Celebrating Tolkien's Legacy

Nancy Bunting, Seamus Hamill-Keays and Toby Widdicombe

Cormarë Series No. 52

Fifty years after the death of J.R.R. Tolkien, these essays look at Tolkien's own history in relation to his fiction and where Tolkien studies may go in the next few decades and what issues it needs to address.

Nancy Bunting is a retired Ph.D. clinical psychologist who now lives in Northwest Arkansas. She has published on Tolkien in Beyond Bree, Hither Shore, Lembas, Mallorn, Minas Tirith Evening-Star, Mythlore, and VII. She and Seamus Hamill-Keays published The Gallant Edith Bratt with Walking Tree Publishers in 2021.

Seamus Hamill-Keays served over 30 years, world-wide, in the Royal Air Force retiring in 1987 from a Senior Scientist Lecturer post at the RAF College Cranwell with the rank of Squadron Leader. He obtained a Master of Arts degree in Celtic Studies, with Distinction, from the University of Wales in 2011. His property in the Brecon Beacons includes the site of the North Gate of the Buckland Estate. The exciting parallels between Brecon Buckland and J.R.R. Tolkien's Buckland in The Lord of the Rings created his intense interest in Tolkien’s early life. His findings about Tolkien are found on his website https://www.talybont.com.

Toby Widdicombe was educated at Cambridge University and the University of California. He has been a professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage for over thirty years after teaching at UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara. His major research fields are American literature, Tolkien, textual studies, Shakespeare, and Utopianism. He has published numerous articles and almost a dozen books including J.R.R. Tolkien, A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury).

 
about the authors | about this book | table of contents | cover | announcements | more

About this book

It has been just over fifty years since the death of J.R.R. Tolkien. This collection of essays by Nancy Bunting, Seamus Hamill-Keays, and Toby Widdicombe celebrates his achievement by looking at two aspects of the legacy of the founder of modern fantasy. First, Tolkien's own history in relation to his fiction and, second, the likely future direction of Tolkien studies. It reassesses his achievement; suggests some fruitful ways forward in scholarship; and examines the complex history of Tolkien's relation to the genres of fiction and epic.The first section, "Biographical Explorations," focuses on the milieu in which Tolkien grew up. It consists of seven essays. The first essay looks at the importance of a likely 1904 excursion by the Tolkien brothers to Kinver. The second discusses the parallels between Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and Tolkien's description of Bilbo Baggins's "long-expected" party in The Lord of the Rings. The third introduces the life of Tolkien's aunt, Edith Mary "May" Incledon (née Suffield), immortalized as one of the "three remarkable daughters of the Old Took" in The Hobbit. The fourth argues for an important connection between Tolkien's having been ambidextrous and his distinctive imagination and rare command of languages. The next essay looks at how attempts to document Tolkien's life have run an obstacle course beginning with Tolkien's own attitude to biography. The Tolkien family and the unstinting efforts to guard their father's extraordinary achievement complicate the situation. The essay then offers possible remedies for the accidents of history and circumstance that have so far dominated how Tolkien is remembered. Chapter Six homes in on the last year in the life of Tolkien's mother, Mabel Tolkien. The last chapter in the first section offers a deeply biographical interpretation of "Smith of Wootton Major." People important to Tolkien's life appear in the story along with those lifelong themes of exile and loss, but these latter appear without the blessing of eucatastrophe.

The second, "New Directions," consists of two essays. The first proposes, first, that in the process of developing his mythology, Tolkien created a number of pocket eutopias and dystopias-communities of betterment or deterioration -- within a larger, even epic, landscape. It then goes on to argue that such a utopian vision can be traced throughout the sixty-year life of the legendarium. The second ponders how Christopher Tolkien, the literary executor of his father's estate, was caught among the conflicting demands and duties of editor, guardian of his father's reputation, and custodian of his family's estate. The essay chronologically traces Christopher's changing editorial choices and the results of those choices that have produced a range of problems-not the least of these being the Tolkien Estate's tight control over the scholarly study and publication of Tolkien's Middle-earth manuscripts. This control is something about which most Tolkien readers are likely wholly unaware.

This collection of essays comes at an important time. With the death of Priscilla Tolkien in 2022, all of Tolkien's children have passed on. Scholars now have an opportunity to recast discussion of Tolkien's achievement in a new era even as they are aware of how much that achievement must be viewed in light of its increasingly obvious and increasingly inaccurate cinematic and televisual re-presentation. Primacy should necessarily belong to Tolkien's written achievement and, hence, to the sort of scholarship this celebratory collection represents.

 
about the authors | about this book | table of contents | cover | announcements | more

Table of contents

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Introduction by Toby Widdicombe

Preface

Past: Biographical Explorations

1. "Tea in Hay"
Nancy Bunting

2. The 1897 Diamond Jubilee and the Long Awaited Party
Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays

3. May Incledon, the Other Suffield Aunt
Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays

4. J.R.R. Tolkien: Ambidexter
Nancy Bunting

5. For Want of a Biography, the Story Was Lost
Toby Widdicombe

6. 1904: Mabel Tolkien, Living and Dying
Nancy Bunting

7. The Interlace of Autobiography and Faërian Imagery in Smith of Wootton Major
Nancy Bunting

Future: New Directions in Tolkien Studies

8. Tolkien as Forgotten Utopian
Toby Widdicombe

9. Christopher Tolkien as Editor: The Perils of Kinship
Toby Widdicombe

List of Abbreviations

Bibliography

About the authors

Index

 
about the authors | about this book | table of contents | cover | announcements | more

Cover

Cover illustration by,

 
about the authors | about this book | table of contents | cover | announcements | more

Announcements

New book: Celebrating Tolkien’s Legacy (26th September 2024)

 
324 pages, Walking Tree Publishers 2024, Cormarë Series No. 52, ISBN: 978-3-905703-52-8.
 

More on Celebrating Tolkien's Legacy

Where can I buy this book?

terms and conditions
visitors since
last updated