Book Notes

The Story of Kullervo, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Verlyn Flieger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016; xxiii, 166 pp.; $25; ISBN 978-0-544-70626-2), is a revised reprint of an article from this journal (“ ‘The Story of Kullervo’ and Essays on Kalevala,” Tolkien Studies 7 [2010]: 211–78). The material by Tolkien consists of an incomplete re-telling, in prose with verse interpolations, of the tale from Kalevala, written about 1912–16, plus a manuscript lecture on Kalevala from the same period and a typescript revision from about 1919–24. Flieger’s contribution, besides editing the texts for clarity, includes introductions, textual notes, and an evaluation of the place of this tale in Tolkien’s development as a writer, all revised and enlarged from the original publication. The book also includes six photographic plates of Tolkien’s manuscript and one of a painting.

Also available in book form is A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins (London: Harp-erCollins, 2016), a critical edition of Tolkien’s 1930s essay, originally published in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. This edition adds additional drafts and notes by Tolkien, plus editorial material including discussion of the popular application of invented languages, by Tolkien and others, in fantasy literature and film.

Several popular biographical books related to the Inklings have made recent appearances. None of these have original research on Tolkien, but they are of interest for context and perception. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) is a lengthy (644 pp.), freewheeling joint biography of Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield. The Oxford Inklings: Lewis, Tolkien and Their Circle, by Colin Duriez (Oxford, UK: Lion, 2015), though a history in format, is less purely chronological: it begins with Williams and does not give Tolkien’s background until chapter 3. Both books include speculation but are less presumptive on factual matters than some earlier writings have been. Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings, by Diana Pavlac Glyer (Kent, OH: Black Squirrel Books, 2016), is a popularization of her earlier scholarly work The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007), retaining its thematic format while cutting back on documentary examples and proofs for the sake of readability. Charles Williams: The Third Inkling, by Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), despite its subtitle, is a full biography with much original research, though little of that relates to Tolkien. Lindop firmly holds that Tolkien and Williams were good friends during Williams’s lifetime, and the other writers discussed here are inclined to the same belief.

Of more direct scholarly note to Tolkien studies, John Garth’s 2014 self-published pamphlet Tolkien at Exeter College (available through http://www.johngarth.co.uk/php/tolkien_at_exeter_college.php, £11.55 for non-EU delivery) expands considerably on his article “Tolkien, Exeter College, and the Great War” (Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, ed. Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger [Zurich: Walking Tree, 2008]) and contains much useful information, especially geographical and chronological, concerning Tolkien’s undergraduate career.