So, I've been looking at the catalogue for the currently ongoing Marquette Tolkien exhibition, I was very pleased to see the following description of my contribution to the reprocessing process, in Wm M Fliss's essay "A Journey Down the Great River of Wilderland: Mapping the Manuscripts for The Lord of the Rings".
The complete collection was digitally photographed in 2016; and a herculean effort commenced to map the drafts and isolated fragments, establishing connections between these manuscript pieces, in terms of both their emergence during the long gestation of The Lord of the Rings and their place within the evolution of individual chapters. The Tolkien scholar and Marquette alumnus John Rateliff has been instrumental in this maping process. Once upon a time, John worked with Taum Santoski to assist Christopher Tolkien in understanding Marquette's manuscripts so that Christopher could write The History of Middle-earth. John, aided by his own long history with the manuscripts as well as by access to the rich body of notes and correspondence between Christopher and Taum, has performed the yeoman's work of fitting these pieces together, work that will be continuously fine-tuned in coming years as other scholars interact with the digital system. (page 28)
Earlier in the same piece (page 27) appears an image of what the schematic map looks like; a description of its function appears on a few pages later:
The mapping process has identified the various drafts for each chapter and a timeline of their approximate creation. Once all the metadata is inserted into the system, researchers will be able to move from page to page within a draft, from draft to draft, and from chapter to chapter across the entire history of Tolkien's masterpiece. (page 30)
It's a good feeling to see the result of years of work (about six years by my estimation) be so favorably described.
My ego is well and truly boo'd.
--John R.
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