List of Books By and About Tolkien

[Jude]

Here is a link to my local book shop's page for the new Unfinished Tales.

It's $150 CDN. Does that sound right?

[N.E. Brigand]

I finished reading The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004 Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder yesterday. This book, edited by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, includes 20 papers that were presented at the 2004 conference held at Marquette University. It is a great collection of essays from some of the top people in Tolkien scholarship. [...]

I attended this conference and had a wonderful time. I arrived too late in Milwaukee to hear Zettersten's paper, which was presented on the evening before the bulk of the conference at an art gallery where some of Tolkien's work was on display. I also deliberately skipped Michael Drout's paper, which was the first one presented on the conference's second full day, because I knew nothing of Beowulf. I arrived at the auditorium to find a very contentious Q&A underway, which I later learned was a kind of sequel to a dispute earlier that year at the Tolkien conference Christopher Vaccaro had hosted at the University of Vermont. The gist of it was that Jane Chance felt that Drout was downplaying Tolkien having largely ignored Grendel's mother in his famous essay, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Chance had written a much-anthologized paper on that subject years before. (Belatedly it occurs to me that there's a possible connection here with Arda Reconstructed.) One fun bit of the conference not captured in the anthology was a multi-performer reading of Verlyn Fleiger's short story "Green Hill Country," that impressed a lot of attendees.

[N.E. Brigand]

There are also some unpublished, and mostly unfinished, works that sound interesting, including a prose and poetic translation of Beowulf, some Old Norse poems, an alliterative poem about King Arthur, and a short story titled "Sellic Spell", which was to have been published in the late 1940s in a journal that folded. It's said to be a version of the folktale which underlies Beowulf.

It's great that most of the works I mentioned in this post almost thirteen years ago have since been published. Only the poetic translation of Beowulf, which is reported to be unfinished, remains unseen from that short list. There are other Tolkien writings still unpublished. Off the top of my head, two more poems in the "Bimble Bay" series and two more bestiary poems are known to exist, and in the first edition of Scull & Hammond's Tolkien "Companion" (I've ordered the second edition, which is 50% larger, and may be updated on this point), they listed what appeared to be all of Tolkien's published and unpublished poetry. But I was told by someone else very knowledgeable in the field that was not an exhaustive list o Tolkien's poems after all, and some of the works subsequently published showed that was correct. We know that the linguistic papers are slowly being issued. There's a lot of academic stuff that I think may yet appear in bits and pieces in papers about Tolkien. And who knows, maybe eventually we'll get to read "The Ulsterior Motive."

As I wrote this, I found this list, whichg appears to be a pretty complete catalogue of known unpublished works.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Just saw this announced. It is a pretty wonderful line-up. As it should be.

Great Tales Never End, The: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien

[N.E. Brigand]

Tolkien Studies is publishing a special supplemental edition next spring, consisting entirely of a previously unpublished and apparently large work by Tolkien, "The Chronology of The Lord of the Rings," as edited and annotated by William Cloud Hicklin, a correspondent of Christopher Tolkien and former participant of this and other Tolkien forums.

Although this was previously unpublished in full, is it the work that Hammond and Scull cite extensively in their book of LOTR annotations? The one in which Tolkien notes that Ugluk captured Gollum and Sauron had Shagrat killed?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I believe so. I believe that Bill Hicklin (who used to post here as solictr) told me he was working on this project a very long time ago, so congratulations to him for completing it.

[Inanna]

Goodness. I know solictr! Here.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Tolkien Studies is publishing a special supplemental edition next spring, consisting entirely of a previously unpublished and apparently large work by Tolkien, "The Chronology of The Lord of the Rings," as edited and annotated by William Cloud Hicklin, a correspondent of Christopher Tolkien and former participant of this and other Tolkien forums.

Although this was previously unpublished in full, is it the work that Hammond and Scull cite extensively in their book of LOTR annotations? The one in which Tolkien notes that Ugluk captured Gollum and Sauron had Shagrat killed?

Here is a post that he made about it at the Barrowdowns Forum (which I saw because for some reason every year they wish me a happy birthday the day before my birthday). He does confirm in that thread that it is the work that H&S cite.

Now that it's officially public, I can talk about what's in it in a bit more detail. This is the third and last of the 'synoptic' time-schemes Tolkien made, in other words using parallel columns to keep track of his various groups of characters. They wind up looking something like calendar pages, grids of boxes. This version, which I have dubbed S3, postdates the completion of the story. That fact I think is important in understanding its nature- it's not a 'working' document, in which we can see him developing his ideas as with the drafts in HME, but more in the nature of a 'reference' document like the Appendices, of which impulse it really was a part, although it was not I believe intended for publication but rather as groundwork for published material.

The first two pages (one leaf), written on 13-inch lined paper in the normal manner, are a linear time-scheme of the story from Hobbiton to the entry into Lórien. The next six (three leaves) use the same paper but are oriented landscape-fashion and divided into columns for the dramatis personae (these change constantly as needed), with a row for each date, January 15 through March 7. The next page, the ninth, followed suit; but it dissolved into a welter of alterations, strikethroughs, insertions, directional arrows and ultimately became such a chaotic mess that Tolkien discarded it (it was found separately in the archives) and replaced it. From this point he used blank pages from exam booklets, his usual medium for drafting. As so often, what had started as a "final" copy had become mere rough work. (It's also possible though that he simply ran out of the other paper!). The new pages 9-11 continue the multicolumn time-scheme through the fall of Sauron on March 25. The verso of 11 was left blank (for now), and 12-14 return to portrait linear mode, there being no need for multiple columns, until Sam's return to Bag End on 6 October 1421. At some time, I am inclined to think much later in around 1954 while working on 'The Great Years,' Tolkien jotted some Appendix B-style entries on the back of p.11, all concerned with global events after the fall of the Dark Tower.

There then follow far more than 15 pages of my own blathering about the above, and an ungodly number of footnotes. The blathering actually covers much more than just this document, because I found myself for better or worse describing the development of all three 'synoptic' chronologies, and their interrelationship to the development of the narrative itself. This applies even to S3: although the story was 'finished,' making S3 caused Tolkien to completely overhaul the week leading up to the Pelennor, and accordingly rewrite all the many, many threads converging on Minas Tirith.

And then there's the matter of converting his calendar post facto from our modern calendar to Shire Reckoning.......

[N.E. Brigand]

Thanks! I'm glad to learn that this work will include some description of the early versions of the chronology as well.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

My review of The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien is now up at The Journal of Tolkien Research.

The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien (2022), edited by Richard Ovenden and Catherine McIlwaine

[Eldy]

It's good to read your thoughts at length, V! I confess myself extremely curious about Flieger's apparently profound conclusion RE: the epilogue, and disappointed (but, I suppose, not wholly surprised) to hear that the Lee essay failed to live up to the hype. If I end up reading this, I will probably skip to Flieger's essay first but a number of these sound quite interesting!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

My latest review at the Journal of Tolkien Research.

Law, Government, and Society in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Works (2022), by José María Miranda Boto

[Eldy]

Very intriguing! I can't say I would have considered law a way of "approaching ... the core of Tolkien's thought and philosophy," but then again, I am not a lawyer. Always good to consider viewpoints other than my own. It's disappointing and, frankly, somewhat baffling to me that he left HoMe out of his analysis, though. Did he explain how "consisten[cy] with legal scholarship rules" necessitated this?

Thanks for sharing the review here, V. I probably wouldn't have heard of this book otherwise.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

He doesn't really clearly explain why "consisten[cy] with legal scholarship rules" necessitated leaving out the texts of HoMe, but the sense that I had was that it was related to confusion of having conflicting versions of the same story. But then he made it clear that if he had the opportunity to produce a second edition, he would want to include those texts, so it clearly is not a deal-breaker in his mind.

[N.E. Brigand]

Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays: on Tolkien, the Inklings, and Fantasy Literature by David Bratman.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Happy to see this. David has long been a prime voice in Tolkien and Inklings scholarship (not to mention being largely responsible for my own book getting published in the form it is in). This is long overdue.

[Alatar]

Crossposting here also

https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=120337246011

Tolkien on sale on Kindle today