I'd only skimmed the HoME, but listening to Scull I had the feeling that most
of what she was saying was already noted in those books. Still it was a
fascinating talk, a good distillation, at least, of key points in the LotR's
development, and much of the information was clearly new to a good chunk of the
audience.
This brings up the subject of the audience for, and the development of, Tolkien
criticism. Does the large audience for literary analysis of Tolkien's
work, broader certainly than for many other authors, assist Tolkien scholarship
by bringing more minds to the subject (several presenters at the Marquette
conference did not have a literatary or linguistic background, not necessarily
to their detriment, as for example one paper by a chemistry professor was far
more coherent than one by an English professor) or impede scholarship by
forcing scholars to talk down to reach the interested audience?
There were many levels of expertise on view at the conference, I think among
the presenters as well as the audience. I wondered sometimes what the
presenters themselves thought of their colleagues, and whether what seemed
insightful to me was old news to them. For example, I've not read
Carpenter's Tolkien biography, and I skimmed the relevant passage in The
Annotated Hobbit, so when a presenter talked about Tolkien's early
unwritten "Bill Stickers / Major Road Ahead" stories for his children, I was
quite amused by what many people already knew. (And sometimes even I
noticed a mistake being made at the lectern (eg. Gloin wasn't the only
descendant of Durin in Thorin's party to survive until Aragorn's coronation,
Frodo didn't just change places with Arwen to get his trip overseas, and
pronunciations were all over the map) though not by Scull.)
Additionally I wonder about two other aspects of the fan interest in Tolkien
scholarship:
1. Does it keep Tolkien scholarship out of the mainstream of literary
scholarship and thus away from the proper peer-review rigor that such
scholarship is supposed to endure (and not being any sort of trained scholar,
I'll gladly listen to corrections or sniggers from those in the know)?
2. Does it mean that good scholarly work is being done in non-standard
and little-seen situations, and thus being needlessly repeated or even not at
all adding toward an accumulating, accepted body of scholarship?
As an example of the second point, I have written several times that to my
eyes, some material in the Reading Room is as good or better than some
published material that I've read on Tolkien or heard at the conference.
Take Curious' comments on the similarities and differences of Bilbo and Gollum
in the original and revised versions of The Hobbit, which seems like
good, new scholarship (if not a full paper, then much more than a
footnote). But is it? How can one check? And does it
matter? (I write this with the understanding that my specific example,
TOR.n's discussion boards, are understood by its users to be transitory in
nature--they just happen to be the amateur Tolkien scholarship that I know
best. But surely the point
holds.)
