Stratofanatic's Emporium

Just read John Holmes's lengthy "review" (actually, a 40-page critical essay!) on The Collected Poems of J. R. R.. Tolkien , edited by Cristina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, and all praise where praise is due -- this is one of the most lucid and enlightening articles I've ever encountered on Tolkien's verse. It's extraordinarily well-written and, at times, even funny. It's charitable yet also appropriately critical -- personally, I get overly impatient with the vapid "thank you for existing" kinds of reviews, but Holmes provides a much-needed discussion on modern textual editing practices as well as the history of textual editing for Tolkien in particular. This review also demonstrates a remarkable knowledgeable of medieval poetry and the history of poetry, which is a critical must for anyone trying to grasp Tolkien's verse, but something most academics are increasingly less likely to have nowadays. This is definitely a text I'll be r...

Blown away that my Los Angeles Review of Books review, " Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited ," has made a top ten list of notable critical works in 2024, as compiled by the Ancillary Review of Books . Their full article is here: " ARB’s 2024 Notable Criticism ." Here's what they said: Wise’s analysis of insularity in specialized fields is a warning that speculative critics, in our genres and subgenres, would do well to consider. So, so much good work is being done. This is a true honor. 

New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf: The Hitches [ Last week, I discussed Tolkien’s poem in dróttkvætt meter, “The Derelicts,” and showed how “Bleak Heave the Billows” is in ljódaháttr meter. This helps date both texts to 1932-1934. As I’ll show here, however, the picture is actually more complicated than that . ] Click here to read Parts 1 & 2 for this entry. Click here to  read Part 3 . The Problem To pick up where I left off last week, I’ve been arguing that Tolkien’s four poems in Norse meters all appeared roughly together during the period of 1932–1933. By relying on metrical form rather than subject matter, I also avoid the problem of why Tolkien might have chosen Old Norse meters for Old English subject matter. That problem is mainly why I hesitate with the dating provided by Scull and Hammond. After all, they linked “The Derelicts” with Tolkien’s first lectures on the old Germanic legend of Finn and Hengest, which in my view puts the poem two years too soon, and they also l...

New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf:  Tolkien the Skald [ Last week, I outlined the shape of Tolkien’s career as an alliterative poet and noted his immense productivity between 1932 and 1934 – the moment he turned to Old Norse meters. Now I’ll tackle specific issues with his two shorter Old Norse poems . ] Click here to read Parts 1 & 2 of this entry. Click here to read Part 4 . Tolkien’s “Lost” Stanzas: The Derelicts If your puppy ever runs away from home, everyone knows what to do. First you search. Then you plaster posters on telephone poles. Then you panic. Though not in that order. Personally, I prefer panic first. But if your poem runs away from home, well, that’s a tougher situation. To be fair, the story behind Tolkien’s dróttkvætt sequence “The Derelicts” doesn’t relate directly to whenever he wrote anything, but the tale’s too good to pass up. These stanzas first came to my attention when researching skaldic meters for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative R...

New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: The Norse Connection Click here to read Part 3  for this entry. Click here to  read Part 4 . Introduction: The Versatile Revivalist So far in this series, I’ve tended to tackle either individual poets (C. S. Lewis, Amit Majmudar, etc.) or specific issues such as SF or fan verse. Now let’s sneak a peek at what happens by focusing on a specific alliterative tradition in the Modern Revival – namely, Old Norse. So here’s a riddle for you. What do medieval Norse skalds – folks like Thjódólf of Hvinir or the legendary Bragi Boddason – have in common with medieval English poets wise in the ways of alliterative poetics? People like Cædmon, William Langland, and whoever the hell wrote Beowulf. Not much, actually. Got you with a trick question! So, yeah … this riddle’s somewhat like Bilbo asking Gollum what’s in his pockets. Although us moderns might study a wide range of medieval texts side by side – thank you, anthologies – in the Middle Ages, obviousl...

It's official: my first review for the Los Angeles Review of Books has just appeared. It's called " Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited " (click link), and it tackles two recent books on Tolkien: The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien by Nicholas Birns (Routledge, 2024) Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology by Robert T. Tally Jr. (McFarland, 2024) I'm a bit nervous about it, honestly, not only because it's such a public forum, but because I share my honest thoughts about the current state of Tolkien criticism. If you're interested, check it out ... and always happy to discuss.

Well, this is amusing. I randomly had a reason to delve into Anthology of Children's Literature (5th edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1977), edited by Edna Johnson, Evelyn R. Sickels, et al, and I thought, "Well, this is odd! They have an excerpt from The Hobbit ... the 'Riddles in the Dark' chapter, no less." So I had a quick look-see .... and discovered they were reprinting the original first edition text of that chapter! Never you mind that the revised 2nd edition of The Hobbit came out in 1951, or that The Lord of the Rings had firmly cemented Gollum's reputation as a sneaky sneaking sneakster in the popular imagination. No, they reprint the first edition text where Gollum, after losing the riddle context, apologizes profusely for having somehow lost the "present" Bilbo had won (i.e., the One Ring already in Bilbo's pocket), and so meekly leads Bilbo out of the Misty Mountains in recompense. Given that this anthology is from Tolkien's America...

Of all the new alliterative poems I’ve recently seen, Lancelot Schaubert’s “ Dear Tolkien Estate ” is one of the more delightful. To give this one some context, if you’re a regular reader of Tales After Tolkien , you might have already heard of a little-known fantasy author by the name of J.R.R. Tolkien. Well, back in May 2013, the executor of Tolkien’s estate (his son Christopher) posthumously published one of his father’s longest original works in strict Old English meter, The Fall of Arthur . If you’ve not read it before, it’s a remarkable achievement, but alas … as holds true for most of Lancelot Schaubert Tolkien’s major projects, he never completed it. Only four cantos plus portions of a fifth are finished. Nevertheless, in 1934, he shared a draft of The Fall of Arthur with his trusted friend and colleague, the medievalist R. W. Chambers (1874-1942), who praised the poem highly. Yet this encouragement was apparently insufficient to entice Tolkien towards completion, and despite...

Well, my l atest book review just dropped in Journal of Tolkien Research : a review of a Tolkien's classical sources. Feel free to read my full review of  J.R.R. Tolkien's Utopianism and the Classics (2023) , but it's an useful book that probably won't interest many folks outside of its narrow disciplinary focus. However, my final paragraph brings up a particularly killer idea regarding Tolkien, diversity, and the "open society," and that may be of interest to folks. I took it on, though, because (a) a hard copy was offered, and I now only review books in exchange for a hardcopy, and (b) it keeps up my streak of one published review every year since 2016 -- that is, eight years running. And I'm guaranteed a ninth year from two reviews in queue. This is a pretty meaningless streak, mind you, but why not.

The news just dropped that Verlyn Flieger, co-founding editor of Tolkien Studies and one of the most eminent Tolkienists who ever eminented, is stepping down as editor after 22 years. Yvette Kisor will be taking her place. Major, major news, and I wish everyone well.

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 instea...

Recently started reading Amber Lehning's The Map of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections on Tolkien's Myth of Wilderness  (2022), and while I'm not far along enough in the book to offer a final opinion, I did get stopped in my tracks by one early remark in particular:  Had he written nothing else, " Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics" would have been enough to rank Tolkien among the great critical thinkers of Western literature. (8) It's hard to believe that no one, nowhere, in the entire  production process, caught this truly wince-worthy hagiographic exaggeration. Of course, Tolkien's essay undoubtedly is the single most famous essay ever composed on Beowulf , but still ..... "great critical thinkers"?  Tolkien was a brilliant philologist, to be sure, but even among medievalists there's a lot of competition for the spot of top dog. When you branch that out to great "critical" thinkers of all Western literature, that makes me qu...

Yeah, this maybe will be a weird post, coming from a Tolkien scholar. Still, reflecting more on John M. Bowers's excellent Tolkien's Lost Chaucer (2019), I realize that Tolkien would have struggled badly as a modern academic ... and that I, most likely, would have resented him deeply as a colleague.  Not as a person , mind you; Tolkien's a decent enough fellow. But my feelings are very much the product of academic labor under the modern neoliberal university. Thousands upon thousands of academics in various states of precarity: contingent laborers who, despite exceedingly high competence in every area of academic labor (research, teaching, and administration), and despite no research support, poor wages, and stressful labor conditions, nevertheless toil in precarity while certain excessively privileged faculty (certain tenure-trackers, Ivy Leaguers, etc.) muddy along with at best middling competence. Don't get me wrong -- as a philologist, Tolkien was brilliant, and he ...

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...

It's well-known that Tolkien pronounced his name tol- keen , not tol- kin  (like most Americans do) ... but here's a conundrum. Did he emphasize the first syllable, or the second? In other words, TOLL -keen or toll- KEEN ? Reading Bowers's Tolkien's Lost Chaucer , which is fantastic, and he says that he confirmed that the accent's on the second syllable through people who worked with him. (His first source was Reynolds Price's Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back , 2009), and then he confirmed Tolkien's supervisee V. A. Kolve.  However, in CS Lewis's essay "The Alliterative Meter," he clearly puts the accent on the first syllable. The line goes like this (the capitals belong to Lewis): "We were TALKing of DRAGONS | TOLkien and I". So, Tol -keen. I'm going with Lewis here for now, because part of me has really never cared about proper pronunciation. So, personally, I'll keep saying Tolk- kin, like a good 'Murican. Sti...

Well, this was a pleasant surprise .... I've just received my first official invitation to contribute to an edited collection. The book is called Tolkien on Screen (Kent State UP), and it's a history of cinematic adaptations of Tolkien edited by Thomas Honegger, Hamish Williams, and Lukasz Neubauer. Unfortunately, I'm already completely swamped with writing projects up through the next year, so I had to decline, but I wish them the best of luck on the collection.

Just back from my first Mythcon! Well, my first in-person  Mythcon .... I attended the virtual one in 2021, which was my first year as Awards Steward. This year's event was held in Albuquerque, which isn't that far from Tucson, and the wife and I were doubly excited because of our admiration for Breaking Bad . By sheer coincidence, the city was unveiling statues of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman on the day of our arrival, and the actors, Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, were in attendance. We missed the statue unveiling, but we twice tried to reach the Convention Center to see the statues. The first time, the Center was closed (it was a Saturday), and the second time it had closed temporarily due to "lockdown" -- certainly, a weird thing. Who calls a threat to a Convention Center? Luckily, our first Uber driver told us that the actors were throwing out the first pitch in the Albuquerque Isotopes game, i.e., the Triple-A minor league affiliate for the Colorado Rockies, a...

I greatly admired Thomas Kullmann and Dirk Siepmann's recent book, Tolkien as a Literary Artist  (2021), which takes a Corpus Stylistics approach to The Lord of the Rings , but I LOVED John R. Holmes's review of it in Journal of Tolkien Research .  Even as a book reviews editor, it's rare to see such a lucid and artistically elegant piece of writing.

Last night just had my  review published in the  Journal of Tolkien Research  on Peter Grybauskas's A Sense of Tales Untold , yet it's mostly an extended reflection on academic labor and Tolkien Studies -- the pressures that contingent academics must face, plus the limits they must endure, as we strive to do original research. This was also the review I was writing when I posted my last entry on the ethics of academic book reviewing .

So, been doing some research on Tolkien's curricular changes at Oxford in the late 1920s, and so I've been going through Raymond Edwards's biography Tolkien , which is absolutely fantastic on these issues. I'm struck again by how good & useful this book is. A clear love of academic detail, a careful knowledge of everyone whom he mentions even in passing, but also smartly restrained in drawing connections -- often illuminating ones -- and interpreting the known facts. And while I'm praising biographies, let me give a shout out to Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond's Chronology and Reader's Guide . Unlike maybe Edwards's biography, these are hardly an unknown set of books, I know, but there's just so much to be said for their format: 2,300 pages of pure facts without all the interpretative apparatus and story-telling of a normal biography. This really opens up the possibilities for researcher's asking unusual questions that a normal biograph...