Mythopoeic Awards

What would have been last summer's Mythopoeic Awards were finally announced today. The delay was not directly related to the cancellation of a Mythopoeic Conference (where the awards are normally announced) last summer; the problem was that the closure of libraries made it difficult for members of the awards committee to locate copies of the nominees, particularly the broad spectrum of first-ballot nominees. (Several of the finalists were distributed to the committee by the publishers on request.) As usual, I was on the scholarship committee and B. was on the fiction committees; I didn't read any of the fiction myself.

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies
Amy Amendt-Raduege, "The Sweet and the Bitter": Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (Kent State)
I recused myself from voting on this award this year, because I have a contribution in a collection which was one of the other finalists, but though this wouldn't have been my first choice, I'm very pleased with the result. Not just a survey of the deaths in Tolkien's story, it explores them in the larger context of the meaning of death in our culture, and how they resonate for the reader. I only wish it had broader coverage, because the death in Tolkien that most moves me is Thorin's in The Hobbit.

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies
James Gifford, A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic (ELS Editions)
On the other hand, I was extremely disappointed with this choice, not that most of the other finalists were much better. Gifford's prose is described as "dense" by those who like it, but I found it turgid, convoluted, and almost unreadable. It's rather embarrassing to give it an award in honor of the clear critical prose of Tolkien and Lewis. Further, what Gifford has to say in his turgid prose, insofar as I could follow it, was equally unappetizing: he appears to be trying to force fantasy into a series of Procrustan beds, alternately Marxist and anarchist. Ugh. In Gifford's acceptance speech, he describes the book as a historical survey of classic 20C fantasies in conversation with modernism and anarchism: that would have been a much better book than the one he actually wrote.

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature
Theodora Goss, Snow White Learns Witchcraft (Mythic Delirium Books)
B. liked this one a great deal.

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature
Yoon Ha Lee, Dragon Pearl (Rick Riordan)
B. says this one was OK.