I came back from the German Tolkien Seminar with a very interesting new publication by a small, specialized Swiss publishing company -
Walking Tree Publishers. It's titled
Roots and Branches, and is a collection of essays by Tom Shippey!! Many were published in obscure and hard-to-get publications, a number were given as speeches. I was excited to be able to read his paper on proverbiality in Tolkien from Birmingham 2005, since I wasn't able to attend his lecture then, and I'm looking forward to the rest as well.
I also bought
Inside Language by Ross Smith - on linguistic and aesthetic theory in Tolkien. I have only peeked inside, so can't say anything about it yet. (Both above books are brand new, so not yet listed on the website, but it is possible for North American and British readers to order them, as they are printed on demand there as well as in continental Europe.)
Then I also brought the second volume of Tolkien and Modernity, which looks interesting, though I didn't buy it for that reason - I translated one paper in it from German into English! (A hard bit of work, if I may say so - academic German is rather difficult to translate!) Obviously, I did want to preserve a publication to which I contributed to show my grandchildren someday...
