Conferences & Silos: Part 1

A critical reading of a press release and a conference site

One of my goals for this newsletter is sharing information on a variety of scholarly activities relating to Tolkien studies, such as conferences, journals, book projects. I firmly believe that the field is stronger for having a variety of activities in as many modes and locations as possible, using as many different approaches as possible, whether or not I’d like to attend all of them.

So in pursuit of that goal, here is information about a conference that I only heard about today: it’s too late to submit anything (the submission deadline was May 15), but it would still be possible to attend if you’re not too far from Steubenville, Ohio.

Franciscan University of Steubenville is hosting a conference on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death: “A Long Expected Party: A Semicentennial Celebration of Tolkien’s Life, Works, and Afterlife,” September 22-23, 2023. The organizer is Dr. Ben Reinhard (breinhard@franciscan.edu).

The rest of this post is about how I learned about this conference and my response to the reporting on it as well as to the conference itself.

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My phone Google news thread this morning included an article in Aletia¹ on a planned Tolkien conference to “mark the new era” in Tolkien studies.² The article is dated June 28, 2023, so it seemed a timely bit of news. I went to read it because, well, a conference!

The author of the article seems a bit out of touch with things Tolkienian: here is paragraph 1.

I bolded the parts that made me think WTF???

J. R.R. Tolkien’s popularity keeps growing. His books remain perennial bestsellers. The filming of the second season of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings is underway, while Warner Bros has an animated film set in Middle-earth scheduled for release next year. There is also an MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online Game) in the works. Yet for all their popularity, some scholars are concerned that Tolkien’s works are not receiving enough serious attention from academics.

1. Amazon’s series is titled The Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power, but most people would use the subtitle as the stand-alone title (in my experience). OK, not a major problem, I guess, but to a retired English teacher, ACK!

2. One MMO (at least) already exists (was launched in 2007 according to Wikipedia): The Lord of the Rings Online. So while a second one starting up is more evidence of popularity, I guess (also evidence of capitalist overlords wanting to make $$$ off existing franchises), it’s an addition to a long-standing one.

3. There is a second MMO in the works which I did not know about (but easily found via Google): the second one is an Amazon collaboration with the Embracer Group (also never heard of this group) that is apparently replacing an earlier planned Amazon LOTR MMO according to this article on GameRant which was published last month. Not surprisingly, the article is reporting on fan doubts (in the context of Amazon’s series)!

4. “Some scholars” and “enough serious attention from academics”: Well, the only scholar mentioned is Reinhard: I guess that the article is mostly working off a press release he sent out. I certainly cannot see that the writer did much research. Thinking that popularity of a work has anything to do with scholarly attention is an assumption; the irony is that during the last half of the 20th century, the more popular a work was, the less likely the “serious scholars” would pay attention to it (but you’d only know that if you were a sff fan attending college in the 1970s/80s/90s and dealing with the sneers aimed at genre literature, including Tolkien—or if you read the introduction to the early Tolkien anthologies by Zimbardo and Isaacs where they lament that the fans, nasty little critters that we were, were hindering serious scholarship by, well being fans).

Paragraph 2 & 4 also led to WTF??? moments:

Hoping for a revival in Tolkien scholarship, the Franciscan University of Steubenville will host an academic conference to explore “the life, works, and afterlife” of J.R.R. Tolkien to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death.

Conference organizer and Steubenville Associate Professor of English Dr. Ben Reinard stated in a press release that “2023 is a significant turning point in Tolkien studies because the generation of scholars that truly knew him is entering retirement.” The conference hopes to prompt a new wave of serious scholarship on the great author and his works.

1. Revival? Seriously? A “come-to-Tolkien” sort of thing? That word implies that Tolkien scholarship has been languishing which is sort of the exact opposite of what has been happening since Peter Jackson’s adaptations (twenty years ago now) which brought scholars in to Tolkien studies who were trained in more than medieval studies, drawing on a wider range of disciplinary, period, and critical approaches. But maybe the major increase in peer-reviewed academic scholarship has gone unnoticed by Reinhard.³ In any case, I would argue that because of the growth (and not only in US/UK scholarship), it is impossible to be able to make any credible claims about all published Tolkien scholarship.

2. Reinhard seems to be working from a PR/marketing discourse rather than an academic one: he declares that 2023 is a “significant turning point in Tolkien studies because the generation of scholars that truly knew him is entering retirement.” Um. Well. I’m not sure which generation, or which scholars, he has in mind. Jane Chance, Tom Shippey, and Verlyn Flieger (who I consider the Major Founders of Tolkien studies as an academic field) all retired some years ago. I could dig up the dates of the anthologies published in their honor but have a lot of other things to do today. I can say all those anthologies were published before the Covid lockdownds, so let’s just say they *have* retired, not are retiring. And is “truly knowing” (whatever that means?) an author that important in scholarship (because if it was, nobody should be writing on Shakespeare or all the other Dead White Canonical authors!).

3. “New wave of serious scholarship on the great author and his works.” This phrasing excludes the growing field of scholarship on adaptations and transformative works of Tolkien’s legendarium. And here is that “serious scholarship” phrase again, along with “great author” (canonization, much?). The Great Author phase of literary studies has been challenged over the last seventy years with some success. But “serious scholarship” is clearly a dogwhistle for “the correct Christian interpretation.” I tried to find what Reinhard has published on Tolkien: there’s one Mythlore publication on Tolkien, and one on Lewis and Eliot. I may be missing something, but he has published a lot more in Crisis Magazine (which touts itself as the “most trusted source for authentic Catholic perspectives” and its goal to “proclaim Christ’s Kingship over all things, at all times, to all nations” (so NOT linking to any of them, but the titles and ledes show he’s definitely anti-adapations and all about declaring the contemporary age as evil).

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While this conference may appeal to some Tolkienists, I think that there are many more of us who would prefer the Tolkien Society’s Tolkien and Religion in the 21st Century seminar and the Interchanging Melodies online summit. Both of these events are much more likely to reflect the actual state of Tolkien scholarship relating to religion (and are open about the focus on a specific sub-field of the larger field): messy and diverse and variable and probably not “authentic” or “serious” in the way Reinhard defines it, but all the stronger for that.

If you are attending *any* of these conferences (or others) and would like to write up a conference report, I will happily publish it here on Writing from Ithilien!

1. I had never heard of the site, so I checked the About section which tells me that the“Aleteia site offers a Christian vision of the world by providing general and religious content that is free from ideological influences,” as well as a “for-profit offshoot of the Foundation for Evangelization through the Media (FEM, a non-profit foundation). The initial capital was provided by private investors who adhere to the spiritual goals of the project.”

2. I am at that point in life where the smart phone is smarter than I am: I admit I use it mostly to read e-books via Kindle and message friends and reject spam calls. I have not given it any news sites I want it to to follow although obviously it’s learning from some of the things I “hide” when I see them, and not surprisingly, throws up a lot of stuff on “Tolkien.”

3. In this 2019 publication, I talk about using the Modern Languages Association’s bibliographic database to identify patterns in scholarly publications including tracking the increase in publications and type of publications. I no longer have access to the subscription databases (retired!), but I’m sure the numbers have only increased since then:

On July 13, 2018, I did a “Subject” search on “Tolkien” in the Modern Languages International

Bibliography, a search I do at least once a year, to keep track of what is being published. I do a “Subject” search because the more general one pulls up work on other mythopoeic authors and topics in Mythlore when the full title, which includes Tolkien’s name, is included in entries. I should note that the MLA does not index all possible sources for Tolkien criticism but draws from over 6000 journals and book series in the fields of “literature, folklore, linguistics, languages, literary theory, criticism, dramatic arts, and the history of printing and publishing” (“MLA Directory”). According to the MLA FAQs, it currently contains more than 2.8 million records covering material in more than sixty languages. The website posts a spreadsheet of all journal titles being indexed (a total of 13,000) which can be downloaded from the MLA FAQ page. It is the database I go to first in my area of studies. I then check Academic Search Complete, which picks up material from journals in disciplines the MLA does not index, if I am feeling especially Entish.

The current number of publications listed on “Tolkien” is 2800 works including single-author monographs, essay collections, peer-reviewed articles, general articles, and editions. The earliest publication listed appeared in 1952, so Johnson’s bibliography is required to see what was published before that date.

I then limited my search to everything published by 1999 (the year before Drout and Wynne’s article appeared) to see what they were dealing with: the total for that period is 1004 publications. That means that from 2000-2018, the MLA added 1,796 publications on Tolkien which averages out to nearly 100 publications a year. The numbers clearly show the rising interest in publishing on Tolkien’s legendarium and associated works as well as the different types of publications:

Academic Journals: 1,744

Dissertation Abstracts: 51

Book Articles: 837

Editions: 5

Books: 162

This overall growth has a number of implications, but the most obvious is that it is no longer possible to have claim to have read, even cursorily in some cases, all the published Tolkien scholarship listed in the MLA, not even if you limit it to peer-reviewed articles and books. You can direct searches to show what was published in specific years or decades, or, of course, add additional search terms to limit by topics.