The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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the creation of an ancient legend of Middle-earth, changing and growing over many years, reflected the search of the author for a presentation of the myth nearer to his desire’ (p. 14). Since ‘the decision of what to include and what to exclude … could only be a matter of personal and often questionable judgement … there can be no attainable “correct way”’ (p. 16).
We should note, in case of changes to the text or page breaks of Beren and Lúthien in the eleventh hour, that we have written this article on the basis of a proof copy, kindly provided us by HarperCollins in advance of publication.
Berkshire. In summer 1912 Tolkien went on a walking tour in this county in the south-east of England, where he made several drawings and watercolours. He was especially interested in the local landscape and buildings, such as the church of St Michael, founded in Anglo-Saxon times but rebuilt in various periods, at Lambourn where King Alfred once had a manor. Tolkien drew its late Norman west doorway, a detail of its keystone, and a gargoyle above a Gothic window. (See Artist and Illustrator, figs. 11, 13.) He also went to East-bury, where he drew the High Street and picturesque thatched cottages (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 12), one of which still stands. In later years he was attracted, with his family, to the Vale of the White Horse with its famous stylized figure of a horse, around 374 feet long, cut into the grass on a chalk hillside c. 100 BC, and the ancient long-barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy (c. 2000 BC).
All three of Tolkien’s sons attended the Oratory School when it was located at Caversham, near Reading in Berkshire. When he returned to Oxford in 1972 after his wife’s death Tolkien often visited his youngest son, *Christopher, who at that time lived with his wife and children in the village of West Hanney in Berkshire (since 1974 part of Oxfordshire).
In his poems and stories the character Tom Bombadil, Tolkien said, was ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’ (letter to Stanley Unwin, 16 December 1937, Letters, p. 26), and the Barrow-downs near Tom’s home in *The Lord of the Rings (Book I, Chapter 8) may be indebted to the many prehistoric graves found in Berkshire.
Bibliographies. The standard history of the publication of Tolkien’s works is J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography by Wayne G. Hammond with the assistance of Douglas A. Anderson (1993). Except for a few minor omissions it is a comprehensive account (to mid-1992) of Tolkien’s books and the books to which he contributed, with details of content, binding, and textual changes in discrete editions and printings; of his contributions to periodicals, his published letters and art, interviews, recordings, and miscellanea; and of translations of his writings. Addenda and corrigenda to the Bibliography, as well as articles on Tolkien bibliography addressed to the serious enthusiast, have been published in the occasional magazine The Tolkien Collector (begun 1992). A second edition is planned. An online supplement and extension of the Bibliography, by Neil Holford, is at www.tolkienbooks.net.
For concise checklists of Tolkien’s principal works, and of his published art and poetry, see the appendix in the second volume of the Reader’s Guide. Other checklists, created by fans and societies, may be found online, such as ‘A Chronological Bibliography of the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien’ by Åke Bertenstam, at www.forodrim.org/arda/tbchron.html; most of these, however, are limited in detail and have not been kept up to date.
The most important of the early bibliographies of writings about Tolkien, Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist by Richard C. West (1970, an expansion of a work that appeared in the journal Extrapolation for December 1968), today is useful chiefly for the picture it affords of Tolkien studies in their infancy. A list of everything of major interest on Tolkien published to that date, it also includes less important material but omits work published in fan magazines (‘fanzines’). Entries considered by West to be of special note are marked with an asterisk. A second edition of Tolkien Criticism, published in 1981, is much enlarged but also more selective, to keep its length within bounds, the literature about Tolkien having expanded greatly the previous decade. Essays and reviews from three leading American fanzines (Mythlore, Orcrist, and the Tolkien Journal) were now cited. All entries in West’s second edition are to be considered ‘definitely of real importance’ to Tolkien studies ‘through the greater part of 1980, while what is excluded is much of what I consider peripheral’ (p. xi).
For Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 4 (Winter 2004) West produced ‘A Tolkien Checklist: Selected Criticism 1981–2004’, giving his subjective choices for ‘some of the best critical studies’ of Tolkien (p. 1015). Michael D.C. Drout and Hilary Wynne include an extensive bibliography, without annotations, in ‘Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look Back at Tolkien Criticism since 1982’, Envoi: A Review Journal of Medieval Literature 9, no. 1 (Fall 2000). This has been continued in the journal Tolkien Studies, by David Bratman and other hands.
J.R.R. Tolkien: Six Decades of Criticism by Judith A. Johnson (1986) is more expansive than West’s bibliography in its coverage of fan as well as mainstream publications (through 1984), and in its annotations provides a welcome alternative point of view to West, but is otherwise less helpful as a guide to scholarship. Valuable writings about Tolkien are listed in the dubious company of Tolkien-inspired blank books and other ‘Tolkieniana’. And whereas West’s second edition is divided simply into two sections, Tolkien’s own writings arranged chronologically, and critical works about Tolkien listed alphabetically by author or (when no author is given) by title, the entries in Johnson are organized in a difficult scheme of multiple chronological and alphabetical divisions and subdivisions. Johnson’s book, moreover, suffers from errors and inconsistencies.
Åke Jönsson, later known as Åke Bertenstam, cast a wide net in compiling En Tolkienbibliografi 1911–1980 = A Tolkien Bibliography 1911–1980 (1983; rev. edn. 1986). Despite the terminal date indicated in the title, Bertenstam also lists works by Tolkien, reviews of Tolkien’s works, and reviews of books about Tolkien that were published later than 1980. Fan publications are included, and many more British and European works than are covered by West or Johnson. Alone among Tolkien bibliographers, Bertenstam provides an index by subject. Five supplements to his bibliography have appeared in the occasional Swedish Tolkien journal Arda, beginning with the number for 1982–83 (published 1986) and ending with that for 1988–91 (published 1994).
Bertenstam’s experience illustrates the difficulties involved in maintaining a comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Tolkien, given the continual growth in that field, the rapidity of its expansion, and the cost of print publication (his final supplement occupied more than 200 pages, fully half of the 1988–91 Arda). Computer technology and the Internet offers a means to produce a Tolkien bibliography that is less expensive and more easily updated (if sometimes ephemeral, as websites and web hosts come and go), though there remains always the difficulty of finding personnel, usually volunteers, able and willing to gather, analyze, and enter bibliographic data and write expert annotations. Michael D.C. Drout and students at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, for example, have contributed to an online database, wheatoncollege.edu/english/tolkien-bibliography, about which he has written: ‘The bibliography is copious but not exhaustive. It has been compiled by students, though checked by me, but sometimes what happens is that a very enthusiastic student takes on a big pile of articles to read and summarize, then things come up, and the articles never do get into the database. So there are many lacunae, particularly in some of the more recent work’ (‘Tolkien Bibliography Online’. Wormtalk and Slugspeak (blog), 15 March 2010).
Further information on early reviews of books by Tolkien, and on early articles and comments on Tolkien, may be found in a series of annotated bibliographies by George H. Thompson in Mythlore (Autumn 1984–Autumn 1987; errata, Autumn 1997). ‘An Inklings Bibliography’, a feature published in most issues of Mythlore between whole nos. 12 (June 1976) and 85 (Winter 1999), often included annotated citations to Tolkien *criticism, compiled by Joe R. Christopher and Wayne G. Hammond. Two checklists of dissertations concerned with Tolkien supplement West’s Tolkien Criticism: Richard E. Blackwelder, ‘Dissertations from