Incredibly, the Tolkien Art Index is now a little over two years old; my last update to it was late last summer, with many new pieces of artwork reproduced in the two new Bodleian Library books accompanying their exhibition, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth. Today, there’s only one new item — a belated entry (TAI #552) for the Allen & Unwin printed map of Middle-earth from 1954, annotated by Tolkien and Pauline Baynes as background for Baynes’s production of her 1969 poster map, discovered by Blackwell’s in 2015. But more than 120 entries now include publication information for the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s newly-opened Tolkien: Voyage en Terre du Milieu exhibition and its exhibition catalogue Amazon.co.uk link.…
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Paper given at the 15th annual Tolkien in Vermont conference at UVM:
Mapping Mordor: Normalizing Tolkien’s maps as the first step in examining his worldbuilding method of construction-by-revision; or, Yet further confirmation (as if we needed it) that Tolkien had no master plan, did not “first make a map and make the narrative agree,” and, in fact, never did produce a map that exactly portrays what’s described in The Lord of the Rings
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The Tolkien Art Index is live! 463 pieces of art by J.R.R. Tolkien are listed — essentially, everything that has been published that is even tangentially related to Middle-earth. At this point, there are titles, descriptions, notes, tags, dates, cross-references — essentially everything except thumbnail versions of the images themselves. These are ready to add, but I must first secure permission to post them, and I have only just now initiated that process — so we’ll need to be patient!…
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The ultimate goal of this index is to list all of the published artwork of J.R.R. Tolkien: drawings, paintings, maps, sketches, doodles — everything, in fact, that might be construed as art other than items consisting purely of Tengwar or Cirth writing. For these, see the excellent Mellonath Daeron Index of Tengwa Specimina (DTS) and Index of Certh Specimina (DCS), respectively. Such an index should ease scholarly discourse and provide an unambiguous shorthand for referring to Tolkien’s artwork.…
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Paper given at the 1st annual Tolkien Symposium prior to ICMS Kalamazoo:
The river Swanfleet: A journey from the Misty Mountains to flat fenlands and half-way back again; or, How the discovery of Tolkien’s annotated map of Middle-earth by Blackwell’s Rare Books in Oxford extricates Pauline Baynes’ cartographic reputation from the marsh of Nîn-in-Eilph
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I’ll be reworking the paper I gave a few weeks ago at Tolkien in Vermont at Brad Eden’s “Tolkien Anniversaries” symposium, held the day before the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University.…
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Well, it’s about time. I’ve given my first academic paper.… 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.
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Paper given at the 14th annual 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.” …
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It seems that one Radagast the Brown (of Rhosgobel & The Cabot Institute) has published a paper presenting the results of his climate simulation modelling for Middle-earth. Though obviously mock-serious, the modelling and the science are real enough. Definitely worth a few of your hard-won free minutes.…
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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. …
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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…
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Friends and colleagues Mark Kaminsky, Sandy Bolm, Andrew Peterson, Dr. Marc Zender, and me at the third Conference on Middle-earth. Thanks, Andy, for the photo! …
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