Friday, February 25, 2011

Details on Light Beyond All Shadow

What a great year for new Tolkien collections this is shaping up to be! I mentioned recently that The Ring and the Cross would have a companion volume, Light Beyond All Shadow, and I can now share some further details. The release date has not yet been set, but here are the cover and the complete table of contents. One odd thing: the ISBN shown on the cover is the same as the one assigned to The Ring and the Cross. Probably just a placeholder, but I hope someone at FDUP has noticed!

Light Beyond All Shadow: Religious Experience in Tolkien’s Work
Edited by Paul E. Kerry and Sandra Miesel
  • Acknowledgements
  • Preface / Paul E. Kerry
  • Introduction: Exploring Tolkien’s Universe / Sandra Miesel
  • Water, Ecology, and Spirituality in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth [sic] / Matthew Dickerson
  • Divine Contagion—On the Nature of Power in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings / Roger Ladd
  • Reflections of Christendom in the Mythopoeic Iconography of Middle-Earth [sic] / Anne C. Petty
  • The Biblical Structure of The Lord of the Rings / Glen Robert Gill
  • Ymagynatyf and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Roman Catholicism, Catholic Theology, Religion in The Lord of the Rings / Jared Lobdell
  • I am the Song, Music, Poetry, and the Transcendental in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth [sic] / Julian Tim Morton Eilmann
  • Tolkien: Lord of the Occult? / John Warwick Montgomery
  • The Fantastic Secret of Tolkien’s Fairy Tales: Literature and Jesuit Spiritual Exercises / Robert Lazu
  • Life-Giving Ladies: Women in the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien / Sandra Miesel
  • Where two or three are gathered: Tolkien and the Inklings / Colin Duriez
  • Peter Jackson, Evil, and the Temptation of Films at the Cracks of Doom / Russell W. Dalton
  • Songs of Innocence and Experience, or, What Remains of Tolkien’s “Catholic” Tale in Jackson’s The Lord of Rings / Christopher Garbowski
  • Bibliography
I hope I don’t seem overly fussy, siccing Grip, Fang, and Wolf on the capital E in “Middle-Earth” above, but it’s a real pet peeve of mine, to which I always have the same irrepressible reaction —“You cannot pass!” :)

I realize that many people regard “Middle Earth” and “Middle-Earth” as perfectly acceptable, but I do not. Never have and never will. “Bag-End” and “Bag End” are both okay (Tolkien used the former in The Hobbit, the latter in The Lord of the Rings), but it is Middle-earth, full stop. Anything else and I’m going to correct it, add an asterisk, or mark it [sic]. It’s nothing personal. :)

By the way, this title is pretty similar to that of a collection I knew Christopher Vaccaro to be working on some time ago. That collection had the working title, Bodies of Light and Shadow: Corporeality and Embodiment in the Texts of Tolkien, and I saw a very promising early table of contents at the beginning of 2008. Gosh, three years have gone by already?! I will have to check with Chris to see where his book stands now. Until I hear, I won’t say anymore about it.

8 comments:

  1. Thanks for the coverage! Ignore the back page blurbs. They're just place-holders. The small photo within the cover image will also be changed but otherwise this is it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Are you the same Sandra Miesel who wrote all the superb articles at the back of Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic/Flandry books, as well as the timeline? If so, let me thank you belatedly for all the interesting thoughts to chew on after reading Anderson's wonderful stories.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Completely agree with you on "Middle-earth".

    ReplyDelete
  4. I agree too! I'll be adding this to my wish list also. Thanks for letting us know, oh fount of information! Now I just have to find a fount that will provide the money for all these...

    Namarie, God bless, Anne Marie :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hahae, you and me both. The perennial problem of the impecunious. :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sandra Miesel2/26/2011 10:53 PM

    Yes, John Cowan, I am she. (How many Sandra Miesels do you think there are in the world?)Some of those essays are available on the Baen Books website, to complement their reissue of all the Technic Civ stories.

    Did anyone notice Tom Shippey's glowing review of Anderson reprints being done by the New England SF Association in the WALL STREET JOURNAL on 26 February? Poul was the perhaps the most versatile writer the field has produced.

    ReplyDelete
  7. You'd be surprised how many John Cowans there are. My books are published as "John Woldemar Cowan" in a hopefully successful bid for uniqueness.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Martha S. Jones1/24/2012 5:03 PM

    Jason, the published version has Middle-earth as you recommended. Some of the article titles vary from the original list; I updated the TolkienWiki page.

    Have you read the book yet or know anyone who has? I'm looking for a review on it and its predecessor.

    ReplyDelete