It’s springtime, and that means that Tolkien conference season is picking up momentum. If you can’t attend the Tolkien in Vermont conference this weekend, then maybe California is closer or more convenient. The annual Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference will be held April 12-15 this year in San Diego, with the Tolkien Studies area organized once again by its founder, Robin Reid. The Tolkien sessions are scheduled for April 13-14.

There’s a public Facebook group where you can keep up with announcements or contact others in the Tolkien Studies area. More conference information is available on the PCA/ACA site. I’ve copied the list of Tolkien sessions from the PCA/ACA Tolkien Studies conference schedule page.

I. TOLKIEN STUDIES: 20th CENTURY LITERATURE AND HISTORY
Thursday, April 13, 2017 – 8:00am to 9:30am (Torrey Pines 3)
Session chair: Victoria L Holtz Wodzak

Presenters

• The Real Business of Bilbo; the Dreams of Conan: Sword and Sorcery, Epic Fantasy, and the Rhetoric of the Ordinary. Jason Ray Carney
• Strange Bedfellows: Tolkien and Eddison. Peter Grybauskas
• There Was a Merry Band of Men, A Gardener, an Invalid, and the Lords Who Loved Them So: The Portrayal of Soldier-Servant Relationships and Their Reflections of War. Alicia Fox-Lenz
• Tolkien Underground: Reimagining World War I Bunkers and Tunnels. Victoria L Holtz Wodzak

II. TOLKIEN STUDIES: INFLUENCES AND CONNECTIONS
Thursday, April 13, 2017 – 9:45am to 11:15am (Torrey Pines 3)
Session chair: Brad Eden

Presenters

• The Dreamflower: Lothlorien in Middle-Earth Space-Time.  Brian Walter
• Tolkien and Pre-Vatican II Catholicism 101. Michael Wodzak
• The ‘Third Spring’: a neglected thread of Tolkien scholarship. Brad Eden

III. TOLKIEN STUDIES ROUNDTABLE: TOLKIEN AND ALTERITY
Thursday, April 13, 2017 – 11:30am to 1:00pm (Torrey Pines 3)
Session chair: Kristine Larsen

Presenters: Kristine Larsen, Brad Eden, Stephen Yandell, Robin Anne Reid

IV. TOLKIEN STUDIES: FAN STUDIES 1
Friday, April 14, 2017 – 8:00am to 9:30am (Torrey Pines 3)
Session chair: Mikhail Skoptsov

Presenters

• Making or Creating: Fans Transforming Orcs. Robin Anne Reid
• Deconstructing Durin’s Day: Science in the Service of Fan-Scholars. Kristine Larsen
• Lord of the Rings and Fans panel. Maggie Parke
• The Hobbit Variations: Publication, Adaptation, and Fan Revision. Mikhail Skoptsov

V. TOLKIEN STUDIES: CULTURAL AND FILM STUDIES
Friday, April 14, 2017 – 9:45am to 11:15am (Torrey Pines 3)
Session chair: Janice Bogstad

Presenters

• The Sacred Nature of Enchantment and Loss: Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit as an Ecotheology of Transformation. Kellianne H Matthews
• Wood and Water, Stock and Stone: Rediscovering English Landscapes through Walking. Christopher Cameron
• Visually Monstrous: Jackson’s Iconic Revisualizations of Hobbit Heroes and Villains. Janice Bogstad

VI: TOLKIEN STUDIES: FAN STUDIES 2
Friday, April 14, 2017 – 11:30am to 1:00pm (Torrey Pines 3)
Session chair: Sarah Coates

Presenters

• Whispers of a Tenth Walker: Lord of the Rings Fanfiction and Feminine / Feminist Interventions in Middle-Earth. Eva Wijman
• Bagginshield: An Exploration of Portrayals of Romantic Relationships between Bilbo Baggins and Thorin Oakenshield in Fanfiction. Sarah Coates

The PCA conference is a huge event. If you’re interested in popular culture, you’re sure to find sessions of interest, even outside the Tolkien Studies area — browse the conference webpages to find out more.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended my first Popular Culture / American Culture Association national conference, held in Chicago April 16-19. It was also the first year in which the PCA was undertaking a trial run of Tolkien Studies as a special topic. After next year, the organization will decide whether Tolkien Studies should become a permanent subject area in the conference. Judging by the full day of Tolkien sessions and the full audiences throughout the day, the prospects must be good for Tolkien Studies to become a permanent part of the PCA annual event in the US. What is especially promising is that there seems to be no limit on the number of sessions in any area, unlike this year’s cutbacks at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, which would not allow more than four sessions for sponsoring groups, effectively cutting the Tolkien panels in half.  The idea for the Tolkien Studies area and the organization of the successful program are all due to the energy and enthusiasm of Robin Reid (U. of Texas A&M, Commerce), who was in effect the organizer and co-ordinator of the event.

With stacks of ungraded papers and exams sitting on my desk, I won’t have time to outline each presentation that I heard – and I heard them all! — starting at 8 a.m. and going through seven sessions until 8:15 p.m., when a viewing of the extended edition of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey closed off the day. It was challenging to find meals, to line up for the washroom, to check in for the next day’s flights home, or simply to stretch one’s legs with only 15 to 20 minute breaks, but each session was as interesting and rewarding as the next. I heard many good presentations and came away with some new ideas to mull over.

In my limited time what I can manage, though, is to describe two of the roundtables, which both dealt directly with researching and publishing on Tolkien — one that I participated in on using the Marquette University Tolkien archives (to be posted in a couple of days, I hope) and one on the state of Tolkien studies scholarship (following).

Roundtable on the State of Tolkien Studies Scholarship

Robin Reid brought together an impressive panel for this discussion. While all of the following presenters have written on Tolkien, here are their credentials as editors and conference organizers (as far as I know; please excuse if I’ve missed something important):

• Janice Bogstad, co-editor of Picturing Tolkien: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy.
• David Bratman, one of the editors of the journal Tolkien Studies and former writer of the “Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies.”
• Janet Brennan Croft, editor of the journal Mythlore, as well as editor of the volume of essays, Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, and of a forthcoming volume on women in Tolkien’s work.
• Brad Eden, editor of the newly launched Journal of Tolkien Research. He has edited the book Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien and is in the process of editing other collections. Brad is also the organizer of the Tolkien at Kalamazoo conference sessions, and he organized a Hobbit conference at Valparaiso University last year.
• Chris Vaccaro, editor of the recently published volume of essays The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality, and organizer of the annual Tolkien in Vermont conference.

Brad Eden’s Journal of Tolkien Research is the latest development in the field. Hosted by Valparaiso University, JTR will be entirely open access, publishing articles as they are accepted; at the end of the year, they will be bundled together and given a volume and issue number. Janet Brennan Croft informed us that she has hopes that in the near future Mythlore will become available online with a one-year embargo, an increasingly common move for scholarly periodicals that have to balance accessibility with sales. Several of the speakers who are librarians advocated that scholars keep the rights to their research whenever possible; they recommended speaking to your university librarian before signing away any copyrights and to ask about the “SPARC Addendum” which as far as I can tell is relevant in the US and in Canada (Canadian information here).

Some discussion also took place about the scope of various Tolkien journals. David Bratman talked about how his Tolkien Studies co-editors are always grappling with the question of how far afield from Tolkien’s writings can they go; for instance, should they publish articles about Tolkien’s influence on other fantasy writers? Janet Brennan Croft pointed out that even though Mythlore focuses on Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams, around 50% of the journal content is on Tolkien. Brad Eden aims for JTR to be interdisciplinary in its coverage, and in addition to articles on Tolkien’s works, it will accept articles on adaptations, gaming, fan productions, and audience reception.

After discussing periodicals, the conversation turned to potential book publishers. Janet Brennan Croft pointed out that submissions can be made to the Mythopoeic Press. Other editors on the panel spoke about publishing with McFarland and found the company efficient and clear in its directions. (I did add a comment to this discussion, though: while I know that McFarland has published many good books, I would caution young academics who are looking for promotion. McFarland does not use external peer reviewers, and for some university promotion and tenure committees, external peer review is essential.)

The panellists emphasized the need to do sufficient research before submitting any scholarly work for publication. As David Bratman pointed out, we have “The Year’s Work,” now written by Merlin DeTardo and published in Tolkien Studies. Janet Brennan Croft presented the idea that essay anthologies could include older, “classic” articles along with new ones. Scholars can also check out the Mythlore Index for the first 102 issues; subsequent issues are indexed on the website. For reviews of older sources, recommendations were also made to look at “Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a look back at Tolkien criticism since 1982” published in Envoi 9 by Michael Drout and Hilary Wynne and Richard West’s Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist, published by Kent State UP.

Finally, the panel was asked what areas of scholarship they thought could use development in Tolkien studies. And of course, various answers were given: Tolkien’s style (Robin Reid); Tolkien’s relation to the modernist canon (David Bratman); bodies in Tolkien’s work and the application of contemporary theories to Tolkien’s work (Chris Vaccaro); Tolkien as a theorist (Janet Brennan Croft); Tolkien and multimodal texts (Janice Bogstad). Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments.

If I’ve missed any important points from this informative panel, please let me know. I’ll post a summary of the roundtable on using the Marquette Tolkien archive in a couple of days (hopefully). In the meantime, if anyone is interested in staying informed about the conference, there’s a Facebook group, Tolkien at Popular Culture/American Culture Association, which is open to interested members.

Here is the list of Tolkien Studies sessions that have been approved for the 2014 Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association conference in Chicago in April. The dates and times of the sessions will be posted on the PCA/ACA website in February. As you can see, there was an excellent response to this year’s first trial run of the Tolkien Studies area — with no small thanks to Robin Reid, who did a great deal of publicizing, encouraging, and organizing to make this happen!

For my own part, I’m looking forward to participating in the roundtable discussion on the Marquette Tolkien Archive when I plan to talk about the potential of the archive for the study of Tolkien fandom.

Take a look at the variety of presentations to come:

SESSIONS:

WAR IN MIDDLE-EARTH
Noms de Guerre: The Power of Naming in War and Conflict in Middle-earth
Janet Croft

Gollum’s Great Chain of Hearing: The Great War and Tolkien’s Last Alliance
Peter Grybauskas

The War Wounded in the Prose Tradition of The Children of Húrin
Margaret Sinex (moderator)

VISUALIZING TOLKIEN: ILLUSTRATIONS AND FILMS
Illustration as Translation: Assertion of National Identity in Tove Jansson’s Illustrations of Tolkien’s The Hobbit
M. Lee Alexander

The Disabled Hero: The Ethics of the Wound in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings
Todd Comer

Ruins and Dreams: Environmental Visions within The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
William Korver

Tolkien and the Multimodal Text: Narrative Transformational Strategies
Janice Bogstad (moderator)

THE MATERIALITY OF MIDDLE-EARTH
Tolkien and Literary Cartography: Spatiality, Fantasy, Modernity
Robert Tally

Constructions of Middle-earth in Tolkien’s Legendarium
Robin Reid

Breaking the Dragon’s Gaze: Revealing Commodity Fetishism in Tolkien’s Middle-earth
Steven Kelly

Darkness Amid the Day: Eclipses in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien
Kristine Larsen (moderator)

COMPLEX HEROES AND IDEALS IN TOLKIEN’S LEGENDARIUM

Frodo is Overrated: Why Samwise Gamgee is the True Hero of The Lord of the Rings
Kathryn Allen

The Making of a Hero: Success and Failure of Heroic Characters in Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings
Rachel Syens

Tolkien’s Unfallen Man: Tom Bombadil as an Image of Humanity’s Ideal State
Brian Kenna

Tolkien and the Buddhist influence: thoughts and perspectives
Brad Eden (moderator)

THREE ROUNDTABLES:

THE STATE OF TOLKIEN STUDIES SCHOLARSHIP
Brad Eden
Janet Brennan Croft
Christopher Vaccaro
David Bratman
Robin Reid (moderator)

THE TOLKIEN ARCHIVE AT MARQUETTE
William Fliss
Amy Amendt-Radugue
Anna Smol
Richard West
Robin Reid (moderator)

AUTHORIZING TOLKIEN: QUESTIONS OF CONTROL, ADAPTATION, AND DISSEMINATION OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN’S WORKS

Kathryn Allen
Cait Coker
Brad Eden
Kristine Larsen
Robin Reid
Robert Tally
Michael Elam (moderator)

OTHER:

Tolkien Studies Business Meeting

Film Viewing: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey