Michael Mints

Haven’t written here anything for quite a while, although there have been quite a lot of news actually.  The beginning of the year was rather messy (and, honestly speaking, a bit crazy), but nevertheless:

• The third Russian version of The Bibliography of Middle-earth is already at the publishing department of my institute and is to appear in print this summer.  Several hundreds of new references have been added, among them both newly published works and some older ones not included into the previous version.
• The first English version of The Bibliography of Middle-earth is also at our publishing department and is to appear this summer.  I hope it’ll be available for readers one way or another (at least electronically) despite the war.
• The Memoir Notes by General Andrei Volkov are at our publishing department, too, and are to appear in May (in Russian).  The book, not published in Soviet time, is quite unusual from the viewpoint of genre because it contains both memoir chapters and diary entries by the author for 1942—first half of 1945.  During the Second World War, Volkov was responsible for artillery supply, in 1939—early 1941 at the Leningrad Military District, and in 1941–45 at the Western Front (renamed into the 3rd Belorussian Front in 1944).  His description of events is quite different from the majority of Soviet generals and marshals that commanded fronts and armies in battle.  His relatives are neighbours of Olga Dernova, my colleague from the State Historical Public Library of Russia, who helped me to prepare The Bibliography of Middle-earth for publication.  When she found out that I’m not only a Tolkien scholar, but also a historian of World War II, she proposed me to take part in editing Volkov’s book 😉
• And finally, a collection of articles and reviews on current anglophone historiography of World War II is to be published in September.  I’m coediting it together with Igor Bogomolov (the head of my department).  We decided the volume should cover not only the Soviet–German war, but also the other theatres of operations, as well as various aspects of the social history.  The work is still in process, so follow the news 😉

The second version of my bibliography on Tolkien has finally been printed on paper and is now available online as well.  After the first version was published, two of my colleagues sent me so much additional material that it took me almost one more year to finish the second version, but the number of references has increased from 2,500 to 3,100.  I’ve added, in particular, a lot of new literature into the section on the languages of Tolkien.  Besides that, the new version contains references to all the articles on Tolkien from the Anor journal.  An alphabetical index of the authors has appeared at the end of the book.

While I was working upon this version of the bibliography, it has become partly outdated because after 24 February, ProQuest closed their resources for Russian users in protest against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  I didn’t remove the references to ProQuest—partly because they may be useful for those colleagues who had to leave Russia, and partly in hope that the access will be restored after the war when Russia joins the civilized countries again.

As I had too much work with the second version, I didn’t manage to finish the English version of this bibliography yet, but I hope to publish it next year 🙂

…had a surprising beginning. A strange man (pretending to be) from the police woke us up at a quarter past six this morning ringing at the door, to “warn” me against “taking part in unauthorized meetings and rallies”. (Actually all the oppositional meetings and rallies had been almost completely prohibited in Russia long before the invasion of Ukraine, officially due to the COVID-19 epidemic. The prohibition doesn’t cover pro-Putin rallies and other mass events organized officially by the authorities.) Two more persons came a half an hour later, they obviously didn’t know anything about the previous visitor. Of course we didn’t let them come in. I suppose they probably came for the first time yesterday afternoon: my mother preferred to ignore the calls from the door phone. Can’t say what was the reason for such a careful attention, because—to my shame—I’ve never taken part in any unauthorized events; will see how things turn out.

Finally I have finished a “full-scale” bibliography on Tolkien. This is the Russian version of it, the English version is still in process.

The bibliography consists of two parts, part one “Primary sources” is designed not as a bibliographic list, but as an overview that describes shortly all the main components of the body of published works by Tolkien, mostly with references to the first printings; to make a full list of all the publications of his writings is already rather a complicated task. Part two “Research literature” is a traditional bibliographic list divided into topical sections. The list isn’t comprehensive, of course, but I hope it covers at least the most important books and papers. Materials published in Tolkien Studies, Journal of Tolkien Research, Mallorn are listed almost entirely, materials from Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon are also listed almost entirely (they include both primary and secondary sources). Articles on Tolkien from Mythlore and Journal of Inklings Studies are also put in the list. I only had to ignore the oldest issues of Vinyar Tengwar, Mythlore and Mallorn because available scans are of poor quality. I’ve also listed all the books from Cormarë series. The amateur publications are listed along with the professional ones.

I thought all of this would take me a half-year or a year, but it took me actually a year and a half. On the other hand, it fortuned that I made this bibliography right by the anniversary of Tolkien 😉

I hope the guide will be useful for researchers, especially for beginners. I’m going to add new information at least once a year. Will be grateful for any corrections or additional information 🙂