A Parting of the Ways

So, now it's official: Doug Anderson is no longer Review Editor for TOLKIEN STUDIES, starting with Vol. IX. I'd heard this a few weeks ago, but now it seems he's also leaving the editorial board as one of the three guiding lights for the journal as a whole. Sorry to hear it. Doug's posted the official word on the whys and wherefores on his blog; here's the link.

http://tolkienandfantasy.blogspot.com/2012/04/publishing-mordor-style.html

The comments are well worth reading too --it's rather horrifying to read that a library can pay $40,000 as subscription for a single major academic journal. I knew things were bad back in my Marquette days in terms of how many journals a college library had to buy, and how much they were charged; they've clearly only gotten worse during the intervening years.

For an independent scholar like myself, it's tantalizing to know there's so much available on Project Muse (a site which comes up rather often when I'm doing research for a specific article), and yet it's inaccessible to those of us not affiliated with a university. And it was rather startling, a year or two back, to find that a book review I'd written for MYTHLORE was available from amazon.com at $9.95.

In any case, here's best wishes to Doug in his new venture at Nodens Books (the first release from which I ordered a few days ago*). And also good wishes to the remaining editors at TOLKIEN STUDIES for carrying on the good work there. Eight volumes are a record to be proud of, and I look forward to the more to come.

Times change. Good work remains.

--John R.

just finished: THE ORDEAL OF GILBERT PINFOLD (#II.2995)

currently reading: THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

*http://www.nodensbooks.com/

Illustrating the Hobbit

So, one of the great things about being a guest of honor at the recent LEOCON I in Commerce, Texas was that I got to attend the presentations of my fellow speakers, and see Doug Anderson's slide-show* of HOBBIT art. I'd seen this twice before, most recently when the second edition of his superb ANNOTATED HOBBIT came out in 2002. But it's an ever-evolving presentation: there were pieces he showed that were new to me, as well as old ones I'd forgotten and many more I'm simply happy to see again.

One of the newer features was the inclusion of Maurice Sendak's sample illustration from the mid-sixties, at a point when he was mooted to produce an illustrated edition (that ultimately came to naught, aside from this one piece),** and he also mentioned a Frazetta HOBBIT piece I hadn't heard of before.*** It's fascinating to see different artists' interpretations, yet I agree with Doug that Tolkien himself is the best illustrator of his own works.

Afterwards, I had a question. If you could have anyone illustrate THE HOBBIT, who would it be? It has to be an artist who was actually alive at the time and theoretically could have done the job -- i.e., not Tenniel or Van Gough, who both died long before the book was published, but someone like Mucha (d.1939) or B. Potter (d. 1943) wd be fair game.

Doug, when I put the query to him, had an inspired choice: S. H. Sime doing Mirkwood. I can't compete with that choice, but after mulling if over a while I opted for Edward Gorey as someone who wd do an interesting, distinctive, and yet somehow possibly get-it-right set of illustrations. As a back-up, it'd have been fun to see what Tolkien's world wd have looked like as illustrated by Hugh Lofting.

So, if you cd pick anyone to illustrate THE HOBBIT, who wd it be?

--John R.

*although, as I think he observed in these days of no more actual slides, it'd probably more properly be called 'a multi-media presentation'. For me, who still dials a phone, 'slide show' will still do.

**cf. my earlier blog post about this one,

http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2011/03/sendaks-hobbit.html

***here's the link to a handful of Frazetta Tolkien designs; I think he showed us the one of Gollum paddling his boat with his great big-toed feet. http://frankfrazetta.org/tolkien0001.php

I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one more years back at The Tolkien Shop's online site, but it was of Gandalf & the Three Walkers meeting with King Theoden at Edoras.

LeoCon (TOLKIEN IN TEXAS)

So, I'd been holding off on posting about an upcoming event until the news went public, only to discover last week that the website of this event is already up online (http://leoconn.wordpress.com/leocon/) and it'd been discussed on Jason Fisher's blog about two weeks ago (http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2012/03/leo-con-2012-april-14-2012.html).

So, here's the news in brief: this weekend, I'm one of the guests of honor at a new little con at Texas A&M in Commerce, Texas (about one-third of the way from Dallas to Texarkana). My fellow guest of honor is my friend Doug Anderson, author of the excellent ANNOTATED HOBBIT. My own talk will be on the relationship between THE HOBBIT and THE SILMARILLION. In addition, Doug, the Dean, and I will be on a Hobbit Roundtable, and Jason Fisher will not only be moderating our two presentations but giving one of his own on Tolkien's sources. The event will be hosted by Robin Reid, for years the organizer of the Tolkien at Kalamazoo tract.

It'll be great to attend the first gathering of a brand new con, to have the chance to combine this with a family visit over in the ArkLaTex, and maybe even have time afterward for a quick (one day) research trip among the Dunsany manuscripts down in Austin (so far as I know, I'm the only Dunsany scholar to have ever made use of them, and it's a LONG time since my last visit [1987]). Maybe we'll even have time to see the famous bats.

It'll also be interesting to return to Commerce Texas, where I'm told we lived for a summer to fulfill a residency requirement while my father was getting his Masters in History (M.S.). I have no memory of the town or campus at all, having been not yet two at the time -- though I do still have a copy of the Master's Thesis he wrote to finish the degree [1960]

So, here's for a safe trip and an interesting weekend ahead. If you're in the area, drop on by and say hello.

--John R.

WORMWOODIANA

So, while I'm on a Doug Anderson kick, I wanted to celebrate the recent launching of Doug's collaborative blog. Doug is not just a superlative scholar but better than anyone I know in finding out things about obscure dead authors (we were once on a panel together of that name at Wiscon along with several other people, and his author was more obscure, though not more dead, than any of the other offerings).

A while back Doug starting doing reviews in a little journal called WORMWOOD. Now, as of sometime in June, he's started a blog to which he and other contributors make postings similar to the fare in the journal, although so far there seem to be fewer reprints of old impossible-to-find stories from decades ago and more articles and notes about such works--which seems to me to make the blog a good complement to the physical journal.

I haven't read all the posts yet, the blog having been already in progress when I discovered it, but already there's been at least one real gem: Sidney Sime's colour illustration of the first JORKENS story back in 1926, which features Sime's portrait of Dunsany himself as Jorkens. So far as I know, this is Sime's only portrayal of his longtime partner. It thus makes a nice accompaniment for Dunsany's intensely moving word-portrait of Sime, which he wrote upon learning of Sime's death in obscurity and poverty in the early days of World War II, the first and last sentences of which read

"We have lost, in a time of losses, when loss is nothing out of the ordinary, a genius, whose stupendous imagination has passed across our time little more noticed by most people than the shadow of a bird passing over a lawn would be noticed by most of a tennis party."

"And now that vast imagination has left us, having enriched our age with dreams that we have not entirely deserved."

(THE GHOSTS OF THE HEAVISIDE LAYER [1980], pages 168-175)


I first saw this illustration in Edinburgh during a research trip in May 1987 but have never been able to get a copy (the Milwaukee Public Library's records state that they have one, but it's in storage in their sub-sub basement, and I was never able to retrieve it on mulitple efforts). Thus, I am delighted to find it posted here (https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW8IRexvyuHZYwdv5ZzFI36OvtDbazx7Yj_i1tNMjq0ljndPItUE3iWbUAzi5Xyo2mN_tOtfvKixr9cyiWUNvj2A1k5-4XaPDiDiZYlhbYAZYxltT20JRuWySEtfWw90Zwlt6n2t8IKfc/s1600-h/Sime+Jorkens+1926.jpg). Quite aside from its associational value, it has intrinsic interest in that it reveals that by 1926 Dunsany had already gone entirely grey, if not white -- I suspect from the stresses of the war years, particularly his harrowing experiences of 1916 (which had such an impact on his work that I devoted a whole sub-section of a chapter to it in my dissertation). I had always assumed that the pictures of Dunsany that appear as frontispieces to the three volumes of his autobiography -- PATCHES OF SUNLIGHT [1938], WHILE THE SIRENS SLEPT [1944], & THE SIRENS WAKE [1945] were contemporaneous with those books' publications. I now believe they are instead pictures of Dunsany as he appeared during the years covered by those volumes, so that (for example) the photograph of Dunsany that appears in the middle volume -- my favorite image of him, the only one which makes him look like an author -- probably shows him as he was at age forty, when the book opens, rather than nearing sixty, as he was when it was published.

And all this from just a single post from a newly launched blog. WORMWOODIANA promises great things, and I've already added it to my short list of sites I check regularly; when I have time, I'll have it added to the list of recommended links on my website. Well done Doug (and associates)!

--John R.


In the meantime, here's the link:

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/