Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review: Its Origins and Evolutions

So David Bratman of Tolkien Studies just posted here that Verlyn Flieger is retiring from the journal after 22 years. I wondered: has it really been that long since Mike Drout and I first discussed the idea, and asked Verlyn to join us in founding the journal?  Yes, it has indeed been 22 years.  I dug into my old emails with Mike. Here is the seed of the whole operation.

I emailed Mike in the wee hours of 27 September 2001:

I have thought for years that we need some journal to publish a “Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies”. In fact, for some years I have wanted someone to found a _Tolkien Studies_ academic journal. I’d happily work for it and contribute. But we’d need some academic affiliation to sponsor it and to get legitimacy. I wouldn’t think that it needed to be a frequent periodical, but if we could get some place to do it as an annual (in which someone could do a Year’s Work…), well, count me in.

Mike replied on the same day, agreeing, and suggesting perhaps Verlyn Flieger (whom, at the time, Mike had briefly met only once at Kalamazoo) could also be involved. I then asked Verlyn, and she immediately came aboard. Thus Tolkien Studies was founded.

I lasted ten years, until 2012 (see here for the reasons I left). David Bratman was added when I left. And Verlyn lasted 22 years. Now welcome to Yvette Kisor as the newest of the three co-editors. Mike remains on, 22 years and counting. I look forward to TS20, which David says is due out later this year.

 

Some New Tolkienian Checklists, etc.

I've had a number of recent publications that I'd like to note here. 

First, Tolkien Studies no. 18 (2021) is out, and it contains a fine obituary of Richard C. West by John D. Rateliff, paired with my updated "Richard C. West: A Checklist"--originally published in Tolkien Studies no. 2 (2005).  

Also, in the current issue of The Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 13 issue 2 (2021), I have published three indices, as follows:

1. "Index to The Journal of Tolkien Research Volume 1 through Volume 13 issue 1" updated from its two previous appearances. 

2. "Index to Tolkien Studies Volume 1 (2004) through Volume 18 (2021)"

3. "A Checklist and Index to Lembas Extra 1985 to 2019"

All three are freely available as pdfs here. 

I also posted a new up-to-date version of my "Tom Shippey on J.R.R. Tolkien: A Checklist through 2022" at my Academia.edu page, here.  This is the third version of it. The first appeared in Tolkien Studies no. 1 (2004), and an updated one, "Tom Shippey on J.R.R. Tolkien: A Checklist through mid-2014," also appears on my Academia.edu page.  

These checklists and indices all began as personal aids to my memory--I spend too much time searching for various things I know I read some place in, say, some volume of Tolkien Studies, but which one?  I thought I would share them in case other people might find them useful. I may polish up a few more, and post them similarly. One serial I'm happy that I don't need to index is Mythlore, for there is already an excellent index, Mythlore Index Plus, compiled by (and maintained by) Janet Brennan Croft and Edith Crowe. It is freely available here.

And speaking of Mythlore, my book review of God and the Gothic (2018) by Alison Milbank, recently appeared there in issue no. 139 (Fall/Winter 2021).  The full issue is available here, while my review is also available at my Academia.edu page (link above). 

I have a short note coming out this winter in the next Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society. A few other non-Tolkien-related items are under consideration at other journals, and there are a few other Tolkien-related pieces close to completion. More about them once they land. 

The Qenya Alphabet, Tolkien Studies 9, etc.

Just published is The Qenya Alphabet by J.R. R. Tolkien, edited by Arden R. Smith, issue number 20 of the journal Parma Eldalamberon.  Here Smith presents some forty documents by Tolkien, examples of his Elvish lettering that is now known as tengwar and associated with Fëanor, though at the time of creation of these documents, beginning in 1931, there is no indication of these associations.  The documents are a motley bunch---some are clearly examples of Tolkien practicing the craft: there are excerpts copied from Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter" in Through the Looking-Glass, from the Pater Noster, from "God Save the King", and from various contemporary letters that Tolkien had written (to E.V. Gordon and C.S. Lewis, among others).  And there are also examples in various styles of handwriting, from versions with pointed letters, to more cursive ones, formal and less formal. Arden Smith has done an excellent job presenting these documents, transliterating them as well as presenting normalized versions, and providing a wealth of commentary. For, in addition to the information on the elvish writing system, there are a number of biographical and literary insights that can be gleaned from the examples Tolkien used. Highly recommended. For ordering details, click here.

Over at the blog Mythoi, Morgan Thomsen has a very interesting post about "Tolkien and the Illustrations of Robert J. Lee".  It describes eighteen illustrations to a reprint of chapter one of The Hobbit in an anthology The Children’s Treasury of Literature, edited by Bryna and Louis Untermeyer, published in England in 1966.  While Thomsen makes many interesting points, the context around this anthology is much more complex and deserves to be delineated further.  

1966

The Children's Treasury of Literature is merely the British retitling of the American anthology The Golden Treasury of Children's Literature (1966), which itself is only a selection of material from a ten-volume series, published from 1961 through 1963 by the Golden Press, the New York office of the Western Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin, a publisher known in America for the "Golden Books" series of books for children (hence the "Golden" in the U.S. title, which doubtless meant little to a British audience so the word was removed). Tolkien's chapter from The Hobbit, with the illustrations by Robert J. Lee, originally appeared in volume 5, Wonder Lands (1962). This volume begins with extracts from The Little White Bird by J.M. Barrie (including the first appearance of the character Peter Pan, predating Barrie's play), a section from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, followed by the Tolkien chapter, then an excerpt from The Happy Moomins by Tove Jansson, and sections from T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, George Macdonald's The Princess and the Goblin, and Dinah Maria Mulock Craik's The Little Lame Prince. Interestingly, the other excerpt that Robert J. Lee illustrated in this volume is that by Tove Jansson, who was herself an illustrator, and coincidentally in the same year as this volume was published (1962) she illustrated the Swedish translation of The Hobbit.

1962

Thus Robert J. Lee's illustrations date from 1962, not 1966, and in that context can be understood as coming from the time before the explosion of popularity of Tolkien's work which began in 1965, not after it, and perhaps in some small way this volume contributed to that great surge in public awareness. Robert J. Lee (1921-1994) was born in California, and educated at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.  He was an instructor at the Pratt Insitute in Brooklyn in 1955-56, and became an associate professor at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York, in 1962. The first of many books he illustrated was This Is a Town (1957), by Polly Curran, and Lee did other work for the Golden Press, including Fifty Famous Fairy Tales (1965). 

Lee's illustrations to The Hobbit are printed slightly differently in the 1962 book from the 1966 one, though the page layouts are identical in the two volumes (i.e., pages 54 though 78 in the 1962 volume are laid out identically to pages 462 through 486 in the 1966 volume). Morgan Thomsen detailed Lee's eighteen illustrations in the 1966 volume in his blog: four in full color, five duotone, and nine monochrome. In the 1962 version, there are four in full color, six duotone, and eight monochrome, the difference being in the illustration of Belladonna Took (Thomsen's #3, duotone in brown and black on page 56 of the 1962 book; monochrome in black on page 464 of the 1966 volume). 

1962

1966

Of the other duotone illustrations,  sometimes the brown and black of 1962 becomes blue and black in 1966 (Thomsen's #1,#8, #9, #18) or the green and black of 1962 becomes yellow and black in 1966 (#11), while the colors of the monotones shift too: the brown of #6 in 1962 becomes blue in 1966; the brown of #12,  #15, and #16 in 1962 becomes black in 1966; the blue of #13 in 1962 becomes black in 1966; and the green of #14 and #17 in 1962 becomes black in 1966. The full color illustrations (Thomsen #2, #5, #7, and #10) are almost the same, though the colors are slightly different.

1962

1966

Of course the success (or lack thereof) of Lee in capturing the essence of Tolkien's story remains in the eyes of the beholder. 

Finished copies of Tolkien Studies volume 9 (2012) have recently shipped, and the text of this volume has been available via the subscription database Project Muse for some weeks now.  When I left Tolkien Studies back in March, I had already drafted some of what would have become the "Book Notes" section for this volume.  Since the content of what I wrote is not covered in the new volume, I figure I might as well share it below.

**

Books Notes

Perhaps the most curious Tolkien publication of 2011 was a new edition of Oliphaunt, a twenty-four page picture book illustrated by Dan McGeehan, published by The Child's World, Mankato, Minnesota, part of their series of "Poetry for Children". Oddly there is no mention of copyright for the Tolkien poem, and this edition was apparently withdrawn soon after publication.  ISBN 9781609731557.

Another curious publication that appears to be a new book is J.R.R. Tolkien's Double Words and Creative Process: Language and Life, by Arne Zettersten, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Though the book itself gives no hint, it is merely a translation into English (presumably by the author himself) from the Swedish original, Tolkien--min vän Ronald och hand världar [Tolkien: My Friend Ronald and His Worlds] (Stockholm, 2008).  Though much of it is based on previous Tolkien scholarship, Zettersten adds interesting recollections of conversations with Tolkien. His style is, unfortunately, discursive and repetitive. Price $85.00. ISBN 9780230623149.  

From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages (Oxford University Press), edited by Michael Adams, has, as one of its eight chapters, "Tolkien's Invented Languages"by E.S.C. Weiner and Jeremy Marshall, two of the three co-authors of The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006). Tolkien-scholar Arden R. Smith also contributes a chapter on "Confounding Babel: International Auxiliary Languages". Price $19.95. ISBN 9780192807090.

The Journal of Inklings Studies debuted in 2011, with two issues, no. 1 (March 2011) and no. 2 (October 2011).  These issues are predominately concerned with C.S. Lewis, and the only Tolkien-related content is a book review of Dinah Hazell's The Plants of Middle-earth, a book published five years earlier in 2006. One hopes for more (and timelier) Tolkien coverage in future volumes. For more information, see www.inklings-studies.com. ISSN 2045-8797 (print); 2045-8800 (online). 

**

Here's the cover of the 2011 version of Oliphaunt. I note that the publisher's website gives more details, showing a few sample pages, but says that "This product is not available for purchase (Withdrawn from sale)". See here. 

Publishing Mordor-style

Academic publishing is at root a kind of scam.  The publishers get away with not paying academics (or paying them very little) because academics mostly need the publishing credits and the exposure which is vital to their academic survival, and they are (supposedly) earning a living by teaching.  This was the traditional model for the bulk of the twentieth century.  With regard to an academic journal, like Tolkien Studies, the editors make a contract with an academic publisher, who regularly brings out each new issue of the journal and deals with all aspects of printing and distributing.  Most of the time (and this is true for Tolkien Studies) the editors receive nothing other than some extra copies of the finished issues of their journal, donating time as well as personal costs while the publisher keeps all the profit (if any) or absorbs the loss (if any).     

This is the model upon which we at Tolkien Studies signed a contract with West Virginia University Press in December 2003.  Pat Connor was then the director West Virginia University Press, and he told us that it usually takes a new academic journal about five years to establish itself and pay its own way.  Just as volume 3 of Tolkien Studies was coming out in 2006, Pat told us we’d managed to do this in three years.  The trade offs with this kind of arrangement are easily understood.  We had a publisher to publish and distribute our work, and our audience of Tolkien readers and scholars had the opportunity to purchase their own copies of the journal and support it—or at least to use the journal in libraries that had purchased it. Not an ideal system, but the trade-offs made it work.

Other factors have grown up in recent years that complicate this scenario.  On the one hand, the bean-counters at universities have been putting the squeeze on university presses, not merely to break even, but to contribute to the fiscal bottom line of the university.  On the other hand, the rise of electronic publishing has brought about some major changes in the industry, and some of these changes are especially pernicious. These ill-effects are mostly seen in the adding of a new set of middle-men between the publisher and the reader—the firms that distribute “content”. These firms make their money in various ways—e.g., via attaching advertisements on the web, or by taking subscription fees. The people who get squeezed by this scenario are the creators of the “content”—the writers, editors, artists, musicians, etc. There is a fascinating book by Robert Levine that details this problem in all of its manifestations called FreeRide: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How theCulture Business Can Fight Back; unfortunately, despite the subtitle (which is slightly altered for its paperback edition) it doesn’t provide any feasible solutions. 

The way this problem arises in academic publishing is in the rise of subscription databases for which libraries have to fork up an annual fee just for access to large databases of various journals (and if a library doesn't pay the annual fee, it loses access to all of the back issues, which is not the case with printed volumes). The fees that are charged to libraries amount to extortion, and some small fraction of these fees are passed on to the original publishers of the various journals.  This problem has been getting an increasing amount of attention in the last year or two.  See:

“Library, Inc.” by Daniel Goldstein in The Chronicle of Higher Education

“Academic Publishers Make Murdoch look like a Socialist” by George Monbiot in The Guardian

Many additional articles center their point around scientific journals, but journals in the humanities are under the same yoke. Some in the sciences have begun boycotts.  See: 

“Publishers Be Damned!” by Stephen Foley, in The Independent

“Academics Revolt Against Elsevier’s Journal Pricing” by Robert Andrews at PaidContent.org

So, how does this all relate to Tolkien Studies?  Well, Tolkien Studies was picked up by Project Muse, one of these subscription databases which can only be accessed at a member library—i.e., one that pays Project Muse a subscription fee. Project Muse in turn pays West Virginia University Press an annual fee based on usage of Tolkien Studies articles.  Though by contract West Virginia University Press is supposed to supply the editors of Tolkien Studies with an annual statement, the only time we actually got one was in November 2008.  Here we learned that West Virginia University Press was receiving a payment from Project Muse of nearly $20,000 for usage on volume 5 (2008), this income being completely separate from the usual subscriptions and expenses. 

The timing of this financial statement coincided with Pat Connor leaving West Virginia University Press.  A replacement took over as Director, with whom we had virtually no contact for a few years.  Gradually, however, we noticed changes.  After Tolkien Studies volume 6 came out, I received queries from a good number of people asking why it wasn’t available through Amazon, as each new volume had been in the past (sometimes in discounted form).  Eventually I was told after querying the Press that the higher ups had decided to eliminate ISBNs on the individual volumes and thus they could only be ordered directly from the Press (direct sales equals more money for the press).  The next year I learned that volume 6 had gone out of print (the only volume of Tolkien Studies to do so), and was told that for some reason the Press didn’t do as many copies as with the other volumes. 

As Book Review Editor for Tolkien Studies, I incurred additional expenses when mailing review copies to reviewers, and buying copies of some books to be reviewed because a number of publishers refused to supply review copies. (These expenses add up, especially when you mail books overseas.)  For the first several volumes, we editors split these costs among ourselves.  But as I learned that West Virginia University Press was receiving healthy payments from Project Muse, I checked with Pat Connor who told me that I could save my receipts and the Press would cover those costs. 

When I submitted my receipts (amounting to some $250) in early 2011, the new Director, however, proved difficult and stand-offish, refusing to reimburse me more than $100 and then refusing to have any further discussion of the matter.  It’s one thing to do all this work on Tolkien Studies for nothing, but it’s another to be treated like the lowliest orc, who must pay out of their own pocket for the privilege of being a slave, owing to the scorched-earth policies of the likes of Barad-dûr University Press.  In fact it’s really galling. The impasse dragged on for many months, with various turns and wrinkles that I needn’t go into here.

The end has been reached.  I have ceased all involvement with Tolkien Studies.  Things could have been otherwise, but under the new climate of Mordor-styled publishing, I don’t fit in.  Like the scientists in the articles referenced above, I must question the value of putting a institutional pay-wall between a scholarly journal and its audience. It certainly doesn’t help scholarship by diminishing access to a journal solely in order to fill the coffers of its publisher and distributor.  The old model is broken, and there needs to be a new one.  A fair one. 

Roundup: TS8, More Stybiorn news, etc. etc.

Reports of printed copies of Tolkien Studies volume 8 being received have reached me from a couple of sources, though my own copies haven't yet arrived.  Nor does it currently (at the time of posting) seem possible to order the new volume via the West Virginia University Press order page, alas. [UPDATE: this has finally been fixed.]

Also on the Tolkien front, Doug Kane sends news of the imminent release of the paperback of his Arda Reconstructed, which has a redesigned cover, which I post here courtesy of Doug.  It looks quite nice.  

Paul Edmund Thomas has passed along some further information on the forthcoming reprint of E.R. Eddison's Styrbiorn the Strong, coming from University of Minnesota Press. It will indeed have the exquisite decorations by Eddison's brother-in-law, the artist Keith Henderson.  But the best news of all is that it will contain previously unpublished material intended for the book written by Eddison himself.  This includes a 1000 word dedicatory epistle to his brother Colin, and a 1500 word closing note that was used only in a very brief form, edited to less than a page.  Add to this Paul's Afterword and this makes for the most complete, and most desirable edition of Styrbiorn ever. One of Keith Henderson's decorations can be seen on the dust-wrapper to the original Jonathan Cape edition (right).

The dust-wrapper design of the Albert & Charles Boni edition (left) is uncredited, but Paul suggests that it is by Boris Artzybasheff, who certainly did the (also uncredited) design for the Boni edition of The Worm Ouroboros (published, like Stybiorn, in 1926).  

In my previous post I observed that by 1976 the publishing practice of comparing anything to Tolkien, in order to attempt to sell it,  had reached a ubiquitous level. Seeing Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet blurbed in the 1976 Pocket paperback edition as "a fantasy world that brings to mind the writings of Tolkien" set me to wondering how and when this phenomenon started.  I first read Tolkien in the summer of 1973, and I recall that by the time Terry Brook's Sword of Shannara came out in April 1977, the blurb on it ("For all those who have been looking for something to read since The Lord of the Rings") was utterly meaningless. So when did this start?

The earliest occurrence I can find (on a paperback volume) is actually appropriate.  It appears on the first printing (April 1967) of the Ballantine edition of The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison, where it says "an epic fantasy to compare with Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings'." The cover is even by Barbara Remington, who did the covers for the Ballantine paperback editions of The Hobbit and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings in 1965.  Can anyone find anything earlier, or some other pre-1970 uses? Perhaps even on hardcover volumes? I will note here that I checked the cover of every volume of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which ran from 1969-1974, and didn't find any such thing. Of course that was when the firm was run by Ian and Betty Ballantine---after they sold out and left in 1974, things changed.  Lester del Rey and Judy-Lynn del Rey ran the fantasy and science fiction imprints, and we can thank Lester del Rey for the careers of both Terry Brooks and Stephen R. Donaldson, boths triumphs of marketing over quality.

The other question that emerges out of this is how far were publishers willing to stretch credulity (and logic) in order to compare something to Tolkien.  What books got such misplaced attempts at marketing?  I do not mean this question necessarily to refer to literary quality, or the lack thereof.  Certainly Leonora Carrington's book is of a high quality and it seems merely publisher cynicism that they would attempt to market it so directly to the masses they perceived to all be Tolkien readers. Another case like this is Franz Werfel's Star of the Unborn (1946), which Bantam resurrected in May 1976 with the following description:  "A vision as magnificent and far-reaching as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or Frank Herbert's Dune".  It is labelled "Fantasy" on the spine, and the cover has a definite fantasy feel.  Again, it's of high literary quality, but of a style quite different from the high literary quality of Tolkien. Of course, in the wake of the moderate success of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which revived all sorts of older books and gave them them a "fantasy" label, thus bringing about the birth of a publishing category, publishers were looking for anything they might so label as fantasy.  Newcastle tried its own Forgotten Fantasy series which ran to more than a dozen books.  And I'm grateful to have seen such books reprinted at that time or perhaps it might have been years before I encountered them, so there certainly are plusses to consider in the growth of the label. 

The oddest of such books as I encountered is probably Astra and Flondrix (1976), by Seamus Cullen. I'll copy the front (very Boschian) and rear covers here.  The blurb on the rear cover is, in itself, priceless ("an erotic Tolkien"!). (Click on any of the images to see them in a larger size.)

News and Notes

The contents of Tolkien Studies volume 8 have gone live at Project Muse (the subscription database accessible in most universities and some public libraries). Jason Fisher first noted this on his blog, but you may need (for a time) to finagle the URL a bit to access the newest issue (read the comments at his blog entry).  Jason and a couple other people have also commented on the length of the review-essay of The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference: 50 Years of“The Lord of the Rings”.  Yes, indeed, it is large. But there are various reasons. In fact the first half was done and should have appeared in volume 7 last year, but we had to cut something, for a too large issue came together very late.  And usually a volume of essays has something like ten to twelve essays in it, so in order to have an in-depth reviews, one needs space, often 3,000 to 5,000 words.  And with the one hundred essays in the massive two-volumes of The Ring Goes Ever On,  well, you can easily do the math.  I'll leave the matter there--personally I think the extended coverage is justified in many ways.  And it is so much more than a book review, which is why it was given the header of review-essay.

John Rateliff gave this new blog a kindly welcome at his own blog. John's most recent (as of this writing) entry tells of the passing of the 20th Lord Dunsany, the artist and architect Edward John Carlos Plunkett (1939-2011), the grandson of the fantasist. I had been going to post a note about this, but John has said most of what I would have, so I'll merely refer readers to John's post and add a few points here.  First, one of Dunsany's late fantasy stories, a partial return to the form of thirty years earlier, was written in 1946 for his seven-year old grandson. This is "The Dwarf Holobolos and the Sword Hogbiter" which John has described in his thesis on Dunsany as a “blending of ‘Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth’ with Don Rodriguez, borrowing its style from one and the flavor of its marvels from the other. Amusing but not up to Dunsany’s usual standards.” It was first published in Collins for Boys and Girls no. 1 (July 1949), and reprinted in Worlds of Fantasy & Horror (a temporary re-titling of Weird Tales magazine), Summer 1994. The other point I'd like to make is that it's worth checking out this link to see examples of the artwork of Edward Plunkett. (Click on the header “Catalogue”.) 

I'd also like to make mention of the passing of Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), the last of the original surrealists. She died in Mexico, where she had lived for almost seventy years. A major figure in twentieth century art and sculpture, her fantasy fiction hides in the shadows of her other achievements, but it does have a following. Perhaps her most notable literary work is the novel The Hearing Trumpet (translated into French in 1974 and published in English in 1976, with illustrations by one of her sons, Pablo Weisz-Carrington). Here's the cover from my 1977 Pocket books edition, sporting the ubiquitous (even in those pre-Sword of Shannara days) blurb comparing it to Tolkien.  Among her other writings are the short novel The Stone Door (French translation 1976; English original 1977), and the collections The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below (1988), and The Seventh Horse and Other Tales (1988). Obituaries appear in The Guardian and in The New York Times.

And a new book on the horizon is the long-awaited anthology of essays from Oxford University Press, From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, edited by Michael Adams.  Tolkienist Arden R. Smith contributes the opening chapter on "International Auxiliary Languages", and the chapter on "Tolkien's Invented Languages" is by Edmund Weiner, one of the three co-authors of The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary.  The new collection is scheduled for November.  See the Amazon page.

Tolkien Studies volume 8 at the Printer

Tolkien Studies volume 8 is at the printers, and finished copies are expected to begin shipping towards the end of June. 311 pages this time.  The cover reproduces two extracts of letters by R. Q. Gilson as detailed in John Garth's very moving article.

The table of contents is reproduced below:

v  Editors’ Introduction

vii Conventions and Abbreviations

1 “Legend and History Have Met and Fused”: The Interlocution of Anthropology, Historiography, and Incarnation in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories”
Philip Irving Mitchell

23 Tolkien’s Goldberry and The Maid of the Moor
John M. Bowers

37 Language in Tolkien’s “Bagme Bloma”
Lucas Annear

51 “Wingless fluttering”: Some Personal Connections in Tolkien’s Formative Years
José Manuel Ferrández Bru

Notes and Documents:

67 Robert Quilter Gilson, T.C.B.S.: A Brief Life in Letters
John Garth

97 The Hen that Laid the Eggs: Tolkien and the Officers Training Corps
Janet Brennan Croft

114 Book Reviews
Compiled by Douglas A. Anderson
Contains reviews of Quenya Phonology: Comparative Tables, Outline of Phonetic Development, Outline of Phonology by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Gilson [review by John Garth];  Hither Shores volumes four and five [review by Mark T. Hooker]; Music in Middle-earth edited by Heidi Steimel and Friedhelm Schneidewind [review by Gerald Seaman]; Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien edited by Bradford Lee Eden [review by Gerald Seaman]; The Power of Tolkien’s Prose: Middle-Earth’s Magical Style by Steve Walker [review by Richard C. West]; The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, edited by Christopher Tolkien [review by Tom Shippey]; and Book Notes by Douglas A. Anderson.

143 Review-Essay: The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference: 50 Years of“The Lord of the Rings” two volumes, edited by Sarah Wells
Deidre A. Dawson

243 The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2008
David Bratman and Merlin DeTardo

297 Bibliography (in English) for 2009
Compiled by Rebecca Epstein and David Bratman with Michael D.C. Drout, Merlin DeTardo, and Douglas A. Anderson

309 Notes on Contributors

See the publisher's website.