onto the Tolkien studies
Sep. 22nd, 2009 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacAccumulating things is an enjoyable pastime, especially when those things are for a purpose, and I've just finished accumulating everything I need to write "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2007," having heard no reason to suspect that my series is not to continue. The "everything" being all the books and articles I didn't already have that were in the bibliography of that year published in the latest Tolkien Studies.
There are some glitches in the bibliography, but that's not the problem. I have some powerful inter-library loan at my disposal (better than I had when at Stanford, where the ILL was behind a sign reading "Beware of the Leopard"), but acquiring items can sometimes be dicey. Phone ILL and say, "If this e-journal article arrived over a week ago, as the request log says it did, why has it not been delivered to me yet?"
Generally the bibliography eschews fan-published material, but a few items listed were unknown to any library accessible to me. I was able to order some of these by mail, including a little walking tour pamphlet of Tolkien's and Lewis's Oxford. And the proceedings of the conference on Elvish linguistics? Why, I borrowed that from my friendly neighborhood Elvish linguist. Yes, it was readable and even comprehensible. I got a particular kick from the paper which assembled formidable tables of phonological statistics in order to prove the bleedin' obvious: that the Elvish tongues (sample: "Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen") are more sonorous than the Black Speech (sample: "Ash nazg durbatulûk"). No kidding, Sherlock.
This year I also get to cover the book whose author criticized me personally because I didn't understaaaaaaand that they haaaaaaad to change everything because it was a moooooooovie. I have no patience with that attitude, and I'm not going to show any, especially when it comes from a person who also argues that the source material guaranteed that the film would be a financial success (an assurance only provided after it turned out to be one, actually). This would be the same source material that had to be mangled into incomprehension because it supposedly wouldn't work on film?
There are some glitches in the bibliography, but that's not the problem. I have some powerful inter-library loan at my disposal (better than I had when at Stanford, where the ILL was behind a sign reading "Beware of the Leopard"), but acquiring items can sometimes be dicey. Phone ILL and say, "If this e-journal article arrived over a week ago, as the request log says it did, why has it not been delivered to me yet?"
Generally the bibliography eschews fan-published material, but a few items listed were unknown to any library accessible to me. I was able to order some of these by mail, including a little walking tour pamphlet of Tolkien's and Lewis's Oxford. And the proceedings of the conference on Elvish linguistics? Why, I borrowed that from my friendly neighborhood Elvish linguist. Yes, it was readable and even comprehensible. I got a particular kick from the paper which assembled formidable tables of phonological statistics in order to prove the bleedin' obvious: that the Elvish tongues (sample: "Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen") are more sonorous than the Black Speech (sample: "Ash nazg durbatulûk"). No kidding, Sherlock.
This year I also get to cover the book whose author criticized me personally because I didn't understaaaaaaand that they haaaaaaad to change everything because it was a moooooooovie. I have no patience with that attitude, and I'm not going to show any, especially when it comes from a person who also argues that the source material guaranteed that the film would be a financial success (an assurance only provided after it turned out to be one, actually). This would be the same source material that had to be mangled into incomprehension because it supposedly wouldn't work on film?
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Date: 2009-09-23 02:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-23 02:02 pm (UTC)