Discovering Tolkienists in all the oddest places

So, the last two months of quarantine were spent writing two essays on modern alliterative poetry in English -- one on Poul Anderson, another on the fandom and genre writers who found in Anderson (and Tolkien to a lesser extent) an example and model. The second essay, especially, was an odd one for me. It involved a lot of emailing random people, especially folks in the Society for Creative Anachronism, on whatever they might have known.** Anyway, I managed to find some really enthusiastic, friendly members who were founts of knowledge. One was Beth Morris Tanner, who co-wrote a booklet for The Compleat Anachronist series on pre-modern verse forms. Another was Sandra Straubhaar, someone previously unknown to me but (I realize now) has been long involved in Tolkien studies, including several entries for the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia edited by Michael D. C. Drout.

 Sandra also helped me with a really tough question. The SCA customarily uses medieval personas, and I couldn't discover the real name of "Anne of Briar Ditch," who wrote a fun alliterative poem in the 1970s for Tournaments Illuminated. Well, turns out that "Anne" was a Tolkienist herself -- specifically, Anne Etkin, who edited a book in 1978 called Eglerio! In Praise of Tolkien. Of course, now when I google Anne's Society name, she comes up instantly, so don't know why I couldn't find it before. But at least that's one mystery solved.

 ---------
** Discovering that the SCA is totally awash in original examples of alliterative verse was probably my biggest and most pleasant surprise.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distin
Read more

A Look at Charles R. Saunders and "Sword & Soul"

Image
So, I've been reading lately about Charles R. Saunders, the black author of sword-and-sorcery fiction, and man .... poor guy. If there's been ever a case of someone being born about 30 years too soon, it's Saunders. Usually, when people mention about black S&S authors, they mean Samuel R. Delany. This makes sense. As a queer, Marxist deconstructionist, Delany established his street cred first by writing SF before wading into the "gutters" (ahem) of S&S fantasy. (Sidenote: are there any black fantasy writers except maybe Jemisin who didn't first establish their street cred by writing SF?). Although I personally never much cared for Delany's  writing style or Nevèrÿon books , which are basically what happens when someone who holds a subgenre in contempt decides to write in that subgenre, it is true that academic critics love Delany .... especially critics who hate S&S themselves. So if they mention Saunders at all, which is rare, it's usuall
Read more

A Good Week For Publication

So, wow. The Journal of Tolkien Research has just published my article, " Harken Not to Wild Beasts: Between Rage and Eloquence in Saruman and Thrasymachus ." What astounds me is that I finished the piece only two weeks ago and already got back the peer reviews. Of course, no real reason WHY the review process has to take months, but it just usually does. Kudos to the anonymous reviewers, great praise upon them, for working so quickly. I might even more appreciative of their promptness than of their kind remarks; I barely had to do any revisions to the article. The process went so fast, in fact, that the publication barely feels real. One of the great advantages of an online open-access journal, too, is instantaneous publication. As I'm learning with the several other articles I have in circulation, the publication process generally takes even longer than the review process. Anyway, this has been a good week. I finished my review of Harry Potter essays, and the edito
Read more