Drout said that Tolkien studies was trying to overcome the obstacle of "lack of
respect" in the traditional academy. As with any new field of study, the lack
of existing scholarship is pointed to to prove the lack of any need of
scholarship. He said his new journal was trying to overcome that by combining
the best standards of peer review with an acknowledgement of the multivarious
sources of good thinking about Tolkien. In effect, if we wanted to compile a
TORn Reading Room topic and submit it, they would consider it, but they would
also expect it to be fairly structured and rigorous. As Luthien Rising has
noted, that is a heavy burden to put on a "collective" effort, where the
net thinking (ha ha) is quite good, but must be extracted from the
paraphrenalia of an internet bulletin board's vagarious looseness.
Another remark I remember from Drout's comments was this: the publication of
HoME has set Tolkien scholarship back 15 years. Not back in a retroactive
sense. Back in the sense that it will take at least 15 years for academic
scholars to absorb and process the incredible amounts of new material contained
in those volumes. Eventually new works will be produced which will rigorously
comment on LotR using all the knowledge now available of what Tolkien wrote in
1917, and in 1968.
Finally, Drout mentioned the Tolkien scholars' doubts about Christopher
Tolkien's work. In effect, the Silmarillion as published is held as a very
black mark against him. The HoME is not to be trusted, for who knows what else
even now he has withheld while publishing his father's notes and drafts?
This is why I was so interested in Scull's comments, and why I am so interested
to learn from Entmaiden and Luthien Rising that she has had full access to all
the Tolkien papers. If this is the case, then surely whatever she is working on
(that the Marquette presentation was an excerpt from) will be a strong
comparative against which to hold the HoME series. This is what Drout was
saying was happening: the community of Tolkien scholars are moving past C.
Tolkien, and will go further than he ever does in commenting on the
meaning of J.R.R. Tolkien's creative process, and the import of
his mythology as a literary and philosophical whole.
John Squire
Waving merrily from the
podium.
"Wake up and smell the coffee."
squire online:
Footerama: "Tolkien would have LOVED it!" (improved!)
The Valaquenta discussion
