Original research papers are the traditional sphere of graduate students. The Grey Book breaks that mold by calling for papers each year from undergraduate students.
Faculty Advisor Leslie Donovan, Associate Professor of the University Honors Program at the University of New Mexico, has published research on Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon women saints, and J.R.R. Tolkien. She has assembled a staff of students from UNM who are passionate in their love of literature and Tolkien. And they come from a diverse range of disciplines.
Launched in 2005, The Grey Book offers only a small selection of undergraduate articles at this time, but the chosen topics are every bit as deep and interesting as typical higher-level journal topics.
Unfortunately, the site has adopted the convention of providing articles in .PDF format (which has become something of a standard among university sites). While the Adobe Acrobat Reader is free to download and use, .PDF files add 1-2 minutes’ rendering time and you can crash your Windows PC if you get tired of waiting and try to close the window.
The students are not afraid to spread their lexiconical wings and engage in academic-speak. Dawn Catanach writes “From a deontological point of view, Éowyn deserts” in her paper The Problem of Eowyn: A Look At Ethics And Values In Middle-earth.
The Catanach paper underscores the impact that post-Tolkien Anglo-Saxonist revisionism has had on the study of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien strove to distance his literary creation from direct Anglo-Saxonist influences. People such as Tom Shippey (who knew and studied under Tolkien, eventually succeeding him in the same faculty position) have argued strenuously that Tolkien was speaking with his tongue-in-cheek, in fact enacting subtle philological gests that most of his readers would never perceive.
The Anglo-Saxonist movement today paints Tolkien in a way that Shippey probably never intended. It’s not all about England. It’s not all about Anglo-Saxons (Tolkien loved his Goths, too).
These criticisms aside, Catanach’s paper is a great first-round study of Eowyn’s character. She has clearly put some thought and work into the project. Trey Smith’s Verbum Caro Factum Est: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Philosophy Of Language looks at Tolkien the Philologist and “Tolkien’s fictional works as exercises in the type of linguistic phenomenology [Martin] Heidegger espoused”.
Citing from Tolkien’s letters where he explains that the word comes first and then the story, Smith distinguishes between the types of stories a Tolkien creates and the types of stories a modern fantasist creates. Tolkien wanted a meaningful language which would give rise to its own stories. Modern fantasists simply use the language they know to create vignettes that are familiar to the modern reader.
Smith’s paper makes a case for the study of Tolkien’s languages, because one cannot fully appreciate the stories Tolkien tried to tell without understanding the cultures he depicted, and one must therefore understand the languages of those cultures.
Undergraduate research work as highlighted by The Grey Book may lay the foundation for future ground-breaking research into Tolkien’s literature. For example, what if Smith and Catanach work together to examine the Rohirric culture portrayed by Tolkien? That culture is expressed partially through his applied Anglo-Saxon idiom. That is, Tolkien reshaped Anglo-Saxon words and expressions to fit his world, rather than to reflect the world of historical Anglo-Saxons.
Tolkien reinvented Anglo-Saxon idiom. You can see how his reinvention has inspired curious young minds through these papers. It won’t take much work for these writers to expand into newer, less traditionally espoused areas of consideration. The Grey Book proposes to unleash a new generation of Tolkien scholars upon the Internet.
Here is hoping more universities nurture such budding scholarly communities, regardless of whether they are fans of Tolkien, Rowling, or other influential authors.