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.

My Newest (re-) publication

So, a few months back (February-March) I got an unexpected request from an unexpected source. The folks at Gale Publishing (aka Cengage Learning) wanted permission to reprint my essay, "A Kind of Elvish Craft: Tolkien as Literary Craftsman", which I'd originally written as my 2007 Blackwelder lecture at Marquette and then, to my great delight, had published as the lead article in TOLKIEN STUDIES (Vol. VI [2009]). Gale are famous for printing small editions of library-only books, long series about authors, and the like. My piece appears in TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE CRITICISM, Vol. 258. *

Or so I'm told. I haven't had a chance to check for myself, since my contributor's copy hasn't arrived. So, if you find yourself in a library which carries the series and happen to notice whether this new volume is on the shelves yet, let me know. Suzzallo-Allen, based on their online catalogue, seem to have most of the set but not the newer volumes yet.

But, in any case, thought I'd share. Woo-hoo.

--JDR

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*Here's a link that gives an idea of what a typical volume in the series is like:

http://www.gale.cengage.com/servlet/ItemDetailServlet?region=9&imprint=000&cf=p&titleCode=TCLC&type=3&dc=null&dewey=null&id=251411

--JDR

The New Publication: RED EYE OF AZATHOTH

So, Thursday the 15th I got together with friend Wolf* at a restaurant he'd recently introduced me to in downtown Renton called Naan 'N' Curry (which I highly recommend, if you're (a) in or passing through the Renton area and (b) like Indian food). Along with the chance to catch up on things, I was pleased to get my contributor's copy of RED EYE OF AZATHOTH, Open Design's first CALL OF CTHULHU release, which I edited.

This is an unusual C.o.C. campaign for several reasons. First off, all five adventures are episodes in a larger story. Also, despite being set in five distinct time periods and milieu, in a sense the Investigators are the same people in each, being linked across time and space. Third, the settings are highly unusual for C.o.C., which usually sticks to the 1920s, with some Victorian (CTHULHU BY GASLIGHT) and modern (CTHULHU NOW) adventures for the occasional change of pace.

The five settings are

(1) Lindisfarne, 887 AD, where the Investigator group is composed in equal parts of monks and of Viking raiders, who naturally enough find it hard to work together in a common cause.

(2) feudal Japan, 1287, where the Investigators are samurai and court officials sent by the shogunate to find out why one obscure remote village pays its taxes, in full, every year, year after year, without fail. I wonder if the Japanese of that era had a proverb equivalent to 'ignorance is bliss'.

(3) Valencia, 1487, where the Investigators start out as prisoners in the hands of the Inquisition, and things go downhill from there. This one involves a lot of running away (hence its new mechanic, a 'Chase Table', to judge whether or not those attempting flight succeed in evading pursuit), and even more not being able to run away.

(4) Roanoke Colony, 1587, where the worst of the Old World and New come together with horrific results.

&

(5) Arizona Territory, 1887, where the Wild West and Cthulhu horror come together in truly apocalyptic fashion: I don't think I've ever read an sequence of descriptions that matched the climax of this adventure for conveying this-is-the-way-the-world ends, with neither a bang nor a whimper but a scream.

All of these have in common one element: isolation. In most Cthulhu adventures Investigators don't call on the authorities for help because it'd be hard to get them to believe what was going on or because said Investigators don't want too much scrutiny of their own actions. In these they're well and truly on their own: allies are few and far between, and any authorities either hostile or wholly absent. I have to say that, overall, I was impressed: there's been an Azathoth campaign before, back in 1986, SPAWN OF AZATHOTH, but that was the worst of the classic Chaosium C.o.C. campaigns.* I do have to warn, though, that the adventures in RED EYE OF AZATHOTH are gruesome, violent, and unforgiving; it's a style of play that owes a lot to early PAGAN P. adventures,** and the body count in the major encounters in each scenario are likely to be high.

It's a polar opposite to the way I usually play Cthulhu, which emphasizes role-playing, exploration, and investigation and has a high Investigator survival ratio (though their sanity tends to fray after an adventure or two, and the occasional Investigator deaths tend to be spectacular when they do occur). But I think the authors pulled it off: if you like that style of play (and a lot of people do), RED EYE OF AZATHOTH is an excellent and sustained example.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who actually plays through these to find out how well they worked at the gaming table for your group.

Good gaming!

--John R.

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*SHADOWS OF YOG-SOTHOTH [1982] being by far the best, THE FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH [1984] a worthy second place, and MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP [1984]*** rounding of the top three; after this there's a falling off with HORROR ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS [1991], an impressive project whose reach exceeded its grasp, and then SPAWN OF AZATHOTH, which was just a mess that reads like an attempt to re-hash MASKS.

Of course, if you go beyond Chaosium, Pagan P. produced not one but two superb campaigns: WALKER IN THE WASTES [1994] and COMING FULL CIRCLE [1995], which learn all the right lessons from SHADOWS and DAY OF THE BEAST and apply them with impressive results. Highly recommended.

**i.e., before they got swallowed up by DELTA GREEN, when they still did an interesting variety of settings & approaches). There's not a lot of Library Use here (though at times it's vital

***most aficionados rank MASKS the top. I don't agree. It's v. good; SHADOWS and BEAST simply happen to be better.

*a.k.a. Wolfgang Baur, The Monkey King, Kobold-in-Chief at Open Design, Editor of KOBOLD QUARTERLY, famed rpg designer, former editor of both DUNGEON and of DRAGON, and once upon a time fellow 'New Fish' at TSR with me in October 1991.

My Newest Publication: "Two Kinds of Absence"

So, yesterday my contributor copy for Jan & Phil's new book arrived, PICTURING TOLKIEN: ESSAYS ON PETER JACKSON'S The Lord of the Rings FILM TRILOGY, the latest in a growing line of Tolkien books from McFarland. This one has been in the works for about two or three years, and it's really good to have it in print. For one thing, it gives me a chance to read the other contributors' pieces.

So far I've only read four of the essays: my own (both to see how it holds up and to see if there are any horrific gaffs I overlooked until too late), Verlyn's (which focuses in on the filmmaker's dilemma of having to choose one specific way to depict things that Tolkien left open to each reader's visualization*), Kristin Thompson's (which is rightly the volume opener and sure to spark discussion, esp. since at one point she argues the filmmakers' presentation of one scene is superior to Tolkien's),** and Jan Bogstad's (about Tolkien's horses); next up is Dimitra Fimi's (on folklore in the films). On the whole, and unlike most of the essays in Croft's TOLKIEN ON FILM, the essays here are far less dismissive of Jackson's work; I suspect the two volumes will wind up making interesting complements to each other.

Since I've only read a quarter of the collection so far, for the rest I'll just give a T.o.C. of titles and authors:

Preface -- Bogstad & Kaveny

Introduction -- ibid

Part I: Techniques of Story and Structure

"Gollum Talks to Himself" -- Kristin Thompson

"Sometimes One Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures" -- Verlyn Flieger

"Two Kinds of Absence: Elision and Exclusion in Peter Jackson's LotR" -- JDR

"Tolkien's Resistance to Linearity" -- E. L. Risden

"Filming Folklore" -- Dimitra Fimi

"Making the Connection of Page and Screen in Tolkiens and Jackson's LotR" Yvette Kisor

"It's Alive!: Tolkien's Monster on Screen" -- Sharin Schroeder

"The Materiel of Middle-Earth" -- Rbt C. Woosnam-Savage

Part II: Techniques of Character and Culture

"Into the West" -- Judy Ann Ford & Robin Anne Reid

"Frodo Lives but Gollum Redeems the Blood of Kings" -- Phil Kaveny

"The Grey Pilgrim: Gandalf and the Challenges of Characterization in Middle-earth" -- Brian D. Walter

"Jackson's Aragorn and the American Superhero Monomyth" -- Janet Croft

"Neither the Shadow Nor the Twilight: The Love Story of Aragorn and Arwen in Literature and Film" -- Richard West

"Concerning Horses" -- Jan Bogstad

"The Rohirrim, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Problem of Appendix F" -- Michael Drout

"Filming the Numinous" -- Joseph Ricke & Catherine Barnett

And now, back to reading.

--JDR

*based on my skim through the book so far, this seems to be a recurrent theme, just as the earlier Croft collection included many discussions of Tolkien's letter re. the Zimmerman script.

**one piece of good news buried in her endnotes is that she's currently at work on a book about THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS

MY LATEST PUBLICATION: "THE LOST CITY"

So, today I saw for the first time an in-print copy of my latest publication: THE LOST CITY, a D&D (4th edition) adventure that lacks both Cynideceans and Yuan-ti but has plenty to make up for them. Being neither a reprint* of module B4. THE LOST CITY (one of Tom Moldvay's fondly remembered classics or, in this case, near-classic) nor a revisiting of DWELLERS IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY (an early work by TSR stalwart Zeb Cook that introduced Howardesque snake-men to D&D), it's an all-new adventure by Logan Bonner, et al.** I think elements of both precursors found their way into this, though, in the form of the lizard-like folk lurking in the city who behave in interestingly peculiar ways that shd lead to lots of role-playing opportunities (for thems that likes to actually role-play in their role-playing games).

Anyway, it's all-new, 96 pages, 4e D&D from the good folks*** at Open Design/Kobold Quarterly. Here's the link:

http://www.koboldquarterly.com/kqstore/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=87&zenid=40067804599022fb03c7136dd620dc81

Nor is this the only roleplaying credit that shd have been included in the updates I've been meaning to make on Sacnoth's Scriptorium. A few months back saw the release of THE FAEIE RING by Scott Gable, which I also edited:

http://paizo.com/store/games/roleplayingGames/p/pathfinderRPG/zombieSkyPress/v5748btpy8i51/discuss

Actually this is just the Introduction to a much longer work. Originally it was to be ten chapters, of which six are already fully edited; I understand the plan is now to divide this into two volumes, each detailing five Faerie Lords (think the old Ravenloft Darklords each with his or her own realm and you'll get the idea). What I've seen of it so far is really intriguing and well done, with some highly unusual takes on the material that really break away from the fey stereotypes into something much darker and more horrific, on the whole. Hence my own private nickname for it, the 'Feyonomican'

And finally there's one more that's finished but not yet come out: a five-part CALL OF CTHLUHU adventure, RED EYE OF AZATHOTH, in which the characters play through five segments of the same campaign set in five different historical eras: Lindisfarne during the Viking Age, Feudal Japan in the 12th century, Inquisitorial Spain, colonial Roanoke (want your characters to find out what happened to the Lost Colony by being part of it?), and the Wild West. I thought it was a fascinating concept, and used the hook of similar events playing out in wildly divergent places to great effect -- although be warned that the scenarios are quite gruesome, much more so than is usual with C.o.C. Here's the link:

http://www.koboldquarterly.com/kqstore/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=56

If you pick up any of these three, let me know what you think.

--John R.

*nor updated expansion, a la the Silver Anniversary 'Return to" series, several of which I worked on

**i.e., Logan is the author responsible for the overall project, with Jobe Bittman, Michael Furlanetto, Tracy Hurley, and Quinn Murphy joining him in writing individual chapters detailing adventures in different parts of the underground city; I edited the whole, smoothing out the occasional disconnects between the different chapters.

***hi Wolf! hi Shelly!

MY LATEST PUBLICATION: Clyde Kilby Memoir

So, today came the long-awaited arrival of the newest volume of VII, the Wade Center's journal focusing on the seven authors to whom the Wade center is devoted (Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, Sayers, Barfield, Chesterton, & MacDonald). I'm particularly pleased to see it, because it includes a piece I edited: Clyde Kilby's guest-of-honor speech at the 1983 Marquette Tolkien Conference. Essentially this is a memoir of his summer working with Tolkien, which focuses mainly on his belief on why Tolkien never finished THE SILMARILLION. I heard Kilby deliver it at the conference, and it wd have been a key part of the published proceedings, but a string of delays eventually forced cancellation of that project. Too bad. But at least now this one piece has finally made it into print. Now if we can only get Paul Kocher's essay into print as well . . .

From my personal point of view, as a student of the history of fantasy and Tolkien's role in the creation of fantasy as a modern literary genre, the most interesting point was Kilby's revealing that one of the books Tolkien loaned him to read as preparation for working on THE SILMARILLION was Lord Dunsany's THE BOOK OF WONDER [1912]. One discovery that was new to me, not having been mentioned in the lecture itself but jotted on one draft, was learning that Tolkien also recommended Sheila Kaye-Smith's THE CHALLENGE TO SIRIUS [1917] as "[the] best novel of the US Civil War". I don't know of any previous evidence that Tolkien knew Kaye-Smith's work; while largely forgotten today (aside from having been mocked by Stella Gibbons' COLD COMFORT FARM) she was famous in her own time both as one of Hardy's heirs and for a famous conversion to Catholicism in 1929 along with her husband (hitherto an Anglican priest).

Quite aside from my own interest in this volume from my own contribution, this issue has much else of interest in it. The lead article prints for the first time what its editor argues is the only part ever written down of Tolkien & Lewis's erstwhile collaboration, LANGUAGE AND HUMAN NATURE. There's also a short biography of Lucy Barfield and two Owen Barfield poems (one never before published)and a memoir of Lewis at Cambridge. So, all in all, a good issue; I'm looking forward to reading the other pieces.

--JDR

Forthcoming publication: SHE AND TOLKIEN Revisited

So, it never rains but it pours, as they say in Bree*

Having started off this string of four posts about recent & forthcoming collections of essays about Tolkien with news of one that includes a piece of mine, I can now round it off with sharing news about another such forthcoming publication that once again includes one of my essays. Horray!

This time the book is THE BONES OF THE OX -- or, rather, it was; the title's now tentatively been changed to TOLKIEN & THE STUDY OF HIS SOURCES: CRITICAL ESSAYS, on the principle that you need to include the word 'Tolkien' in a book on Tolkien so people know, instantly, that it is indeed a book on Tolkien.** It's due to be published by McFarland (yay, McFarland) sometime this fall

Here's a listing of the contents (the numbering is mine):

Introduction by Jason Fisher

1. Why Source Criticism? by Tom Shippey

2. Source Criticism: Background and Applications by E. L. Risden

3. Tolkien and Source Criticism: Remarking and Remaking by Jason Fisher

4. The Stones and the Book: Tolkien, Mesopotamia, & Biblical Mythopoeia by Nicholas Birns

5. Sea Birds & Morning Stars: Ceyx, Alcyone, & the Many Metamorphoses of Earendil and Elwing by Kristine Larsen

6. 'Byzantium, New Rome!': Goths, Langobards, & Byzantium in LotR by Miryam Libran-Moreno

7. The Rohirrim: 'Anglo-Saxons on Horseback'?--An Inquiry into Tolkien's Use of Sources by Th. Honegger

8. Wm Caxton's The Golden Legend as a Source for JRRT's LotR by Judy Ann Ford

9. She & Tolkien, Revisited by John D. Rateliff

10. Reading Jn Buchan in Search of JRRT by Mark T. Hooker

11. Biography as Source: Niggles & Notions by Diana Pavlac Glyer & Josh B. Long

Overall, it's an interesting mix of contributors. Lately there seems to have grown up several more or less distinct groups of people publishing on Tolkien: those associated with Kalamazoo (e.g., Risden, Larsen, Ford), Walking Tree Press (e.g., Honegger), Beyond Bree (Hooker), Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Fisher), et al. This book brings folks from those various threads together into one volume. The presence of Shippey in the lead essay, and also of Diana at the end, welcome in themselves, shd attract attention to the volume.

As for my contribution, this is the piece I was invited to present at this past summer's Mythcon in Dallas: a re-working of the first piece I had published in a juried publication (MYTHLORE), way back in the Summer 1981.*** I've gotten a lot of good comments about it over the years and it seems to get cited more than most things I've done, so I welcomed the chance to go back and revisit it: I think I've gotten better as a writer since I was twenty-two, and there's vastly more information available on Tolkien and his reading now than there was then. I reined in some speculations where I thought I went too far, and added some new claims that hadn't occurred to me back then. And, of course, added a lot of footnotes. All in all, I'm v. pleased w. how it came out, and it seemed to go over well enough at the presentation in Dallas, so far as I cd tell. Once again, I'm really looking forward to the book's publication so I can read all the other essays in it. Many thanks to Jason for putting this together, and for letting me be part of it.

--John R.

current audiobook: THE (FIRST) BOOK OF NEPHI

current reading: MIRKWOOD: A NOVEL and FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON

today's songs: "Dragonfly" by Danny Kirwan & "The Green Manalishi" by Peter Green Splinter Group

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*whereas around here they say, 'huh. looks like rain again'.

**shades of the D&D mega-adventure about Orcus which WotC was careful not to tell anybody was about Orcus -- thus preserving the secret but also preventing most of the people who would have wanted to buy an adventure about Orcus from giving it a try.

***i.e., between my graduating from Fayetteville with the Masters and starting at Marquette on the Ph.D., appearing pretty much at the same time as my first research trip to England (the one where I got to meet Barfield and Havard and Wiseman). An exciting time for me, obviously.

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UPDATE 2/13-11: It's been pointed out to me that I got the publisher's name wrong; accordingly, I've gone back in and fixed 'Macfarland' to McFarland. Thanks to Jason for catching that. --JDR

Forthcoming Publication: PICTURING TOLKIEN

So, I just got word that I can now share the good news about a forthcoming publication that includes a piece of mine. It's an essay called "Two Kinds of Absence", appearing in the collection PICTURING TOLKIEN, edited by Jan Bogstad and Phil Kaveny and due out from McFarland half a year from now (official release date: July 31st 2011). Here are two links to descriptions of the book, the first at the McFarland website

http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-4636-0 *

and the second at amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Picturing-Tolkien-Essays-Jacksons-Trilogy/dp/0786446366/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297226695&sr=8-1

My own contribution (the full title of which is "Two Kinds of Absence: Elision & Exclusion in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings”) examines the claim of Jackson and his co-writers -- that scenes not appearing in the movie nevertheless took place in the film world -- by looking closely at the Bombadil material. In the process, I also take into account how seven previous adaptations (film, audio, and stage) dealt with the Bombadil chapters. It was an interesting mental exercise to distinguish between characters and events that could appear (say, in a hypothetical vastly extended cut) from those that could not, pre-empted when events in the film-world diverge from what happens in the book. It having been some years since I'd written anything about the films (in the extensive three-part review I did at the time the films were released), it was also a good chance to renew my acquaintance with the first film in particular on a v. detailed level.

What's more, I'm pleased to be in such good company: here's a table of contents listing.

Introduction: Jan Bogstad and Phil Kaveny

1. "Gollum Talks to Himself" by Kristin Thompson

2. "Sometimes One Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures" by Verlyn Flieger

3. "Two Kinds of Absence" by John D. Rateliff

4. “Tolkien's Resistance to Linearity" by Edward Risden

5. "Filming Folklore" by Dimitra Fimi

6. “Making the Connection on Page and Screen” by Yvette Kisor

7. “It’s Alive!" by Sharin Schroeder

8. “The Matériel of Middle-earth" by Rbt Woosnam-Savage

9. "Into the West" by Judy Ann Ford and Robin Reid

10. "Frodo Lives but Gollum Redeems" by Phil Kaveny

11. "The Grey Pilgrim" by Brian Walter

12. "Jackson's Aragorn and the American Superhero Monomyth" by Janet Croft

13. "Neither the Shadow nor the Twilight: the Love Story of Aragorn and Arwen in Literature and Film" by Richard West

14. "Concerning Horses" by Jan Bogstad

15. "The Rohirrim, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Problem of Appendix F" by Michael Drout

16. "Filming the Numinous" by Joseph Ricke and Catherine Barnett

--congratulations and thanks to Jan and Phil for all their hard work assembling these essays and seeing the book through the editing process. I'm really looking forward to the chance to read the other contributions.

--John R.

current audiobook: more Kipling (gah!)

current book: Verne

current music: Bare Trees (Danny Kirwan/Fleetwood Mac)

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* for a convenient listing of all four of their books on Tolkien, see http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/searches/advanced_search2.php?advanced=tolkien&x=0&y=0

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UPDATE 2/13-11: It's been pointed out to me that I got the publisher's name wrong; accordingly, I've gone back in and fixed 'Macfarland' to McFarland. Thanks to Jason for catching that. --JDR

My Newest Publication: THE 100 BEST FAMILY GAMES

So, today brought a package from Green Ronin that, when opened, turned out to contain my contributor's copy of Jim Lowder's THE 100 BEST FAMILY GAMES. This is the follow-up to THE 100 BEST HOBBY GAMES [2007], also edited by Jim, and to which I also contributed an essay*. You can't very well follow up a book that includes "100 Best" in its title with another titled 'the next best' or '100 honorable mentions' or even '100 more games you might like', so I thought it canny of Jim to shift gears a bit and change the focus for this second volume in the series.

Even on a brief skimming, it's an impressive array of essays by an impressive collection of people; I'm honored to be included. The games featured range from universal favorites like RISK and CLUE and MONOPOLY and even BATTLESHIP to lesser-known cult hits like KILL DOCTOR LUCKY.

My own choice for a game that's a keeper for the ages was DOGFIGHT, one of the old American Heritage games from the early sixties and a longtime favorite of mine when I was growing up. I enjoyed Battle Cry (their Civil War game) and thought Broadsides (their War of 1812 game) fun enough,** but Dogfight, their WWI flying aces game, was always far and away my favorite of the lot. I just hope I was able to convey a little of why it was such a good game.

Kudos to Jim for having conceived of the project and brought it to fruition -- a herculean task that required co-ordinating a hundred freelancers. To do that once was impressive; to willingly do it twice a marvel. Here's hoping the book does well and inspires people to pull old games back off the shelf or try a new one they've never played before.

--JDR

*on MYTHOS, the wonderful but alas defunct CALL OF CTHULHU ccg.

**though they carefully avoided telling us we LOST that war, something I only discovered years later. funny, that.

More forthcoming projects that are all done and awaiting publication (as opposed to those I'm still in the process of working on, like my Kalamazoo paper): an essay in a forthcoming book, a guest editorial in a journal, and two reviews.