Tolkien bibliography

That's what I've been working on for the last couple days: the annual bibliography of Tolkien studies for the journal of the same title. This year we're covering 2017 (just long enough in the past to let the references settle down).

First thing is to go through all the specialty indexes and known Tolkien-related journals, and then turn to more general indexes. This is my first time using Google Scholar, which I added to my list of sources last year. I like it a lot. Its article listings are more detailed than WorldCat's, and it has a lot more material, though there's a lot of scholarly sources it omits, and there's plenty more work to be done. It's a very high-recall index, which means there's lots of dross to sort through, and despite using a relevance ordering there's no obvious spot where the dross entirely takes over; that comes from the intensity and depth of the recall. It's a good thing I'm working on an author with an exceedingly rare surname; if I were working on Charles Williams, I wouldn't be able to proceed this way.

Biggest problem is: what possibly relevant items to omit? I omit anything about the movies that isn't directly about comparing them with the books: this is Tolkien Studies, not Jackson Studies. Similarly with other derived and inspired material. Accordingly, I also omit an article about tiny neopagan groups who've modeled their religion on The Silmarillion: it's fascinating, but it turns out to have nothing to do with Tolkien's book, just on what these people did with it.

Theoretical linguists seem to be taking to using Tolkien to provide examples for their airy discussions. There's an article on the difference between the truth values of "Frodo lives in the Shire" (which is a fictional statement already) and "Frodo lives at 221B Baker Street," and what happens if you add "Imagine that ..." to the front of either of them. I decided this was just N to fill the space and had nothing to do with Tolkien.

Equivalently, I've decided to stop listing the trickle of articles, mostly from Eastern Europe, that use translations, usually of The Hobbit, as source material for usually rather vague analyses of how particular forms of expressions or types of words are translated from English into Bulgarian or some other such target language. Any Tolkien content has been sucked out in the process.

There are a lot of things, however, that I add as tentative because there's no full text accessible online and I can't figure out from the citations if they're relevant or not until I can get to a library and figure them out. Already out, from a view at the public library, is a book of tales of famous authors' childhoods whose story of Tolkien and the tarantula is full of made-up detail, because there isn't any that isn't made up. It also says he remained terrified of spiders, which he wasn't.

Besides topic, there's also nature of publication. We don't list unpublished theses. I'm trying to be chary of undergraduate term papers stuck without additional formatting into their school's online journals. Self-published books can go in if they're substantial. Something with no library holdings, no proper title page, and a single Amazon customer review saying it's a worthless ripoff of Tolkien fans' money, no. Frantic e-mails to obscure Tolkien publications: why does your website not list an issue from you, but WorldCat says there is one?

Now to spend the rest of the weekend thinking about making food - there's visits to both a Pesach seder and an Easter dinner on the calendar; that's what comes of being an interfaith couple - and I'm bringing food to both of them. Come Monday, it's down to the trenches of the university libraries for a couple more days' bibliographic work.