The contents of Middle-earth and Beyond

Last month, I announced that one of my conference papers was being published in a new collection, Middle-earth and Beyond: Essays on the World of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Kathleen Dubs and Janka Kaščáková, forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Publishers. Today, I’m happy to be able to share the full table of contents. There looks to be some really interesting stuff here, even if there isn’t any overarching theme or method to organize the collection. Moreover, the bulk of the contributors are European, and many of them Slavic, so the collection should offer some valuable new perspectives.

• Introduction, by Kathleen Dubs
• Sourcing Tolkien’s “Circles of the World”: Speculations on the Heimskringla, the Latin Vulgate Bible, and the Hereford Mappa Mundi, by Jason Fisher
• Staying Home and Travelling: Stasis Versus Movement in Tolkien’s Mythos, by Sue Bridgwater
• The Enigmatic Mr. Bombadil: Tom Bombadil’s Role as a Representation of Nature in The Lord of the Rings, by Liam Campbell
• Tom Bombadil — Man of Mystery, by Kinga Jenike
• Grotesque Characters in Tolkien’s Novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, by Silvia Pokrivčáková and Anton Pokrivčák
• “It Snowed Food and Rained Drink” in The Lord of the Rings, by Janka Kaščáková
• “No Laughing Matter”, by Kathleen Dubs
• “Lit.”, “Lang.”, “Ling.”, and the Company They Keep: The Case of The Lay of the Children of Húrin Seen from a Gricean Perspective, by Roberto Di Scala

Like the last CSP collection to which I contributed, this will be rather a slim volume: eight essays, plus an introduction and front and back matter. Judging from the table of contents Janka sent me, the book will be about 150 pages, of which my essays occupies 1–18. And this is the second consecutive book in which the editors sent my contribution up to bat first; I must be doing something right. :)