Tolkien Scholars – Now YOU Have a Friend in the Fandom Business!

Apologies to the Shane Company for bastardizing their slogan. I’m sure if they are Tolkien fans they won’t mind. And if they do mind, well I guess I’ll be changing the title of this article.

In any event, the real point of this punfest is to help spread the word about a new series of articles for fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-earth (that includes all you folks who read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and all those other “Tolkien” books).

When I launched Xenite.Org’s Middle-earth Website in July I knew I would have to publish a lot of new content to make it really interesting. Just republishing old Suite101 essays wouldn’t be enough. To that end I launched the Middle-earth Unplugged series of articles, which are written in the style of National Geographic articles (including pictures). But it takes a long time to put those articles together.

There are also the Tolkien Questions and Answers, which are all new essays that address questions asked by Tolkien fans around the world (and they can ask some challenging questions, let me tell you).

But I didn’t want this Website to be all about ME. I wanted it to be something that Tolkien fans could appreciate on an entirely different level. I also needed to take a break from the Middle-earth Unplugged articles because the amount of work they entail was killing me.

So I finally decided (after much thought and mulling over of the pros and cons) to start contacting Tolkien scholars and asking them for interviews. So far, five have agreed and I’m sure I’ll be able to get more to come on board (no one has actually turned down a request for an interview, in case you’re wondering).

The first interview has just been published. Please read “An Interview with Janet Brennan Croft”. Janet is a right fine Tolkien scholar but she is also the editor of Mythlore, the official peer-reviewed journal of the Mythopoeic Society, which publishes research about Tolkien, the Inklings, mythology, and fantasy (basically all the good, cool stuff).

Each week around this time another article will be added to the Interviews with the Scholars section. Other scholars who are already in the pipeline include Wayne Hamond and Christina Scull (J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator as well as the about-to-be-published The Art of The Hobbit), John Garth (Tolkien and the Great War), John Rateliff (The History of the Hobbit), and Michael Drout (co-editor of Tolkien Studies).

More scholars will be invited to participate, I promise you. There are a LOT of them out there and, quite frankly, I feel confident they’ll all want to participate. This series is special because, so far as I know, no one (in the online fandom community) has attempted anything like this before. So I am hoping the fans will come along for the ride.

I also want to ask these scholars some pretty intense questions — not to put them on the spot, but to get into what drives their interest in Tolkien, and to tease a few interesting glimmers of their special insights from them. So these are not fluff interviews by any means. They’re pretty meaty, in my (admittedly biased) opinion.

I hope you’ll agree with me on that point. And, don’t worry. I’ll eventually get back to Middle-earth Unplugged. Just as soon as I can ransom my camera from those pesky Orcs who stole it.