Wednesday, June 11, 2008

I Am Nominated . . .

. . . for this year's Mythopoeic Award.
To be specific, for this year's Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies. This is given out once a year to a book that looks at the life and/or works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, or the Inklings as a group. It's a great honor to be nominated, and I'm among outstanding company: in addition to MR. BAGGINS/ RETURN TO BAG-END the other four finalists are

Verlyn Fleiger's INTERRUPTED MUSIC
Marjorie Burns' PERILOUS REALMS
Diana Pavlac Glyer's THE COMPANY THEY KEEP
and Gilliver, Marshall, & Weiner's THE RING OF WORDS.

In addition, there's also a separate Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for non-Inklings books, of which the most interesting this year looks to be Tom Shippey's volume THE SHADOW-WALKERS, a collection of essays on the various creatures featured in Jacob Grimms' TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY; I finally managed to pick up a copy at Kalamazoo, but have not yet had time to read it. And of course there are also awards for best fantasy fiction and best fantasy juvenile fiction; the most striking nominees there are Guy Gavriel Kay's new book (YSABEL)and the Harry Potter series, respectively. For a complete list of nominees and past winners, see the Mythopoeic Society website (www.mythsoc.org).

The award itself will be handed out at this year's Mythcon, in about two months' time.

--John R.

3 comments:

Indiana Douche said...

I have not (and probably won't) read the other ones, so my vote would go to yours.

Because of your books, I am re-reading the History Of Middle Earth books about the writing of LOTR. I read them when they first came out too.

I must say that I liked your work better than CJRT's. I don't know why, maybe because his dealt almost exclusively with textual minutia and you included interesting notes about the history behind the words/names etc.

Good luck!

Have you heard Christopher Lee's reading of The Children of Hurin? Amazing, is all I can say about it.

Vinny said...

Congrats!

Jason Fisher said...

Congratulations on your nomination!