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Anderson, Douglas A., Michael D. C. Drout, and Verlyn Flieger, eds. Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review, Vol. VII. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2010. x + 401 pp. Hardcover. ISSN 1547-3155. Institution $120/year; $224/two years; individuals $60.00/year; $112/two years.
Now in only its seventh year of publication, Tolkien Studies has established itself, in a relatively short period, as a pillar of the field after which it is named. In keeping with the precedent set by past issues, this seventh volume includes a wide variety of material, not limited to academic essays, that will be of interest to an equally wide range of Tolkien scholars. Indeed, one wonders if the journal will need to expand beyond an annual at some point: although the first volume contained fewer than two hundred pages, the issue length has grown steadily over the years, now for the first time exceeding four hundred.
The ten full-length articles occupy roughly half of these pages, but one of the volume's major points of interest appears in the later "Notes and Documents" section, namely, Verlyn Flieger' s edition of Tolkien's previously unpublished fragment "The Story of Kullervo" alongside two drafts of a talk he delivered on the Finnish Kalevah. This review is not the place to judge the quality of the narrative itself - after all, it was not intended for publication - but these texts will become a fundamental point of reference for all future arguments about the place of the Kalevala in the shaping of Middle-earth. As Flieger points out, Tolkien himself described this early story as the germ of what would become The Silmarillion, and scholars of Tolkien's artificial languages may find the lecture even more illuminating due to the commentary on Finnish it includes. I would further note the considerable quantity of verse intermingled in the prose narrative, which makes "Kullervo" also a minor trove of Tolkien's previously unpublished poetry. Finally, Flieger provides extensive and quite learned annotations to both story and lecture, although some are slightly misleading, such as her comment on an allusion to Troilus and Pandarus that "Tolkien could be thinking of the story as told in Chaucer's poem Troilus and Criseyde or in Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida" (260). It seems clear that Tolkien is...