Copyright © West Virginia University Press The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2005

Tolkien studies in 2005 retrenched into Lord of the Rings studies. Not many of the published items were primarily concerned with any other work by Tolkien, and a few which could have benefited from con-sideration of other work failed to do so. Some writers still need to watch out for the fallacious assumption that Tolkien wrote nothing else of im-portance. The keynote publication of the year was The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. This is essentially an enormous spinoff project of Rings-related material from the authors ’ even larger The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion & Guide which ap-peared the following year. The works together may be considered as a core dump of these very learned scholars ’ knowledge about Tolkien up to the time of writing. They received the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies in successive years, 2006 and 2007. The Hammond and Scull works are encyclopedic in form. The out-standing monograph of the year was not typical of the year in subject