Book Notes

As of January 1st, 2007, the publishing industry switched from using 10-digit ISBNs to 13-digit ones. For book reviews in this issue, we have listed only the 10-digit forms, but beginning with the next volume of Tolkien Studies, only the 13-digit forms will be cited. The 13-digit ISBNs are nearly the same as the 10-digit ones, with a new prefix 978 and a different final check digit. Conversion utilities can be found at the Book Industry Study Group website, http://www.bisg.org.

Among recent publications worth calling attention to is the Third Edition (2006) of The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 1A: The Middle Ages, edited by David Damrosch, Christopher Baswell and Ann Howland Schotter (ISBN 0321333918), a popular university course book which now includes in full Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Matthew Dickerson and David O'Hara's From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy is a trade paperback from Brazos Press (ISBN 1587431335), which considers myth and modern fantasy particularly from the critical viewpoints of Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis.

Valancourt Books has reprinted in trade paperback the 1825 translation by Robert Pearse Gillies of The Magic Ring by Baron de la Motte Fouqué (ISBN 0977784126). Though advertised by the publisher as "one of the inspirations for Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings," the introduction by Amy H. Sturgis is much more cautious, claiming only that such works of German Romanticism as The Magic Ring influenced George MacDonald, and laid the foundation for Tolkien to follow afterward. Though Tolkien himself, in the printed record of his letters and essays, was oddly silent about works by the German Romantics, reprints of such neglected fantasies as The Magic Ring are welcome.

Lindisfarne Books has reprinted in trade paperback R. J. Reilly's Romantic Religion: A Study of Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien (ISBN 1584200472). The publisher seems to have desired to obscure the fact that this is a facsimile reprint of book published in 1971 (which itself was a revision of a 1960 dissertation), but the author in a new four-page Preface at least mentions that the book was first published thirty-five years before.

The title of Gwendolyn A. Morgan's The Invention of False Medieval Authorities as a Literary Device in Popular Fiction: From Tolkien to "The Da Vinci Code" (ISBN 0773459391) promises a lot more than this slim book delivers, as the Tolkien coverage consists of only two and a half pages of very general commentary. With this book the publisher, Edwin Mellen Press, has achieved a new low in terms of shoddy book production.

Some publications forthcoming in 2007 are worth noting in advance, including The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien, which is being billed by the publishers as the first completed narrative of Middle-earth published since The Silmarillion thirty years ago.

John D. Rateliff's long-awaited study of the manuscripts of The Hobbit will appear in two volumes under the title The History of The Hobbit, Part One: Mr. Baggins and Part Two: Return to Bag-End.

Also of considerable interest will be Kristin Thompson's The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood, coming this summer from University of California Press.