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.