Map to Tolkien Studies Bibliographies on WfI

Links to bibliographies here or elsewhere online (w/bonus bibliographic essay discussion!)

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

This post is an overview for bibliographies hosted on Writing from Ithilien as well as links to bibliographies and other research resources on the internet. My bibliographies are all Works in Progress, and I welcome additions to them (added to the comments) and suggestions. I will be updating as time goes along, but I no longer have access to the academic/subscription databases since I retired.

If you have a bibliography on a specific aspect of Tolkien studies (which, in this space, includes adaptations, transformative works, and reception/response studies) that you would like to share, I’ll be happy to include it (as I have with Clare Moore’s annotated bibliography on “Disability in Tolkien Studies)!

Quick definitions: a bibliography is a list of sources. An annotated bibliography consists of the list with short annotations (usually summaries or summaries plus evaluations) of the sources. A bibliographic essay is an analysis of the sources on the bibliography.

Bibliographies hosted on Writing from Ithilien

Clare Moore: Annotated Bibliography on Disability in Tolkien Studies

Robin Anne Reid: Bibliography: Scholarship on Racisms and “Tolkien”

Robin Anne Reid: Working Bibliography: Tolkien and Religion

Robin Anne Reid: Bibliography: Feminist/Gender/Queer Tolkien Scholarship

Robin Anne Reid: Bibliography: Tolkien and Film

Robin Anne Reid: Selected Bibliography of Robin's Readings

Bibliographies from elsewhere on the Web

Drout, Michael and Hilary Wynne: Tom Shippey's J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look Back at Tolkien Criticism Since 1982 Bibliographic essay, plus bibliography.

Anna Smol and Gavin Foster: Descriptive Bibliography: Tolkien’s Alliterative Verses Housed on a dedicated website with additional resources on alliterative poetry.

Richard West: An Annotated Bibliography of Tolkien Criticism: Supplement Two

Justin Keena: Tolkien and Old English: An Annotated Bibliography

Philip Mitchell: A Beginner’s Guide to Tolkien Criticism

David Bratman: The Inklings in Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography

David Bratman also organizes the annual bibliography of scholarship on Tolkien published annually in Tolkien Studies (available only through Project Muse, a subscription database, or by subscription at West Virginia University Press). The Tolkien Gateway wiki contains a table of contents for each volume.

Bibliographic resources that are not formatted as bibliographies

Douglas Anderson: Index to The Journal of Tolkien Research Volume 1 through Volume 9, Issue 1

Douglas Anderson: Index to Tolkien Studies Volume 1 (2004) through Volume 18 (2021)

Oronzo Cilli: Tolkien's Library: An Annotated Checklist Link goes to a description of the Walking Tree Press publication.

Janet Brennan Croft: Bibliographic Resources for Literature Searches on J.R.R. Tolkien

Janet Brennan Croft and Edith Crowe: Mythlore Index Plus (Electronic)

Tolkien Gateway Wiki: An Index of Writings by J.R.R. Tolkien

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I confess it freely: when I was a student, I hated doing bibliographies! I loved doing research, mind you, finding and reading the scholarship. I just hated typing up (on a manual typewriter back in the day) the “Works Cited” or “Bibliography” for my essays.

I still say I hate doing bibliographies, but all my friends laugh at me because at some point, I’m not quite sure when, I became fascinated with finding secondary sources, analyzing them, and then writing bibliographic essays, as well as learning about the important work bibliographers do in creating resources for scholars.

I think one reason for the change was my experiences realizing I had to teach my students (undergraduate and graduate) how to do research, how to evaluate and select sources, and how to engage with the ideas and cite the sources for their work in my classes. But honestly, the major reason was probably Tolkien!¹

Bibliographic scholarship in Tolkien studies originated with annotated bibliographies that attempted comprehensive coverage of Tolkien criticism. Richard West's 1970 Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist covered fan and academic criticism from the 1920s to 1969 and first appeared in Orcrist #1 before being published by the Kent State University Press. A second updated edition was published in 1981, and a third volume had selected criticism from 1981-2004.² A second annotated bibliography, by Judith Johnson, was published by Greenwood in 1986: it covered critical and academic criticism up to 1984.³

In 2001, Michael D. C. Drout and Hilary Wynne published a bibliographic essay accompanied by an extensive bibliography in Envoi. Drout and Wynne evaluate the patterns in Tolkien criticism, identify significant problems, and present their criteria for strong scholarship on the legendarium in future. Their focus was primarily on academic, primarily but not exclusively peer-reviewed scholarship, and their purpose was evaluative rather than comprehensive: meaning, they wanted to identify the best scholarship that was done and warn against weaknesses they were seeing in the scholarship of the time.

My work in recent years has argued for the usefulness of themed/focused bibliographic essays, given the growth and increasingly multi-disciplinary approaches in Tolkien scholarship since the Peter Jackson films were released. The two themed bibliographic essays I have published are: "The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliographic Essay" in Perilous and Fair (Croft and Donovan, 2015) and "Race in Tolkien Studies: A Bibliographic Essay" in Tolkien and Alterity (Vaccaro and Kisor, 2017).⁴

In "Female Characters," I analyze changes in the forty-three years of scholarship on female characters (1971-2013), concluding that the changes over time showed an increase of work on the topic, the inclusion of new critical theories and methods, and a shift in publication venues from fan publications to peer-reviewed journals and anthologies.

In "Race in Tolkien Studies," I analyze the twelve years of scholarship on race (2003-2015), noting the extent to which Peter Jackson’s live-action films led to increased interest, popular and academic, in Tolkien’s work as well as more debate over questions of race and racism. I saw less change over the short period of time than in the essay on female characters.⁵

While there is a growing body of work on the topic, the scholarship on races/racisms and Tolkien scholarship seems to be divided between "those who see Tolkien or his work as racist and those who see Tolkien or his work as celebrating diversity and multi-cultural cooperation" (33-4). I identified the cause of the split as due to a theoretical difference in regard to the definition of racism: scholars who work with the general definition (often based on a dictionary definition) of racism as limited to individual dislike, or bigotry, tend to defend Tolkien (the human being). In contrast, those working with sociological or other critical race definitions of racism as systemic, tend to focus on the ways in which Tolkien’s work can both reproduce and challenge the racist ideologies (multiple) current during his lifetime (see Fimi and Stuart for racism.

My analysis incorporated recent debates about critical race theories in medieval studies relating to the growth of White supremacists who seek to return to an imagined White Middle Ages and concluded with the need to move beyond the either/or structure of the current debate and to find ways to engage with race and Tolkien, a need I would say is even more imperative in 2023. That need is one reason why I am doing a Substack, open-access and free, to share ideas, events, and tools (like bibliographies — why reinvent the wheel yourself if you don’t have to!).

1. I talk about my journey to bibliographic scholarship (and fanzines! so archival research as well) in my published GOH talk, "On the Shoulders of Gi(E)nts: The Joys of Bibliographic Scholarship and Fanzines in Tolkien Studies," (Mythlore, vol. 37, no. 2, article 3).

2. I was lucky to hear Richard present a number of scholarly papers on Tolkien’s legendarium at conferences even before I learned about his immensely valuable bibliographical publications. We lost Richard in November 29, 2020: David Bratman’s tribute to him can be read here.

3. I cannot find Johnson’s work discussed on any of the fan reference works, nor were there as many editions/copies made/distributed (so the remaining copies available via Amazon and other used book sellers are very expensive).

4. In many cases, bibliographic essays are published in journals and collections which are expensive to purchase or access. If you are unable to afford either of my two publications, please email me at robinareid AT fastmail.com, and I will send you a pdf of the requested chapter for your personal scholarly use. I am also making the bibliographies (absent the analytical essays) available on my Substack where I can update them as time goes on because that’s another thing about bibliographic work: it’s a neverending project because new work is published continually (in more media than ever!). If there is anyone out there tracking the Tolkien podcasts for instance, I would welcome an annotated list of podcasts!

5. As I discuss in my introduction to "Nine Tolkien Scholars Respond to Charles W. Mills’s “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto,” published in Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, article 13, 2023, the posthumous publication of the Afro-Jamaican philosopher’s essay, which was written in the late 1980s/early 1990s but which Mills could not get published at the time, completely changes the chronology and narrative of scholarship on race, racism, and Tolkien.