Wednesday, February 6, 2008

A new review

Andy Higgins has reviewed two new Tolkien books over at his blog, Wotan’s Musings. These are The Frodo Franchise, which I haven’t read myself, and The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On, for which you must know by now — *broken record* — I wrote a chapter. In the latter, he singles out two of the essays as his personal favorites: Mike Drout’s moving and highly personal account of his first reading of The Silmarillion (a rarity among academic essays), and ... mine! :)

In addition, he’s taken up the ideas I present in the essay and begun searching for other possible analogues (e.g., in Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Homer). I dropped a comment there with my thoughts, so I won’t be so vain as to simply repeat them here, but stop by Andy’s review and chime in!

I must say: it feels very nice to be among somebody’s favorite essays in a collection. That’s a feeling I could get used to. :)

2 comments:

  1. Jason

    Hope well. Thanks for this and I am going to do some more work on your idea about Arthur - I am currently reading a fairly new book on Parsifal as the Fifth Act of the Ring which may point to some new sources.

    Also, did you see the Douglas Kane is going to have his analysis of the construction of The Silmarillion is going to be publised in 2009 - that should be interesting!

    Take care, Andy

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  2. Hi Andy. I’m just about recovered from the flu, thanks; hope you’re well. I did see that Doug’s book is going to be published by Lehigh University Press — as far as I know, the first title to be published on Tolkien by that press. Interesting. He presented some of his research at the last Mythcon, but I was not able to attend, so it will all be new to me when his book appears next year.

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