A series of bibliographies of primary and secondary works concerning the Inkling

Christopher, J. R.

Hammond, Wayne G.

English

Entries 42–59 in this series are written by Hammond (Tolkien material) and Christopher (Lewis and other material). See Hammond, Wayne G., for one later entry in this series

Christopher, Joe R.

SWOSU Digital Commons (Southwestern Oklahoma State University)

Volume 21 Number 4 Article 10 1997 An Inklings Bibliography (57) Joe R. Christopher Wayne G. Hammond Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore  Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Christopher, Joe R. and Hammond, Wayne G. (1997) "An Inklings Bibliography (57)," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 21 : No. 4 , Article 10. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss4/10 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact phillip.fitzsimmons@swosu.edu. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Entries 42–59 in this series are written by Hammond (Tolkien material) and Christopher (Lewis and other material). See Hammond, Wayne G., for one later entry in this series. This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss4/10 MYTHLORE I s s u e  8 2 W i n t e r  1 9 9 7 P a g e  6 1An Inklings Bibliography (57)Authors and readers are encouraged to send copies and bibliographic references on: J.R.R. Tolkien — Wayne G. Hammmond, 30 Talcott Road, William- stown, MA 01267; C.S. Lewis and Charles W illiams — Dr. J.R. Christopher, English Department, Tarle- ton State University, Stephenville, TX 76402.Crystal, D avid. The Cambridge Encyclopedia o f the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. vii + [2]-489 pp. [Tolkien 9, 37,185, 253]Tolkien is cited four times in this illustrated popular history of the English language. In one sidebar, the author notes that the magical sense of rune, from a Scandinavian rather than Anglo-Saxon tradition in which the word con­noted a symbol used for magical or mystical rituals, "lives on in the popular and fantastic imagination" of the 20th century, "perhaps most famously in the writing of Tolkien" (p. 9). Part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight after the Tolkien-Gordon edition is quoted in a section on Mid­dle English. In another sidebar, appended to a discussion of archaisms, is a quotation from Gandalf's account of Isildur and the Ring in chapter 2 of The Lord of the Rings (". . . and it seemeth to shrink, though it loseth neither its beauty nor its shape ..."). Finally, Bilbo Baggins is given as an example of an onomatopoeic nonsense name, like Spike Milligan's Bumbley Boo and Swift's Brobdingnagians, "full of voiced plosives, nasals, and laterals" (p. 253). [WGH]Flieger, V erlyn. "Pitfalls in  Faerie." Saga: Best New Writings on Mythology, vol. 1. Ed. Jonathan Young. Ashland, Ore.: White Cloud Press, 1996. 157-71. First published in Mythos Journal, Winter 1995. [Tolkien]The aborted allegory out of which Smith of Wootton Major grew "left its ghost" in the final story. It is not allegory, Tolkien asserted in an unpublished essay on Smith, though it is capable of allegorical interpretation. The Great Hall, in fact, is "in a way" an allegory of the village church, and the Master Cook the parson and the priesthood. Yet, Flieger notes, the story became "larger than an allegorical structure could accommodate" (p. 160).Tolkien wanted to show how the worlds of Faerie and humanity remain separate yet interact. In Smith as in The Lord of the Rings, The Lost Road, and The Notion Club Papers, he attempted to characterize and codify the relationship between the worlds, to grasp "the union of the actual with the transcendent" (p. 161). But in doing so, he took an untenable position. On the one hand, he rejected a faërian time-warp as a "mistake in credibility," but on the other he maintained that a journey within Faerie should bring about "no dislocation of normal human life" (p. 162). He was more successful with questions of space, in choosingthe forest over the underground passage as the means of access to Faerie. This, writes Flieger, allowed Tolkien "to move out of time and into space, and to conceive a geog­raphy both magical and mappable" (p. 163).Whereas in On Fairy-Stories Tolkien argued that Faerie is a perilous realm, in the unpublished Smith essay he endorsed it as beautiful and beneficent, and necessary to humankind, for whom the awareness of a limitless world and the desire for wonder are as essential for health as sunlight. And yet, as Flieger notes, the most powerful episode in the story of Smith, the traveller's encounter with the wind and the birch tree, suggests that a mortal is not welcome in the enchanted land. [WGH]Green, W illiam  H. The Hobbit: A  Journey into M a­turity. New York: Twayne, 1995. Twayne's Masterwork Studies no. 149. xiv + 151 pp. [Tolkien; Lewis 11-12,13,18]The Hobbit "is a variation on the archetypal story of apprenticeship," in which Tolkien "reinvents traditional heroism for his century" (pp. 8-9), and was the beginning of a major postmodern movement in "escapist" literature. Green surveys the critical reception of The Hobbit (through 1983 only), relates the work to Tolkien's theory of fairy- stories, and suggests many sources and analogues, most frequently H. Rider Haggard. The greater part of Green's book, a close reading of The Hobbit, is heavily indebted to the psychological analyses of C.G. Jung and of Erich Neu­mann, except for the final chapter, which is based in phi­lology. His most arguable point may be his assessment of the first chapter of The Hobbit as "slow," the "shakiest" chapter "from a literary critical point-of-view," "likely to weary children with short attention spans," and possibly troubling even to adults because of its "many ornamental dwarf names and . . . cute domesticity and childishness" (p. 125). [WGH]H ow e, John, illustrator. There and Back Again: The Map of  The Hobbit. Text by Brian Sibley. New  York: HarperPrism, 1995.Like Howe's Map of Tolkien’s Middle-earth (1994; see Mythlore 79, p. 63), his full-color Hobbit map folds out to poster size from a binder which also contains an explana­tory booklet. The central portion of the map is a painted aerial view of the region in Tolkien's Wilderland, with lettering overlaid. This is framed by the ouroboros figure of a golden dragon, and below the dragon is a depiction of the scene in chapter 1 of The Hobbit in which the Dwarves play their musical instruments. The whole is enclosed in a decorative frame with Celtic interlace designs and painted scenes and characters from the story. The accompanying booklet by Brian Sibley, There and Back Again: About the Map of The Hobbit (23 pp.), summarizes Tolkien's story, brieflyP a g e  6 2 I s s u e  82 W i n t e r  1 9 9 7 MYTHLORErelates its history, and includes a glossary of "Places on the Map of Wilderland." [WGH]Kroeber, Karl. Rom antic Fantasy and Science Fic­tion. N ew  Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. viii + 188 pp. [Tolkien 2 -3 , 1 3 , 3 4 , 69, 7 0 , 110 , 159 , 174]Tolkien's essay On Fairy-Stories "articulates some es­sential qualities of fantasy more cogently than many later and more pretentious essays" (p. 2) and is a necessary underpinning of Kroeber's book, although he refers to the essay directly only a few times, and only briefly. His principal topic, as the title of his book indicates, is fantasy as it emerged and developed in Romantic English poetry, in works such as "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "La belle dame sans merci," and in Frankenstein, "the pro­totypical work of science fiction" (p. 1). In fact, he is more deeply and particularly concerned with the interaction in fantasy literature between "otherness" (Elfland, or Faerie) and reality, and how the authors of works of fantasy deal with the "artistic experience of confronting as real what one knows cannot be real, the arousal of belief in the unbeliev­able" (p. 34). This concern is also at the heart of On Fairy- Stories (cited in Kroeber's first note, and clearly his point of departure) and was of continuing interest to Tolkien, as Flieger shows in her "Pitfalls in Faerie" (q.v.). [WGH]Lembas Extra 1995. Ed. Sjoerd van der Weide. Leiden: Tolkien Genootschap "Unquendor," 1995. 73 pp.Includes four essays wholly or partly concerned with Tolkien:"Tolkien and the West Midlands: The Roots of Ro­mance" by T.A. Shippey, pp. 2-22, from an address given at King Edward's School, Birmingham, 15 October 1992. Shippey remarks on Tolkien, philology, and the West Midlands, and concludes that the roots of romance in Tolkien's work were his "sad early life, which left him in permanent emotional exile," his image of the West Mid­lands "as a form of paradise from which he was forever excluded," and the way that these first two "roots" were "altered and refashioned" by his philological imagination (pp. 21-22)."Sex in Middle-earth" by Annemarie van Ewijck, pp. 23-33. M iscellaneous comments on procreation, gender roles, feminism, etc. in The Lord of the Rings."Writing Fantasy and Horror" by Brian Stableford, pp. 35-56. Reprinted from Focus: The BSFA Writers Magazine 25 (Dec./Jan. 1994). Stableford draws heavily upon Tolkien's On Fairy-Stories in discussing secondary world fantasies and the functions of fantasy. He notes that "the extreme length of the typical contemporary fantasy novel is not merely a reflection of the magnitude of The Lord of the Rings, it is a testament to the sheer laboriousness of build­ing a satisfactory eucatastrophe" (p. 52)."Tolkien's Golem: A Study in Gollumology" by Rene van Rossenberg, pp. 57-71. An extended version of an article in File: A Literary Journal 2 (1994). The author specu­lates that Tolkien was familiar with the Jewish legend of the Golem and that it was an inspiration for Gollum of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. [WGH]M ast, Edward. J.R.R. Tolkien's The H obbit: An A d­venture P lay. Woodstock, Ill.: Dramatic Publishing Co., 1996. 56 pp.This is the fourth dramatization of The Hobbit to be published by the Dramatic Publishing Company (see Hammond Tolkien bibliography, p. 23, and Mythlore 74, p. 62). It is designed to be performed in only one hour, as one act, and although there are twenty-nine parts, the actors are meant to double, and the actual cast could number no more than ten. Many elements of Tolkien's story are omit­ted, such as the trolls, Rivendell, eagles, elves, and Beom, while other elements differ markedly from Tolkien's book, and Mast introduces side-glances to The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. The action progresses immediately from the "unexpected party" to the Misty Mountains, Gollum, the riddle-game, and the finding of the ring. Bilbo then rescues the dwarves from juvenile goblins planning their execution ("It's gotta hurt! It's gotta be looooooooong! It's gotta be picturesque'."), the company meets a band of Men from Laketown (sic), and Bilbo briefly converses with Smaug, all in the course of a few pages. At the end of the play, a battle among dwarves, men, and goblins has startlingly horrific results (considering that children are the presumed audience): "agonized groaning of wounded," a battlefield "strewn with ugly dead and blood and severed limbs" (stage directions, p. 50). [WGH]R ateliff, John D. "Dragons o f Legend." Dragon 21:1, issue 230 (June 1996): 24-28. [Tolkien 2 6 , 2 7 , 28; Lewis 26]Tolkien's dragons—Glorund, Smaug, Chrysophy- lax—figure prominently in this overview of dragons in literature. "J.R.R. Tolkien's contributions to fantasy in gen­eral and dragon-lore in particular are so great as to place him in a league of his own" (p. 27). He restored the sense of dragons as deadly predators, unlike Kenneth Gra- hame's Reluctant Dragon and similar creatures. Tolkien's dragons are "clever, unscrupulous, greedy, and exceed­ingly dangerous," they delight in mischief, and they are hard to kill (p. 27). After Tolkien, dragons became a promi­nent feature of mainstream fantasy fiction. [WGH]Zim m er, Mary. "Creating and Re-creating W orlds w ith  Words: The R elig ion  and the M agic o f Lan­guage in The Lord o f the Rings." Seven 12 (1995): 65-78.In The Lord of the Rings language is used to re-create material reality. "All it takes to work magic in Middle- earth," writes Zimmer, "is the ability to use language" (p. 76). Tom Bombadil, for example, reverses the Barrow- wight's spell with a counter-incantation, and tames Old Man Willow by describing the essence of a tree. Just as Tolkien's world was created with a word, Ea, which "ex­presses both the structure of being— 'It is'—and the will­ing of this structure into being— 'Let it be,"' so "throughM Y T H L O R E I s s u e  8 2 W i n t e r  1 9 9 7 P a g e  6 3incantation and charm, a magician both creates the desired effect in language and realizes this effect in material crea­tion" (p. 70), a process which Zimmer relates to Christian- Neoplatonic thought. The act of naming can also work "magic": Elanor, for example, relates the beauty of Sam's daughter to the beautiful golden flower on Cerin Amroth. "Naming things through words which resemble them is a general phenomenon of Middle-earth" (p. 72). Also evi­dent there is the practice of taking on a new name to signify a change of being: Smeagol, for example, becomes Gollum after he takes to thieving. [WGH]M o r e  R e v ie w sS e e  W h a t  I  A mCharles W illiam s, The Figure o f Beatrice: A Study in Dante (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994 [1943]), 236 pp. ISBN 0-85991-445-3.In 1943, Dorothy L. Sayers read The Figure of Beatrice, "not because it was about Dante but because it was written by Williams."1 In 1959, I read it for the same reason. I didn't know then that in 1944 Miss Sayers had followed her reading of it by taking a copy of Dante's Inferno into her air raid shelter to read; it wasn't until 1963 that I read her translation of The Divine Comedy and encountered Dante for myself. She called Williams "the dead Master," and it is easy to see why.I'm making this autobiographical reference and hubristic comparison with the great Dorothy L. Sayers to prove, I hope, that anyone can read The Figure of Beatrice and be astounded, even before reading Dante. I recom­mend, of course, that one should read both, in any order of choice. But like Miss Sayers, m y first-encounter with Dante was through The Figure of Beatrice. Being at the time 30 years old, I ran into this book as into a wall. In its central thesis I found absolute validation of m y life experiences up to that date (don't worry, I'm not going to tell you about them). That thesis holds that the experience of encounter­ing love for the first time is, indeed, an encounter with Love, that divine Love who is, in fact, God. The luminous revelation of utter otherness, encountered in those early hours of a young person's life, in, that is, the first love encounter (this has nothing to do whatsoever with any form of physical consummation) is, Williams argues in this remarkable book, nothing other than an encounter with the infinitely and eternally Real, the utterly and absolutely True, and the entirely and ineradicably Good. It is a gift, perhaps the gift, and one can properly base an entire lifetime upon this revelation, as Dante did.The bearer of this revelation for Dante was Beatrice, an actual girl, and Williams' thesis is, wonderfully, that theBeatrice of The Divine Comedy is the Beatrice of Dante's actual life, not a symbol or a figure but a true and actual human being. I have just finished reading, in preparation for his review, the above-mentioned reprint of The Figure of Beatrice all the way through for the second time, at the age of 65, and find it to match — I suppose nothing could surpass — its original impact, and I certainly celebrate the fact that it is now available again.I don't know if The Figure of Beatrice w ill strike you as forcibly as it did your reviewer, let alone as forcibly as it did Miss Sayers, but if you are encountering it for the first time, you are in for a wild and wonderful ride. William says in his very first paragraph: "This study of Dante is intended to pay particular attention to the figure of Bea­trice and to the relation of that figure to all the rest," (p. 7) and he keeps his promise. Beatrice is presented not simply as a figure for, but an actual example of the Way of Af­firmation, the finding of the Divine in the world instead of beyond it. Williams concludes:"Wherever any love is — and some kind of love in every man and woman there must be — there is either affirmation or rejection of the image, in one or another form. If there is rejection —  of that Way there are many records. Of the affirmation, for all its greater commonness, there are fewer records. 'Riguarda cjual son io'—we have hardly yet begin to look at or to look." (p. 232)This sentence ends his final paragraph.The Italian phrase, "Riguarda qual son io," occurs in the Paradiso, Canto XXIII, verse 46, which Barbara Reynolds (who completed the translation of Miss Sayers' version of the Paradise after Miss Sayers' death) translates this —  Beatrice is speaking — as follows:"Lift up thine eyes and look on me awhile;See what I am; thou hast beheld such things As make thee mighty to endure my smile."Williams, not bound by the necessities of terza rima, translates the first line as"Open your eyes; see what I am."In Williams' reading, as in Reynolds/Sayers', the term "I am" exactly expresses the revelation of divine identity in those words used in the English versions of the Bible for the encounter of Moses with the Burning Bush, where God reveals to him the Divine Name.The naked daring of this idea, which, at least for those whose reading of Dante is guided by Williams, is astound­ing. I'm happy to say that the rest of The Figure of Beatrice, which gives Williams' reading of Dante in toto, matches the intensity of this thesis, and will make you want to read the Commedia Divina, for the first time, or again, as it may be, as if for the first time.— Nancy-Lou Patterson1. Barbara Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Uni­versity Press, 1989),p. 14.

An Inklings Bibliography (57)

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An Inklings Bibliography (57)

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