It is award season! The Mythopoeic Society released its 2025 Awards shortlists earlier this year. While I had good intentions to read a lot more, there is only one category I was able to work through all of the finalists: the Inklings Studies scholarship award. This year’s slate of finalists was entirely Tolkien-focussed—four monograph (single-book) studies and a manuscript study. I have submitted my votes for the Inklings Studies Scholarship Award committee, but I have not heard the results yet. In this in-between moment, I decided to share my brief notes on each book—not full reviews, but something like a chatty “stub.”
For more information about the Mythopoeic Awards, visit the Awards section of the Mythopoeic Society website. The winners of this year’s awards will be announced at the Online Midsummer Seminar 2025, “More Perilous and Fair: Women and Gender in Mythopoeic Fantasy,” which runs August 2-3, 2025, on Zoom and Discord.
Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies: 2025 Finalists
Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Cartographies by Anahit Behrooz (2023)
From the book’s website:
“In this cutting-edge study of Tolkien’s most critically neglected maps, Anahit Behrooz examines how cartography has traditionally been bound up in facilitating power.”
This is quite a great description, actually—knowing that “maps” and “cartography” have more and less literal and metaphorical meanings in the study. And all to the good. I am a lover of maps and someone who has been toying with GIS-mapping for professional pleasure. Berhooz was able to bring me immediately “there” in their project. Maps really are “political” as they chart (see what I did there?) the ways that humans interact with the non-human (land, creatures, seas, skies, the cosmos etc.).
Mapping Middle-earth is a smart book that plays with mapping in all kinds of ways. The introduction and chapter one are some of the best things I’ve read. The book closes with a compelling reading on Tolkien, race, culture, and empire (which pairs well with Stuart’s volume on race and racism). I simply didn’t resonate with the middle chapters, but this could be my issue rather than a problem with the book. I have a love-hate relationship with the F-word in scholarship–Foucault–which is a critical part of chapter three. I’m not always fussy about the conversation partners (theorists) Berhooz uses, but I think it works well overall.
It is also worth noting that the “Bloomsbury Perspectives on Fantasy,” edited by Matthew Sangster and Dimitra Fimi, is becoming a globally leading series in the field.
Tolkien’s Transformative Women: Art in Triptych by Annie Brust (2024)
In Tolkien’s Transformative Women, Annie Brust is trying to invite us into a broader vision of Tolkien’s female characters in Middle-earth using an artistic lens. I am quite sympathetic with her project as I find Tolkien’s work quite visual (imagistic, well-woven, etc.), I like the characters as material for study, and gender questions are important to me.
Ultimately, though, I wasn’t sure what to do with this book, exactly. I quite like the way Brust invites us into her material, and her “Triptych” is an elegant structure for the book. Although I am certain that this is a book that took years of careful work to write and produce, I had trouble keeping it together as a whole and (I blush to say) I wanted “more.” While this book covers quite a few women characters, perhaps it needed fewer with a deeper look.
But that is to wish for a different book. I hesitate to say more because I feel like the book grows on me with use, but I was not allowed that time as the copy I got was borrowed on a limited time. Moreover, as I reread the Introduction I have on PDF, I look forward to spending more time here as a study, testing out the themes and arguments.
The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond (2024, 3 volumes)
I will say little right now about this volume as I am working on a larger post. That said, this beautiful 3-volume boxset was my favourite Christmas gift in the last few years.
As entire volumes are dedicated to Tolkien’s poetic works, it is not an exhaustive collection. The selection seems to me wise, careful, and illustrative of Tolkien’s poetic life and work. I used the volume for a careful look at Tolkien’s WWI-era period, including his first forays into verse, his growth and development as a student, his artistic fellowship (the TCBS), and his lifelong editorial and revision habits.
The Collected Poems is, in my view, the most important Tolkien legendarium literary event since The Collected Letters, The History of Middle-earth, and The Nature of Middle-earth. Scull and Hammond have done us a tremendous service—and did it well.
Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth by Robert Stuart (2022)
The description for this volume begins by claiming it is:
is the first systematic examination of how Tolkien understood racial issues, how race manifests in his oeuvre, and how race in Middle-earth, his imaginary realm, has been understood, criticized, and appropriated by others.
Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth is each of these things . . . but it is not the first of any of these claims. Scholars greater than I can tell you whether it is the first to bring these features together. However, for engaged readers, it is a quick-moving, informative, and theory-rooted study of these issues.
The advert for this book then says that the key question is this: “Was Tolkien racist?” Well, this is kind of nonsense. What Stuart does is present for us a careful argument that, given these definitions of race, racism, and racialization, these are the ways that Tolkien was a racist, a racialist, and a resistor of—or even a liberator from—the shackles that these social constructs place upon the racialized.
This volume was my least favourite to read—partly because of the way the material is presented but also because of the heart-stripping nature of the material. I think these are good kinds of studies, but to make “Is Tolkien a racist?” the question at the spearpoint of his study arrogates a kind of spiritual mastery that I cannot, myself, claim to have acquired. I will have more sympathy for studies like these when the author clearly acknowledges they are choosing their future regrets now and they cannot know the ways that they will be viewed as clearly “racist” or “racialist” in the future.
Still, because Stuart so thoroughly engages with the scholarly community, it is one of the most useful books for researchers to begin a study of the kind in race, culture, Indigenous studies, or political studies. Tolkien, Race, and Racism is the work of many years—well-researched and far more carefully written than the (invitingly) witty and occasionally (less-welcome) flippant tone belies. I like spreadsheet books like this one for reference, study, teaching, and provocation rather than sitting down and reading it cover-to-cover for enjoyment (as I did). Finally, Stuart’s self-introduction in the volume is important to remember.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics by Hamish Williams
Hamish Williams, a classics scholar and colleague in the faculty of the SPACE program at Signum University, has produced a thoughtful, well-written, and engaging linked-collection of essays, which could perhaps be called J.R.R. Tolkien’s Eutopianism and the Classics. Like Tolkien’s “eucatastrophe”—the good catastrophe—Williams plays with similar roots of the language to tease out ideas.
I quite enjoyed this intelligent, well-written study in overlapping areas of interest. Williams’ concern is the Greco-Roman corpus of classical literature as it potentially echoes, refigures, or otherwise appears in Tolkien’s work. There are three main movements in the volume:
- 1) Lapsarian Narratives: The Decline and Fall of Utopian Communities in Middle-earth
- 2) Hospitality Narratives: The Ideal of the Home in an Odyssean Hobbit
- 3) Sublime Narratives: Classical Transcendence in Nature and beyond in The Fellowship of the Ring
I resonated most with #2, which opened up a new depth of understanding in both The Hobbit and The Odyssey–though it was the chapter I was initially least interested in. I am hesitant to go all the way with Williams in #3–not because the books don’t share a sense of the transcendent/sublime–but I felt least certain of the pattern appearing in Hobbit and LotR.
This is an academic text that slips into humour from time to time—always a plus for me. There are some academic-y words that cracked my mental palate, but it is mostly accessible to folks with a general reading in the Greco-Roman classics and who love Tolkien’s texts.
It also pairs particularly well with Berhooz.
A Pilgrim in Narnia 
Prof. Dickieson,
The most interesting item on your list for me is the Hamish Williams text. Though I almost think apologies are owed, because a lot of why I find the description of its content so fascinating is down to the way it seems to jibe with where my own occasional forays into the sources the Inklings drew upon. Perhaps that also explains why I haven’t found much in the current crop of Mythopoeic studies to interest me all that much. Say real sorry and thankee sai, there. It’s just that I seem to have reached a point in my Inklings fandom where the original authors have sent me scurrying into the shared library of Classic and Canonical texts and writers that Inspired them. It’s the kind of pastime that only a bookworm can enjoy, yet it works for me. My current source of fun in this endeavor lies in having my Imagination set alight by a particular literary topos (in this case, the Great Chain of Being) and trying to trace its usage throughout literary history in the vein of T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”.
To put it in Lewisian terms, my aesthetic Joys of the moment all stem from trying to figure what different artists and authors put that concept to use in their various writings (Modern, as well as Ancient). As of this writing, it’s led me all the way back to Macrobius’s “Commentary on Scipio”, and all the way up to the uses that the Chain has been put to in the writings of Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison. I owe a newspaper article by CSL published in “Selected Literary Essays” for setting me on that particular breadcrumb trail, and the curious ways in which the two 18th century wits have a way of seeming to be in competition with one another at first, and then almost come off as strange collaborators of some sort.
There have been three pieces of scholarship that have been somewhat eye-opening in these exploits. Two of them are semi-recent, the last dates back just after the passing of Lewis. The first is an essay entitled “Magnitudo Animi and Cosmic Politics in Cicero’s De Re Republica”, by Sean McConnell. The basic gist of this paper is that it “offers a fresh interpretation of the role played by the Dream of Scipio in Cicero’s De re publica. It explores Cicero’s key distinction between the cosmic and the local levels of statesmanship and the problems he sees with localism, and it details fully for the first time the importance that Cicero attached to the virtue of magnitudo animi (“greatness of soul”). The paper makes the case that in De re publica Cicero promotes his own innovative cosmic model of politics, in which magnitudo animi is developed through an educational process situated in the traditional Roman mos maiorum”. This theme is continued in the aforementioned 64 text, “The Blazon of Honour”, by Margaret Greaves. The great thing about this book is that without having any access to McConnell’s essay, she nonetheless centers her study around this idea of philosophical “Big Heartedness” and devotes her entire book to studying how it was carried forward into authors like Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton.
The last and most recent source is “Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton”, by Nicholas McDowell. It’s basically part one of a projected two or maybe even three (or four?)-part general biography of the author of “Paradise Lost”, the first one to be attempted in the new Teen and Twenties. What makes this first part so good from a Mythopoeic vantage point is that McDowell doesn’t skimp or try to gloss over all the elements of the poets writing that he borrowed from the likes of Cicero, and that later made their way into both “Narnia” and the “Ransom” books. If you go into that text with a working knowledge of Lewis the Miltonist, then it becomes possible to see where he got a great deal of his not just his imagery, but also his thinking from. The upshot of bringing all these studies together is that it makes me wonder if it’s possible to posit that one of the purposes of the “Chronicles” was to see how probable it is to see if a modern artist can honor Spenser’s dictum to fashion a gentlemen, or Cicero’s Big Hearted Person in the ways that his earlier models tried to do in their own works. That’s just a theory, however. It’s been a fun speculation to arrive at as I’ve gone along, and that’s why Williams’ study on a potential Classical influence on Tolkien sounds so intriguing, as it’s an avenue waiting to be explored.
I’ll leave this comment off by noting that I may have found something for a side project you once mentioned, Professor. You said you’ve been scouring about for any info that would help to form a connection between Mythopoeia and the Horror genre. Well, I think none other than Edmund Spenser might be the link you’re looking for. What allows me to say this with a now fair degree of confidence is the discovery of the profound influence that “The Faerie Queene” exercised upon Nathaniel Hawthorne. Together with Edgar Allan Poe, he has to be counted as one of the major shapers of the modern Horror story. To call him a pioneer appears to be a very inadequate compliment. Together with the “Raven” writer, he helped give the genre both its modern dress and contemporary mode of expression. He’s responsible for the first major haunted house novel, and crafted the initial small American town with a dark secret in books like “The Scarlet Letter”. The trick is he used Spenser to accomplish all of this. What this means in practice is that the modern Gothic can trace its roots all the way back to Faeryland. Spenser’s Faerian Realm seems to function as the root well for all things that go bump in the night. Which kind of makes sense when you realize that Horror is a Fantasy story where the focus of the spotlight remains trained on the trolls lurking under the bridge, or the Grendels hidings in the dark.
There are again three sources that opened my eyes to this link between Lewis’s favorite poet and eventual paperbacks like “Desperation” or “Salem’s Lot”. The first is an article called “Una’s Line” by Catherine Nicholson, which was published by Cambridge University’s “Spenser Review”. It serves as a decent introduction to the ways in which Hawthorne’s enthusiasm for Spenser’s poetry led him to incorporate it into not just various aspects of his work, but also his family life, with a particular focus on the author’s perception of Una the character, versus Una his own flesh-and-blood daughter. The second is an actual book-length study, “C.S. Lewis and His American Cousin, Nat Hawthorne”, by D.G. Kehl. This is a work of criticism which studies the “literary affinities” between the Narnian author, and the chronicler of the “House of Seven Gables”. It’s instructive for being the first book to ever try and tie Lewis to the Horror genre via one of the format’s key architects. As a whole, Kehl’s book has to be considered decent enough in the avenues of exploration it opens up for the relation between Horror and Mythopoeia to be considered a necessary keeper. It should also come with the caveat of being a flawed necessity, if that term makes any sense. The reason for that is down to the nature of Kehl’s scholarship.
While his main thesis is original and rewarding, there are moments where the critic shows that he has not kept all that much abreast with the later academic advancements made in Inklings scholarship as it pertains to Lewis. If I had to summarize what I mean, then it would be to say that the text reads as if it could have just come out not long after Clyde S. Kilby had published either “The Christian World of C.S. Lewis”, or else “Tolkien and the Silmarillion”. Kehl’s outlook on Lewis and Hawthorne gives a contemporary reader of being that old in spots, even though the book was published in 2012. For all I know, this could be an example of a trunk text. A monograph written long ago but only now seeing the late of day in recent years. I cannot say, and this is pure speculation in any case. What isn’t is the fact that Kehl’s musings sometimes wander into realms that paint either Lewis or Hawthorne as more a pair of dinosaurs than either of them managed to be in real life. The funny thing is how this potential flaw doesn’t serve to limit the author’s basic premise. He notes how Lewis was a fan of the American gothic novelist, and does a very decent job of showcasing the ways in which some of the New Englander’s Gothic themes might have found their way into various indirect aspects of the Lewis corpus
In particular, he does manage to devote a moment to demonstrating how both authors were united by their love of Spenser’s poetics and practices, and let that be the key takeaway in all this. That modern Horror might be the bearer of a lineage which can trace its line of artistic descent all the way back to the most remarkable and unexpected of places. It jibes in an interesting way with something Stephen King once said near the end of his own non-fiction study, “Danse Macabre”. It’s there that he makes the startling claim that “Modem horror stories are not much different from the morality plays of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when we get right down to it. The horror story most generally not only stands foursquare for the Ten Commandments, it blows them up to tabloid size. We have the comforting knowledge when the lights go down in the theater or when we open the book that the evildoers will almost certainly be punished, and measure will be returned for measure (422, modern American trade paperback edition)”. If we apply Hawthorne’s appropriation of Spenser, then it becomes to entertain the possibility, not just of a logic, but also of a long established historical tradition to King’s words. I think that Hawthorne’s application of Spenserian literary practice to the American Gothic, and its possible lingering legacy in the modern Horror story is a go place to link it up with Mythopoeia.
The best place I can offer as a starting point would be Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story”, which is the final source text to go to for potential help in linking Horror and Eucatastrophe. If the name of the author sounds familiar, that’s because he was King’s collaborator on “The Talisman”. It’s not my idea of their finest moment, yet “Ghost Story” certainly has to count as Straub’s best effort. It’s within the pages of this now criminally neglected Eldritch tome that the attentive may run across the following artistic musing. “I had found the hook for the Hawthorne lecture; it was in an essay by R. P. Blackmur: “When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned.” The idea seemed to radiate throughout Hawthorne’s work, and I could connect the novels and stories by this black Christianity, by the impulse in them for nightmare—by what was almost their desire for nightmare. For to imagine a nightmare is to put it at one remove. And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: “I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life.” When I had the ideas which would structure the lecture, the details fell onto the pages of my notebook (192-3, current American trad edition)”.
Once more, if it’s a link between the effects and nature of the Horror genre and the Romanticism of the Inklings, then it seems as if Straub has given a good starting point via Hawthorne’s thoughts on the relation between the modern Gothic, and the Mythopoeic literary methodology of Spenser. Hawthorne seems to suggest that the secondary worlds of Horror fiction like that of King, Straub, Poe’s, or even his own can be spoken of as inhabiting that same realm of Faerie that Spenser or Tolkien wrote about. In other words, a work like “Ghost Story” or Jerusalem’s Lot partakes of that same Realm of Enchantment that Spenser knew so well. The only difference to speak of is that the spellcasting is painted in darker shades and longer shadows. And even this can’t be considered that great a difference when even the things going bump in the night come from the same origin point of Faery as the gods and the elves. Anyway, the only reason I’ve let this note drag on for so long is because I thought it might be of some kind of help for the project you said you were working on. Hope it wasn’t too much. A link for a Sehnsucht Magazine review for D.G. Kehl’s Hawthorne/Lewis book can be found below. Like I say, hope this was of some help, for what it’s worth.
https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/cslewisjournal/vol11/iss1/17/
LikeLike
Very cool set of responses. “The Inklings sent me to…” resonates with me. Reading for me is like a cold case mystery show. I have to follow the clues and choose what is evidence and keep shaking it down. For me, it isn’t a single direction, but I spent a lot of time in the classics before Lewis—tho the scholarly stuff you talk about is still beyond my ken. I have the McDowell volume though. Queue it up?
Narnia as Spenser, who talked about that some time ago? Starts with an “M”. I don’t have my notes with me.
But Spenser—horror—Inklings—Hawthorne—Poe … it sounds you like have your own cold case here!
Is that Kehl volume real?
That slow receiving of the medievals was a great part of my last 15 years.
I don’t know why, but I just don’t prefer the 18th century…
LikeLike
Prof. Dickieson,
Thanks for the kind reply. I would most definitely queue up the McDowell bio, as it delves into a decent discussion of the religious thought and philosophies that seem to have shaped the poet and his poems. The good news is that McDowell handles what in other hands would be considered very heady material, and somehow manages to translate it all into easy to understand terms. That is no mean feat for a late Elizabethan author with a great deal of old school sophistication in both his polemics and fiction.
As for the cold case I’ve discovered, well, I’m glad you like it. If it’s a question of wanting more, then I have broached the topic in further detail in an old email letter I sent off to you a while back. It should still be somewhere in your inbox (I hope). And for the record, the Kehl book most certainly is real. A purchasing link ban even be found below:
Hope this helps.
LikeLike
I have picked up the kindle! And if I may be so bold, if you have the ability to rekindle that old email thread, I would love to make sure I haven’t missed it. I have been having trouble with correspondence management for a couple of years now
LikeLike
Prof. Dickieson,
Thanks for the reply. My initial reaction to the news of your email troubles was, in essence, “Oh dear”. Followed up by a resolve to at least try and see what I can do to “resurrect” that particular piece of correspondence. That’s why I hope this reply reaches you sooner rather than later, because here’s an outline of the sequence I’m hoping works out for the best. I plan to post a follow up reply to my previous letter, in the hopes that this sends the sunken galley back up to the surface on top of the pile. If this should work, then, I’m not sure what else to say beyond that except to advise one minor caveat.
Looking back at what I wrote in that email, I realize now that what’s set down there is less of a simple letter, and more like an impromptu Introductory Essay on the subject of this conversation, one that ends up utilizing the epistolary format to achieve it’s critical-aesthetic goal. My only excuse for the length of the letter I hope to send back to the top of the pile boil down to just one reason. It all has to do with the accurate judgment call you made above. It’s not just a cold case at issue here, so much as completely virgin territory for either Mythopoeic Fantasy or the Modern Gothic genre. It means everything has to be written on a First Introductions basis, and that a greater deal of detail is necessary than normal. That seemed unavoidable, for better or worse.
Therefore, apologies if what’s meant as a simple letter exchange comes off sounding like a full-on blog article of some sort. Expect a greater deal of sources for possible further study and use (only as your own discretion sees fit, of course, Professor), along with the inclusion of more famous literary names responsible for the construction of the field of Horror as we now know it. Apparently, Spenser seems to have been one of those authors who was able to plant seeds in the mind of just the kind of writers you’d least expect. And yet it appears that if you wish to gauge what kind of impact a book like “The Faerie Queene” has left on modern fiction, then for a host of reasons, it turns out you have to consult authors like Edgar Allan Poe, or even Herman Melville. It’s a different result from the common critical consensus, yet somehow it turns out to be true, just the same. “Nobody told me there’d be days like these”, as a wise Beatle once observed. Still doesn’t stop it from being all kinds of fun, so far as I’m concerned, anyway. I think its cool knowing there’s a line of descent from Gloriana all the way to the Crypt-Keeper.
All of which is to say I hope this message, and the future email I’ll be sending early this morning, reaches you well and on time. From there, feel free to do whatever you like with the material attached. It’s all for the purposes of free critical inquiry, so far as I’m concerned, one way or the other. No more, and certainly not less. Sorry if this has turned into any kind of hassle, though. I guess if you need any further help with seeing the letter, then feel free to let me know. Otherwise, don’t let me bother you.
LikeLike
Hi Chris, I have a message notification from you. Is this lovely note copied in there as well? I’m emerging from the (pretty literal) woods in a couple of days.
LikeLike
Prof. Dickieson,
I think we just barely missed each other on this exchange. Thank gosh I was on alert here.
To answer you’re question, not only does the original letter contain further insight onto the remarks about Poe and Melville seen above, it provides links and citations to hitherto unknown Spenserian (and therefore, according to Lewis, Mythopoeic) aspects that even I wasn’t aware of in terms of the influence the incomplete Faerian poetic cycle had on the builders of Fright stories. One of these links contains a Scriblerus essay I wrote a while back on how this hidden Spenserianism within the Gothic genre had a hand in developing its earliest and most iconic artistic expressions, at least so far as the American side of things is concerned.
The only thing that’s missing is the Crypt-Keeper comment. That one just emerged off the top of my head 🙂 Hope this helps.
LikeLike
These sound interesting topics. I like fantasy.
LikeLike