Tolkien Studies 14: an announcement

[calimac]

On behalf of myself and my co-editors, Michael D.C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger, here are the expected contents of volume 14 of the journal Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review. All of the works are now in the hands of our publisher, West Virginia University Press, and the volume is scheduled to be published in softcover and on Project MUSE later this year. - David Bratman, co-editor

Tolkien Studies 14 (2017)

• H.L. Spencer, "The Mystical Philosophy of J.R.R. Tolkien and Sir Israel Gollancz: Monsters and Critics"
  
  
• Christopher Gilson, "His Breath Was Taken Away: Tolkien, Barfield, and Elvish Diction"
  
  
• Kathy Cawsey, "Could Gollum Be Singing a Sonnet? The Poetic Project of The Lord of the Rings"
  
  
• Eleanor R. Simpson, "The Evolution of J.R.R. Tolkien's Portrayal of Nature: Foreshadowing Anti-speciesism"
  
  
• Leonard Neidorf, "J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur: Creation from Literary Criticism"
  
  
• Jeffrey J. MacLeod and Anna Smol, "Visualizing the Word: Tolkien as Artist and Writer"
  

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Notes and Documents

• Paul Tankard, "'Akin to my own inspiration': Mary Fairburn and the Art of Middle-earth"
  
  
• J. Silk, "A Note on the Sindarin Translation of the Name Daisy"
  
  
• Giovanni Costabile, "Stolen Pears, Unripe Apples: The Misuse of Fruits as a Symbol of Original Sin in Tolkien's The New Shadow and Augustine of Hippo's Confessions"
  

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Book Reviews

• A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins, reviewed by Arden R. Smith
  
  
• The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Verlyn Flieger; and The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Aleksandar Mikić with the assistance of Elizabeth Currie, reviewed by Dimitra Fimi
  
  
• The Feanorian Alphabet, Part 1; Quenya Verb Structure, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Gilson and Arden R. Smith, reviewed by Nelson Goering
  
  
• Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works, edited by Leslie A. Donovan, reviewed by Diana Pavlac Glyer
  
  
• Laughter in Middle-earth: Humour in and around the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Thomas Honegger and Maureen F. Mann, reviewed by David Bratman
  

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• David Bratman, Edith L. Crowe, Jason Fisher, John Wm. Houghton, John Magoun, Robin Anne Reid, "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2014"
  
  
• David Bratman, "Bibliography (In English) for 2015"

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Congratulations! The Costabile piece sounds particularly interesting to me. Back in 2005 or so, in a chance conversation, a friend who knew nothing of Tolkien briefly described the stolen-fruit passage from Augustine's "Confessions" to me, who had known nothing of Augustine, and I was blown away to realize that Tolkien must have had it mind when he wrote "The New Shadow". (A similar experience had happened about a year earlier when some colleagues worked through a reading of J.M. Barrie's short play "A Well Remembered Voice" in the large office / conference room we shared, and repeated references to "Trotter" plus a passage about a character so moved by someone's death that he didn't want to smoke his pipe any more slowly seeped into my head as I was pouring over spreadsheets.) I looked up the relevant Augustine text and posted a short comparison on TORN shortly after, but I left it at that. I think there was a large book on Tolkien (or maybe all the Inklings?) written by a husband-and-wife team in the past few years that also mentions the connection, but only in passing, so I look forward to seeing the subject given some actual analysis.

-MTD/neb