The Shippey Festschrift

So, last night I discovered that a book I've been looking forward to a long time has now gotten near enough to publication that there's a pre-order page on the publisher's website.

I refer to the T. A. Shippey festschrift TOLKIEN IN THE NEW CENTURY: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF TOM SHIPPEY, due out from McFarland early next year.

This isn't the first Shippey festschrift, having been preceded by CONSTRUCTING NATIONS, RECONSTRUCTING MYTH: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF T. A. SHIPPEY, ed. Andrew Wawn et al [2007], quite an interesting volume in itself. But that focused on Shippey's career as an academic, with the contributions coming from his fellow medievalists (as is traditional for a festschrift). This second volume comes from the Tolkien community, with the contributors being his fellow Tolkienists --esp. those who have taken part in the ongoing Tolkien Track at the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress, which Shippey played a large part in up to his retirement.

Here's the link:

http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-7438-7

Disclaimer: I'm both an editor and contributor here, my own essay being "Inside Literature: Tolkien's Exploration of Medieval Genres". As we get closer to publication date, I'll see about posting a Table of Contents. But for now, wanted to share the good news that this volume, which has been a long time in the works, is finally near to seeing the light of day.

In the meantime, I did a quick check and see that this will make the seventh of McFarland's collections of essays on Tolkien, and the third to which I've contributed. Quite a nice little line they've built up:

http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/searches/advanced_search2.php?advanced=tolkien&-Find=Start+Search

--JDR