Early Tolkien Scholarship: 1969, Source 1

Shadows of Imagination, edited by Mark R. Hillegas

Photo by Flash Dantz on Unsplash

Background

I began writing this post months ago (last fall!) for Webs — but then, as often happens became distracted by something else. My main interest was what they were doing with Tolkien’s work (the anthology is about the Inklings) and how different it might be from the more well-known (I suspect) Zimbardo and Isaacs’s collections. But I got carried away in summarizing things. I’ve decided to publish as is, not finished, and later will pull out some material for use. There’s only one more Tolkien essay I have to read.

I think some of my friends who are interested in Christianity/theology/Tolkien might be interested in the main argument the editor Mark Hillegas makes as he tries to distinguish the excellence of the Oxford writers compared to pulp sf cultists! I sure snickered a lot when I was reading that—but I think it’s a rather unique approach to trying to save their work from the “garbage can of genre” (in the context of literary scholarship of the last century’s dead white male canon and their prejudice against fantasy which has been well-documented in Tolkien studies!).

And my friends interested in feminist approaches to scholarship and questions of misogyny in scholarship might also be interested.

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This post is sort of an extended (yes, it’s too long for some email browsers) set of notes and commentary on a 1969 anthology as evidence of a pattern of exclusion of women from Tolkien scholarship. I tend to write this sort of thing out at some length searching for patterns as I go through the note-taking, then compress later on. The anthology is:

Mark R. Hillegas, editor. Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Preface by Harry T. Moore. Southern Illinois UP, Feffer & Simons, Inc. 1969. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques, Harry T. Moore, General Editor.

I decided it was worth seeing what the earliest (Anglophone) academic publications looked like (mapping out disciplinary, gender, theoretical, and religious discourses in them—not to mention acknowledging the Whiteness of them all!) as background for some of the current assumptions in Tolkien scholarship in today, fifty plus years later.

The notes below are just a starting point: I’m skimming the essays rather quickly to see which I’ll be interested in reading in more detail later on (spoiler alert: it will be those essays which go against what one might call the ‘mainstream’ of Tolkien literary criticism!).

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I discovered the Hillegas anthology while doing research on fanzines at Marquette. I was wandering around in the shelves where the Tolkien Archive’s excellent library of secondary scholarship is stored, and it was one of those delightful serendipitous discoveries that happen in libraries and bookstores, plus other places where books assemble, creating magical spaces! [It can sometimes happen, sorta kinda, when I am mousing around online—when I click on a link from somebody, or browse through a list of the results from a search¹

The title intrigued me; I pulled it out to examine, and realized that I had never heard of it which was odd given its early publication date.²

As far as I knew/had read, the first of the three Isaacs and Zimbardo collections was the only academic anthology published in the 1960s as well as the first academic collection period. Given my experiences with Tolkien (and sff in general) as a fan and aware of the Modern Language Association's attitude of disdain toward genre literature back then, I was fascinated to read the "Introduction" in which Hillegas goes into detail about his 1966 MLA session on the works of Lewis and Tolkien, noting that "the room was packed, with people standing at the back and overflowing into the hall. . . the response was so enthusiastic that it seemed worthwhile to carry the discussion over into a book" (xvi).³

At that time, I was primarily interested in how Hillegas presented the collection of essays, how he framed them, in his Introduction, which meant I only skimmed a few of the chapters since I am don’t work on the other Inklings, and the essays on Tolkien were not relevant to any of the approaches I take when analyzing Tolklien’s works (or the adaptations, or the reception).⁴ But it’s worth looking at the overall terrain when thinking about patterns in the scholarship as a field.

As an undergraduate and lifelong sff fan, I was aware of the prejudice that the genre/genres faced in U.S. English departments in the 1970s and 1980s! Back then, I was the weird English major who not only devoured Shakespeare and the Romantics and British literature generally but who also read sff and was not afraid to talk about in my undergraduate and two Master’s programs at the time.⁵ One sub-branch of the Tree of SF was somewhat respectable in Englit terms: dystopias (probably because they’re so depressing!). No contemporary fantasy was ever allowed in the door as far as I knew.

Hillegas explains that his goal is to rescue the three writers from a "cultist's underground," thus the MLA session and the anthology. Hillegas's “cult” differs from the one that Isaacs and Zimbardo (who I’ll be writing about later in this series!) saw as the problem for SRS Tolkien scholars: the fans, specifically in their case, the 1960s counterculture fans of Tolkien, were faddists, button-makers, hippies, and college students who were to blame for Tolkien’s work failing to earn the proper intellectual/academic respect.

Hillegas finds an entirely different “cult” to blame: the readers and fans of August Derleth, Weird Tales, and pulp science fiction generally, as well as the writers with "technical or scientific" educations who ignore myth in favor of materialism are the cult Hillegas wants to rescue the Inklings from. Hillegas describes Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams as “emerging, as it were, from the underground of the cultists,” praising their “seriousness” about fantasy and its “value” as a “mode. . .for presenting moral or spiritual values, which could not be presented in realistic fiction,” and the “high order of excellence of what Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams have written” (xiv).

Finally, Hillegas claims that “the fantasies of these three men are of the sort which appeals especially to the literary community—‘serious’ novelist and poets, critics, professors of literature—whom one might call ‘literary intellectuals’” (xvi).⁶ There are more comparisons, of course, showing the superiority of these authors over (apparently) all the “Weltanschauung of most writers of science fiction,”⁷ with their ”quantifying materialistic vision of the universe and human existence” (xvi).

The overall impression I get from Hillegas's introduction is that a large part of the Inklings' status (for him) comes from their Oxford connection as well the fact that their work is presented in a "mode valuable for presenting moral or spiritual values” which appeals to “literary intellectuals” which nobody would ever (snirk) call a cult, right? After all they have a better Weltanschauung that all the grubby materialists and peons out there who LIKE pulp sf!

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NOTES

170 pages, hardback, blurb on back is summary of the “Contributor Information”

Part of a series focused on “Crosscurrents/Modern Critique” (meaning not coming from medievalists).

Preface (v-vi), Harry T. Moore, dtd. March 2, 1969, 7 paragraphs.

In the first paragraph, he explains that as a series editor, he always writes a preface for all the books chosen for the series which was “not an easy task, but he did the beset he could, often wishing that he had been born more glib. Since he read widely, however, he could generally manage to find something to say about whatever book he was dealing with” (v).⁸ However, this particular book is about “three authors he had no read with any thoroughness, nor did he intend to read them, although the book in question was one he had no hesitation in accepting” (v).

In the rest of the preface, Moore explains that he accepted the ms. for publication in a series which “has been fairly wide-ranging” (vi); that he does not consider “his preferences necessarily infallible . . . . particularly when so many people whose judgment he respects happen to like those particular authors” (v); that while he enjoys some fantasy, “he cannot become engrossed by the whimsy of a Tolkien; let others enjoy it as much as they please,” but he will “help them along, and help the cause of these three writers,” by publishing it for “the many intelligent readers interested in its material” (vs). Moore is friends with Hillegas⁹ whose “Introduction . . . makes out a good case for his special kind of fantasy, showing how it has an appeal for many ‘literary intellectuals,’ as Professor Hillegas designates them” (vi).

Notes on Contributors (vii-ix) [10 men (83%) 2 women 17%)]¹⁰

J. B. S. Haldane: The “world-famous bio-chemist, biologicist, geneticist, Marxist, and philosopher and spokesman of science,” (vii). Link goes to a site dedicated to his life and work. I’m not sure how much of his published work is literary criticism—but I look forward to following up after reading his essay on Lewis!

Mark R. Hillegas: At the time Shadows was published, he was an “Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University,” specializing in “the impact of science on literature, the relationship between the humanities and the sciences, and the literary imagination of science” (vii) [huh, apparently he thought the impact of science on literature was no-good, materialistic, not spiritual?]. The link leads to his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction which notes that “[i]n 1961 he gave, at Colgate, one of the first university-level classes in sf in the USA,” and published a number of essays on dystopian fiction (“his approach reflecting a period [‘1960s-1970s] when they were primarily thought of and treated as Mainstream Writers”)¹¹ AHA: he was working with dystopias which were considered mainstream instead of pulpy.

Daniel Hughes: A literary critic and”poet; he was “an Associate Professor at Wayne State University, specializing in English Romanticism” (vii), publishing on “Shelley, modern fiction, and poetry. The link leads to an obituary for Hughes, written by a personal friend of his from Wayne State, focusing more on his poetry than his criticism, describing him as living “a pure life of the mind, and art -- romantic poetry, Renaissance Italian painting, European classical music -- [which] was for him a kind of religion, through his life, including the forty years he endured multiple sclerosis.”

W. R. Irwin: William Robert Irwin was a “Professor of English and Director of Graduate Study in English at the University of Iowa.]” (viii). The link leads to the entry describing his archived papers at the University of Iowa, a collection which includes “reviews, essays, and manuscripts he produced throughout his career as a professor of English. Correspondence, newspaper clippings, course notes, and departmental memos are also included.”¹²

Clyde S. Kilby: The first major figure in Tolkien studies hoves into view, described as “Professor of English at Wheaton College . . . a personal friend of C. S. Lewis [who] spent the summer of 1966 working with J. R. R Tolkien in Oxford” (vii). The link leads to Kilby’s biographical page at Wheaton College: he was the “founder and first curator of the Marion E. Wade Collection [now Center].”

Charles Moorman: Full name: Charles Wickham Moorman III. He was a “professor of English [focusing on medieval and Arthurian mythologies] and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Southern Mississippi,” publishing on the Oxford Christians (such as Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot).¹³ The link goes to his Wikipedia article (which supports my sense that there are not many online sources about Moorman available).

Robert Plank : was “the Program Chief, Social Work Service, Mental Hygiene Unit, Veterans Administration Hospital, Cleveland Ohio, and Lecturer in English and Psychology, Case Western Reserve University” (vii). The link leads to the Tolkien Compass which lists Plank as one of the contributors to Jared Lobdell’s A Tolkien Compass. Plank’s essay is "'The Scouring of the Shire': Tolkien's View on Fascism.” Lobdell’s anthology was first published in 1975, so six years after the Hillegas anthology. Plank’s essay in Shadow is on “Some Psychological Aspects of Lewis’s Trilogy.” In the second paragraph of this essay, Plank declares that his intention is to “stay away, as far as possible, from literary criticism,” and to avoid“[fixing] Lewis’s place in literary history, or [discussing] his religious, philosophical or political ideas” (26).

Gunnar Urang: I could not find any authoritative source to link to for this writer, and his “Note” is rather brief. He was an “Assistant Professor of English at Wooster College, has just completed his Ph.D. in Theology and Literature in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, writing a dissertation on Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams” (ix). That means he probably completed his doctorate in or slightly before 1969.

Jessica Yates has a post (at the Tolkien Collector’s Guide) discussing the possibility that Gunnar Urang was the “Mr. Rang” that wrote to Tolkien asking for information about about some of the names in LotR which led to Tolkien writing a letter (#297) which he never sent. Yates references Urang’s book, Shadows of Heaven: Religion and Fantasy in the Writings of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien. The book was published in 1971, so I would bet a nickel that it’s based on Urang’s dissertation. Yates describes the book (including his careful attribution of research!) and concludes that the “book deserves to have been more cited than it has been.”

George Parker Winship, Jr.: I have not been able to find any online information on this author (although I think I may have found some articles about his father, George Parker Winship, Sr.? the name doesn’t seem all that common); the only results are citations of his work. Junior was at the time of publication of the anthology “Chairman of the Department of English at King College,” and wrote an “early, seminal¹⁴ article on [Charles] Williams’ fiction, which appeared in the Yale Review in 1950” (ix). The title of early article is cited in publications about Williams: “This Rough Magic: The Novels of Charles Williams.”¹⁵

Alice Mary Hadfield got a degree from Oxford, and then an “M.A. from Mount Holyoke [and was] an assistant to Charles Williams at Oxford University Press in Amen House in London” (vii). She published a number of books, including “the first biography of Williams” (vii). The first link leads to her Wikipedia entry, and the second to a list of her books at an online used book shop.

Patricia Meyer Spacks OK, this is interesting—I actually *knew* of Spacks previous to finding the Hillegas anthology (as I knew of Kilby, but in an entirely different context). I vaguely knew Haldane was a scientist, and I knew Kilby’s name from other Tolkienists, but Spacks was a feminist literary scholar! And I spent a lot of years doing feminist literary scholarship (which used to be a small enough field you could buy all the books in a year without much effort and which then grew rapidly and exponentially during my time as a working academic though the “feminist scholarship on sff was a very small part of that growth!). Her area of specialization was 18th/19th C literature (not really Tolkien’s period), and according to the Wikipedia article, she accomplished a great deal during her life (chairing multiple departments, publishing books, winning awards, serving on major humanities organizations, and serving as the President of the Modern Language Associations, not exactly a bastion of feminism back in the day!). Lo, she has donated papers to the Archives at Yale!

Born in 1929, she is still alive and apparently still writing as of information posted in 2024. Her essay in Hillegas is on Charles Williams’ work (“Charles Williams The Fusions of Fiction”) but she has another essay, titled “Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings” which appeared in the 1968 and the 2004 Isaacs and Zimbardo anthologies. According to Wikipedia, it was a reprint from a socialist journal, Critique, I’m saying “apparently” because I have to check this all out.¹⁶ All I’ve found so far is Wikipedia sources, and I think there’s an error in their attribution which I’ll try to figure out when I have a bit more time later, plus I want to see what Zimbardo and Isaacs say in their anthologies which are on my pile to be covered later for this series!)

She published many books—none about Tolkien!—but the earliest book publication seems to be 1971 (I don’t know how comprehensive this list is—I may find a better one later). She got her doctorate in 1955 (the year I was born!) I am interested in her work, given she is clearly a feminist literary scholar who, for whatever reason, chose to write on a fantasy writer at a period when the genre was not accorded much respect/status by the academic types .

“Introduction,’ Mark R. Hillegas, pp. xiii-xix, dated December 18, 1968.

Table of Contents

“C. S. Lewis: The Man and the Mystery” by Chad Walsh (pp. 1-14)

Focus is on Lewis’s work on religion; Walsh knew Lewis; draws on biographical sources, influences on Lewis, and mostly the nonfiction. I don’t think I’ll be spending much time on this one.

“Auld Hornie, F.R.S.” by J. B. S. Haldane (pp. 15-25)

Haldane was not part of the original MLA session; in fact, his essay is a reprint of one which was published earlier.¹⁷ As a scientist and Marxist, his essay was (I suspect) sought out by Hillegas because he describes his “principle of selection in putting together this volume has been to achieve as much variety in approach and viewpoint as possible: not only the biologist and Marxist, Haldane, but an expert in psychological analysis, two poets, and various scholar-critics have their say” (xix).

While the essay was originally framed as a review of Lewis’s Space trilogy, Haldane feels free to engage with Lewis’s books “which are intended to defend Christianity,” nonfiction as well as fiction (15) and to make larger argument about Lewis’s influence, and the contemporary debates around “science” and “religion” (as well as to be rather sarcastic about some elements of Lewis’s style). I can definitely tell that I’ll be coming back to this one because, although it’s about Lewis, there are resonances with Tolkien’s work (although now I have to go see if Haldane every wrote about Tolkien!).¹⁸ And, I am impressed, given the commentary from Hillegas in his introduction, that he wanted to feature Haldane’s essay in this collection!

Haldane praises Lewis’s literary skill and brilliant writing in the trilogy (comparing him to Dante and Milton), but also criticizes Lewis’s ignorance of the science of his time.¹⁹ Haldane’s explanation for this problem is that “Christian mythologoy incorporated the cosmological theories current eighteen centuries ago. Dante found it a slight strain to combine this mythology with the facts known in his own day. Milton found it harder. Mr. Lewis finds it impossible” (16). Haldane goes on to point out that there is only “one decent scientist in the three books, a physicist who is murdered by the deveil-worshippers before we have got to know him” (17), while the rest “have an ideology which ranges from a Kiplingesque contempt for ‘natives’ to pure ‘national socialism’ with the devil substituted for the God whose purposes Hitler claimed to carry out” (17). Then, Haldane extends the criticism of “scientists” to the limitations of Lewis’s theology upon his view of “[Haldane’s] species” (22) (a lovely word choice! Then, a page or so later, Haldane says “I agree with Mr. Lewis that man is in a sense a fallen being The Origin of the Family seems to be to provide better evidence for this belief than the Book of Genesis. But I disagree with him in that I also believe that man can rise against by his own efforts” (24).

“Some Psychological Aspects of Lewis’s Trilogy” by Robert Plank (pp. 26-40)

Plank situates his purpose, and his argument, in this chapter as “[staying] away, as far as possible, from literary criticism,” in order to focus on the [I guess psychological] question of “why does [this literary text, the Space Trilogy] appeal to readers?” while also avoiding Lewis’s “religious, philosophical, or political ideas” (26). I admit that I’m not quite sure what to do with that information which appears in the second paragraph, immediately following the first paragraph’s opening statement that:

C. S. Lewis was, for which we should be thankful, paradoxical: a science fiction writer who did not write real science fiction;²⁰ a Christian who ranged far away from the inherited world of Christianity;²¹ a novelist whose works were not, in any ordinary sense, novels.²² (26)

Plank claims that Lewis “shows in his works how he has come to terms with the great issues that are also the objects of psychological study: birth and death; the role of man [sic]—and his own role in particular—in the world; love and hate (or sex and aggression),” “great issues” that Plank also calls “fragments” (26-7). And by paragraph 5, Plank has pulled the rhetorical move which is one of the major reasons I dislike (most) psychological approaches to literature: he is going to psychoanalyze the human being who write the fiction:

The task of psychological analysis is to put the confession together from the fragments. In endeavoring to do so, I shall lean on what Lewis says in the trilogy, using extraneous material only occasionally, to make explicit what in the three novels, since they are fiction, can only be implicit. (27).

If someone ever wants to do a study of the historiography of psychological criticism of authors/literature (especially done by people trained in the discipilne, as opposed people trained in literary studies who’ve read some psychology), they might be interested in reading what Plank has to say!

“Out of The Silent Planet as Cosmic Voyage” by Mark R. Hillegas (pp. 41-58)

This chapter is by the editor of the anthology and might be of some interest to Lewis scholars! The basic argument is that the scholarship on Lewis’s Space Trilogy has focused on his “use of myth in the ‘cosmic trilogy,” but that readers tend to think that the first of the books is less valuable than the second and third (presumably in how mythic it is). Hillegas’s argument is that: “I would like to argue here that Out of the Silent Planet, seen for what it really is and not just as a mythic presentation of Christian doctrine, is a considerably better work than it is at the moment thought to be” (42), concluding that the first “is the least propagandistic of the three volumes in the trilogy,” and that Hillegas thinks that as time goes on, Silent Planet will be considered the best of the three books” as an example of "the “cosmic voyage” (58).

“‘Now Entertain Conjecture of a Time’—The Fictive Worlds of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien” by Charles Moorman (pp. 59-69)

A rather interesting comparative approach, starting with comparing “On Fairy Stories” with “Fantastical or Mythical?” (an essay by Lewis) in order to consider the ways in which each of the writer’s theory connects to their fictional practice: Moorman sees Lewis as more consciously allegorical than Tolkien (check!); also sees Lewis as more focused on Christian themes than Tolkien (check—in fact, at the end, Moorman sees LotR as more pagan! YAY early pagan identification FTW!); acknowledges the different tones might be largely due to the presence of child protagonists). Would probably be of most interest to Inklings scholars (and/or Lewis fans who might disagree with some of Moorman’s conclusions about Lewis’s series), but I’m definitely interested in the pagan element.

“Meaning in The Lord of the Rings” by Clyde S. Kilby (pp. 70-80)

Kilby seems to consider the “meaning” of a text to be connected to its popularity and/or being recognized “as a creation of permanent value” (70), and puts forth some reasons for the popularity. These include: “Ancestry and antiquity”. . . .”a viable history”. . . .being a “world. . .containing its own myths and legends” . . . .characters still living from “the ancient past” . . . .and the “myths [turning] out to be true” which is important to those of us living in an “infinitely atomized l[universe] (70-71). Additional reasons come up throughout the essay: “epic scope”. . . . “noble blending of melancholy and joy” [compared to Keats’s “Grecian Urn”]; “joins the high art of the world in revealing the significance, even the glory of the ordinary” (73); “creates a more poignant feeling for the essential quality of many outdoor and indoor experiences” . . . “the depiction of a world of being as well as doing” (74). . . .the desire of readers to re-read (“Great writing is always more qualitative than quantitative. Knowing the outcome enhances rather than detracts from the story” [74-5]). And the list goes on for a few more pages (little time spent developing any of these points—it truly does read like a list, especially when a few pages later, Kilby lists names of people writing about the dire situation of the modern world (Barfield, Lewis) and, a few pages later (astonishing!) “Miss Marjorie Wright” (must indicate marital status of The Woman!) who wrote a thesis on myth in Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams. But she doesn’t take up much space, and within a few lines, Kilby is back rhapsodizing about goodness/truth/beauty/myth/mystery/reality and the conversations among/between men, and then off to a couple of pages on sound/phononlogy in Tolkien’s work (a lot of lists here) (oops, I was wrong: at one point, “Professor Tolkien” appears—the only other honorific popping up.²³ The last two paragraphs are all about the reason why the novel is “being widely read today”, with the answer being that “people [specifically “a businessman,” W.H. Auden, and Kilby himself] experience in common the meaning of leadership, greatness, valor, time redolent of timelessness, and common trials. Men become temporary human. . . . . For a century at least the world has been increasingly demythologized. But such a condition is apparently alien to the real nature of men” (80).

OK then! But I have to say this is just the sort of example I figured I’d find that sees Tolkien’s world as “a world in which history is not bunk and truth is a possibility here and now, a world in which God still happens to be alive and man is still responsible, an allusive but not at all an illusive world” (75).

Clearly Kilby felt Tolkien’s work was limitless and inspiring; not surprisingly perhaps, Kilby’s interpretation of its meaning seems limited in many many many ways.

“Pieties and Giant Forms in The Lord of the Rings” by Daniel Hughes (pp.81-96)

Hughes’s essay explores whether or not LotR is more connected to the Classical (which is what Hughes claims that Tolkien’s aesthetic is “aligned with” [81], according to "“On Fairy Stories”) or to the Romantic (comparing parts of his essay and novel to Coleridge and Blake’s work). Tolkien’s religious beliefs are more or less gestured at in the context of his art (treating them more as as shaping his Classical and/or Romantic elements, or as a way to connect Tolkien’s themes to Simone Weil’s work). Hughes covers quite a few structural elements of the novel: Frodo as the main character, Gollum, and Gandalf as the characters “whose presence manifest almost as well as Frodo’s” [86]), discussing the characterization and narratological choices Tolkien made. But the essay also covers the major “fantastic” characters: Bombadil, Treebeard, the Elves, and what he says “may be the most striking feat of The Lord of the Rings [for many readers]: its resuscitation of the Heroic Age, its virtues and valor intact” (91). Interesting claim at this point:

Tolkien, in writing for now even through his removed world, has succeeded in doing what might have been thought impossible in our ostensibly liberal-democratic, war-hating times (emphasis mine); he has almost brought off an epic as grand as Beowulf, as detailed as an old dim chronicle, and as old-faschioned in its values as an Icelandic saga or Sir Walter Scott. (91)

The exemplar of the Heroic Age is Aragorn who serves, when Tolkien realized who “Strider” was, as the “image that enables Tolkien, the artist, fantastist, and theorist of Faërie, to join hands with Tolkien the admirer of the Heroic Age’s tales and devices” (92).

“Tolkien’s Fantasy the Phenomenology of Hope” by Gunnar Urang (pp. 97-110)

Note to self, need to do!

The Novels of Charles Williams” by George P. Winship, Jr. (pp. 111-24)

“The Relationship of Charles Williams’ Working Life to His Fiction” by Alice Mary Hadfield (pp. 125-38)

“Christian Doctrine and the Tactics of Romance The Case of Charles Williams” by W. R. Irwin (pp. 139-149)

“Charles Williams The Fusions of Fiction” by Patricia Meyer Spacks (pp. 150-159)

1. Not so much with Google these days, and yeah, don’t get me started on the “AI/Sponsored results", but I’ve switched to Ecosia The Search Engine That Plants Trees, so it’s still possible.

2. It dawns on me that saying it was “odd” might not make sense to some people—but one of the steps in a humanities research process (in theory!) is doing bibliographic searches to see the history of publication on your topic—the historiography of the scholarship. You can also get a sense by paying attention to the “Works Cited” or “Bibliographies” in the recent scholarship. One of the most educational experiences I had in a graduate class (on “Renaissance Playwrights Who Were Not Shakespeare”?) was being assigned to find and review 200 years (plus or minus a few years) of critical commentary on one of the plays—with that timeline, the definition of “critical commentary” was purposefully broad since peer-reviewed scholarship is such a recent invention. I chose 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by John Ford. We had to submit our plays before starting so my professor could make sure we had different plays, and also probably to warn us off any she knew wouldn’t have enough stuff written about them, and we presented to the class at the end. What. An. Education! This assignment was back in the days where you had to go to the library and haul the humongous MLA Indexes of publications off the shelves, sneeze at the dust, and, in order to get back to publications during the past two centuries, brave the microfiche room in the dark’n’gloomy basement if you couldn’t find what you needed in the card catalog! Good times, good times (erm, I am NOT being sarcastic here!)

So, yes, when I did my pivot from feminist speculative fiction to Tolkien stuff, I started looking around for the criticism, and all I ever saw cited and discussed as the "first/earliest (in the U.S.) were the Isaacs and Zimbardo collections.

3. He notes that because of time constraints, Charles Williams was not included in the focus of the panel but that his name came up during the papers and following discussion, so he got included in the anthology.

4. In the early stages of research, I’m pretty much skimming to see what books I need to spend more time with, meaning reading over the Table of Contents, the Preface and Introductions at the start of anthologies (or monographs), and looking at the introductions to the essays (or the chapters in monographs). Checking out essays involves reading the introductions and conclusions (which in academic writing are usually multi-paragraph sections).

5. Not only that, I tried to write an sf story in my creative writing class to the horror and confusion of my peers (probably my prof too, but he was too professional to show it). I remember the only feedback I got was that they just could not get over the opening lines where the doors the POV character (a woman) was passing through swished open: I said, um, like in Star Trek and got nothing but BLANK stares. I didn’t try another sf story in my fiction writing classes (I was doing more with poetry and plays anyway, so no hardship, but MEMORABLE).

6. Subtext: men, white, straight, educated, you know the pinnacle of Humanity!

7. I had to look up what “Weltanschauung” means: and according to online dictionaries, basically the worldview or philosophy of a certain group—in this case science fiction writers—but of course using a word borrowed from German make the specific audience of the essay (which isn’t likely to be sf writers with their nasty materialism!) clear.

8. Yes, he refers to himself in third person — and his first sentence opens with “Once upon a time—to begin fabously, there was an editor of a series . . .”(v). I’m sure he thought himself very clever. I couldn’t find much information about him, but it’s clear from the scholarship he’s associated with that he did in fact read widely (very Dead White Male Canon widely, that is, which is probably why he found the Inklings’ work “unreadable” (v)).

9. It isn’t what you know, it’s who you know—networking is a basic human characteristic, I think, but in this place and time, it was the academic white old boy network and not much else.

10. Yep, I’ll be doing the basic math for percentages because there is (or has been—I’m sure the Mump Regime will be trying to shut it down) a growing amount of scholarship on gender perception bias (which I identified in third grade as “fear of girl cooties” based on my classmates’ behavior which involved a lot of shrieking and running away—specifically the boys would shriek “girl cooties” and run away dramatically).

This bias is particularly evident when it comes to estimates of women in leadership. One 2018 global Ipsos survey spanning 27 countries and nearly 20,000 respondents found that people in almost every country polled believed that more than 20% of the world’s top CEOs were women. In reality, the actual figure was 3% at the time. Another 2020 study in the US found that Americans overestimate women’s representation in Congress by an average of 14%. Interestingly, it’s young people — especially young men — who had the most inaccurate perceptions of how many legislative seats women actually hold.

Jgln, Katie. "Why Even a Few Women At The Top Feels Like ‘Too Many': On gender perception bias and its damaging consequences." The Noösphere. 10 Feb 2025, thenoosphere.substack.com/p/why-even-a-few-women-at-the-top-feels.

11. Interesting entry in the Encyclopedia on “Mainstream Writers” as a category that was more relevant in the 20th century (“the early twenty-first century has seen such an extraordinary slurring of old boundary lines among the genres that the term seems decreasingly relevant to characterize recent work”). I have always been interested in the “genre” debates around what is “Literature” (with a capital-L!), vs. what is “genre” (and conflicts over quality vs. popularity — as if the two cannot exist in the same work), as well as how the constructedness of such categories reflect socio-cultural hierarchies. I was born in 1955, and was reading sff from an early age because my father was a fan, and was used to hearing sff dismissed as “junk” — but became an English major (and then teacher) anyway because I loved reading a lot of the “Great Books” as well as “Junk,” and didn’t actually see what was to many a huge difference between them!

12. Samples of “Tolkien Criticism 1954-1973” are listed at the Tolkien Collector’s Guide and references Irwin’s essay on Tolkien; the essay in the Hillegas anthology is on Charles Williams.

13. From what I can tell, the term “Oxford Movement” seems to refer to the “Oxford Christians,” but this is not a topic I’m familiar with except in the most basic sense that it seems important to discussions about religion and the Inklings.

14. The fact that “seminal” (yes, based on the literal “semen”) was used as a figure of speech to denote important literary criticism is another indication of just who thought themselves the default CREATORS in literary studies as an academic field. The metaphor may have been used in other fields, but I know it from literary criticism, and at one point in my angry young feminist phase started using “ovular” in regard to major feminist authors’ work!

15. I was surprised to see that “This Rough Magic” (from Shakespeare’s Tempest) was not in quotation marks which I’d expect these days. Maybe the idea was “everybody would know it was from Shakespeare so no need to mark it as such”?

16. As I used to tell my students, it can be useful to check an encyclopedia (way back in the days before Wikipedia existed) as a place to get basic information and (if a good encyclopedia) some expert sources when they are starting their research project! But it wasn’t enough to stop there (and I more or less said the same thing about Wikipedia in later years!).

17. In my experience, academic anthologies often get their start in a paper session at a conference, but since most paper sessions in the humanities are limited to three-four presenters, the editors do a call for proposals, or invite others to submit their work. Haldane’s essay was first published in 1946 (The Modern Quarterly which, according to Wikipedia, was the first British Marxist academic journal; there’s an American journal, The Modern Quarterly as well — right now, I’m guessing that Haldane published in the British one, but that’s a guess—and WOW, cool to see all these socialist Marxist journals way back in what a lot of *ahem* “conservative” people think was the good old days before the Woke Behemoths began trampling the universe!). Hillegas got permission from Allen & Unwin who published Haldane’s Everything Has a History to reprint the essay in Shadows. You can read a transcription of Haldane’s essay online, at the Marxist’s Internet Archive! Serendipity can happen online as well as in physical spaces!

18. A quick search online isn’t turning up much: Tolkien Gateway, Letter to G.E. Selby (14 December 1937), JRRT references Haldane slightingly; and this whatever it is at PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23674294/; OK, good, grief, Naomi Mitchison is Haldane’s SISTER, and Tolkien definitely knew and respected her work, and exchanged letters with her as I recall: https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2017/03/28/the-tolkien-letter-must-read/; a few Lewis scholars talking about Haldane’s “polemic.” Will have to do more when time allows.

19. That issue is definitely one that Tolkien struggled with—would be a fascinating topic for someone interested in religion and science and how the two discourses engage but not my topic!

20. My first question would be what is the definition of “real science fiction” and how does Lewis’s work differ from that category? Is it only his religion which makes his work “notreal” science fiction (possible underlying assumption is that all all scientists are atheists and all sf writers are scientists [both proven wrong over the years]). Oh, and how do you square this generalization with the fact that Lewis also wrote fantasy, hmmmm?

21. My second question would be what is the “inherited world of Christianity,” and what makes Lewis’s Christianity different (hmmm, same structure as above!). There is a reason one of my mantras for my students was “define your terms, pls.” Also one of my criteria for evaluating critical/analytical writing at all levels.

22. Ditto the two questions above for my third: what do you mean by “novels…in the ordinary sense,” and where, again, how is Lewis a novelist who isn’t really a novelist by some definition I have that I cannot bother to define for readers who might have a different definition especially those trained in literary studies which includes genre studies from which you want to remain as far away as possible?

23. The convention in academic literary criticism is to not use honorifics, just names, starting with the full name the first time someone is mentioned or cited, then following with last name only.