Recommended Readings on Tolkien
Enjoy!
Not only is there more and more work being done on what I call the “Tolkien phenomenon” (meaning, not only his legendarium, including the posthumous publications Christopher Tolkien gave us, but also the multiple adaptations and the fandoms all around the world), but more and more the people doing the scholarship are making their work more freely available online. And while I will always cheerlead for open-access scholarly journals like Mythlore and The Journal of Tolkien Research, I also want to recommend scholars who make work available on their blogs/newsletters/etc.!
The three recommendations below also show the wide range of topics in Tolkien studies!
Tom Emmanuel shares his Oxonmoot presentation, “Tolkien the Post-Christian,” at Queer and Back Again. A teaser (the opening two paragraphs), but I recommend reading the whole thing for a beautifully written, nuanced, analysis of a question that is too often simplified to “opposing sides.”:
Commuting from my flat in Glasgow to the University where I study Tolkien and theology, I pass by no fewer than four church buildings. One of them has become a popular bar and concert venue. Another is now an upscale restaurant and theatre. A third has been converted into a block of flats. The final church houses a much-reduced congregation of the Church of Scotland. My walk to work captures, in miniature, the condition of post-Christian modernity. The social, psychological, and indeed physical architecture of Christianity can be found on every street corner, but fewer than fifty percent of English and Welsh identify as Christian (Roskams 2022).
Whether this is good or bad depends on whom you ask. It nevertheless points to a profound shift in the contemporary spiritual landscape. The philosopher Charles Taylor, in his magisterial book A Secular Age (2007), identifies World War I as a critical inflection point in declining religiosity in the West. Not coincidentally, it is also the critical inflection point in the creative life and career of J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien’s literary mythology develops and achieves mass popularity precisely during the period when religious affiliation begins to fall off dramatically.
Anna Smol, and her graduate assistants, supported by an Actual Grant!, have created an incredible resource for those interested in Tolkien’s alliterative poetry: Tolkien and Alliterative Verse. Besides all the resources, there is a blog, and the most recent entry opens discussion of an incredible new resource: the recent edition of Peter Grybauskas’s Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son and ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’ which makes some previously unpublished material available in print for the first time.
As her own teaser, Anna quotes Tolkien:
“But a poem perishes even as it is being uttered. To live it must be preserved in memory and be after repeated. And men die quicker than pictures or monuments; and the time soon comes when the memory must pass into a different mind and the repetition to another mouth, or perish. And this whole prolongation of life, this ‘tradition’ can only normally be accomplished in and through the language, the ‘habitual’ element and the most changeable.”
“Tradition of Versification,” page 97
I have probably recommended Cultus Dispatches the blog at the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild before, but it cannot be recommended too often and too highly!
The most recent entry, "Tolkien, His Gnarly Canon, and His Authority", analyzes the attitudes of fanfiction writers (from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data) as part of the exploration of “the complex ways in which different fans regard the authority of Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien, scholars, filmmakers, and fellow fans.”
As I wrote in the last article, Western culture has come to regard some people as having more authority over a creative work than others. The original creator would certainly be in this group—though not without caveats, as adaptations of books that flout the author's intentions don't generally raise much hullabaloo. This is because we have also come to see "rights"—which can be purchased—as granting the authority to change a text. People who deeply engage with and care about a text—fans, in other words—are not typically seen as having this authority. If you've ever read through a comment section that leans anti-fanfic, you'll be familiar with the arguments that liken fanfiction writers to all sorts of scoundrels and criminals.
Fan studies scholars, on the other hand, typically theorize that fanworks creators see authority differently. They do see themselves as having the authority to change another creator's published work for any reason at all, with the assumption that fanfiction writers do exactly this. Fan studies scholarship abounds with examples of fans flouting the original creator's authority for reasons noble and profound (e.g., centering the perspectives of characters from marginalized groups) to simple wish fulfillment (e.g., putting two characters in bed together who aren't involved in the original text). What is less often explored is the ways that fanfiction writers simultaneously make fanworks and are constrained by authority: appropriate ways to use the original texts and what changes it is acceptable to make.
But in my almost two decades in Tolkien fanfiction fandom, I've never believed it is that simple for Tolkien fandom (and others as well). Most of us respect Tolkien's authority to some degree. While some fanfiction writers would agree with the statement, "I'm willing to change anything about Tolkien's works that I want," most would not. The Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, which I ran in 2015 and 2020, the latter in collaboration with Maria K. Alberto, looks at three of these possible constraints: facts, morality, and Tolkien's inferred approval. The survey included writers and readers of Tolkien-based fanfiction, though I'm just looking at results from authors this time. Most items offered five possible responses: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, or No Opinion/Not Sure. When I use the small-a "agree," I include respondents who chose Agree or Strongly Agree, and similarly for small-d "disagree." In the 2015 survey, there were 1,052 participants, 642 of whom were fanfiction authors, and in 2020 there were 746 participants, 496 of whom were authors.