Tolkienists.org

This site has been designed and coded from the ground up by, well, me to serve as an up-to-date central repository for everyone interested in the field of Tolkien studies. Most of the site construction is now complete — but data entry is more complicated:

Blog posts

We publish excerpts of relevant posts from the blogs of Tolkien scholars (with their permission, of course). While keeping up with new posts, we’ll also be working backwards through time to include a larger and larger chronicle of posts.

Book releases

We publish notices of new releases of Tolkien-related books as we become aware of them, and create listings for the books as relevant. Over time, we look forward to listing more and more older books; however, we won’t retroactively be adding earlier release announcements.

Events

It’s our hope to provide a comprehensive centralized listing of all Tolkien-related public events that include an academic component (sc., ​“conference papers”), world-wide. Gradually, we’ll be working our way back through time to include earlier and earlier conferences, symposia, lectures, and so on.

Journal issues

The field of Tolkien studies has never been richer, with three English-language journals specializing in peer-reviewed articles directly related to Tolkien himself, at least two more focussing on the Inklings, and countless with broader scopes that include parts of Tolkien studies: fantasy literature, Medieval studies, Christian theology, world-building, and so forth. Again, it’s our hope to on-goingly list all specifically Tolkienian articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as all articles and reviews in Tolkien-related periodicals (peer-reviewed or not), as they are issued. We will also steadily work our way back through time to include earlier articles and publications.

News articles

We publish excerpts of relevant news items from reputable news sources. We’ll be keeping up with new articles from this point forward, but no effort will be made to add ​“old news.”

We’ll post right here in our own Tolkienists blog when we reach specific milestones as we extend our annals back through time.

The site itself will soon include full-text searching; but in the meantime, everything that looks like it might be a link should in fact bring you to a relevant listing of material on the site.

At the moment, the site is entirely in English. It’s being designed, however, to support many languages. We will be soliciting on-going contributions to pay for (surprisingly excellent) automatic translation of the entire site into other languages. Watch this space!

Please, if you know of any current blogs, new book releases,events, journals, or calls for papers that are not listed here, please let us know!