Vermont Softworks:

blog entry

Tolkien in Vermont, 2017 — at which I give my first paper

Well, it’s about time. I’ve given my first academic paper 1 1 At our local Tolkien in Vermont conference at UVM.:

“Far-away places with strange-sounding names: Endonyms (autonyms), exonyms (xenonyms), and the romance of Tolkien’s toponymy of Middle-earth; Or, On the redundancy of Bree-hill, the heady topper of the Brandywine, and how the discovery of Tolkien’s annotated map of Middle-earth by Blackwell’s Rare Books in Oxford extricates Pauline Baynes’s cartographic reputation from the fens of Nîn-in-Eilph”

Detail of Swanfleet River from Christopher Tolkien’s 1980 map, “The west of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age” Detail of Swanfleet River from Pauline Baynes’s 1970 map, “A map of Middle-earth” Detail of Swanfleet River from Christopher Tolkien’s 1954 small-scale map of the west of Middle-earth, annotated by J.R.R. Tolkien and Pauline Baynes
Detail of the Swanfleet River as seen in CT’s 1980 map, PB’s 1970 poster-map, and CT’s 1954 map annotated by JRRT and PB.

A curious set of circumstances led up to this, but essentially I was prepared to give this paper and was called upon to fill a suddenly empty slot. It worked out well.