a history and theology, but each taking entirely different angles. Fimi’s, as her title suggests, takes a cultural, historical, and biographical approach to the whole legendarium, from the early poetry and including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, while Whittingham concentrates on the theology and mythology in The Book of Lost Tales and the “Silmarillion.” Fimi’s book received the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies in 2010. The Lord of the Rings and the Western Narrative Tradition by Martin Simonson, an attempt to integrate Tolkien’s work into the various narrative genres with which it is often loosely associated, is also an important work. Tolkien On Fairy-stories, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson, brings the documentary history and annotation project of Tolkien’s works, previously applied to The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major, and “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” to the essay “On Fairy-stories.”

Biographical studies made a significant return to the forefront of Tolkien studies this year, with new geographically oriented books on Tolkien’s connections...