The University of Vermont has financially supported an annual “Tolkien at UVM” conference for most of its ten-year history. My understanding is that this has not been a large sum, but has been sufficient to pay a speaker’s honorarium and travel fees, as well as to provide a simple breakfast and light refreshments through the day. I was told UVM had found that the bequest which had been funding the event should not have been used for such a purpose (fair enough: these things happen), but that no effort was made by the university to find an alternative source of support or to provide any stop-gap funds even for the scheduled 2013 conference or its engaged keynote speaker.
This piece by my good friend Timothy Boyd is the first in what I hope will be a continuing series of posts by guest authors. Dr. Boyd teaches Greek, Latin, and World Civilizations at the University of Buffalo. …
Over the last few days, Andy Peterson and Timothy Boyd have pointed me to two very different on-line articles about Tolkien films. One was Ethan Gilsdorf’s interview over at Wired magazine with Philippa Boyens, one of the screenwriters for Peter Jackson’s three-part movie of The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings before that. (Boyens is of course not to be confused with Pauline Baynes, Tolkien’s friend and illustrator.) The other article was “Concerning Christopher — An Essay on Tolkien’s Son’s Decision To Not Allow Further Cinematic Licensing of His Work,” an essay posted by “JPB” at TheOneRing.net. JPB doesn’t break much new ground, but he does thoughtfully take us step-by-step to the conclusions that Christopher Tolkien “has the legal right to make the call, is a good choice to be the one making the call,” and “knows his father’s wishes better than anyone,” — before finally concluding…
A month ago today, John Rateliff (author of The History of The Hobbit) posted an interesting entry. He begins:
So, two months ago today I was at Marquette, talking to Dr. Machan’s Tolkien class there in the morning (“how to become a Tolkien Scholar”) and giving a talk at the Library in the afternoon about how The Hobbit manuscript wound up in Milwaukee, of all places, including an anecdotal account of what little is known about JRRT’s planned trip there. We had a good turn-out for the latter talk, which they recorded on video. And now they’ve gone through and put together a ten-minute representative excerpt from the Q‑and‑A session at the end.11John Rateliff, “Me, at Marquette”. Sacnoth’s Scriptorium, 2012-12-03. …
My friend and colleague Andrew Peterson visited this last weekend to help with the initial work on my new pagination cross-reference for The Lord of the Rings. … I’ve built a database which will contain one record per paragraph of The Lord of the Rings, containing the first few words of the paragraph, the paragraph number within the chapter and book (watch for a posting soon describing how this is assigned), and the page number on which the paragraph begins in each of the five editions listed above. In addition, there are spots to put the correlative page in Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull’s The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (if there is one) and Words, Phrases and Passages in The Lord of the Rings (in Parma EldalamberonXVII. … Once we’ve entered the rest of the data, I’ll make everything available freely in spreadsheet form. I may also have the time to create an on-line pagination converter and companion iOS app.…
