The Mythopoeic Society
PRESS RELEASE: May 14, 2013

2013 Mythopoeic Award Finalists Announced

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature
Alan Garner, Weirdstone trilogy, consisting of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (Collins), The Moon of Gomrath (Collins), and Boneland (Fourth Estate)
Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl (Roc)
R.A. MacAvoy, Death and Resurrection (Prime Books)
Tim Powers, Hide Me Among the Graves (William Morrow)
Ursula Vernon, Digger, vols. 1-6 (Sofawolf Press)

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature
Jorge Aguirre and Rafael Rosado, Giants Beware! (First Second)
Sarah Beth Durst, Vessel (Margaret K. McElderry)
Merrie Haskell, The Princess Curse (HarperCollins)
Christopher Healy, The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom (Walden Pond Press)
Sherwood Smith, The Spy Princess (Viking Juvenile)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies
Robert Boenig, C.S. Lewis and the Middle Ages (Kent State Univ. Press, 2012)
John Bremer, C.S. Lewis, Poetry, and the Great War 1914-1918 (Lexington Books, 2012)
Jason Fisher, ed., Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2011)
Verlyn Flieger, Green Suns and Faërie: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien (Kent State Univ. Press, 2012)
Corey Olsen, Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies
Nancy Marie Brown, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Jo Eldridge Carney, Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Bonnie Gaarden, The Christian Goddess: Archetype and Theology in the Fantasies of George MacDonald (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2011)
Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012)
David Sandner, Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831 (Ashgate, 2011)

The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature is given to the fantasy novel, multi-volume, or single-author story collection for adults published during 2012 that best exemplifies the spirit of the Inklings. Books are eligible for two years after publication if not selected as a finalist during the first year of eligibility. Books from a series are eligible if they stand on their own; otherwise, the series becomes eligible the year its final volume appears. The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature honors books for younger readers (from Young Adults to picture books for beginning readers), in the tradition of The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia. Rules for eligibility are otherwise the same as for the Adult Literature award. The question of which award a borderline book is best suited for will be decided by consensus of the committees.

The Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies is given to books on Tolkien, Lewis, and/or Williams that make significant contributions to Inklings scholarship. For this award, books first published during the last three years (2010–2012) are eligible, including finalists for previous years. The Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies is given to scholarly books on other specific authors in the Inklings tradition, or to more general works on the genres of myth and fantasy. The period of eligibility is three years, as for the Inklings Studies award.

The winners of this year’s awards will be announced during Mythcon 44, to be held from July 12-15, 2013, in East Lansing, Michigan. A complete list of Mythopoeic Award winners is available on the Society web site: http://www.mythsoc.org/awards/

The finalists for the literature awards, text of recent acceptance speeches, and selected book reviews are also listed in this on-line section. For more information about the Mythopoeic Awards, please contact the Awards Administrator: David D. Oberhelman, awards@mythsoc.org

Just over one week until Tolkien's unfinished alliterative poem The Fall of Arthur is released! While the contents of this book fall well outside his realm of Middle-earth, this is a poem that has been known to exist for many years, and fans are excited to finally get the chance to read it along with notes, fragments, and some very interesting essays by Christopher Tolkien.

From the publisher:

The Fall of Arthur, the only venture by J.R.R. Tolkien into the legends of Arthur, king of Britain, may well be regarded as his finest and most skillful achievement in the use of Old English alliterative meter, in which he brought to his transforming perceptions of the old narratives a pervasive sense of the grave and fateful nature of all that is told: of Arthur’s expedition overseas into distant heathen lands, of Guinevere’s flight from Camelot, of the great sea battle on Arthur’s return to Britain, in the portrait of the traitor Mordred, in the tormented doubts of Lancelot in his French castle.

Unhappily, The Fall of Arthur was one of several long narrative poems that Tolkien abandoned. He evidently began it in the 1930s, and it was sufficiently advanced for him to send it to a very perceptive friend who read it with great enthusiasm at the end of 1934 and urgently pressed him, "You simply must finish it!" But in vain: he abandoned it at some unknown date, though there is evidence that it may have been in 1937, the year of publication of The Hobbit and the first stirrings of The Lord of the Rings. Years later, in a letter of 1955, he said that he "hoped to finish a long poem on The Fall of Arthur," but that day never came.

Associated with the text of the poem, however, are many manuscript pages: a great quantity of drafting and experimentation in verse, in which the strange evolution of the poem’s structure is revealed, together with narrative synopses and significant tantalizing notes. In these notes can be discerned clear if mysterious associations of the Arthurian conclusion with The Silmarillion, and the bitter ending of the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, which was never written.

The Fall of Arthur (Trade Edition) on Amazon.com : $13.78 at this time
The Fall of Arthur (Trade Edition) on Amazon.co.uk : £11.99 at this time

I was just digging around on the Amazons, and still having trouble finding the deluxe edition through 'normal' search terms. I had to go look up the ISBN and search on that to find it on Amazon.co.uk. Sheesh!

The deluxe pre-order price on Amazon.com is not discounted but for us Americans it is a pretty good price on Amazon.com (including free shipping to the USA) if you are wanting a copy when it comes out.

The Fall of Arthur (Deluxe Edition) on Amazon.com : $69.53 at this time
The Fall of Arthur (Deluxe Edition) on amazon.co.uk : £60 at this time
[UPDATE]Trotter points out the UK Deluxe version is cheaper from the Book Depository ( http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Fall-Arthur-Tolkien/9780007489893 ) at £45. I also found the UK Deluxe at WHSmith for £38.40 which appears to include free shipping (or in-store pickup) inside the UK. http://www.whsmith.co.uk/Products/The-Fall-of-Arthur-De-Luxe-edition+Hardback+9780007489893

Bibliotrivia:
Just over 50,000 copies of the UK trade edition are being printed, and 2,000 copies of the deluxe slipcased edition. I do not yet have the US print run size. [UPDATE] Unofficially heard that the US trade print run is also 50,000 copies.

David Bratman, co-editor of Tolkien Studies, has published the contents for the tenth issue over on his website, Kalimac's Corner. The next issue is due to be released sometime in July or August, and is already available for pre-order at the West Virginia University Press website.

As a side note, Volumes 1-4 and 6 are sold out, and the press confirmed with me that there are no plans to reissue any volumes. All of the volumes are still available in electronic format, however.

Tolkien Studies 10 (2013)

Editors: Michael D.C. Drout, Verlyn Flieger, and David Bratman
E-ISSN:1547-3155
Frequency: Annual

Institutional: $120.00
Individual: $60.00
International Institutional: $130.00
International Individual: $70.00

• Claudio A. Testi, "Tolkien's Work: Is it Christian or Pagan?: A proposal for a 'synthetic' approach"
• Nils Ivar Agøy, "Vague or Vivid?: Descriptions in The Lord of the Rings"
• Hope Rogers, "No Triumph without Loss: Problems of Intercultural Marriage in Tolkien's Works"
• Thomas Honegger, "My Most Precious Riddle: Eggs and Rings Revisited"
• Michael Organ, "Tolkien's Japonisme: Prints, Dragons and a Great Wave"
• Renée Vink, "'Jewish' Dwarves: Tolkien and anti-Semitic stereotyping"
• Derek Shank, "'The Web of Story': Structuralism in Tolkien's 'On Fairy-stories'"
• Benjamin Saxton, "Tolkien and Bakhtin on Authorship, Literary Freedom, and Alterity"

Notes and Documents

• Kris Swank, "Tom Bombadil's Last Song: Tolkien's 'Once Upon A Time'"

Book Reviews

• An Hobad, translated by Nicholas Williams, and Hobbitus Ille, translated by Mark Walker, reviewed by Harley J. Sims
• The Quenya Alphabet, edited by Arden R. Smith, reviewed by Edith L. Crowe
• The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, reviewed by Sarah Beach
• Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, by Corey Olsen, and There and Back Again, by Mark Atherton, reviewed by Jason Fisher
• Green Suns and Faërie, by Verlyn Flieger, reviewed by John D. Rateliff
• The Broken Scythe, edited by Roberto Arduini and Claudio A. Testi, reviewed by John Garth
• A Hobbit Journey, by Matthew Dickerson, and A Hobbit Devotional, by Ed Strauss, reviewed by Donald T. Williams

• Merlin DeTardo, "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2010"
• Rebecca Epstein, David Bratman, and Merlin DeTardo, "Bibliography (In English) for 2011"