squiretalk

Well, we can only try. I admit it is gratifying to be involved in this. Good luck, and I hope you at least get touched: N.E. Brigand: “Farewell my friends! I go to a better place!” Reading Room: “Oooooh! The Claw! The Claw!”

Drout collapsed in defeat, writing NEB on May 18:

Bible (1000) Bournemouth (250) Children's Literature and Tolkien (1200) Christ: Advent Lyrics (700) Dante (500) Devil's Coachhorses (1000) East, The (500) Epic Poetry (750) Gaze (500) Genesis (500) Greece: Reception of Tolkien (500) Hierarchy (750) Ireland (250) Juliana (500) Justice and Injustice (500) Knowledge (600) Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1000) Maps (2500) Marriage (1500) Marxist Readings of Tolkien (750) Merchandising (1000) North Borneo, Reception of Tolkien (500) North Polar Bear (500) Philo-semitism (500) Possessiveness (500) Prophesy (500) Ransome, Arthur (250) Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire (700) Russian Language (500) South, The (600) Spenser (500) Suffield Family (250) Tolkien Remembered: Humphrey Carpenter (600) Treason of Isengard (1000)

As I perused the list, I felt rather like someone going into a dark cavern where dragons were once reported to live. A long time ago, but reliably reported all the same. I replied to NEB:

Oh, Lord, all the easy ones are taken.
I have to say, of all those topics, the only one I remotely feel I could tackle without disgracing myself and disappointing Prof. Drout, is "Maps". In a pinch, maybe "East" or "South". Or "Treason of Isengard", at least I've read it. Once.
Are the numbers next to the entries, dollars, word-count, or both?

NEB said that Maps was properly given to arquen, since she is a professional geologist. I could have the East, South and Treason articles. The numbers were for word-count. He hastened to reassure me:

Also, after attending the Kalamazoo conference, I feel that Reading Room stalwarts know as much as any of the presenters there--except Douglas Anderson--about Tolkien, though perhaps not about medievalism or literature generally.

I agreed to volunteer for those three subjects, giving myself my own brief of what I guessed would be required:

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more a HoME volume might be the ticket. Most of the topics are meant to connect Tolkien to other academic fields; a knowledge, not just of Tolkien, but of the other academic field, is required. Arquen is perfect for Maps.
South and East will require some serious research into the "meaning" of those regions in relation to the NW Europe of Tolkien's literary sources. Not hard, I suppose, and fun; but all I'm really going to have going for me is the internet and my fine local county library system. The NY Public, and the hours required to use it properly (it's just heaven!) are not available to me just now.
Whereas Treason of Isengard is going to be a kind of summary of C. Tolkien's work, and the LotR draft history it contains. Much more doable by a wonky Tolkien amateur, late at night after a hard day at work.

On May 23, N. E. Brigand, moving fast, opened a Yahoo Groups private forum so that the Reading Room Encyclopedists could exchange thoughts, drafts, research, etc. without risking copyright violations involving public posts of proprietary material.

On May 25, the other shoe fell. I received a formal invitation / contract from Routledge to write three articles for the Encyclopedia by September 1, 2005.

TERMS OF AGREEMENT BETWEEN ROUTLEDGE (“Publisher”) and *squire’s real name* (“Contributor”)
Entry Title - Ms Due - Words - Scope Notes
East, The - 9/1/2005 - 500 - Location, explanation, discussion, and symbolism; connections with race, blue wizards, and migration of the elves.
South, The - 9/1/2005 - 600 - Explanation and discussion; connection to men of the South, connection to race and depictions of race
Treason of Isengard - 9/1/2005 - 1000 - Summary and discussion; new information revealed, contribution of Christopher Tolkien

I came near to a-spoilin’ me pantaloons! This was beyond serious. This was real! What had I been I thinking? Yes: it’s all very flattering. Yes: the glory of publication etc. But the glib arrogance of my blithe “If my resume’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me” had clearly boomeranged.

They didn’t care about my resume at this point -- they cared about handing out article assignments as fast as possible, to anyone in the room who raised his dumb conceited hand.

Now it was sink or swim for poor squire, in the same meme pool as Michael Drout, Verlyn Flieger, and Tom Shippey. If I sank, I somehow knew, no tears would be shed: someone with a Ph. D. in medieval geomancy would get a quick call in September to knock out a “real” article on, say, The East to replace “the crapola we got from one of those One Ring fanboys.”

And September was only three months away.

September was only three months away. It was already the end of May. I was going to have to focus like a laser to get through this thing alive.

Not. At the end of June, with my Reading Room discussion on the Letters completed, I finally emailed Routledge, accepting the assignment but asking for an extension on the Treason of Saruman article. They agreed. My panic was fading a bit. And I began to get to work, more or less.

Wooh! I had some idea of what this entailed. After all, as a geek of the 32nd degree, I’d read LotR, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion; and also The Letters, the History of Middle-earth (some of it), and such seminal critics as Paul Kocher, Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger. Most importantly, the topic was pretty much “internal” to Tolkien; I didn’t have to be a scholar of the Bible, Old English, Feminist Theory, English archaeology, or Epic poetry to pull this off, unlike some of my RR Encyclopedist colleagues!

How hard could it be? It’s only 500 or 600 words, about a page and a half.
It seemed to me that in a page and a half, I basically had space to present what the East or the South “was” in Tolkien, and – oh yeah -- then quickly review what scholarship had been done on these subjects.

Uh-oh.

Just what ‘scholarship’ had been done on these subjects?

So: what scholarship had been done on my subjects? Drout was the key. His bibliography showed that he had, to some degree, already reviewed what was out there. It seemed obvious that he expected the Encyclopedia to be a three-dimensional version of his massive book-list, with hundreds of contributors acting as editorial integral functions, assembling a shining city of meaningful prose summaries, topic by topic, from the seemingly infinite plain of existing but obscure scholarship on Tolkien.

*ahem* Yeah. Well, have you seen the Bibliography? It’s long, it’s thorough, and it’s really hard to figure out what to do with it. So I databased it, and two or three others that I found are in the public domain (Richard West, etc.)

It beat thrashing the internet for fan articles and movie reviews, which seemed the only other option. When I was done, a week or so later, it was a structured list in MS Excel. I identified all possible listings that could, by their titles, have something to do with my topics; I marked them off, and after a quick filter and sort, had a kind of shopping list of books and articles I thought I needed to look at.

Oog. How to get them?

Next stop, my town library. They were actually wonderful to work with. It turns out that enough authors live in my town that the library is used to professional research. The kindly little old ladies at the reference desk would politely explain to me the procedures for scouring not just the stacks, but the entire County system, and after that, the entire academic library system of the U.S., which would, with some prompting and enough time, cough up anything I could find in the computerized catalogue. And speaking of computers, the library subscribed to several of the lesser academic databases, and by using my card I could download anything I could find there – stuff that is not on the public internet. And I could do all this from home via the library’s website! Those kindly little old lady librarians cast some heap powerful hoodoo these days.

For the rest of the summer I put in for the several dozen Tolkien books that I could find in the library’s various catalogues. The further away they were, the longer they took to come in. I particularly enjoyed getting “The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien” from Wheaton College library, with its invaluable dissection of The Treason of Isengard. (Wheaton is Drout’s college – there’s only one reason why that book was in that library).

So the books began to drift in through July and August. They began to stack up in my study; and my wife couldn’t help but notice that every evening I’d be slapping stickies into three or four more extremely weird Tolkien books between boredom-induced snoozes.

Ah, the boredom. Yes, there is such a thing as too much Tolkien. Most of the books were sort of interesting, but as the deluge flooded in in August, I just didn’t have the time to read them – just scan as quickly as possible for something, anything, about directionality, geography, ethnography, cartography, racialism, Eden and the fall of Man, or the History of Middle-earth. It all became a kind of blur, leaving in its wake only a overdue heap of tomes in the corner with a fungal growth of yellow and purple stickies marking what I had yet to extract into my note files.

The pathetic thing was just how few of the books and articles on my original list actually materialized. In the end, if it wasn't in my library's catalogue, I didn't get it. Here, for giggles, is the final list of "works consulted" for my three articles. I didn't use everything here (some duds), but I read it all (or at least skimmed it between naps). Note the almost total lack of overlap between that ambitious first list and the final one!

Wait, you say. Isn’t it all on the Internet?

Well, no. That is, you’ll find stuff, but it’s typically not scholarship quality. And since I work all day online, I had plenty of opportunity to do searches. I found some material, sure. The white supremacists for Tolkien thing was interesting. But books remain the only way to really do Tolkien studies.

There comes a time in every Encyclopedist’s life when you realize: 1. You are never going to get a single issue of Mallorn or Mythlore from anyone, anywhere. 2. Whatever Inklings: Jahrbuch fur Literatur und Asthetik is, you’re not going to get that, either. 3. In fact, perhaps it’s best if you give up on trying to get any decent journal articles at all. 4. The 1992 Centenary Conference Proceedings is cited by every Tolkien scholar – it’s just brimming with first-rate articles by the stars of the field. You’re not going to get that, either. It’s out of print and rare. 5. Tolkien’s Legendarium is indispensable for anyone studying the History of Middle-earth books (like The Treason of Isengard). You’re not going to get it. It’s not even in the catalogue --

Oh, yes I am! Dammit, I’m going to buy it!

Yeah. There came a time . . . when money changed hands. I bought the Legendarium off eBay, for a slight discount. I bought The Peoples of Middle-earth (HoME XII). I bought Tolkien Studies, vol. 2. I bought Rosebury’s book (the best discovery of the summer! Thanks, NEB!) And -- this was actually so painful it was fun -- I bought

from Finland, no less. Since any kind of international money order or check effectively doubled the cost to either them or me, I paid for it eventually by stuffing cash euros in an envelope and mailing them off in a burst of optimism.

The entire summer was that kind of experience: pure romance, pure research. I felt like a scholar, occasionally: a fun feeling. It was a path not taken in my life, a long time ago, and now, it hadn’t made all the difference, not quite. I’m not an academic, but I play one on TORn.

And in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia.

Chapter 3: “It is nice just to know that you are about the place”

A huge help for me in staying sane last summer during this adventure was knowing that many other souls were also on the edge of mental breakdown. Or that they were nervous, at least.

I am referring to the Yahoo Groups board that N. E. Brigand set up in May, that allowed us TORn Encyclopedists to share thoughts, research, criticism, suggestions, and just a hand to hold from time to time.

The first weeks on the board were full of twittering excitement. Routledge sent out its assignments to us in the last week of May, and it was then that the difference between the few, who were professional academics, and the many, who were not, became apparent. Briefly, the dialogue went thus:

Amateurs: Waaaaaaah!
Pros: There, there.

The few were drogo_drogo, modtheow, and Penthe. They were amazingly there for us. I’m sure they were struggling with their own private demons like overcommitment and straying outside their fields into Tolkieniana. But for those of us with nothing but a love of Tolkien and maybe a bachelor’s degree in the dim past, they were Gods. They had real libraries that subscribed to scholarly journals, they knew how to footnote, they knew where the bodies were buried, and they were not afraid of Michael Drout. In short, they didn’t need no stinkin’ badgers.

But we amateurs pulled our weight, too. Not only by sharing sources and methods and anxieties; there was the sheer comfort factor of being just one of the many sheep in the fleecing-sluice. As I struggled with the overwhelming mass that is the Tolkien bibliography, seeking in vain for articles and books titled The East and The South in Tolkien’s Fiction and The Treason of Saruman: A Scholarly Evaluation, I would vent on the board:

And it was very consoling then to read things like:

The mid-summer quieted down a bit, as people got to work. One debate we went back and forth on was just what the editors wanted: an original essay, or a dull bibliographical note on the existing scholarship. The answer turns out to be, both, and keep within the word count while you’re about it.

“Word count” became a common curse as the deadlines approached and drafts began to get written. It became clear to all of us, under the gentle tutorship of the pros, that while an encyclopedia article may be only 500 words long, it represents about 5000 words of distilled research – and every carefully chosen word stands in for ten. That’s a fatal amount of port.

Cooperation? Help? You had only to ask, and you would receive. By the end of the summer, I had received at least three original sources from Encyclopedists modtheow, N. E. Brigand, and Anchises Ghost, either by fax, messenger service, or emailed jpegs of scans (fuzzy but legible). Neither rain nor snow nor narrow band, etc.

I also was encouraged by my colleagues’ willingness to write to the authorities for help. When you need to know what Bible Tolkien owned personally, you write the world’s leading collector of Tolkien books. When you need something that can only be found at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, by God, you write the Bodleian Library. We work for Michael Drout, mister, and we don’t expect any trouble from you, hear?

It was with this spirit that I found myself in correspondence with two Tolkien scholars, Margaret Sinex and Gloriana St. Clair. Both were extremely courteous and seemed happy to help me with with copies of articles they had written that were either still in pre-publication, or long since out of print. Each got about half a sentence of text in one of my articles, and another immortal reference in a published bibliography. Dr. Sinex also got four pages of my not always acidic commentary on her draft article on Tolkien’s use of the medieval idea of the South. I haven’t heard from her since, but I know she appreciated it.

Chapter 4: Writing the damn thing

As August rolled by, I was torn by conflicting emotions.

On the one hand, I now felt like a Tolkien god. I bestrode my topics like a colossus. I was the world’s expert on The East and The South in Tolkien. Wild fantasies of an academic article, or a book, tantalized my sleep-deprived mind. Surely all the stuff that I now knew, that was not going to make it into those little 500-word entries, should see the light of day elsewhere!

On the other hand, I was all too aware that I had actually acquired pitifully few of the original books and articles on the list I compiled back in June. All I really had was what my county library system had gotten me. What was I missing? And what about all those articles? What did Drout know that I didn’t? And when did he know it?

Luckily, a careful reading of the Encyclopedia guidelines provided me some comfort about my not having references to things like Orr, Robert: “Some Slavic Echoes in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth;” Germano-Slavica 8 (1994): 23–34.

Avoid works that most users would not be able to find in a research library.
Cite works that can be easily found and avoid obscure sources.

Still, sheer cussed instinct tells you: when it comes to research for an authoritative reference work, too much ain’t enough!

As the clock ticked toward September, I frantically waited for those last few books still outstanding from my last call request at the library. I begged other Encyclopedists for articles they said they could get me (have you ever read Tolkien’s article Sigelwara Land from Medium Aevum, 1931-33? Don’t bother. But thanks anyway, modtheow, you can bet it’s in my footnotes all right!). I hounded Dr. Sinex for the draft of her forthcoming article on Harad. I shook my fist in rage (metaphorically) at Jared Lobdell, when I finally got his new article with the tantalizing title "In the Far Northwest of the Old World" -- and found almost nothing of value.

One thing I felt good about: I had a hook. I’d felt from the beginning that I needed an organizing principle for my twin “compass point” articles – something theoretical, perhaps. In the set design game, we call it a “visual concept”. In the army, they call it the artillery, which “lends dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl”. Just so: my articles craved dignity.

Originally I thought I could adopt “directionality”, because Ursula LeGuin uses that term in her fine essay on LotR. Unfortunately, no one else seems to use it in the context that I wanted. Then I stumbled on “Moral Geography”. Jackpot!

Moral Geography associates moral qualities with physical places. Montaigne first proposed this as a way to study geography, famously pronouncing that the inhabitants of southern European countries are inherently lazier than their northern neighbors. I found a bunch of other stuff on the internet (that’s what the internet is really good for: faking it) that convinced me it was still a valid buzzword today. I could pull off a mention (or two! introduction and conclusion) of the term to explain why The East and The South, as they appear in Tolkien’s works, are worth talking about in today's academy. Dignity? I’ll show you dignity.

My first two pieces were due September 1, 2005. I had the knowledge, I had the research, I had the hook. In short, I had my academic mojo, yeah baby! It was time to start writing.