The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide
The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide | |
---|---|
Author | Christina Scull, Wayne G. Hammond |
Publisher | HarperCollins (UK) Houghton Mifflin (US) |
Released | 11 November 2006 (UK) 6 October 2006 (US) |
Format | Hardcover boxed set |
Pages | 2300 |
ISBN | 0007169728 |
The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide is a most comprehensive reference book on the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien. This work is by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, first published in 2006.
The first edition consists of two volumes, one is an extraodinarily detailed Chronology of Tolkien's life, the other is a Reader's Guide containing entries on all things, places, and persons that Tolkien was concerned with, arranged in alphabetical order. The whole work totals up to 2300 pages.
A second edition was published in 2017, with much revision and addition to the first edition that the Reader's Guide has to be divided into two volumes. The book is now expanded to have 2720 pages.
Overview[edit | edit source]
- 1. Chronology
The Chronology, being the first of the three volumes, traces J.R.R. Tolkien's progress from his birth in South Africa in 1892, to the battlefields of France and the lecture-halls of Leeds and Oxford, to his success as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, until his death in 1973.
It is the most extensive biographical resource about Tolkien ever published. Thousands of details have been drawn from letters, contemporary documents in libraries and archives, and a wide variety of other published and unpublished sources. Assembled together, they form a revealing portrait of Tolkien in all his aspects: the distinguished scholar of Old and Middle English, the capable teacher and administrator, the devoted husband and father, the brilliant creator of Middle-earth.
- 2. Reader's Guide
The Reader's Guide, being the two remaining volumes, is an indispensable introduction to J.R.R. Tolkien's life, writings and art. It includes histories and discussions of his works; analyses of the components of his vast Silmarillion mythology; brief biographies of people important in his life; accounts of places he knew; essays on topics such as Tolkien's interests and attitudes towards contemporary issues, ideas found in his works, adaptations and invented languages; and checklists of his published works, his poetry, his pictorial art, and translations of his writings.
Reception[edit | edit source]
David Oberhelman, writing in Mythlore, call the work "undoubtedly a seminal if not the definitive reference work on the Professor". He states that "in true Tolkien fashion, [it] grew in the telling". In his opinion, "the breadth of the coverage and the authority with which Scull and Hammond document Tolkien's life and times will make these books an invaluable supplement to Humphrey Carpenter's classic 1977 biography and their own 2005 The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion". Oberhelman notes that rather than studying the fictional Middle-earth, the work focuses on Tolkien himself, describing "people, places and things" linked to Tolkien. Where there is interpretation beyond what Tolkien or his son Christopher write, the work tends to cite scholars like Verlyn Flieger and Tom Shippey. Arguments are presented in a balanced way, and the discussions are "always informative as well as entertaining". Oberhelman calls the work "truly a monumental achievement".[1]
John Garth, in Tolkien Studies, describes Scull and Hammond's work as a "super-heavyweight contribution by two highly regarded veterans of Tolkien studies." In his view, while Michael D.C. Drout's The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia may have the edge on matters of criticism, Scull and Hammond is best on "biographical matters". The work's encyclopedic structure "rightly" avoids having entries on fictional people, places, and "totems", an approach that works like Robert Foster's The Complete Guide to Middle-earth had incautiously adopted. Instead, it "ambitiously" aims to cover the whole of Tolkien's life in diaristic detail, as The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien did for 1944, given that Tolkien had written repeatedly to his son Christopher in that year detailing small events in his life. The result is to offer the scholar and the interested reader a wealth of detail on why and how Tolkien wrote as he did.[2]
Publication history and gallery[edit | edit source]
|
- First edition
- boxed set: HarperCollins, boxed set (2006), pp. 2300. ISBN 0007169728
- volume 1: HarperCollins, hardcover (2006), pp. 1020. ISBN 0618391029
- volume 2: HarperCollins, hardcover (2006), pp. 1280. ISBN 0618391010
|
- Second edition
- boxed set: HarperCollins, boxed set (2017), pp. 2720. ISBN 0008214549
- volume 1: HarperCollins, hardcover (2017), pp. 960. ISBN 0008214514
- volume 2: HarperCollins, hardcover (2017), pp. 860. ISBN 0008214522
- volume 3: HarperCollins, hardcover (2017), pp. 900. ISBN 0008214530
See also[edit | edit source]
External links[edit | edit source]
- Book review by David Oberhelman, from Mythlore vol. 25
- Book review by John Garth, from Tolkien Studies vol. 4
- Book review (2nd edition) by Jason Fisher, from Tolkien Studies vol. 15
- Addenda and corrigenda to the first edition (2006)
- Addenda and corrigenda to the second edition (2017)