A Review of the Haggerty Tolkien Exhibit

For those who couldn't make it to the recent Tolkien Maps, Art, and Manuscripts exhibit at Marquette's Haggerty museum, here's a review that does a fine job showing what the exhibit space looked like as well as individual items on display : 

https://www.marquette.edu/haggerty-museum/documents/icma-march-newsletter.pdf 

I was particularly pleased to see a description of the Archives' reprocessing project, which shd be of enormous help to future researches wanting to locate specific passages within the mass of manuscripts:

Before exiting the exhibition, one found a “bonus” portion across from the final named section that presented the complex navigation, reorganization, and ongoing digital humanities project that encompasses the Tolkien Archives. Here the curators contextualized Marquette’s initial acquisition of the Tolkien materials and how this exhibition coincided with the Raynor Memorial Library’s creation of the digital platform, AnduinTM. AnduinTM, named for the river that crossed most of Middle-earth east of the Misty and White Mountains, is the database system that is meant to resemble the “river of creativity flowing from Tolkien’s work.”

To highlight the ease of the new system of digital scanning in which you can view The Lord of

the Rings by book, chapter, chapter draft, and (eventually) individual passage, the curators included large interactive screens with which one could explore the database, a contrast in comparison with the cumbersome microfilm machines of the past and highlight of how far technological access has come for current and future Tolkien scholars and fans alike. For those wishing to access AnduinTM, please contact William Fliss (william.fliss@marquette.edu) at Marquette’s Special Collections and University Archives.

I'm planning to spend a day in the Archives after Kalamazoo , so we'll see how much I get through. 

--John R.

--current reading: several things, all of which are distracting me from each other.