The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2014

Introduction [David Bratman]

Ecocriticism and philosophy were the growth fields in Tolkien studies for 2014. Studies of nature and the environment as depicted in Tolkien's work had appeared before—Ents, Elves, and Eriador by Mathew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans (2006) and The Ecological Augury in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien by Liam Campbell (2011) were the major contributions to this topic—but this was the year the flowers bloomed. Besides an entire collection of papers in Hither Shore 11 (2014, though not released until 2015), the yearbook of the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft, under the title "Nature and Landscape in Tolkien," there were enough other books and papers on the subject to warrant a separate section in this survey, and subsequent years' work has suggested this practice should continue, at least for the immediate future. Ecocriticism is not just defined by topic, but is a discipline with its own language and procedures; whether these match scholarly standards in older disciplines is a matter of some dispute, but, in any case, the work is here.

Philosophy is also a topic that has appeared in Tolkien studies before, and indeed one of the interesting features of the anthology Tolkien and Philosophy (Zurich: Walking Tree, 2014) is the presence in the introduction by editors Roberto Arduini and Claudio A. Testi (9–20) of a lengthy chart of 62 earlier studies on the topic in Tolkien going back as far as 1956, including several books. Nevertheless, this book, and the presence of the chart within it, mark a deliberate scholarly invocation of the topic in a way that, Arduini and Testi claim, had not previously been practiced. The book, the proceedings of a conference held in Italy in 2010, is a short collection of two papers and two informal dialogues exchanging ideas. The latter make this an unusually free-wheeling book. Appropriately, then, the philosophy collection is split up in this survey between Literary Theory and Religious/Ethical studies.

Several disparate pieces of Tolkien's own work appeared in 2014: his long-awaited prose translation of Beowulf, together with lecture notes and some creative reworkings of the tale; some "Fragments on Elvish Reincarnation" from the late period of his legendarium, in a book from France; his translation of the Book of Jonah, as a journal article; and some rare and previously unpublished poems in the commentary to a new edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond.

Besides interesting and important monographs and collections in biographical, source, and literary theory studies, discussed under those headers, three important anthologies on Tolkien appeared in 2014. Largest, and perhaps most significant, of these, is A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Stuart D. Lee (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), a volume in the Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. As an attempt to cover all of Tolkien studies within a single compass, it invites comparison with The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion & Guide by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond (2006) and the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia edited by Michael D. C. Drout (2006), but whereas these are both encyclopedic, the Lee volume is much more a collection of criticism, despite its conscientiously broad coverage. As a collection whose contents are deliberately welded together, it is covered here as a unit under General Works.

Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014) is a festschrift whose honoree is so weighty in Tolkien studies that it required five editors to compile: John Wm. Houghton, Janet Brennan Croft, Nancy Martsch, John D. Rateliff, and Robin Anne Reid. It is cited in this survey as "Houghton et al." Besides numerous papers inspired by and taking off from Shippey's work on Tolkien in philology, medieval studies, and other areas, the volume includes six brief memoirs and tributes to Shippey by John R. Holmes, David Bratman, E. L. Risden, Todd Jensen, Jessica Yates, and John Wm. Houghton...