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Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader
CONTRIBUTORS
from Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader
Edited by Jane Chance
MICHAELA BALTASAR is in her last semester of the M.F.A. program in fiction
at the University of Maryland-College Park. She is currently at work on her first
novel.
ALEXANDRA BOLINTINEANU is currently completing her M.A. at the University of Toronto's
Centre for Medieval Studies. Her research interests include Anglo-Saxon narrative
poetry, the English monastic reformation, and modern speculative fiction. Her
paper "The Ancestry of Gollum" was published in Concerning Hobbits and Other
Matters (Conference Proceedings, University of St. Thomas, 2001).
MARJORIE
J. BURNS has been on the faculty of Portland State University for thirty years
and has lectured widely on Tolkien throughout the United States, as well as in
Australia, Norway, England, and The Netherlands. She has also lived in Norway
(once as a Fulbright professor). She teaches Norse and Celtic mythology, as well
as Tolkien's literature and that of the Victorian writers he knew. Her publications
on Tolkien include four journal articles, two essays in conference proceedings
collections, and one book chapter. She has recently completed a book, "Perilous
Realms: Celtic and Norse in J.R.R. Tolkien."
JANE CHANCE, professor of English, teaches medieval literature, medieval studies,
and women and the study of gender at Rice University. She has taught a course
on Tolkien at Rice, off and on, since 1976. A specialist in medieval mythography
and general editor of three series, the Library of Medieval Women, Greenwood Guides
to Historic Events in the Medieval World, and Praeger Series on the Middle Ages,
she has published eighteen books, editions, and translations. Among them are revised
editions, in 2001, of Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England (1979) and
The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power (1992), also to be translated
into Japanese in 2003; and a collection of essays, Tolkien the Medievalist
(2002). She has served as guest editor for two issues of Studies in Medievalism,
on the twentieth century (1982) and the Inklings (1991). Her essay revising
Tolkien on Beowulf-"The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel's
Mother"-has been published seven times, most recently in the Norton Critical Edition
with the Seamus Heaney translation. Her book Medieval Mythography: From Roman
North Africa to the School of Chartres, 433-1177 A.D. won the SCMLA Best Book
Prize of 1994.
ANDY DIMOND, after a childhood of having The Hobbit read to him
(and reread, and reread), first experienced The Lord of the Rings at the age of
twelve and was immediately entranced by its depth and power. Now, eight years
later, he is immersed in Tolkien as part of the Century Scholars undergraduate
research program at Rice University. He has also served as an editorial assistant
for this collection and in part for Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance
(2002).
MICHAEL D.C. DROUT is associate professor of English at Wheaton College,
Norton, Massachusetts, where he teaches Old and Middle English, fantasy, and science
fiction. Drout is the editor of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Beowulf" and the Critics (2002)
and the author of How Tradition Works: A Descriptive Culture Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon
Tenth Century (forthcoming, 2004, Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies).
He has also published articles on Anglo-Saxon literature, Piers Plowman, Ursula
Le Guin's Earthsea novels, and Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising. Drout is the
director of the Tolkien Research Group and one of the founding editors of Tolkien
Studies.
KATHLEEN E. DUBS is currently on the humanities faculty of Pázmány Péter
Catholic University in Piliscsaba, near Budapest, Hungary. She teaches courses
in medieval literature, the history of the English language, and Old and Middle
English, as well as in American literature before the twentieth century. She has
lectured on Tolkien, recent interest in whom has resulted in the revival of courses
about his work. She is a member of the newly-founded Hungarian Tolkien Society.
VERLYN FLIEGER is a professor in the Department of English at the University of
Maryland, where she teaches courses in medieval literature, comparative mythology,
and the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. She has published two books on Tolkien, Splintered
Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World (1983; rev. ed., 2002) and A Question
of Time: Tolkien's Road to Faërie (1997). She is the editor with Carl Hostetter
of Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on the History of Middle-earth (2000).
DAVID ELTON GAY teaches folklore in the School of Continuing Studies at Indiana University.
His research is primarily in Indo-European studies (especially Germanic and Lithuanian
folklore and mythology) and in Finno-Ugrian studies (especially Finnish and Estonian
mythology and folklore). His recent publications include articles on the editing
of oral traditions, on the Kalevala, and on Lithuanian incantations and legends.
JOHN R. HOLMES is chair of the English Department at Franciscan University of
Steubenville, where since 1985 he has taught, among other things, medieval literature,
Old English language, and Tolkien. Most of his published articles have been in
the field of early American literature (he is currently editing the letters of
Charles Brockden Brown), but his recent discovery of the delightful fellowship
of Tolkien scholars has encouraged him to write more on J.R.R.T.
DAVID LYLE JEFFREY,
Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities and provost at Baylor
University-Waco, received his B.A. from Wheaton College in 1965 and his Ph.D.
from Princeton in 1968. Previously chair of two English Departments (University
of Victoria, University of Ottawa), he has taught also at the University of Rochester
and the University of Hull (U.K.) and has been a visiting faculty member at Notre
Dame and at Regent College (University of British Columbia). He was elected Fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada in 1996. He has published eleven monographs and
editions, among them The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (1975);
Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition (1984); Toward a Perfect Love: The Spiritual
Counsel of Walter Hilton (1986; 2000); English Spirituality in The Age of Wesley
(1987; 1994; 2001); The Law of Love: English Spirituality in The Age of Wyclif
(2000); People of The Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (1996); Houses
of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture (2003); and Jack Hodgins
and his Works (1990). With B.J. Levy he has published The Anglo-Norman Lyric (1990),
and with D. Manganiello, Rethinking the Future of the University (1998); he has
also served as general editor and coauthor of A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition
in English Literature (1992).
ANDREW LAZO is a graduate student in the English
Department at Rice University and a collector of rare books by and about C.S.
Lewis. He plans to write his dissertation on myth in C.S. Lewis. He has published
several essays and reviews on Tolkien and Lewis.
CATHERINE MADSEN is a contributing
editor to the inter-religious journal Cross Currents and the author of a novel,
A Portable Egypt (2002). She received the M.F.A. in Writing and Literature from
Goddard College in 1990. She converted to Judaism in the same year and serves
as a lay cantor in Amherst, Massachusetts. She has published widely on liturgy
and is at work on a book on problems in contemporary liturgical prose style.
GERGELY
NAGY is a junior assistant professor at the Institute of English and American
Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary. He is writing his doctoral dissertation
on Tolkien and poststructuralist literary theory. He teaches courses in medieval
English literature, Tolkien, and Plato. He has published essays on Tolkien, Chaucer,
and Malory. Nagy is also a founding member and the academic vice president of
the Hungarian Tolkien Society.
TOM SHIPPEY is Walter J. Ong Chair at Saint Louis
University. He has previously held appointments at the universities of Leeds,
Oxford, and Birmingham in England, and been Visiting Professor at Harvard and
the University of Texas in the United States. His publications include two books
on Tolkien, The Road to Middle-earth (1982, rev. ed. 1992) and J.R.R. Tolkien:
Author of the Century (2000), three on Old English, and a number of edited collections
and anthologies. He is currently editor of Studies in Medievalism and is preparing
a volume on Tolkien's predecessor, Jacob Grimm.
JEN STEVENS is a reference librarian
at Washington State University, where she works with the English and Foreign Language
Departments. She did her B.A. and M.A. in English and American Literature at the
University of Colorado at Boulder, where she studied English medieval and Renaissance
literature and wrote an undergraduate thesis on the narrative structure of Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Her current research interests include Tolkien's
and C.S. Lewis's deployment of earlier literatures in their own literary works.
SANDRA BALLIF STRAUBHAAR, a lecturer in Germanic studies at the University of
Texas at Austin, can date her obsession with Tolkien to the first appearance of
the Ballantine paperbacks. She researches and teaches a number of topics, including
medieval Scandinavia, the heroic archetype, the Indo-European folk tale, women's
poetry, and postmodern popular medievalism. Lately she has published on Saint
Birgitta of Sweden; trollwomen in the legendary sagas; women skalds; historical
sagas and Norwegian nationalism; the Cambridge Celticist Nora K. Chadwick; and
Swedish popular novelist Jan Guillou.
RICHARD C. WEST has graduate degrees in
both medieval literature and librarianship. He is the compiler of Tolkien Criticism:
An Annotated Checklist (1970, 2nd ed. 1981) and has published several articles
on Tolkien and other authors. He is currently the Assistant Director for Technical
Services at the Kurt F. Wendt Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He and his wife and occasional collaborator, chemist Perri Corrick-West, live
in Madison, Wisconsin.
MARY E. ZIMMER is a Presidential Fellow at Rice University,
where she is writing her doctoral dissertation on seventeenth-century British
literature. She has previously published on St. Catherine of Siena in Studia Mystica
and on John Donne in Christianity and Literature.
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