Update on Amazon (US & UK)

So, here's the happy ending: I had the Garth book before three o'clock the day after I ordered it. I've given it a quick skim; I'm sure I'll post about various odds and end that come up as I read it.

And to give them due credit, the UK amazon processed the cancellation right away, so that's all taken care of as well.

And if that weren't good news enough, the long-awaited packet of my current favorite Yunnan and Keemun finally reached me as well.

And now it's back to reading a slim volume of George Sterling (as a precursor to Clark Ashton Smith) and continuing on WATERSHIP DOWN. In token of which it felt entirely appropriate that on yesterday's walk from here to the local wetlands and back I saw seven rabbits on the way out and twelve on the way back, aa new record.

--John R.

Shippey Lectures

So, I just order another lecture series from The Great Courses, to go with the Bart Erhman one from several years ago. This one is called HEROES AND LEGENDS: THE MOST INFLUENTIAL CHARACTERS OF LITERATURE, and my attention was drawn to it by noticing that the first lecture was devoted to "Frodo Baggins -- A Reluctant Hero" and the last two to Lisbeth Salander ("Avenging Female Fury") and Harry Potter (Whistle-Blower Hero"), while most of the other twenty-one come from more traditional literature (the Wife of Bath, Elizabeth Bennett, Sherlock Holmes).

What entirely escaped me, until my attention was drawn to the fact by a posting over on the MythSoc list, is that the lecturer is none other than Tolkien scholar and distinguished medievalist Tom Shippey. Here's the link:

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=2192


I've ordered the audiobook version of the course, so more on this one when it's arrived and I've had a chance to listen to it. Shippey is a great lecturer, charismatic of presence and memorable of phrase, so I'm really looking forward to this one.

Oh, and we've just heard that the Shippey festschrift,* of which I'm one of the editors, is either in typesetting or about to enter that stage, so we're getting close to the release date, which shd be late spring/early summer. I've also been told that it's appeared in McFarland ads in LIBRARY JOURNAL (Feb 15 2014 issue, p. 52) and BOOKLIST (ibid, p. 13). And now it's available for preorder on Amazon as well, which estimates the release date as May 15th -- just a hair too late for Kalamazoo, but if we're lucky they might have an advance copy or two on display there. We'll see. It's nice for this project, which took far longer than any of us thought it would, to finally be coming to fruition.

--John R.
currrent audiobook: DREAMS OF TERROR AND DEATH: THE DREAM CYCLE OF H. P. LOVECRAFT (which turns out to actually not be 'the dream cycle' of HPL but his dreamland stories mixed with a lot of other things, like CHARLES DEXTER WARD, "Pickman's Model", and "From Beyond")
current reading: AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND by Geo. MacDonald (just finished, thank God); I AM A BARBARIAN by E. R. Burroughs (just started; the story of Caligula's bodyguard)


*TOLKIEN IN THE NEW CENTURY: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF TOM SHIPPEY

My Newest Publication

So,  the latest volume of VII arrived on Wednesday (vol. 29). This is my contributor's copy, mine being the final item in this issue: a short (for me) review of Arne Zettersten's book JRRT's DOUBLE WORLDS AND CREATIVE PROCESS. I'd really liked Zettersten's talk at Marquette as keynote speaker at the Blackwelder conference back in 2004, so I had high hopes when I heard he was writing a book about his relationship with Tolkien and mildly dismayed when it was released not in English but Swedish (the original Swedish title translates as MY FRIEND RONALD, which is actually a far better title). Luckily for those of us who, unlike Tolkien, are not conversant in the modern Scandinavian tongues, they've now (2011) released an English translation of the Swedish original (2008).

When it finally arrived a few months back, I was at first disappointed; it seemed mostly a re-telling of Carpenter with a new little new bits added here and there. But reading the work turns out to be rewarding: Zettersten has some insights into Tolkien as a working medievalist I've never come across before, and into the way Tolkien himself viewed his two careers, as academic philologist and fantasy writer, and their interaction. Plus he conveys, better than I've seen it anyplace else, just how brilliant Tolkien was as a philologist, and how early that manifested itself. He gives a good example of Tolkien's mastery of his field in recalling his (Zettersten's) having once, in 1972, mentioned a crux in a work he was editing (WALDERE, a fragment of an OE epic), only to find Tolkien entirely familiar with the minutia of the text; it later turned out that JRRT had worked through that text in detail himself fifty-nine years before, in 1913, and remembered his own solution to each crux off the top of his head all those decades later. Impressive.

In the end, despite not being the book I wanted, this is a book I'm glad I got and read; it gave me a new picture of Tolkien as he was in retirement, and he himself saw his work and his relationship to it. Recommended!

--John R.
current reading: MEDIEVAL PETS (2012) by Kathleen Walker-Meikle

Arrivals

So, I shd have noted the arrival of the new biography of Father Francis Morgan, which arrived on the 18th. But I've been so busy getting ready for Kalamazoo after losing a week to the cat-bite incident that posts have lagged behind. So let me just quickly note some new arrivals/purchases of interest:

 LA CONEXION ESPANOLA DE J. R. R. TOLKIEN. This looks to be an interesting and consequential book, but I'll have to brush up my long-rusty Spanish to be able to make any headway into it at all. Once I get back I'll try to post a list of chapter titles/topics, the better for folks to see what the book covers.

The second of the two WETA WORKSHOP making-of-the-film books. The first was much more interesting than I expected, so I'm looking forward to making my way through this one too at some point.

3-MINUTE TOLKIEN, by Gary Raymond [2012]. I heard about this one recently on the MythSoc list, and saw that Wayne and Christina have weighed it and found it wanting. Looking through the 'bargain books' (remaindered) shelves at Barnes & Noble turned up a small stack of them (as well as the Tolkien Trivia book I blogged about a while back and the David Day). Thought it'd make for light reading on the plane (varied with re-watching the Peter Jackson HOBBIT). I'm about half-way through, so I'll hold off comment for now.

And finally something really weird: a coffee-table biography of H. P. Lovecraft by S. T. Joshi. I shd have thought HPL the last author to lend himself to such treatment, and Joshi the last scholar to have his work come out in that format. Live and learn.

And so it goes on the eve of the medieval congress, where I'll no doubt find some interesting books I never heard of while looking and failing to find several I'd like to pick up. The book room at Kalamazoo never disappoints, but it's capricious in its discoveries. We'll see what it yields up this year.

--John R.,
in Kalamazoo,
the night before the day before.
(the biggest 'arrival' being myself, at Kalamazoo, completed draft of my paper* in hand)

*8000 words

J. R. R. Tolkien: The Comic Book

So, a few days ago I was looking through the Tolkien offerings on amazon's Kindle store site and came up with some unusual ones, three of which I ordered. The strangest, and the only one I've looked at in any detail so far, is called ORBIT: J. R. R. TOLKIEN: THE TRUE LORD OF THE RINGS, by Brian McCarthy and Michael Lent. This turns out to be a comic book biography of JRRT from Bluewater Comics, whom I'd not heard of before; part of a line ('Orbit') that includes Keith Richards (!), Howard Stern (!!) and Stephen King.* The Tolkien book is supposed to have come out in May, but I'm having trouble finding out if it actually ever shipped.

Here's an announcement of it as forthcoming on the Bluewater site, which also includes a view of the cover:

http://www.bluewaterprod.com/news/tolkien_announce.php

Here's the catch-22: I was able to buy the Kindle version of this comic, but it turns out to be virtually impossible to read. My old Kindle is black & white, and reading a comic book page in a swirly blurry style with tiny type all in a space about the same size as an index card is an exercise in frustration. Even after borrowing my wife's iPad reading the comic is difficult and time-consuming: I have to select and blow-up each page and move the cursor around to follow it panel by panel. And even then I ran into the problem that blowing up a panel large enough for me to read it meant blurring the type, meaning I had to choose between small and thus illegible or large but semi-legible. There's got to be an easier way to read a comic.

I can't order a print copy via amazon, because Bluewater chose to make this a comic store exclusive, not sold through any other venue. And upon visiting my friendly local comics shop today (The Comic Hut in downtown Renton, for the first time in much too long**), they told me it's not available through their distributor and hence not something they cd special-order me. In fact, it seems their distributor solicited it in March and cancelled it in April, if I understood rightly, casting doubt on whether it ever came out at all in physical (non-ebook) form.

So there I'm stuck. I'd gladly buy a copy, if I had the option (indeed, I have bought a copy, it's just in a really horrible-to-read format). I'm probably as close to the target audience as they're likely to find (I mean, this wd be the third comic book adaptation featuring JRRT or his work I have).*** But they don't seem to have left open a mean whereby I can get it. I'll post here if that changes.

--John R.

today's song: Medicine Jar.

*apparently at one time they were also thinking of doing a Gary Gygax comics bio, but I don't know if anything ever came of this.

**mainly because I more or less gave up reading comics after I switched to manga.

***the other two being Wenzel's graphic novel adaptation of THE HOBBIT and that strange fantasy story in comic-book form starring Charles Williams, HEAVEN'S GATE, which had JRRT (or a caricature thereof) in a few scenes.

And the Winner Is . . .

. . . Carl Phelpstead, for TOLKIEN AND WALES, which has just* been awarded the Mythopoeic Award for the year's best work in Inklings Scholarship.

Congr. to Dr. Phelpstead and also to all the finalists.**

This is an interesting book, and I hope winning the award brings it to the attention of a wider audience, especially over here (given that it's a University of Wales Press book). It carries on a theme of renewed attention to Tolkien's Celtic sources and influences that began with Verlyn Flieger's INTERRUPTED MUSIC and Marjorie Burns' PERILOUS REALMS, then was developed by Dimitra Fimi's TOLKIEN, RACE, & CULTURE; now the focus narrows in specifically on Welsh. We've learned a lot about Tolkien's 'Celtic Library' in recent years, and it's been illuminating. And Phelpstead's book carries on that tradition.

So, well done, and congratulations.

--JDR

*actually, I think the winner was announced last Sunday night, but for some reason the news seens slow to perculate out.

**disclosure alert: I was a contributor to one of the other finalists, the Jason Fisher edited volume TOLKIEN & THE STUDY OF HIS SOURCES

Advance Reading Copy

So, for the first time ever, I think, I've been sent an advance reading copy of a forthcoming book on Tolkien. I've read unpublished books before, of course, including works on (and by) Tolkien and D&D novels. But that was usually when the author loaned me the Ms (Ts, files, &c) and asked my opinion (something I myself do with most of my work: it helps to have a fresh and well-informed set of eyes to look over a piece to help find things I might have missed). This is a special occasion because it marks the first time a publisher has ever let me see somebody else's forthcoming book (it probably helps that they're my publishers too: Houghton Mifflin, who brought out the American edition of my History of The Hobbit).

The book in question, Corey Olsen's EXPLORING J. R. R. TOLKIEN'S THE HOBBIT, is forthcoming this fall (Sept 18th release date, just in time for Bilbo's Birthday on the 22nd). This is one I've been looking forward to since I first heard about it a few months ago. I'm not a great follower of podcasts, but I'd seen Corey present a piece on a HOBBIT roundtable at Kalamazoo a year or two ago and been struck by the detail with which he treated Tolkien's poetry, which is usually given short shrift.

What we have with this book is a chapter-by-chapter close reading of THE HOBBIT: nineteen chapters in Tolkien's original corresponding to nineteen chapters of Olsen's explication. I can't go into detail, since it's still forthcoming and it wdn't do to give away the best bits, but I enjoyed it quite a lot and will probably be using it for reference for a long time to come. Corey both scrutinizes specific scenes and follows the appearance of some major themes that recur throughout the book. One specific example I can mention is his treatment of the Riddle-game, since in lieu of some last-minute cancellations, he allowed that section to be read out loud in absentia at this year's medievalist congress. I've never seen as in-depth a discussion of the various riddles that make up Bilbo's and Gollum's exchange, pointing out how they tend to form matched pairs thematically or symbolically, how each works as characterization for the one telling the riddle, &c. I'm not sure that Tolkien intended all themes Olsen finds here, but that can be said of a lot of detailed explication, mine included. In any case, it's really an impressive piece of work.

So, if you're interested in THE HOBBIT you'll definitely want to check out this one.

More later, once the book's actually out.

--John R.

Houghton Mifflin hits a bump

So, many thanks to friend Matt for sending around the following link, with the news that Tolkien's American publisher (and thus MY American publisher), Houghton Mifflin, has filed for bankruptcy, having more than two billion in assets but more than three billion in debt.

Houghton Mifflin's mainly an educational publisher, but for decades they've been famous for having been the publishers of THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS, as well as most of Tolkien's other books, from LETTERS and THE ROAD GOES EVER ON to THE FATHER CHRISTMAS LETTERS and the whole HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH. And of course associated books such as both editions of THE ANNOTATED HOBBIT and all three editions (so far) of THE ROAD TO MIDDLE-EARTH, not to mention the American edition of THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT as well.* Having been chosen by Sir Stanley Unwin as his American partner to help him sell a larger print run so many years ago turned out well for everyone concerned; they've survived his original British publisher by about two decades. Let's hope they make it through this trying time as well.

Here's the link:

http://bostonglobe.com/business/2012/05/21/houghton-mifflin-harcourt-publishing-files-for-bankruptcy/IKnMtMD8AgnPSgVNoeQWqI/story.html

* unfortunately, so far as I know they have no current plans to bring out an American edition of the revised & expanded second edition of H.o.H.

The New Arrival: GREEN SUNS

So, last week (Tuesday) brought my copy of Verlyn's latest book, GREEN SUNS AND FAERIE: ESSAYS ON J. R. R. TOLKIEN. I'd had this on order from amazon.com for months last year, until they finally cancelled; you'd think they'd have added it back in on my 'recommended' list when it finally became available. Apparently not. Given that, once I heard from the MythSoc list (for which thanks) that it was now out, I decided to order it directly from Kent State.

Wow what a book. Haven't had time to read it yet, but I already know a number of these pieces from having heard Verlyn present them at conferences and workshops over the years (some of them dating back to when we first met, over twenty-eight years ago now!) For some reason, the amazon.com entry seems to lack a Table of Contents, so here's what all's in this book [N.B.: the essay numbering is not in the original, being added by me here to help differentiate between the sometimes-lengthy essay titles*]:

PART ONE: TOLKIEN SUB-CREATOR

1. Fantasy and Reality: JRRT's World and the Fairy-story Essay

2. The Music and the Task: Fate and Free Will in Middle-earth

3. Tolkien and the Idea of the Book

4. Tolkien on Tolkien: OFS, THE HOBBIT, and LotR

5. When Is a Fairy Story a Faerie Story?: SWM

6. The Footsteps of AElfwine

7. The Curious Incident of the Dream at the Barrow: Memory and Reincarnation in Middle-earth

8. Whose Myth Is It?

PART TWO: TOLKIEN IN TRADITION

9. Tolkien's Wild Men from Medieval to Modern

10. Tolkien and the Matter of Britain

11. Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero

12. Bilbo's Neck Riddle

13. Allegory Versus Bounce: Tolkien's SWM [Flieger vs. Shippey]

14. A Mythology for Finland: Tolkien and Lonnrot as Mythmakers

15. Tolkien, KALEVALA, and 'The Story of Kullervo'

16. Brittany and Wales in Middle-earth

17. The Green Knight, the Green Man, and Treebeard: Scholarship and Invention in Tolkien's Fiction

18. Missing Person

PART THREE: TOLKIEN AND HIS CENTURY

19. A Cautionary Tale: Tolkien's Mythology for England

20. The Mind, the Tongue, and the Tale

21. A Post-modern Medievalist

22.Taking the Part of Trees: Eco-conflict in Middle-earth

23. Gilson, Smith, and Baggins

24. The Body in Question: The Unhealed Wounds of Frodo Baggins

25. A Distant Mirror: Tolkien and Jackson in the Looking-glass

I also found it interesting that when I read the blurbs on the back cover, for once I didn't think they exaggerated at all. Here are a few representative snippets:

"No one knows Tolkien's oeuvre better than Flieger,

or presents it more accessibly"

--Tom Shippey

"It is not often that a new book makes me want

to stand up and shout 'Hallelujah!'"

--Diana Pavlac Glyer

"essential reading, not just for scholars but for all readers

who want to understand Middle-earth and its development"

--Michael Drout

"a book of insights and delights"

--Marjorie Burns

and finally my personal favorite, the one that says it all:

"these essays track a major scholar's deepening understanding

of the work of the master of fantasy"

--I know that, for my part, I'm going to be savoring these, one at a time, for weeks to come.

--JDR

*many of these's topics are self-evident from their titles, although this is not the case with some ("Whose Myth Is It?" being about the Athrabeth while "Missing Person" suggests no Christ is coming to Middle-earth).

Writing Reviews

So, I haven't been posting much the last week or two, mainly because I've been playing catch-up after my two unplanned trips so far this year. One thing that's kept me busy the last week and a half of February was a book review. Normally this wdn't be a problem, except that after having arranged to do the review last May, I completely forgot about it until asked how it was coming, just before its deadline. I've now read the book, completed the review, sent it off, and gotten a provisional 'looks okay' -- so that's done, barring any changes that might need to be done at the proofing stage. But it's got me thinking about reviews in general.

For me, it's always easier to review a good book (this is great! you shd rush out and buy it!) or a bad book (stay away from this one, folks) than a so-so book (not terrible, not great; pick it up if you're particularly interested in its subject, otherwise check out a library copy). This particular book fell mostly in this third category. I'm also more self-conscious of what I write just now, since I recently discovered there's an 'Open Letter' posted on the website of one author whose work I reviewed last year, protesting against my incompetence and malice. I don't think I'm either, actually; I just happened not to think much of his book, and said so, and explained why, as clearly as I cd. I'm not surprised he's annoyed, though; no one likes a negative review.

Having just been asked to write yet another review, this time a much shorter one of a book I'm predisposed to like, I've been mulling over the problem and realized I cd avoid such trouble in the future by only reviewing books I like, and boiling my review of said books down into seven words:

Scholar like books.

This book.

Scholar like!

--John R.

The New Arrivals!

So, Friday brought some long-awaited arrivals: three boxes filled with four copies each of the new, improved, one-volume second edition of THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT. These are my author's copies, mailed to me from Glasgow near the end of October; I assume they got delayed by all the holiday mail in-between. At over 5 kgs each,* they're a pretty hefty bundle.

Two are already spoken for, and the rest go on the smallish stack downstairs of my remaining copies of the first edition (the trade paperback version).

Horray!

--John R.

........................

Here's what Janice had to say about it, reposted from her Facebook:

Thump:

The sound of John's author copies of the 1 volume The History of the Hobbit arriving on the door step.

We've now got 13 hobbits. I wonder where we can find a dwarf to make up our lucky number?

*each box that is, not each book

Reprehensible Behavior . . .

So, I mentioned recently that I'd ordered what I considered a second-tier book on Tolkien -- by which I mean one that might be interesting, but not a must-have given my particular interests. One I'd put off because of the price, but finally decided to get because of the out-of-print price madness I'd seen take place a time or two in the past that I'd rather not get mixed up in.

Turns out I was just a little too late: The book in question (Alison Milbank's CHESTERTON AND TOLKIEN AS PHILOSOPHERS) went out of print between my ordering it on November 5th and Amazon's shipping the rest of my order on the 16th. Checking amazon.com now, I find that $39.93 (pretty much the original price of the book) will now only get you a dog-eared, marked-up copy: 'like new' will run you $141.42 at least. And if you miss this one, the other two 'new' copies are priced at $160.61 and $223.29, while the remaining 'used' copies come in at $135.80 (a pretty bit jump from $39.93), $358.58, and a stunning $900.00. I have no idea who Bordee Books might be, or why they think people wd pay $900 for this book.

As for online book services, ABEbooks came up a blank, but Bookfinder came through with a lot of options. Used started at $43.92 -- which sounded good, until you realize that this is the amazon.com entry and is no longer operative. The next-best used price was $118.78 for the hardcover and $119.49 for the softcover -- though why, give the choice, anyone wd buy the paperback when they cd get the hardcover for slightly less is beyond me. After various amazon.this-or-that-country, the final (and most expensive) used option listed was from A Libris for $362.57 -- again, bizarre, because A Libris also lists it New at $181.45.

Clearly the 'New' book options looked much better at Bookfinder -- that is, until you actually tried to use them. The first one, from Barnes & Noble.com, says they're offering the book for $34.15, but once you actually click on the button and go to the B&N site, it turns out they're offering it for $117.46, $185.78, and $358.58. I don't think this is a bait-and-switch, though, so much as the price being updated as it soared in one place and not in the other. The Super Book Deals listing promises it at $42.36, but clicking on the button reveals that the book is no longer available. The Overstock.com offer of $42.90 simply turns out to be a broken link.

However, there is hope: The Blackwells.com link does work, leading to the book, new, in paperback, for twenty-one pounds. Which comes out to about the same as the original amazon.com price wd have been before they ran out of it.

The real fascination here is the price-gouging of a book that hadn't made any particular stir when it first appeared and now, a few years later, went out of print without the public much noticing. But as I understand it the online book-dealers have some sort of software that alerts them to books that go out of print and in some cases (presumably when linked to authors whose readers are as obsessive as we Tolkienists)* immediately doubles or triples the price on any remaining stock. And then others seems to have a variant of that same software than prices their just a little bit higher or lower than those results. And yet others triple that highest price, apparently in the odd belief that, given the choice, people will prefer the most overpriced of all available options.

As for me, I ordered it from Blackwells -- whom I'm happy to give my business (I've bought books from them before, but only when I was in Oxford on one of my rare research trips over there, never before on-line. Now to wait till it arrives, and see if it was worth all this hooplah.

--John R.

*the same thing happened a year or two back with Frederick & McBride's WOMEN AMONG THE INKLINGS, copies of which on Bookfinder start at about $100 (i.e., more than double its original price), with one bookseller offering it for $1503.00. And I'm afraid to say Amazon.com even outdoes this, offering a dozen or so copies in the $100 to $200 range but with one dealer asking $1995.06 for his copy.** Unless it's written on mallorn leaves by elven calligraphers, this is grossly overpriced.

**plus shipping. You'd think that might throw that in gratis. You'd be wrong.

The New Arrival: DECONSTRUCTING TOLKIEN (McFaddon)

So, another book to arrive the same time as the Sammons and the Loo (but in a different package) turned out not to be anything like the book I thought I was ordering. According to amazon.co.uk, they were offering a book by Tom Piccirilli (a name new to me in Tolkien scholarship) called DECONSTRUCTING TOLKIEN. From the title, I assumed this was a Deconstructionalist interpretation of JRRT's work, which sounded bizarre enough to be potentially entertaining -- perhaps worthy to go on the same shelf as Giddings & Holland or Eaglestone. I mainly know deconstructionist theory second hand, having suffered through a lot of it while at Marquette (the department there was theory-mad in the eighties; don't know if that's the case today); my own take on it was that it stated the blindingly obvious as if it were profound, and in practice more closely resembled performance art than literary criticism (I'm thinking here in particular of a dubious talk by Gayatri Spivak, Derrida's translator), at a critical symposium Marquette hosted. But I only saw an interesting and insightful application of deconstructionist ideas for the first time this past year at Kalamazoo. That made me realize that the two--deconstructionism and Tolkien-- can actually be brought together and be worthwhile, so I decided to opt for the book.

Turns out it's not at all as advertised. For the first thing, Tom Piccirilli (whoever he is) didn't write it: all he did was contribute a two and a half page introduction. The bulk of the text that follows is by Edward J. McFadden III, who I also hadn't heard of: turns out he's the editor of FANTASTIC STORIES OF THE IMAGINATION, which is described as 'one of the largest fiction magazines in the country'.

Also, it turns out the book has nothing to do with Deconstruction; the author just used the term in the sense of getting back to basics. So too the subtitle (A FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS) doesn't have anything to do with Fundamentalism.

As for the book itself, it turns out I'd seen it before, on Doug Anderson's shelves, when I was visiting there last year. It's too bizarre to have forgotten, but any note I made of the title at the time has since gotten misplaced, and at any rate I was certain I didn't have any book on Tolkien by anyone named Piccirilli. As indeed I still go not.

The weirdest thing about this book is not the mis-ascription of authorship by amazon.co.uk but the fact that only about every other chapter is by McFadden. The rest are by an eccentric array of authors: Edgar Poe, H. G. Wells, Jane Yolan, Chaucer, and Lovecraft. McFadden's procedure is to write an essay, then follow it up with a story (e.g., Wells' THE VALLEY OF THE SPIDERS or Poe's WILLIAM WILSON), then another essay, then another story, and so forth. Sometimes the reasons why he includes a particular story are self-evident (e.g. the Wells, which is a sort of "Leiningen & the Ants" except with spiders rather than formians). In other cases, it's nothing short of baffling (Chaucer's THE COOK'S TALE*)

And the book itself? Well, so far I haven't had time to read it, but the bits I dipped into (e.g., the chapter on changes made in Tolkien's story for the Peter Jackson film) seem okay.** I'll try to post an update once I actually get around to reading the thing -- but my first impressions remain that this book'll wind up being on the fringes -- not as far out there as Vander Ploeg,*** but still not one of those that winds up being central to Tolkien studies either. We'll see.

--John R.

current reading: ON CONAN DOYLE by Dirda

current audiobook: THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST by Larsson

................................

*included, McFadden says, to show how Tolkien imitated Chaucer's language in LotR

**quote #1: "picture your greatest literary influence . . . on plastic cups at Burger King"

quote #2: "I don't think that fantasy has been well served by cinema"

quote #3: I could hear the text of the book in my head as I watched the scene"

***this is the one that reveals the Elves are really lizards from outer space. No, really.

The New Arrivals

So, one of the problems about not-blogging when I get busy or just bogged down is that the things I want to blog about (books arriving, the 'Occupy' movement, unnecessary surgery) tend to pile up, so that the longer I wait the bigger the log-jam.

Case in point was the most recent post about the new book arrival, wh. was also my newest publication; finally got this off a day or two ago, after having begun a week before. During that time, another three packages with books arrived on the door step. So in the interests of playing catch-up, the following descriptions may be briefer and brisker than wd otherwise be the case.

In any case, this current lot represent books I ordered to fill in around the corners, mindful of the difficulty that can result if I wait too long (e.g., the ridiculous prices some books on Tolkien shoot up to when they go out-of-print).*

New Tolkien Book #1: Martha C. Sammons' WAR OF THE FANTASY WORLDS [2010]. This is one of two books I've been meaning to get for a year or so but kept putting off month by month because of the expense (in this case, $45 for a text that sans notes &c. runs less than 200 pages).* I'm interested in this one, because books on Tolkien and Lewis tend to conflate the two, which I think does an injustice to both: they were v. different men, with v. different ideas and aesthetics; more alike perhaps in their goals than in how they tried to reach them. Sammons, by contrast, looks to stress the differences between their writings. We'll see if she's able to do justice to an interesting thesis.

What shd have been New Tolkien Book #2, Alison Milbanks' CHESTERTON & TOLKIEN AS THEOLOGIANS, was also fairly pricey ($40 for a 200 page paperback), and while quite interested to see what she had to say about Tolkien as theologian (a topic about wh. not much has been written), I admit to being put of by the fact that what I've read of Chesterton's theology (ORTHODOXY) didn't make me inclined to read more if I cd avoid it. In this case, looks like I hestiated too long: Amazon cancelled this book from my order, claiming the book is no longer available. I can still get it used, but again there's the dis-encouragement of now having to pay $40+ for a secondhand book

Book #3 is Oliver Loo's A TOLKIEN ENGLISH GLOSSARY ("2004-2009"). That title might cause some confusion, given that Tolkien is writing in English, but the subtitle clarifies things: A GUIDE TO OLD, UNCOMMON AND ARCHAIC WORDS USED IN THE HOBBIT AND THE LORD OF THE RINGS. So, if you were a bit puzzled by words like "eyrie" and "furrier" when first read THE HOBBIT, this is the book for you; Tomnoddy, Attercop, Lob, and Cob all make an appearance. On the other hand, it's cluttered with words that are far from exotic, like "rug" and "toe"; Loo seems to presuppose that his target audience is a bright ten-year-old. Which is all well and good, but it means that practically anybody who'd buy his book wdn't need it, having already mastered difficult words like Glossary and Archaic. I'm sure his inspiration must have been the (v. useful) glossary of archaic words Christopher Tolkien appended to THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, but Loo sets the barrier much, much lower. I suspect his book wd be of most help to non-native speakers reading LotR in English but not entirely conversant in the large vocabulary Tolkien delights in using.

--John R.

current book: 1948

current e-book: THE HOUSE OF SILK

current audiobook: THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST

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*Frederick & McBride's WOMEN AMONG THE INKLINGS being a case in point, having only attracted minor attention until it went out of print, whereupon prices soared.

My Newest Publication: Volume 258

So, Thursday a week ago brought a copy of my latest publication to the porch: a reprint of my 2007 Marquette lecture " 'A Kind of Elvish Craft': Tolkien as Literary Craftsman", which had first appeared in TOLKIEN STUDIES volume four [2009]; before that it'd been the 2007 Blackwelder Lecture at Marquette. I'd been surprised and pleased when a few months ago I got a request from Cenegale (formerly Gale) Publishing, the folks who do long series of encyclopedia-sized books like CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM and NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE CRITICISM and TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM,* asking if they cd include a reprint of my piece in their latest volume. This was new territory to me, but after taking advice I said sure, asking for a copy of the volume in question in return. And now, after being backordered for a month or two, here it is: Volume 258 of TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM.

Rather than author-by-author, which had been how volumes by Gale I'd consulted in years past had been organized, this volume has three sections, each devoted to a different literary movement: The Abbey Theatre (p. 1-123), The Confessional School of Poetry (p. 124-203), and The Inklings (p. 205-313), followed by over 150 pages of indexes. My contribution is the concluding essay of the third (Inklings) section; while familiar enough with the Abbey Theatre through my work on Lord Dunsany (whose first plays were produced there, before he had a falling out with Lady Gregory), I confess I had to look up who the 'Confessional School' were -- turns out this is their label for Berryman, Lowell, Plath, Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass (the last of which I'd never heard of before, I'm sorry to say; the rest are all famously manic-depressive).

Since others interested in Tolkien and in the Inklings might want to know what's in this volume (besides my piece, of course), here's a run-down on the contents of their 'Inklings' section:

After an anonymous Introduction (perhaps by series editor Kathy Darrow, or one of her thirteen-person-strong editorial staff) comes a select bibliography of Representative Works by Barfield, Cecil, GKC, Coghill, Dyson, Fox, CSL, WHL, Lindsay, Geo MacD, Mathew, CT, JRRT, Wain, & Ch Wms. The inclusion of Chesterton and MacDonald, neither of whom was ever an Inkling, is explained by their being considered formative influences on the group. It may be significant that in this bibliography of suggested reading Tolkien is represented by just five works (HOBBIT, LotR, Silm, Letters, plus Middle English Vocabulary), far less than CSL (thirteen, including BOXEN) or even Wms (eleven), being about the same as Barfield (six), Cecil (four), and Warnie (five).

Next up come the reprinted essays, as follows:

(1) Gareth Knight, fr. The Magical World of the Inklings (1990) [201–214]

(2) Fredrick & McBride, fr. Women Among the Inklings (2001) [214–230] (including a section on Sayers, 'Not Quite an Inkling")

(3) Diana Pavlac Glyer, Mythlore essay (2007) [230–236]

(4) ibid, fr. The Company They Keep (2007) [236–265]

(5) Walter F. Hartt, "Godly Influences: The Theology of JRRT and CSL", Studies in the Literary Imagination, 1981 [266–270] (L & T as Xians)

(6) Maria Kozyreva, "Chesterton's World in the Mirror of His Poetry", Inklings Jahrbuch, 1996 [270–275]

(7) Rbt W. Maslen, "Towards an Iconography of the Future: CSL and the Scientific Humanists", Inklings Jahrbuch, 2000 [275–285] (which devotes a good deal of space explicating THE DARK TOWER, I was glad to see, since I consider this work overly neglected)

(8) Rolland Hein, "Doors Out and Doors In: The Genuis of Myth", Truths Breathed thr Silver (2008) [285–290]

(9) David L. Neuhouser, "The Role of Mathematics in the Spiritual Journey of Geo. MacD", Truths Breathed thr Silver (2008) [290–297]

(10) Kerry Dearborn, "The Sacrament of the Stranger", Truths Breathed thr Silver (2008) [297–303]

(11) JDR "A Kind of Elvish Craft", from TOLKIEN STUDIES Vol. VI (2009) [303–313].

--I was interested to see that three essays come from the same book, a book I happen to have published a review of a year or two back.*

Finally comes an extremely brief (two-item) list of Further Reading, being a piece by Rachel Falconer ("Rereading Childhood Books: CSL's The Silver Chair") & another by Carl Phelpstead ("Auden and the Inklings: An Alliterative Revival") [313]. Given how impresive Phelpstead's recent TOLKIEN & WALES book looks, I'll have to track down a copy of this latter, which appeared in JEGP back in 2004.

And that's basically it. I'm pleased to see my essay get picked up and reprinted in a new venue, and hope it helps disseminate my argument (Tolkien was a meticulous writer who made every detail count, who used stylistic variations to prompt his readers' creative involvement in his subcreation) to new audiences. We'll see.

--John R.

current reading: THE DIARY OF EDWARD VI, 1547-1553

current audiobook: TOLKIEN & THE GREAT WAR by Jn Garth

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*as well as, it turns out, less well-known lines like NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE.

**a review which prompted one contributor to write a rebuttal that has since appeared in MYTHLORE; I'd like to write a counter-rebuttal but haven't gotten around to it yet.

THE ART OF THE HOBBIT

So, the second new Tolkien book to arrive this past week was THE ART OF 'THE HOBBIT', by Wayne and Christina. I'd known this one was in the works for a few months, and even got to see a preview of some of its highlights this summer. It's a beautiful book, and one that anyone interested in Tolkien, Tolkien's art, or in THE HOBBIT, will want to get their hands on it as soon as possible (I got mine via amazon.co.uk). Their previous JRRT: ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR [1995] was a major work that shd be on every Tolkien scholar's shelf, and this is a worthy, if more narrowly focused, successor.

Basically they've brought together every known illustration, map, or rough sketch Tolkien made for THE HOBBIT,* arranged them into order of where they fit into the story, and added a page or so describing each piece or set of closely related pieces. One particularly nice feature is that they've been able to use multiple gatefolds to bring together sequences, where Tolkien went through a series of attempts to capture a particular scene, like The Hill at Hobbiton, or the Elvenking's Gate, or Smaug flying 'round the Mountain.

I did my best to demonstrate the importance of Tolkien's art to the story in THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, but there I only had twelve plates and two frontispieces to convey what they've used 144 pages to get across. And it's wonderful to see (particularly for those of failing eyesight, like myself -- the community of Tolkien fans and scholars alike being an aging one) the pieces are, as Wayne & Christina point out, "reproduced . . . as large as possible" [p.17], rather than shrunk down (as I needed to do to 'stuff every rift with ore', as Jn Keats wd put it). It helps that this is an oversize square-format book (ten & a half by ten & a half inches) in a handsome slipcase, resembling the original edition of PICTURES BY TOLKIEN more than it does ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR.

The results are, I repeat, wonderful. Tolkien didn't have much confidence in himself as an artist, but like Thurber and Lofting (fellow artistic autodidacts) his work is distinctive and instantly recognizable; it's part of the tales.

And this is a definitive collection: there are a few pictures here even I've not seen before -- for example, the more detailed picture of Elrond's house [#18], or the rough sketch of Eagles' Eyrie [#40], or the first version of The Three Trolls Are Turned To Stone [#14] (I find I prefer the trolls' faces here to the final version). And many more here reproduced in sharper detail than ever before -- e.g., all the dwarven activity at The Back Door [#69]. Others I've seen at some point but not paid much attention to; here they stand out much more when placed in the right context (like #35: The Misty Mountains, which had previously been tucked at the end of the index of ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR [H-S#200]).

This book is relatively text-light, compared with ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR, which is as it shd be: here the focus shd all be on presenting Tolkien's art as clearly as possible. Their introduction does a good job of covering a great deal of territory in relatively little space: only eighteen pages to discuss the origins to the book, explain how the art came to be created, and comment on the "rich visual experience" of the results. I particularly admired the economy with which they addressed various complex and thorny issues -- as, for example, dating when Tolkien began and finished the story:

". . . around 1930 (the evidence is too contradictory to give a precise date), [Tolkien] began to write [The Hobbit]" [p.9]

". . . It may have reached substantially its published form by the time Tolkien lent it to C. S. Lewis around the start of 1933, or it may be that its final chapters . . . were not composed until Allen & Unwin showed an interest in the work in 1936" [p. 10]

--While I think the 1930 date is pretty firm, that's a great way of getting a lot of information judiciously into v. little space (even the choice of the word write is significant, given speculation about oral tales); likewise, they acknowledge but do not take a position re. the Carpenter hiatus. Anyone who's delved into the complexity of the evidence re. these two points can appreciate how difficult it is to clearly explain them without oversimplification: here I think there's just the right amount of simplification for this context (where the emphasis is, and shd be, all on the art).

Finally, I'm envious of one thing. They've pulled off something I wanted to do in RETURN TO BAG-END but in the end wasn't able to: assemble all eight known pictures of Bilbo** onto one spread. In my case, I simply ran out of space, and in the end agreed w. my editor at HarperCollins that it'd be better to include two more new pieces rather than devote a page to reproduction of pieces already appearing elsewhere in the book, esp. given how small the eight pieces wd have to be to all fit onto one (nine-inch by six-inch) plate. Freed of that restriction, Wayne & Christina reproduce enlargements of them all. Looking at these side-by-side is illuminating: it's clear that Tolkien had a v. clear image of what Bilbo looked like; despite his difficulty with drawing faces there's a recognizable likeness in BB's features in the majority of the portraits. It's also interesting to note that Bilbo wears some sort of footwear in four of the eight pictures (Tolkien having meant to insert a passage re. Bilbo's getting shod at Rivendell before heading up into the mountains but never having gotten around to doing so). Well done!

--John R.

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*with the possible exception of the tracings of the two hasty sketches of Gandalf's hat that appear in the end of the new one-volume H.o.H. [p.901]

**at the doorstep of Bag End, inside Bag-End smoking, in the bushes by the trolls, barrel-riding (two images from different versions of this scene), bowing to Smaug (in silhouette), resting in the Eyrie, and in the sketch he drew for Houghton Mifflin, this last having first been reproduced in H.o.H.).

The New Arrivals: ART OF THE HOBBIT and MR. BLISS

So, a while back my wife saw a box from amazon.co.uk that had just arrived and asked, 'have we run out of books over here that we now have to start importing them?'

Well, maybe. It used to be in the old days that the only way to get ahold of a book published in England but not the US was to set up a trade with someone in England wherein you'd buy books for them over here and ship them over there, while they'd buy an equivalent amount of books over there and ship them over here. I've had three book-trades going on over the years (with Jessica Yates, and Christina Scull, and Charles Noad), and I have them to thank for many items I'd never have been able to come across myself (such as the limited edition HOMECOMING OF BEORHTNOTH and all those Pratchetts Charles stood in line to have signed for me), and sent off many a volume from this side to hold up my end.

Nowaday with amazon.co.uk, it's easier to just buy direct -- but not always, as some items can only be sold in one country or the other (e.g., the soon-to-be-released Kindle version of THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, which initially at least will be UK-only, alas). You can get killed on the exchange rate and shipping, but for some books it's worth it. And the latest such are two that arrived together on Wednesday: the new edition of MR. BLISS, and THE ART OF THE HOBBIT

To take the first one first, I remember the days when MR. BLISS was The Great Unknown: we knew there was an unpublished hand-illustrated children's book by Tolkien at the Marquette Archives but v. little about what it was about. My first letter to the Archives (which Chuck Elston showed me still in the files years later) was in fact a request to see if I cd have a copy made (they said no). And so the first task on my first weekday in Milwaukee once I arrived there in August 1981 was to go to the Archives, introduce myself, and ask to see MR. BLISS. I spent what little free time I had (this was the opening week of grad school for me to work on my Ph.D.,* and also the week I started teaching freshmen English at Marquette, along with all the business of moving into a new apartment in a new city) transcribing it into a notebook (which I still have, having unearthed it from among The Boxes not long ago). And I remember shortly thereafter when the photographers came in to take careful pictures of the original book in preparation for its publication the following year (in 1982).

To be honest, while it was a thrill to read a new piece by Tolkien, the story itself was a bit of a disappointment. Unlike FARMER GILES OF HAM, which is a little gem in its own right, and THE FATHER CHRISTMAS LETTERS, which have a sort of charm of their own, I've never really warmed to MR. BLISS or ROVERANDOM (which I heard a lot about in 1987 but had to wait to read till 1998, like everybody else).

This being the case, I have to say I really like this new (third) edition of BLISS. The first combined a facsimile of the original with typeset text on facing pages -- not really necessary, I thought, since Tolkien used clear and highly readable 'uncial' lettering -- but unfortunately they decided to replace the original cream-colored pages (from natural browning of good-quality paper over the preceding fifty years) with greyish paper, which bleached out the art somewhat.

This was replaced by a beautiful slipcase edition in the same format (facsimile on right-hand pages, facing typeset transcription on facing left-hand pages) but kept the original paper-color, so that the art came through better). I saw this second edition in Blackwells while in England in 2007 but have never seen it for sale over here; they really did a nice job of it.

Now here comes the third edition, which is really two books in one. The front cover shifts the orientation of the book from manuscript's horizontal orientation (i.e., the pages are wider than they are tall) to a more normal vertical orientation (like, say, FARMER GILES or TREE & LEAF or any of the other smallish Tolkien volumes). They've also typeset the whole with the pictures interspersed where needed, making for an attractive little book.

And for those who prefer the original, all you have to do is flip the volume over and there's the whole story again, this time in its original horizontal orientation, facsimile pages, and facing transcription pages. So in fact here we have the same book twice, starting from the respective outside covers and both ending in the middle. It's an interesting and I thought highly effective layout; well done, HarperCollins! There's also a brief (two-page) introduction [unsigned] that sets the stage while adroitly avoiding the various unknowns about the tale (exactly when it was written, its inspiration, &c).

All in all, a nice little volume that shd get a little more attention to this minor but amusing little bit of Tolkien.

Next up: THE ART OF THE HOBBIT

--John R.

*and also the week of the infamous episode in which I met with my advisor for the first time, and he told me "I don't want to catch you working on Tolkien while you're here". Ah, those were the days.

THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, second edition

So, today brought the long-awaited author's copy of the new, one-volume, expanded edition of THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT.

Yay!

A quick skim shows that the new note about trolls turning to stone (citing Grettir's Saga and Helen Buckhurst) [p. 110] made it in, as did a new page of material about yet another version of Denham's list to surface (the earliest one yet) [p. 854]. The notes and citations in Appendix IV: Tolkien/Ransome, have now been straightened out. All the illustrations from the original edition are here, including both frontispieces and all twelve pages of plates, plus one new illustration: two sketchy depictions of Gandalf's hat [p. 901]. I see to my regret that the additions to the Acknowledgments, esp. my thanks to Charles Noad for all his help proofing this new edition, didn't make it in.

This new edition does have APPENDIX V: AUTHOR'S COPIES LIST, which identifies all the people on a list Tolkien drew up when he was trying to decide who to give his twelve author's copies to.* And it includes the ADDENDUM, or 'Seventh Stage': some new manuscript material Christopher Tolkien found and sent me too late for inclusion in the original edition. I've divided this into six short sections:

i. Timeline of Events [the fifteen days following Durin's Day]

ii. Notes on a Parley [detailed description of the Front Gate]

iii. Responses to Queries [some proofreader's concerns addressed by JRRT]

iv. Personae [an interesting listing of Thorin & Company]

v. Runic Charts [details on using dwarven runes]

vi. Feanorian Letters [details on writing in tengwar, including punctuation and numbers]

It's a great pity that the latter two weren't published in the Longmans Green edition of 1966, which seems to have been when the bulk of this was written -- just think how readers in the initial wave of Tolkien mania wd have loved a detailed account of how to write in Elvish (tengwar, that is). Ah well: better late (forty-plus years) than never.

There were also extensive errata that should have been incorpoarated into this new edition that I haven't had time to check yet; with in any luck, we took care of any remaining typos and fixed various small glitches here and there (Langland! Langland! Langland!)

On the whole, I find I stand by what I wrote; this edition adds a little here and there, but aside from a thirty-two page addition of new material it's substantially the same book as before -- just larger and more portable, with many small refinements of detail.

Contrary to initial report, it does not weigh five pounds, 'only' two pounds thirteen & a half ounces (1.29 kg for the metrically inclined).

As my wife said: IT'S STILL DONE. AGAIN!

--John R.

*I find it vastly amusing that he initially wrote down C. S. Lewis's name, then crossed it off

--not because he didn't want to give him one, but because Lewis already had an advance copy (in order for him to do the reviews). Still, it's amusing.

The New Arrival: A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY

The New Arrival: A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY

So, the day before I left for my trip, the mail brought the latest addition to my Tolkien shelves, Cor Blok's A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY: PICTURES TO ACCOMPANY THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I've already expressed my opinion of Blok's artwork in an earlier post; this deeper exploration confirms me in the opinion that the story behind the picture-cycle is more interesting that the art itself. Imagine what it'd be like to discover that Barbara Remington, in addition to her gosh-awful covers for the Ballantine Tolkiens, had carried on for several years creating over a hundred more pictures in a similar style, only now to be revealed in their glorious awfulness. That's essentially what we've got with this book, except that it's the artist who did the Dutch paperback covers instead of the psychedelic American ones.

What we have here are a hundred and forty pictures, created between 1958 and 1961, retelling THE LORD OF THE RINGS (more or less*) in faux-naif art. I don't think anyone has done this extensive a series, at least not that I've seen assembled in sequence. Oddly enough I thought the back cover of the dust jacket, which creates a mosaic of some thirty pieces seen all at once side-by-side in a great collage, was the most effective presentation. The fact that there are so many pieces in this book means that some scenes that never get illustrated appear here -- Grima spitting, the bath at Crickhollow, the Fellowship being led while blindfolded in Lorien, Nob helping Merry (the only depiction of him I remember ever seeing), or Bill Ferny being hit by the apple. But Blok's art is such that he provides not just a truly inept Gollum (he looks like a splay-footed duck) but possibly the worst Goldberry ever, a truly hideous Galadriel, and worst of the whole lot a gaggle of Ents looking like walking cigars festooned with green rot-fungus.

The most valuable thing about this book is the Tolkien letter reproduced on page 6 (and a paragraph from another quoted on page 7; Blok also summarizes two things Tolkien told him regarding Blok's art on pages 15 and 25 (that he did not want a definitive illustrated edition that wd associate his work with any particular artist [e.g., Carroll & Tenniel], and that Blok had completely misrepresented Gollum by forgetting he was of hobbit-kin).

Blok's commentary is quite interesting, both in his history of the project** and his pointing out specific details in individual paintings -- I'd missed, for example, the fact that Gollum always appears in silhouette, with no refining detail. Reading this in conjunction with looking at the pictures, I'm forced to conclude that Blok is an Erol Otus -- his art only looks inept, and actually is the result of a highly trained artist deliberately choosing that effect -- what Tolkien called elsewhere "the modern mode in which those who can draw try to conceal it."***

In the end there truly is no arguing about taste. And I'm glad that those who find some merit in Cor Blok's work have revived and printed it (and doing a v. gd job of it too, I might add****); it's an interesting project, and worth preserving. But I hope the year after next's Tolkien calendar features somebody whose work isn't just occasionally interesting in a weird and freakish way but actually art I'd enjoy looking at for a whole month at a time per image. Say, a Hobbit calendar using the artwork in Wayne & Christina's new book. Or I'd be happy for an entire calendar illustrated by Tolkien's beautiful calligraphy, given my druthers.

In the meantime, we get Howard the Gollum in Gormenghast.

--JDR

............................................

*some crucial scenes are missing -- for example, Blok seems to lose interest in the latter part of the story: there are only two pictures of minor scenes following the Ring's destruction, one of Gimli and Legolas in the Glittering Caves and one of hobbit-shirriffs accompanying the four travellers.

**his 'Barbarusia' project, which preceded his LotR, was a sort of Islandia for artists; his 'Iron Parachute' which was to follow is a massive still-incomplete graphic novel with Joycean prose (think CERBERUS THE ARDVARK issued as a single volume all at one time but written in a style of FINNEGANS WAKE word-slush).

***JRRT to R. Unwin, December 1965 (cf. LETTERS OF JRRT). Was Tolkien thinking about Blok? No way to tell . . .

****I only found one likely glitch: I don't have a copy of LotR with me to check this, and it's always dangerous quoting from memory, but I'm pretty sure the quote on page 74 doesn't apply to the Inn at Bree but instead to the House in Crickhollow.

The New Arrival: Ruud's Companion.

So, this week the mail brought a book I only learned about through amazon.com's 'Recommendations',* Jay Rudd's CRITICAL COMPANION TO J. R. R. TOLKIEN: A LITERARY REFERENCE TO HIS LIFE AND WORK. This is a hefty book (650 pages) at a hefty price ($75)** that seems to have just slipped out without anyone being aware it was in the works or, so far as I can tell, that it's now been released.

I think this is because its target audience is clearly libraries (the publisher is Facts on File), and its intended readers are high school and college students who need to write a book report but don't necessarily want to read the book in question. It falls into the same territory as Michael Drout's TOLKIEN ENCYCLOPEDIA or Wayne & Christina's COMPANION & GUIDE in its attempt to cover Tolkien's life and (especially) works through a series of encyclopedia-like entries, but unlike those seems to be largely a one-man show. Rudd has clearly put an enormous amount of work in on this book, but I'm not sure how many Tolkien scholars will find themselves making much use of it: its intended reader is the non-specialist.

I haven't had a chance to read the book yet, but on a quick skim it seems that Rudd derives most of his information from relatively few sources (e.g., Carpenter and Garth seem to provide pretty much all the biographical information). I haven't found any signs yet of original research, such as distinguish the Hammond-Skull, while it lacks the Drout project's all-star cast, which largely offset that production's flaws.

As usual when first looking at a great big book like this, I check the relative accuracy and quality by reading a few entries on topics I know really well -- like THE HOBBIT. Here Rudd starts by saying that "The origin of The Hobbit is well-known" and then proceeds to get several of the salient facts wrong. Oddly enough, Rudd devotes three paragraphs to describing the existence and significance of the 1960 Hobbit but never mentions that it's been published. I suspect from this that his book was a long time in the works, and so wasn't able to take advantage of books published within the last half-decade or so (just as my own MR. BAGGINS wasn't able to draw much from the Hammond-Scull).

Rudd's method is to first provide a brief overview, then a synopsis of the text, then commentary on the book, then some notes on major characters, ending with a selective bibliography. In the case of THE HOBBIT, the whole entry runs some thirty-five pages (p. 95 to 129), of which fourteen are a plot-summary. The commentary that follows is a bit eccentric -- for example, he asserts that Bilbo is the Grail Knight and Bard the Fisher-King -- and its general thrust is suggested by his including in this entry's Suggested Reading: Northrop Frye, Joseph Campbell, Jung, Propp.

The sheer bulk of the synopses indicate that this really is a book meant for the non-specialist (cf. the paragraph or two summarizing each poem in ATB). But that being the case, if this book is going to be the only authority someone checks when reading about Tolkien, it's all the more important that it get the facts right. A quick skim makes me worry on that front (e.g., "Thorin is the grandson of Thrain, the last dwarvish King under the Mountain"), but I may have just been unlucky and come across more than my fair share of the sort of inevitable slips that occur in any large project.*** I'll certainly be dipping into it and reading more over the next few weeks.

So, my initial impression: an impressive achievement, but to be used with some caution.

--John R.

current reading: THE ZERO STONE by Andre Norton [1968]

current audiobooks: The Learning Company lectures on Skspr***

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*i.e., 'you seem to buy everything there is to buy w. Tolkien's name on it; why not buy this too?'

**making it the latest of a recent run of budget-busting bks on Tolkien.

***Captions are a particular problem, as when a photo of the Radcliffe Camera states that "The manuscript of Roverandom was discovered among Tolkien's papers in this library" (p. 333). Um, no. Also, at least four times cover art for movie tie-in editions of various volumes of THE LORD OF THE RINGS are inexplicably described as "coloring book editions". However, these gaffs shd not be held against Rudd himself, since captions for most publishers are not written by a given book's author and are invariably inserted into books at a v. late stage, usually too late for even the editor to double-check them.

****not surprisingly, they think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. I gather the new movie just out about Skspr ("Anonymous") subscribes to one of the various conspiracy-theories instead.

UPDATE Oct. 17th: I've corrected the spelling of "Roverandum" to "Roverandom", as per D.B.'s comment -- JDR