Editors' Introduction Douglas A. Anderson Michael D. C. Drout Verlyn Flieger Tolkien Studies, Volume 7, 2010 Published by West Virginia University Press Editors’ Introduction This is the seventh issue of Tolkien Studies, the first refereed journal solely devoted to the scholarly study of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. As editors, our goal is to publish excellent scholarship on Tolkien as well as to gather useful research information, reviews, notes, documents, and bibliographical material. In this issue we are especially pleased to publish Tolkien’s early fiction “The Story of Kullervo” and the two existing drafts of his talk on the Kalevala, transcribed and edited with notes and commentary by Verlyn Flieger. With this exception, all articles have been subject to anonymous, ex- ternal review as well as receiving a positive judgment by the Editors. In the cases of articles by individuals associated with the journal in any way, each article had to receive at least two positive evaluations from two different outside reviewers. Reviewer comments were anonymously conveyed to the authors of the articles. The Editors agreed to be bound by the recommendations of the outside referees. The Editors also wish to call attention to the Cumulative Index to vol- umes one through five of Tolkien Studies, compiled by Jason Rea, Michael D.C. Drout, Tara L. McGoldrick, and Lauren Provost, with Maryellen Groot and Julia Rende. The Cumulative Index is currently available only through the online subscription database Project Muse. Douglas A. Anderson Michael D. C. Drout Verlyn Flieger v Abbreviations B&C Beowulf and the Critics. Ed. Michael D. C. Drout. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2002. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 248. Bombadil The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. CH The Children of Húrin [title as on title page:] Narn i Chîn Húrin: The Tale of the Children of Húrin. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 2007; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. FG Farmer Giles of Ham. Ed. Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. London: HarperCollins, 1999. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. FR The Fellowship of the Ring. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Second edition, revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1987. H The Hobbit. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. The Annotated Hobbit. Ed. Douglas A. Anderson. Second edition, revised. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Jewels The War of the Jewels. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Lays The Lays of Beleriand. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Letters The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Lost Road The Lost Road and Other Writings. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Lost Tales I The Book of Lost Tales, Part One. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. viii Lost Tales II The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. MC The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Morgoth Morgoth’s Ring. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. OFS Tolkien On Fairy-stories: Extended Edition. Ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins, 2008. Peoples The Peoples of Middle-earth. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. RK The Return of the King. London: George Allen & Unwin 1955; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. Second edition, revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. S The Silmarillion. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Second edition. London:HarperCollins, 1999; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Sauron Sauron Defeated. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. SG The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. Ed Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009 Shadow The Return of the Shadow. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Shaping The Shaping of Middle-earth. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. SWM Smith of Wootton Major: Extended Edition. Ed. Verlyn Flieger. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ix TL Tree and Leaf. London: Unwin Books, 1964; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Expanded as Tree and Leaf, including the Poem Mythpoeia [and] The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son. London: HarperCollins, 2001. TT The Two Towers. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. Second edition, revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Treason The Treason of Isengard. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. UT Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. War The War of the Ring. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. x The Books of Lost Tales: Tolkien as Metafictionist VLADIMIR BRLJAK When new Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense, and it now produces a singular effect. For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo. (MC 33) I t has often been noted that J.R.R. Tolkien’s renowned lecture on Be- Iowulf, defending the integrity of the Anglo-Saxon poet’s art against those modern readers for whom this art was an embarrassment redeemed only by the poem’s value as an historical and linguistic document, was on another level also a defense of, and a blueprint for, his own literary work. As T. A. Shippey has remarked, “Tolkien felt more than continuity with the Beowulf-poet, he felt a virtual identity of motive and of technique” (2003, 47; see also Shippey 2007). Various aspects of this special affin- ity have since been looked into, including specific points of motive and technique: for example the “unexplained” and “unattainable vistas” (Let- ters 210, 333), a technique indebted to such “vistas” in Beowulf. Following Tolkien’s cues, the importance of these has long been acknowledged. Like the Beowulf poet, he had at his disposal a large amount of background material which, skillfully inserted at strategic moments, could greatly in- crease the tale’s mimetic potency. The vistas remained in background, unexplained and unattainable, but depicted against such a background, the foreground could jump off the page, immersing its reader in a fantas- tic world realized with an unprecedented “reality” or “depth.” Besides the “vistas,” however—as Christopher Tolkien noted long ago (Lost Tales I 4-5), in connection to the same passage cited at the begin- ning of this paper—Tolkien also set out to reproduce that singular effect of which he speaks, the effect of the work reaching us as an echo of an echo (of an echo . .) from a remote antiquity, expending his art in in- creasing the distance between the (mostly) Modern English text the read- er would be holding in his or her hands and the fictional characters and events of which it told. For this purpose, he integrated his major works of 1 Vladimir Brljak fiction into an intricate metafictional structure, presenting them within their fiction precisely as such echoes of echoes: translations of redactions of ancient works, telling of things even more ancient. This metafictional framework, it will be argued here, is both the cornerstone and crowning achievement of Tolkien’s mature literary work. Indeed, “framework” is a revealing metaphor: the problem is precisely that when they are dis- cussed, these elements in Tolkien’s work often tend to be thought of as merely a frame, extraneous and secondary to that which it frames, which is where the true interest supposedly lies. Tolkien critics have, of course, broached these issues before. Ver- lyn Flieger has addressed them on several occasions, with increasing complexity and sophistication: besides exploring the use of metafiction throughout Tolkien’s opus, Flieger has drawn attention to Tolkien’s mod- els in medieval literature and the modern reception of that literature, to the use of metafictional devices by ninenteenth- and early twentieth- century century novelists, or to the parallels between Tolkien’s work and the work of his “postmodernist” contemporaries.1 Other scholars have been covering some of the same terrain: Mary R. Bowman, for exam- ple, has argued that “The Lord of the Rings goes beyond being an absorb- ing and moving story to constitute a meditation on the nature of story” (273); Gergely Nagy writes that “Tolkien’s focus on the written text as the only appropriate medium in which the creation of a world can be performed leads to important theoretical considerations about the dif- ferent discourses of culture” (642). The present article would like to add to these discussions by further specifying and elaborating a number of points where such specification and elaboration seems necessary. Two interrelated questions may be discerned: what is the form and what is the function of the metafictional elements in Tolkien’s work? The questions, as I say, are interrelated, indeed interdependent, yet it seems best to begin with that of function, for it appears that the misunderstand- ing of the function of Tolkien’s metafiction has been the main factor in the misunderstanding of its form. By and large, those readers of Tolkien who have taken account of the metafiction have seen its function as that of intensifying the mimetic potency of the works.