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

Fairleigh-Dickinson

Continuing the current trend of what's turning out to be a string of posts about some newly arrived or just-announced Tolkien books and their contents, here's the Table of Contents for what I think will be a really interesting collection, THE RING AND THE CROSS: CHRISTIANITY AND THE WRITINGS OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN, ed. Paul E. Kerry; the first book (so far as I know) on JRRT from Fairleigh-Dickinson Press.

Introduction: A Historiography of Christian Approaches to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings by Paul E. Kerry

Part I: The Ring

The Pagan Tolkien by Ronald Hutton

The Christian Tolkien: A Response to Ronald Hutton by Nils Ivar Agoy

Can We Still Have a Pagan Tolkien? A Reply to Nils Ivar Agoy by Ronald Hutton

The Entwives: Investigating the Spiritual Core of The Lord of the Rings by Stephen Morillo

'Like Heathen Kings': Religion as Palimpsest in Tolkien's Fiction by John R. Holmes

Confronting the World's Weirdness: J. R. R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin by Ralph C. Wood

Eru Erased: The Minimalist Cosmology of The Lord of the Rings by Catherine Madsen

The Ring and the Cross: How J. R. R. Tolkien Became a Christian Writer by Chris Mooney

Part II: The Cross

Redeeming Sub-Creation by Carson L. Holloway

Catholic Scholar, Catholic Sub-Creator by Jason Boffetti

'An Age Comes On': J. R. R. Tolkien and the English Catholic Sense of History by Michael Tomko

The Lord of the Rings and the Catholic Understanding of Community by Joseph Pearce

Tracking Catholic Influence in The Lord of the Rings by Paul E. Kerry

Saintly and Distant Mothers by Marjorie Burns

The 'Last Battle' as a Johannine Ragnarok: Tolkien and the Universal by Bradley J. Birzer

When faced with the vexing question of whether Tolkien was a Catholic (or Xian) Writer or a writer who happened to be Catholic (or Xian), most books on Tolkien & religion simply assert the former; the essays here actually delve into the question from several different points of view. Based on my skimming so far I think the highlights for me may turn out to be the exchange between Hutton and Agoy and the Madsen essay.

Hutton points out that, for an author who was supposed to be strictly doctrinaire, Tolkien showed an awful lot of interest in pagan myth and incorporated a lot of it into his work. Agoy does his best to refute this, but Hutton remains unconvinced. As for the Madsen, she wrote what's probably one of the ten best essays on Tolkien years ago,* and this one looks to be a worthy follow-up: she essentially asks how, if Tolkien is so self-evidently Xian, do so many readers fail to notice that fact? Kerry's introduction is also impressive, attempting to survey all the previous studies of Tolkien from a religious perspective.

So, my feeling is that this book will be a major collection. I'm looking forward to reading through and thinking about all the essays.

--John R.

*though I preferred the original version, which she delivered at the 1987 Marquette Tolkien Conference, to the published one.

The New Arrival: another book about Tolkien

So, yesterday's post brought yet another new book about Tolkien, this time another collection of essays published by Cambridge Scholars Press (also home to TRUTHS BREATHED THROUGH SILVER, ed. by Jonathan B. Himes et al [2008],* and THE MIRROR CRACK'D, ed. Lynn Forest-Hill [also 2008]).**

Having just shared the table of contents from the forthcoming volume I contributed to, it only seems fair to let folks who might be interested know what's in this one as well. I've numbered the chapters in the list below for ease of reference, but they're not so numbered in the book itself.

MIDDLE-EARTH AND BEYOND: ESSAYS ON THE WORLD OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN, ed. Kathleen Dubs and Janka Kascakova (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010)

Introduction, by Kathleen Dubs

1. Sourcing Tolkien's 'Circles of the World': Speculations on the Heimskringla, the Latin Vulgate Bible, and the Hereford Mappa Mundi, by Jason Fisher

2. Staying Home and Travelling: Stasis versus Movement in Tolkien's Mythology, by Sue Bridgewater

3. The Enigmatic Mr. Bombadil: Tom Bombadil's Role as a Representation of Nature in LotR, by Liam Campbell

4. Tom Bombadil -- Man of Mystery, by Kinga Jenike

5. Grotesque Characters in Tolkien's Novels H & LotR, by Silvia Pokrivcakova & Anton Pokrivcak

6. 'It Snowed Food & Rained Drink' in LotR, by Janka Kascakova

7. 'No Laughing Matter', by Kathleen Dubs

8, 'Lit', 'Lang', 'Ling' & the Company They Keep: The Case of The Lay of the Children of Hurin Seen from a Gricean Perspective, by Roberto Di Scala.

no index, alas.

It's interesting to see a strong Slovak connection here, shared among four of the contributors -- Taum, who was half-Slovak and half-Polish, wd have loved that. I'm rather surprised to see not one but two essays on Bombadil, but these will probably be the first I read among the volume's offerings, along with the one by Jason Fisher (since I know Jason). And it's unusual to see a piece on the alliterative TURIN poem -- the first such I've come across, though it seems the author has written another before. Exactly what a Gricean perspective might be, and how it might usefully be applied to provide insights into Tolkien, are alike a mystery to me -- all the more reason to read the essay, I suppose. I shd warn that like all the Cambridge Scholars Publishing releases I've seen so far this is a rather expensive volume: $52.99 for 145 pages.

In short, something I'm glad to have picked up, but it doesn't immediately bump its way to the top of my reading list, the way some new arrivals do.

--JDR

current reading: Verne (still)

current audiobook: Kipling short stories (still)

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*which I reviewed -- for MYTHLORE, I think. The review seems to be available online at

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Truths+Breathed+Through+Silver%3A+The+Inklings'+Moral+and+Mythopoeic...-a0211707046

**which I confess I've not yet read, despite importing a copy via amazon.co.uk

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

The Most Depressing Book I've Ever Read

So, yesterday I finally finished the audiobook of HUMAN SMOKE by Nicholas Baker, a book I tried to read several months back and had to give up on; it was simply too depressing. A few weeks back I gave it another go, this time as an audiobook, which I've been finding a good way to get through long or difficult books. Even so I had to put it aside twice for weeks at a time.

Why so depressing? Essentially this is the story of the people who saw World War II coming years ahead of time and did everything they could to head it off -- unsuccessfully. Then, once the war starts, it documents the opposing viewpoints of those who want to protect civilian populations and bring the war to an early conclusion vs. those who target civilians for bombing campaigns and death camps and insist on an all-out unconditional-surrender total war. It concludes on December 31st, 1941, when the death camps were just getting started; Baker observes in his Afterword that "Most of the people who died in the Second World War were at that moment still alive."

There are plenty of surprises here, such as the phrase 'The Iron Curtain' being coined by Goebbels to describe English censorship of Britain's newspapers. Or that it was the British, not the Luftwaffe, that started the bombing of non-military targets early in the war. Or that a year and a half before Pearl Harbor FDR had already drawn up plans for the Chinese to firebomb Tokyo, using bombers bought from the Americans, flown by an American pilot, and with an American in charge of releasing the payload.

One thing I wd never have suspected is that Herbert Hoover, of all people, comes across favorably (something I never thought I'd hear myself say): essentially the famine-relief work Truman appointed him to lead in 1945/46 was something he'd been trying to do since the fall of France and the Low Countries in 1940: send food to prevent starvation, especially of children, especially of civilian populations in occupied territories. Churchill had prevented the aid from getting through the Naval Blockade he'd instigated early in the war, on the theory that (a) it might be diverted to feed Germans and (b) the more desperate people became, the more likely they were to rise up and drive out the Germans.

By the same logic, Churchill claimed* that the bombing of civilians in Germany itself would eventually lead to a coup or revolution that wd topple the Nazi regime. Perhaps one of the most heartbreaking bits was the conclusion by the British, about two years into the war, that saturation bombing of German cities wd have no appreciable contribution towards winning the war (since on average they only killed .75 people and wounded 1.25 more per bomber per raid) but decided to keep it up anyway, since they thought it was good for morale. It was particularly disheartening how some people who said they were opposed to the war suddenly reversed themselves -- e.g. Dashiell Hammett after Russia entered the war and Charles Lindberg after Pearl Harbor -- while the Quakers and a few others (e.g. Jeanette Rankin) carried on both opposing the war and trying to mitigate the damage.

What makes this book interesting stylistically is that Baker didn't write it: he assembled and edited it. Its text is made up entirely of quotes or summaries from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, memos, memoirs, speeches, propaganda leaflets, and the like, all arranged in chronological order. He lets the people who caused the chaos and those who had to live through it speak for themselves.

I found his dedication in the Afterword at the very back of the book particularly eloquent:

"I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett & other American & British pacifists. They've never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States & Japan, & stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right." [emphasis mine]

--and now, on to some lighter, or at least less grueling, fare.

--JDR

current reading: JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH by Verne

current audiobook: THE MAN WHO WD BE KING by Kipling.

*in general, Churchill comes across quite poorly; it's hard not to conclude that he did everything he cd to bring about the war, then everything he could to expand the war, and finally everything he cd to extend the war as long as possible. Quite a legacy!

Mr. Alspaugh

About a month ago I heard the sad news that Mr. Alspaugh, my old scoutmaster, had died. I had not seen him for a long time.

I was one of those who was really into scouting, going to the camporees every spring and fall, summer camp for a week every year at Camp De Soto over near El Dorado, most of the weekend hikes/camping out the Burnt Bridge Road, even one Survival. And of course there were the occasional bigger trips: up to Little Rock for the Quapaw Line Trail [?1970], over to Vicksburg [1971], and even once to Shiloh [1972]. And of course all the way up to the Jamboree in Moraine State Park in Pennsylvania [1973]. I made it all the way to Eagle Scout, plus a sashful of merit badges (from Public Safety to Indian Lore), two palms, and the God and Country Award.

When I first joined Troop 32 -- which must have been around the end of 1969, when I wd have left Webelos, where the scoutmaster had been Mr. Jean* -- it was a large troop, but its numbers dwindled over the years --largely I think because the Powers That Be within Scouting tried to reconfigure and reinvent the Boy Scouts during that era to shift the emphasis from camping and hiking in the countryside (which we enjoyed doing) to doing good works in large cities. I think I joined Troop 32, over at the Methodist Church, rather than the troop over at my own Presbyterian Church because I'd already been in Webelos (the Methodists being the only group which had a Webelos program). I think Mr. Alspaugh's older son, Bill, had already left the troop by that time, but I certainly knew his younger son, Wally (whose nickname, for reasons never made apparent, was Worm).

Too many memories for one post: the Monday night meetings at the scout hut, where we might be called on to recite out our daily Good Deeds for the week. Getting to meet Danny Thomas and, what impressed me much more, Col. Sanders at the Jamboree (Nixon didn't show up, the first time a president had blown off the Scouts' big once-in-four-years-event since FDR). Doing the Mile Swim at camp, and discovering wild huckleberries. Biking around a good deal of Columbia County with Mason Cozart and Jim Polk.** Working on Astronomy and Space Exploration merit badges with Mr. McGee at the college, one of my favorite absent-minded professors. Discovering genealogy through work on another merit badge (for a time I was the youngest member of the So-We-Ar, or Southern Arkansas Genealogical society, of which Mrs. Alspaugh was a member). Carrying along a copy of THE HOBBIT to re-read at summer camp.

Mr. Alspaugh himself remains one of my chief icons for stern-but-fair. I think we often exasperated him, but he never yelled and I only once saw him lose his temper (when some people were horsing around during a flag-lowering ceremony). In daily life he worked at the post office; I remember learning quite by chance once that he was a World War II vet, having served in the Pacific. He was also a man of many talents: years later, when I'd found my grandfather's old Seth Thomas clock and was trying to get it running again, I discovered that he'd once been a clockmaker and he volunteered to undertake the task of cleaning it up (it turned out it'd just wound down when Dr. Smith died nearly thirty years earlier).

One particular memory involved the Order of the Arrow. I got inducted into this, and later reached the middle rank of Brotherhood. Mr A. (as we called him) went all the way to Vigil, and to commemorate the occasion I gave him an Eisenhower silver dollar. Twenty years later, when I saw him for the last time after having been out-of-touch for years (having moved away to graduate school and he having retired from the post office), he pulled out of his pocket a large silvery disk, worn almost smooth, which I cd just recognize as the same 1971 silver dollar; apparently he'd carried it as a good-luck piece ever since (just as I carry a 100-mon coin with me every day).

I'm sorry to hear he's gone, but glad that at 87 years he had a good long life. I wish I'd kept in touch more, but I'm glad I got to see him that last time. I'm glad to have known him, and hope he knew that he meant a lot to a lot of us.

Rest in peace, Mr. A.

--John R.

*whose son, Lane Jean, was with me in scouts and more recently has been Magnolia's mayor.

**now Rev. Polk

And All the Seas with Oysters

So, yesterday I came across a new phrase for the first time: "functionally extinct".

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/04/oysters-are-functionally-_n_818870.html

This is not to say there are no more oysters left in the world, but that precipitous decline means they've lost their ecological niche. In many regions, they're dropped to less than 1% of their former numbers; now 75% of all oysters come from just five remaining oyster beds.

This is all the more ironic, since oysters have often been used as an example of nature's fecundity; cf. Avram Davidson's story "Or All the Seas with Oysters", which in turn takes its title from Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Dying Detective". As Holmes lies on his apparent deathbed, he rants ". . . I can't think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem . . . Shall the world, then, be overrun by oysters? No, no; horrible!"

Horrible indeed -- not from an excess of life but from the vast emptiness left behind.

--John R.