The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2018

Abstract

The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2018 David Bratman (bio), Kate Neville (bio), Jennifer Rogers (bio), Robin Anne Reid (bio), Jason Fisher (bio), John Wm Houghton (bio), and John Magoun (bio) Introduction [David Bratman] An accounting of 2018's outstanding monographs on Tolkien should begin with "The Sweet and the Bitter": Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, by Amy Amendt-Raduege (Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2018). More reduced than expanded or revised from the author's 2007 thesis from Marquette University, this book won the 2020 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award from the Mythopoeic Society. Pagan Saints in Middle-earth by Claudio A. Testi (Zurich: Walking Tree, 2018) is another notable monograph of the year. This book expands on previous work by Testi, including "Tolkien's Work: Is it Christian or Pagan? A Proposal for a 'Synthetic' Approach" in Tolkien Studies 10 (2013). Several more books of interest are also described below. A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger, edited by John D. Rateliff (Wayzata, MN: The Gabbro Head, 2018) is a Festschrift celebrating one of the outstanding Tolkien scholars. It is a notably large book, 448 pages with 22 contributions, of which 20 are sufficiently attached to Tolkien to warrant coverage here. The volume is particularly noteworthy for including "Canute and Beorhtnoth," one of the last essays by the late Richard C. West. On the other side of the size scale in anthologies lies Poetry and Song in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar 2017, edited by Anna Milon (Edinburgh: Luna Press, 2018), an 81-page small-format volume of four contributions, forming number 18 in the Society's Peter Roe series. Two outstanding and unusual books lie in special categories of their own. One is The Fall of Gondolin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), the late Christopher Tolkien's final work editing his father's papers. It is presented as the last volume in a set of book-length reader's editions of the three Great Tales of the Silmarillion, following The Children of Húrin (2007) and Beren and Lúthien (2017). Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, by Catherine McIlwaine (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2018), may be considered as much a souvenir gift book as a catalogue for the Bodleian Library's 2018 exhibit of Tolkien's art, papers, and personal artifacts. The bulk of it is a well-illustrated [End Page 275] catalogue of selected items from the exhibit, while an opening seventy pages consists of commissioned articles by noted scholars covering aspects of Tolkien's work. This volume received the 2021 Tolkien Society Award for Best Book. Journals of the year include volume 15 of the present journal, Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review; issue 59 of Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society, dated Winter 2018; and two issues of Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature from the Mythopoeic Society, vol. 36.2 (whole number 132, dated Spring–Summer 2018) and vol. 37.1 (whole number 133, dated Fall–Winter 2018). The open-access electronic Journal of Tolkien Research, hosted at scholar.valpo.edu, published its volumes 5 and 6 during 2018. The other journals named here are also available online: back issues of Mallorn are now publicly available at journals.tolkiensociety.org/mallorn, and Mythlore is archived at dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/. Coverage this year, besides the usual scattered individual pieces, also includes multiple articles from volume 35 of Inklings: Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik from the Inklings-Gesellschaft für Literatur und Ästhetik, and two Tolkien-specific newsletters, the Tolkien Society's bimonthly Amon Hen and the American Mensa Tolkien Special Interest Group's Beyond Bree. Several other societies either missed a 2018 publication date or had no material about Tolkien in their publications of the year. The 2018 bibliography included seven papers in various journals by N. Ravikumar and R. Chandrasekar, some of them with collaborators. On inspection for the Year's Work, some of these proved to be plagiarized, and have subsequently been removed from online databases by their...