New Tolkien Publication in NOTES & QUERIES

Well, that was lightning fast. Just ten days ago I achieved an unofficial academic rite of passage by getting accepted into Notes & Queries .... and now the article has been published online. N&Q is one of those quintessentially English-y things: short, fact based articles on random questions in literary and textual history. Not a big publication, but a classic one -- the journal's been around for 120+ years, and it was hilariously parodied in Frederick Crews's The Pooh Perplex.

Anyway, my article (only 1700 words long) is called "A Tale of Two Essays: The Inklings on the Alliterative Meter." It's long been known that Tolkien wrote an essay on Old English meter called "On Translating Beowulf" in The Monsters and the Critics, and that this essay originated as a preface for a student edition prose translation of Beowulf in the 1940s. Well, Tolkien promised his publisher a "few words" only to end up submitting a 36-page document instead. Why? 

Well, that's what my article uncovers. Basically Tolkien had been planning his material for about 15 years and intended to save it for his own prose translation of Beowulf .... but rather than giving up on that idea, the real reason he wrote "On Translating Beowulf" was because his ole' good pal, good buddy, and fellow Inkling C. S. Lewis was about to scoop Tolkien with his own essay on Old English meter. Lewis had actually published this essay a few years earlier in 1936, but in 1939 he came out with a collection of academic essays called Rehabilitations that would include it. Since other scholars would doubtlessly see Lewis's volume, Tolkien realized that if he wanted to maintain any claims of precedence, he had to publish quickly .... so he risked his publisher's ire by writing a preface drastically longer than required.

Luckily the publishers were thrilled with it despite the cost of the increased pages, so, all in all, a fun little story .... and for me, one more publication in the books.

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