The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2009
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Tolkien studies in English of 2009 included an unusually large number of articles on The Hobbit and on war and violence, thanks to the appearance of theme anthologies on these subjects in the form of issues of Hither Shore: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Tolkien Gesellschaft, partly in German but each including many articles in English. Volume 5, titled Der Hobbit (no English translation of this title seemed necessary), is dated 2008, but appeared in 2009. Volume 6, titled Violence, Conflict, and War in Tolkien, is dated 2009. Both are conference proceedings edited by a team headed by Thomas Fornet-Ponse.
Other continental European publications in English of the year included Arda Philology 2, edited by "Beregond" Anders Stenström, second in a series of conference proceedings on Tolkien's invented languages, and the 2009 issue of Lembas-extra, from the Dutch Tolkien Society, Tolkien Genootschap Unquendor, edited by Cécile van Zon. The latter has the theme of Tolkien in Poetry and Song, foreshadowing the musical topic of theme anthologies in later years.
Rather unusually, no other theme anthologies not in semi-periodical form appeared in 2009, not even from Walking Tree Publishers, an industrious Swiss organization with some personnel overlap with the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft. Walking Tree's only book of the year was a retrospective collection of articles by the Australian Tolkien scholar J.S. Ryan. This was their second collection of this kind, the first having been Tom Shippey's Roots and Branches in 2007.
On the Anglo-American side, the Tolkien Society in the U.K. produced issues 47 (dated Spring) and 48 (dated Autumn) of its journal Mallorn, edited by Henry Gee, and the Mythopoeic Society in the U.S. produced Vol. 27, no. 3/4 (issues 105/106, dated Spring/Summer) and Vol. 28, no. 1/2 (issues 107/108, dated Fall/Winter), of its journal, Mythlore, edited by Janet Brennan Croft. Mallorn is generally entirely focused on Tolkien, though including fiction and poetry, not covered here, while Mythlore also covers C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and other mythopoeic literature; each of this year's issues included three articles on Tolkien. Also appearing this year was Vol. 6 of the journal in hand, Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review. Lastly, and returning to Tolkien's invented languages, came Parma Eldalamberon 18, from a team of editors headed by Christopher Gilson, eighth in a series of annotated primary texts of Tolkien's own philological writings.
Of book-length monographs of the year, the most attention has gone to Christopher Tolkien's edition of the previously unpublished, [End Page 107] and indeed previously almost unknown, Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. Among secondary scholarly studies, there has been much interest in and some contention over the portrait of Christopher Tolkien as an editor in Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion by Douglas Charles Kane, an attempt to put in narrative form a lengthy and thorough table tracing the sources in The History of Middle-earth texts of the work published as The Silmarillion in 1977. Other noted books of the year include The Power of Tolkien's Prose: Middle-earth's Magical Style by Steve Walker, part of a movement seen also in this year's shorter papers to extend Tolkienian language studies to include his English, and Languages, Myths and History: An Introduction to the Linguistic and Literary Background of J.R.R. Tolkien's Fiction by Elizabeth Solopova, which gestures in the direction of Tolkien source studies, this year as always a rich topic. Source studies merge imperceptibly into comparative studies, and the other author most compared to Tolkien this year, not always to her advantage, is J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter series, completed in 2007, is passing more rapidly into grist for the critical mill than The Lord of the Rings did when it was new in the 1950s.
Authorship of the individual sections of the "Year's Work" that follow are designated by their author's initials: David Bratman [DSB] and Merlin DeTardo [MTD].
Works by Tolkien [DSB]
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún...
