Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote:I finally got a copy of this, primarily so that I could read Charles Noad's essay "On the Construction of 'The Silmarillion'" and see how much overlap there is with my work. Not much, I am happy to say. There is considerably more overlap with the sections on the individual chapters of The Silmarillion in the Reader's Guide of Scull and Hammond's massive Tolkien Companion. There is, in fact, one statement in Noad's essay that my work shows to be inaccurate. I am pondering whether or not to point that out.
Unless it is the tiniest of trifles, do. It is definitely appropriate for your work to respond to earlier scholarship -- that's just the sort of thing your reviewer is looking for, I'd guess. How much emphasis the correction deserves is another matter.
I have only glanced through some of the other essays. David Bratman's essay on "The Literary Value of the History of Middle-earth" seems particularly interesting, as does Scull's "The Development of Tolkien's Legendarium" and Hammond's "A Continuing and Evolving Creation".
Again, where you can, cite these articles to show how your work responds to or develops earlier ideas.
I have to say, for the price charged for this work, I think we have a right to expect more. It is about 275 pages of fairly large print, and yet was quite a bit more expensive than the 2,250-page plus of dense small print of the J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide.
Well, the
J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia sells for about twice the cost of
Tolkien's Legendarium, is about three times longer, and of much more
variable quality; David Bratman contributed to both: ask him which he thinks if more valuable. Here's what Michael Drout and Hilary Wynne had to say in their 2002
article, "Tom Shippey's
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look Back at Tolkien Criticism Since 1982":
More specialized than the Clark and Timmons collection, but of even higher scholarly quality, is Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on the History of Middle-earth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter. The Legendarium collection focuses primarily on the posthumously published twelve-volume History of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien, but of course studies of these texts are of necessity linked to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, since The History of Middle-earth and these books created and drew upon Tolkien's series of interconnected legends. Among the essays, Charles E. Noad's painstaking work at tracing the composition of The Silmarillion will not be easily surpassed. David Bratman's essay on "The Literary Value of The History of Middle-earth is a fair-minded approach to analyzing the problem of whether or not The History of Middle-earth should be seen as literature or merely scholarly source material. Verlyn Flieger's "In the Footsteps of Ælfwine" (discussed above) is essential for understanding the links between English history, legend, and Tolkien's work, and Paul Edmund Thomas does an admirable job of looking at Tolkien's style in his investigation of some of Tolkien's narrators. Finally, although the linguistics of Tolkien's invented Elvish languages is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that the essay "Three Elvish Verse Modes: Ann-thennath, Minlamad thent/estent, and linnod" by Patrick Wynne and Carl F. Hostetter, is the clearest and most approachable effort in this subject that we have yet encountered.
Also, you might be amused by another would-be Tolkien scholar's
experience trying to track down the relevant secondary literature, at first through the library:
There comes a time in every Encyclopedist’s life when you realize: 1. You are never going to get a single issue of Mallorn or Mythlore from anyone, anywhere. 2. Whatever Inklings: Jahrbuch fur Literatur und Asthetik is, you’re not going to get that, either. 3. In fact, perhaps it’s best if you give up on trying to get any decent journal articles at all. 4. The 1992 Centenary Conference Proceedings is cited by every Tolkien scholar – it’s just brimming with first-rate articles by the stars of the field. You’re not going to get that, either. It’s out of print and rare. 5. Tolkien’s Legendarium is indispensable for anyone studying the History of Middle-earth books (like The Treason of Isengard). You’re not going to get it. It’s not even in the catalogue --
Oh, yes I am! Dammit, I’m going to buy it!
Yeah. There came a time . . . when money changed hands. I bought the Legendarium off eBay, for a slight discount. I bought The Peoples of Middle-earth (HoME XII). I bought Tolkien Studies, vol. 2. I bought Rosebury’s book (the best discovery of the summer!) And --this was actually so painful it was fun-- I bought
Scholarship & Fantasy: Proceedings of The Tolkien Phenomenon. Anglicana Turkuensia, no. 12. Ed. by K.J. Batterbee. Turku: University of Turku, 1993
from Finland, no less. Since any kind of international money order or check effectively doubled the cost to either them or me, I paid for it eventually by stuffing cash euros in an envelope and mailing them off in a burst of optimism.
)
Ain't no way I'm quitting now, after all this work.
