Stratofanatic's Emporium

 Well, it's that time of year again .... February 15th was the deadline for nominations to the Mythopoeic Society Awards , and, as awards administrator, it obviously fell to me to share those lists with the committees yesterday. We have a pretty good range of books across all four awards categories, and I'm excited to start reading them -- the scholarship awards, anyway, as I don't have time to be on the two fiction committees. Thanks to my recruitment efforts, too, we have 14 new members across the four committees, which, if it doesn't double the size of the previous committee members, comes pretty close. Fresh blood is especially important in the scholarship awards, which have traditionally had relatively few members compared with the fiction committees.  Probably this weekend I'll start ordering books from ILL and Amazon. It's going to be a good next three months!

So, having finally read enough of Chaucer now that I thought myself able to read John Bower's Tolkien's Lost Chaucer with justice, I did so .... and really liked it. Perhaps the most common critique I've seen in the reviews is that many of the correspondences he draws between Chaucer as source and Tolkien as author are rather weak. These occur mostly in the book's latter half -- the first half is more straight literary history about what went down with Tolkien and that book. At the same time, the Chaucer linkages that Bowers make between Tolkien and the Reeves's Tale and (especially) the Pardoner's Tale are particularly solid -- I thought the last bit about the Pardoner quite strong as well. Maybe the most fascinating part for me, personally, though was Bowers's claims that Tolkien suffered an "anxiety of influence" from 19th-century medievalist Walter Skeat ... something I don't think I've ever read before, but which perfect sense for an a