THE BONES OF THE OX

So, yesterday's mail brought my author's copy of TOLKIEN AND THE STUDY OF HIS SOURCES: CRITICAL ESSAYS (formerly 'The Bones of the Ox', taking its cue from Tolkien's Cauldron of Stories in OFS), edited by Jason Fisher, which includes my essay "SHE and Tolkien, Revisited".* This is a re-casting and expansion of my v. first scholarly essay, which appeared in MYTHLORE as far back as the summer of 1981. I was glad to be asked to revise this piece, which seems to get cited a lot over the years. We have so much more material available to us now than then (e.g., LETTERS of JRRT, the HME, the Scull-Hammond chronology), but my basic premise still held, I think, and it was good to be able to include more evidence in support of my conclusions. And it was interesting to revisit a piece written so long ago (thirty years) -- my style and also I think my critical acumen have both evolved over that time.
I'm also glad that I'll now have a chance to read my fellow contributors' essays, which cover a range of subjects from Mesopotamian sources and the Goth/Lombard/Byzantine connection to writers whose lifespans overlapped Tolkien's own like Haggard and Buchan. It's not an exhaustive collection -- it's hard to see how it cd be** -- but it's a good place to start a look at how Tolkien handled his sources (which is as interesting a question as what the sources were).
And of course congratulations to Jason for his first book. Putting together a collection of essays by diverse hands can be like herding cats, and it's a tribute to his organizational powers and stick-to-it-ness that we now have this book. Kudos!
--John R.


*which I delivered at last year's MythCon in Dallas.
**a thought which conjures up visons of a companion volume someday with pieces on MacDonald, Morris, Dunsany, &c.