The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder (review)

This collection of essays derived from the 2004 Marquette conference bears comparison in its scope to the 1995 Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, edited by Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight. The contributions range across the whole of Tolkien's work, though, as the title implies, there is a predominant focus on The Lord of the Rings. If we compare it to the 1995 collection, one of its most striking features is its uniform confidence and maturity of tone, the absence of any hint of defensiveness or apologetic amateurishness. It is the work of a community of scholars who have no doubt of the importance of their theme or the comprehensiveness of their sources.

There is also a sense, in most of the essays, that fairly gentle adjustments and additions are now being made to a generally accepted understanding of Tolkien's art and thought. We are on the putting green of scholarship, as it were, rather than the fairway. In "Elvish as She Is Spoke," for example, Carl Hostetter offers some deft and perhaps overdue correctives to enthusiastic misconceptions. Though he invented them, Tolkien was not "fluent" in Quenya or Sindarin. The languages were not finished products, designed like Esperanto to be usable by others for narrative or speech, but the expression, in the essentially dynamic form of historical grammar, of his "own, personal linguistic aesthetic" (234)—which itself changed over time. Attempts to translate into and out of these tongues (generating what Hostetter calls "Neo-Elvish") can lead to gross and potentially comic semantic mismatches. Does all this need saying? Yes, and Hostetter's essay is exceptionally incisive and lucid, but the most remarkable thing is that we have reached the point at which these correctives are called for and can be widely understood.

Following Charles B. Elston's tribute to Richard E. Blackwelder as "Scholar, Collector, Benefactor and Friend," Tom Shippey cites Blackwelder's Tolkien Thesaurus (1990) in his "History in Words: Tolkien's Ruling Passion." It prompts him not only to characteristically searching inquiries into individual words—dwimmerlaik, ninny-hammer, and noodles (where he draws a blank)—but to a wider reflection on grammar and grammarians in Tolkien's life and work, and a brief polemic against the continuing ascendancy of "misologists" in the humanities. Arne Zettersten in "The AB Language Lives" uses light-hearted allusions to two of Tolkien's less developed languages—Nevbosh and Arctic—to frame a serious discussion of the prospects for future research on the Ancrene Riwle manuscripts and their linguistic context. Arden R. Smith's "Tolkienian Gothic" looks at the Gothic names appropriated or adapted in The Lord of the Rings, and provides etymologies for the "reconstructed" (as opposed to authentic) words in Tolkien's "Gothic" poem, "Bagme Bloma." Much in Zettersten and in Smith is at the limit of this reviewer's competence, if not well beyond it, but neither scholar entirely loses sight of the "humanity," the creativity and historical awareness, that illuminates Tolkien's philological inquiries. Michael D. C. Drout's study of "The Rhetorical Evolution of 'Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics'" similarly emphasizes that the lecture "reaches beyond scholarship" (191) in its concluding pages. For Drout, this critical text, especially in its final version, achieves rhetorical power for reasons we can recognize from the fiction: it suggests great resources of knowledge behind what is expressly stated; and it retains and refines "tableaux" which sprang into being quite early in the composition (such as the allegory of the tower) while repeatedly rethinking their position and weighting in the overall structure.

In "What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?: Planning, Inspiration and The Lord of the Rings," Christina Scull renews our gratitude that in 1937 George Allen & Unwin did not, like a well-managed present-day publisher, hold Tolkien to a synopsis, a contract and...