I haven’t seen a lot of reviews of The Bovadium Fragments – John Garth has one in The Times, and the Tolkien Guide has also covered it – but here’s mine if you want it.
Since 2000 we’ve had 56 video games (including expansions), 1,215 minutes on the big screen, 16 TV episodes, and whole host of board games and card games. With such a huge shortage of adaptations you can understand why New Line Cinema felt the need to plug such an obvious gap in the market. (more…)
The result of browsing through The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond with the thoroughness, accuracy, and attention to detail we’ve come to know from their work. Reading the whole thing will be more than a casual project.
Then be sure to visit the newly renovated and reopened Folger Shakespeare Library. It’s described in an article (probably only available to subscribers) in the Washington Post. Not only is there loads of Shakespeare material, including a collection of 82 copies of the First Folio – because in those days printing changes and corrections were made on the fly and every copy is different, that’s why – but there’s also “rare books and manuscripts disconnected from the famous playwright,” including “a galley proof of The Lord of the Rings with author J.R.R. Tolkien’s handwritten corrections.” Got to see that.
Apparently I’m the first to get this news on the TS website, and it’s not all that brand-new: the news came to my eyes on March 12.
The long-needed collection by this title will be published in September, and is available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk. There’s a brief article about it in The Bookseller that’s informative but has one error: it’s not one volume, it’s three.
For the 240 or more poems (depending on how you count different versions – remember that you can count Errantry and Bilbo’s Lay of Eärendil as the same poem if you’re an extreme lumper in classification), including many never previously published at all, will be edited by the prolific and meticulous team of Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, and the set will include extensive commentary, a lengthy introduction, a chronology, and a glossary of the hard words. It should be over 1500 pages long.
Scull and Hammond have provided details in a blog post. The main additional takeaway from this is that this is a collected poems, not a complete poems. It will not include all of the poems from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, as surely anyone wanting this collection will already have those. As for the very long poems, such as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and The Lays of Beleriand, those will be given in excerpts. Again, they’ve already been published elsewhere.
To this post I can add two additional pieces of information. First, to confirm, as the post suggests, that Tolkien’s never-published (except for a few quotations) verse translation of Beowulf will be among those long poems given in excerpts. It was never completed anyway, and the extracts should be extensive.
Second, I have been told that the set will be for sale from U.S. booksellers and not just in that country by order from the U.K., but there will not be a separate U.S. edition.
ETA: I’ve been further told that copies for sale from U.S. booksellers will bear the U.S. imprint of William Morrow, though they will be printed in the U.K. along with the HarperCollins print run. Publication date will be one week later.