Recent Tolkien Events & Publications
Enjoy!
Verlyn Flieger is teaching an online course through Politics and Prose (a Washington, D.C. independent bookstore): Finding Tolkien’s Essays in His Fiction.
The course topics are listed at the link: the class is scheduled over four Sundays: October 29, November 5, 12, 19 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET Online.
The latest edition of Mythlore is live: Volume 42, Number 1 Fall/Winter 2023, #143 (2023).
Mythlore is *always* worth reading, but I’m linking to some of the works by friends of mine that I can recommend (along with a group of responses to Charles W. Mills’s recently published essay!)
Below are the authors, titles, and abstracts: but there is much more in the issue (more essays, more notes, and a large batch of reviews).
ESSAYS:
Tom Emmanuel’s "'It is 'about' nothing but itself': Tolkienian Theology Beyond the Domination of the Author."
Abstract: There is a broad stream of Christian interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction, especially The Lord of the Rings, which views it as the intentionally, essentially Christian work of an intentionally, essentially Christian author. This reductive, exclusivist approach does not do justice to the complex, generative interactivity between Tolkien’s faith, the faith of his readers (or lack thereof), and the text itself. Building on work by Verlyn Flieger, Michael Drout, and Robin A. Reid, this paper interrogates how Christian Tolkien scholarship drafts Tolkien the human sub-creator to perform Foucault’s author-function by suppressing his contradictions and painting a figure whose life and works speak with a single, authoritative voice. Then, drawing on progressive Christian and Jewish hermeneutics and Tolkien’s own writings on intent and the freedom of the reader, it proposes a hermeneutics of Tolkienian inspiration that honors Tolkien’s Roman Catholic foundations, the sub-creative integrity of his secondary world, and the religious diversity of the readers who draw such deep wells of meaning from it. In so doing, it intervenes in ongoing conflict in the field of Tolkien Studies and Tolkien fandom more broadly over diverse interpretations of his fiction and the control of Tolkienian meaning.
Ethan Danner’s “Through Fire and Water: The Exodus of the Gondothlim”
Abstract: Despite being one of the earliest Middle-earth texts and a central component of the legendarium, J.R.R. Tolkien's Fall of Gondolin has received far less attention than the tale deserves. Building upon the works of David Greenman, Bruce Alexander, and Austin Freeman and their studies comparing The Fall of Gondolin to Virgil's Aeneid as well as Tom Shippey's monograph, The Road to Middle-earth, this article seeks to expand current scholarship surrounding The Fall of Gondolin by the examination of Exodus, as both a Medieval and religious text, as a potential source for the narrative structure, characters, and themes found in Tolkien's Fall of Gondolin.
NOTES
Verlyn Flieger’s "A Fearful Weapon"
Abstract: The changes to Tolkien's cosmology introduced in "Myths Transformed" were not well received. Certainly their realism is a 180% turn for the man who declared unequivocally that "Fantasy remains a human right" (72). Have Tolkien's revisions, radical as they are, been “a fearful weapon” against his own creation? And if they have, how has the perception of that creation changed since the publication of Morgoth's Ring in 1993? Has Tolkien's weapon destroyed his imaginary world?
Kristine Larsen’s “The Sun, the Son, and the Silmarillion: Christopher Tolkien and the Copernican Revolution of Morgoth’s Ring”
Abstract: Among the most central of Tolkien’s myths is the creation of the Sun and Moon as the last fruit and flower of the Two Trees of Valinor. The death of the Trees is central in a long chain of events that directly leads to the later battles, kin slayings, and geological upheavals in Middle-earth. It is therefore curious that during the writing of The Lord of the Rings (and continuing into the later 1950s and 1960s), Tolkien began second-guessing himself, and became concerned with what he called “the astronomically absurd business of the making of the Sun and Moon.” Beginning with the experimental 1948 “Round World” cosmology of the Ainulindalë C*, the elder Tolkien explores what his son terms a “radical transformation of the astronomical myth,” changes that appear jarring to his son’s sensibilities concerning what his father came to call a “primitive” mythology but Christopher defends as “in conception beautiful.” As the cosmological writings become further removed from the medievalist geocentric worldview reflected in writings Christopher (himself a medieval scholar) had been carefully collecting and editing for nearly two decades, his commentary seems severely curtailed, mainly limited to philology and drawing a few cursory connections to similar passages within the same volume.
Robin Anne Reid, Bianca Beronio, Robert T. Tally, Cait Coker, CamiAgan, Robert Stuart, Charlotte Krausz, Tom Ue, and Helen Young, "Nine Tolkien Scholars Respond to Charles W. Mills’s ‘“The Wretched of Middle-Earth”: An Orkish Manifesto.’
Abstract: In spite of being written over three decades ago, Mills’s posthumously published “Manifesto” not only anticipates but transcends the majority, if not the totality, of the scholarship on Tolkien, race, and racisms which has been published since 2003. Scholars in philosophy and related fields familiar with Mills’s work will recognize that the essay was a “critical exploration of [how] a fictional racial hierarchy strikingly illuminates the ongoing influence of certain old racist ideas on our present day [sic] social realities.” Reid has invited a wide-ranging Tolkienists who have read the essay to respond, briefly, on the significance of the essay to their work.