Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien.

ROOTS AND BRANCHES: SELECTED PAPERS ON TOLKIEN. Tom Shippey. Berne and Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007. Softcover. 432pp. $24.20. ISBN 978-3905703054.

ANY EXCUSE TO REVISIT the essays of Tom Shippey, arguably the world's preeminent Tolkien scholar, is a welcome one, and the convenience of having so many collected together in one place already makes Roots and Branches well worth its cover price. Shippey's papers and talks are always illuminating and lively; anyone who has heard him speak publicly will perceive his witty and droll delivery coming through from every printed page in this long overdue collection. The twenty-three essays that comprise the volume represent some of Shippey's finest work, broken down into four sections, each reinforcing the central metaphor of the ramifying Tree so dear to Tolkien: "The Roots: Tolkien and his Predecessors," "Heartwood: Tolkien and Scholarship," "The Trunk: The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion," and "Twigs and Branches: Minor Works by Tolkien."

Along with previously printed essays, the collection presents several new, unpublished papers. These include the lead essay, "Tolkien and the Beowulf-Poet," a logical companion piece to "Tolkien and the Gawain-Poet," published with the Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference in 1995. That essay, long out of print, is here too, and both are essential reading for anybody who would learn how Tolkien's professional studies informed his creative processes. In many cases, as Shippey demonstrates, Tolkien sought to solve or rectify in his own mythopoeic creations the apparent mistakes, cruces, and lacunae he discovered in the course of his academic work on Beowulf, the Eddas, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and other medieval writings. Other new essays include "The Problem of the Rings: Tolkien and Wagner," "Fighting the Long Defeat: Philology in Tolkien's Life and Fiction," "'A Fund of Wise Sayings': Proverbiality in Tolkien," and the marvelous "Tolkien and Iceland: The Philology of Envy" (this last has been available online, though never formally published).

Of the remaining eighteen papers, all previously published, several have been expanded, updated, or otherwise revised from the forms in which they originally appeared. This includes, for instance, the minimization of "the signs of original oral delivery" (i), and the addition of explanatory notes, annotations, and even translations, as in the case of "Tolkien and Iceland." All of this adds up to a collection that is, in many ways, new and refreshing--even for readers already familiar with many of the volume's constituent parts.

At the same time, I must call into question the ostensible premises on which the collection has been assembled. In his Preface, Thomas Honegger asserts that "many of [Professor Shippey's] essays are, though still highly topical, no longer readily available. It was this unsatisfactory situation which prompted Walking Tree Publishers to approach Tom Shippey and propose to him the republication of his older essays." If that was indeed the case, then the collection has not quite succeeded in its mission. The majority of the papers collected in Roots and Branches are recent, still in print, and readily available (though to assemble them all on one's own would be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor). To give an idea of what I mean: fourteen of the twenty-three essays in the book were printed or written in just the last seven years (2000-2006), and almost all of them are still in print. For the decade of the 1990s, there are only five representative essays, and for the 1980s, only four. Even the majority of these are still in print and available today. For the 1970s, there are none, though this decade admittedly precedes the "period of some twenty-five years" (i) professed in the Introduction.

One can readily see how the skew toward Shippey's most recent work could have been better balanced by the substitution of older, rarer essays for some of those published more recently and still in print. To be more specific, where is "Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings" (originally published in J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller, and unavailable since 1979)? Where is "Tolkien as a Post-War Writer" (published in the notoriously out-of-print Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, alongside an essay that did make it into this collection)? Where are Shippey's engaging and insightful speeches to the Tolkien Society's Annual Dinners of 1980, 1983, and 1991 (published in Digging Potatoes, Growing Trees, volumes 1-2)? Perhaps these would have presented too great a challenge for editing out the artifacts of orality, but they are delightful to read and difficult to come by. And while I must congratulate Walking Tree for unearthing Shippey's 1982 review of Tolkien's neglected opuscule, Mr. Bliss, the present collection could also have benefited from the inclusion of his reviews of the Carpenter biography, The Silmarillion, and The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (published in the Oxford Mail and Times Literary Supplement between 1977 and 1981). Had all these essays been included, the temporal distribution of Shippey's work would have been much more level, and the works reprinted much more difficult for the average reader to obtain, thereby increasing the value of the present collection many fold.

Regarding the speeches at the Tolkien Society's Annual Dinners, I would note that one of the most interesting--and entertaining--aspects of these talks is their interactive nature. The speeches as printed in Digging Potatoes, Growing Trees include not just Shippey's declamations, but also the questions and interjections of his audience--sometimes including well-known names, such as Charles Noad, Jessica Yates, and Helen Armstrong, to name a few. Each one is a conversation. As noted earlier, this might have presented a dilemma to Honegger and Shippey in the preparation of the present volume: whether to remove those traces of orality or to print the piece(s) intact. But one of the essays that is included in Roots and Branches presents just the same problem: "Allegory versus Bounce: (Half of) an Exchange on Smith of Wootton Major." Shippey explains in a footnote that the essay "began as a public debate between myself and Verlyn Flieger" (351), and it was subsequently published, as a dialogue, in the Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts-so why prune Flieger's worthwhile perspective out of the conversation here in Roots and Branches? Perhaps it was done in the interests of keeping the volume entirely in Shippey's own voice, but though that would make sense, something is definitely lost in the revision.

But lest I sound too negative, let me hasten to reassert that, despite some exaggeration of the age or unavailability of its contents, and despite a few missed opportunities to reprint genuinely rare essays, the collection is nevertheless an essential addition to any serious Tolkien library. Some particular gems include: "Grimm, Grundtvig, Tolkien: Nationalism and the Invention of Mythologies," which set the stage for such later essays as Anne C. Petty's "Identifying England's Lonnrot" (Tolkien Studies, 2004) and Verlyn Flieger's "A Mythology for Finland: Tolkien and Lonnrot as Mythmakers" (in Jane Chance's Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, 2004); "Tolkien and 'The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth'," a genuinely hard-to-find essay on one of Tolkien's most overlooked works, and which may have paved the way for Richard C. West's superb essay, "Turin's Ofermod: An Old English Theme in the Development of the Story of Turin" (in Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter's Tolkien's Legendarium); and "Tolkien's Academic Reputation Now," a dated but important assessment of Tolkien's impact on the scholarly study of Old and Middle English, as assessment which has been considerably furthered in Michael D.C. Drout's more recent essay, "J.R.R. Tolkien's Medieval Scholarship and its Significance" (Tolkien Studies, 2007).

Additionally, readers should not overlook the short but valuable Introduction, in which Shippey sets his own work in context, and more importantly, delivers his verdict on what Tolkien studies has not yet adequately addressed. These few preliminary pages offer a kind of "to do list" for Tolkien scholars and will hopefully spur further investigation of: Tolkien's literary antecedents, particularly the Victorian and Edwardian; the significance of the parallel efforts at comparative philology and comparative mythology undertaken in Tolkien's milieu; the interplay of topoi in the works of Tolkien, Lewis, Williams, Barfield, and their friends--which Shippey calls the "Inkling conversation"; Tolkien's early poetry in all its varied forms and revisions; and more besides. But the work continues unabated, of course, by Shippey and others. And one may hope that the coming years will yield ample material for a second volume of Shippey's essays on Tolkien. In the meantime, Roots and Branches stands as an excellent checkpoint in an enviable career.

Works Cited

Anderson, Douglas. "Tom Shippey on J.R.R. Tolkien: A Checklist." Tolkien Studies 1 (2004): 17-20.

Armstrong, Helen, ed. Digging Potatoes, Growing Trees: Volume 1 (Peter Roe Booklets, Number 5). London: Tolkien Society, 1997.

--. Digging Potatoes, Growing Trees: Volume 2 (Peter Roe Booklets, Number 6). London: Tolkien Society, 1998.

Drout, Michael D.C. "J.R.R. Tolkien's Medieval Scholarship and its Significance." Tolkien Studies 4 (2007): 113-76.

Flieger, Verlyn. "A Mythology for Finland: Tolkien and Lonnrot as Mythmakers." Tolkien and the Invention of Myth. Ed. Jane Chance. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. 277-284.

Petty, Anne C. "Identifying England's Lonnrot." Tolkien Studies 1 (2004): 69-84.

Shippey, T.A. "Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings." J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam. Eds. Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. 286-316.

--. "Tolkien as a Post-War Writer." Proceedings of the Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992 (Mythlore 80 / Mallorn 33). Eds. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight. Altadena: Mythopoeic Press, 1995. 84-93.

West, Richard C. "Turin's Ofermod: An Old English Theme in the Development of the Story of Turin." Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on the History of Middle-earth. Eds. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000. 233-246.