Vinyar Tengwar #50

For all those who are interested in Tolkien’s invented languages, very welcome news from Carl F. Hostetter. The fiftieth issue of the linguistic journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, Vinyar Tengwar, is on the horizon at last! Here’s the announcement Carl posted to the Lambengolmor email list this morning:

Thanks to a long year-end break and the easing up of professional obligations, I am pleased to announce that the long-awaited 50th issue of Vinyar Tengwar is nearing completion. VT 50 contains my presentation and analysis of the “Túrin Wrapper”, featuring a set of three untranslated Sindarin texts from the (probably early) 1950s pertaining to the “Túrinssaga”.

I hope to have the issue completed, printed, and mailed off by March 1.

Please note that henceforth issues of Vinyar Tengwar will be available only through the online, print-on-demand publisher Lulu.com, which currently also publishes the various volumes of “The Collected Vinyar Tengwar” [link]. Once VT 50 has been mailed, I will be adding it to, and thus completing, volume 5 of “The Collected Vinyar Tengwar”.

Current subscribers to VT please note: if you have moved in the years since VT 49 was published, please email me […] as soon as possible with you current mailing address. And thank you very much for your long patience!

Tolkien Studies 6 on the horizon

Well, folks, it’s that time of year again. The arrival of late spring brings with it a new volume of Tolkien Studies. I have been piecing together the contents of the sixth volume for some time now, and with the help of Tolkien-Buecher.de (and their source, Michael Drout), I can now fill in the remaining gaps and give you what I think is a fairly complete table of contents. The issue is not yet available on Project Muse, let alone in the mail to subscribers, but this should satisfy your curiosity for the time being.

Front Matter

• Editors’ Introduction
• In Memoriam: Pauline Baynes and Derek Brewer
• Conventions and Abbreviations

Essays

• John D. Rateliff — “A Kind of Elvish Craft”: Tolkien as Literary Craftsman
• Douglas A. Anderson — John D. Rateliff: A Checklist
• Ármann Jakonsson — Talk to the Dragon: Tolkien as Translator
• Jill Fitzgerald — A “Clerkes Compleinte”: Tolkien and the Division of Lit. and Lang.
• Stefan Ekman — Echoes of Pearl in Arda’s Landscape
• Judy Ann Ford and Robin Anne Reid — Councils and Kings: Aragorn’s Journey Towards Kingship in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings
• Cynthia M. Cohen — The Unique Representation of Trees in The Lord of the Rings
• Josh Long — Clinamen, Tessera, and the Anxiety of Influence: Swerving from and Completing George MacDonald
• Verlyn Flieger — The Music and the Task: Fate and Free Will in Middle-earth

Notes and Documents

• J.R.R. Tolkien [Edited by Carl F. Hostetter] — Fate and Free Will
• Stuart D. Lee — J.R.R. Tolkien and The Wanderer: From Edition to Application
• Christopher Gilson — Essence of Elvish: The Basic Vocabulary of Quenya

Back Matter

• Book Reviews
• The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies
• Bibliography (in English) for 2007

I know (or think I know) a few of the books being reviewed, but since the reviews comprise a much more fluid section of the volume, I have learned that it’s better not to talk too much about them before they appear. I have also heard that there is supposed to be a comprehensive index of volumes 1–5 published in this issue. We’ll see. I hope so.

If the pieces by Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter sound familiar, then you were either at Mythcon last year, or you read my follow-up discussion (or both). It’s nice to see both of these published, even if Carl was unable to provide the commentary he had hoped. I still have my fingers crossed that he will find the time to write it one of these days. The lead essay by John Rateliff may also sound familiar. He delivered a version of it as the Blackwelder Lecture at Marquette University in October, 2007. I could not be there, so I’m really looking forward to reading the essay now.

Once I’ve read and digested the issue, I’ll share my thoughts about it, as I hope some of you will too. In the meantime, back to The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún …