Copyright © West Virginia University Press The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2003

Responses to the flood of interest in Tolkien generated by the Lord of the Rings films of Peter Jackson continued to develop in 2003. Fewer direct appreciative articles on Tolkien were published in general maga-zines. Instead, books directly capitalizing on the wave began to appear. There were three new books on Tolkien for children. There were books marketed as introductory guides to Tolkien which failed to provide intro-ductory guidance. There were books loaded with useless bullet-pointed lists. There was the first sign of books treating Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Jackson’s films as interchangeable. But more significant criti-cism carried on. This was, for instance, the year that Tolkien translation studies came into their own. The outstanding work of Tolkien scholarship published in 2003, and winner of the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award the following year, is Tolk-ien and the Great War by John Garth. Covering Tolkien’s adolescence and young adulthood through his service in World War I, this was the first originally researched biography of Tolkien, if only a partial biography, to appear since Humphrey Carpenter’s standard work in 1977. Some of the best books on Tolkien from 2003 are updated revisions of older books: The Road to Middle-earth by Tom Shippey and Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomeno