Tenure Track Job in History at Wheaton

The History Department here at Wheaton is going to be searching to fill a tenure track position this year. I have pasted the ad in below. I should note that I have nothing to do with this search directly (Wheaton departments are a little prickly--correctly, in my view--about prerogatives with regard to hires and tenuring, so no Chair of English is going to be trying to tell History what to do).

A few other things that obviously wouldn't go in the ad, but I can tell you: The History department is very strong at Wheaton, made up of good people who are involved in all aspects of the life of the college. It is also among the most popular departments among students; when we were reducing requirements for the our new curriculum History was willing to give up a requirement because their classes always fill. Our students clearly are interested in history, and the department has a whole line-up of excellent teachers. Teaching load is 3/2, but a new program makes that 2/2 the first year. Pretty decent research/travel budget (in excess of $1000 and has been going up) for every year and opportunities for other funding. Fully funded junior sabbatical and post-tenure sabbatical. Very, very "flat" organizational structure at Wheaton means that there are no deans over the faculty. Our "connections" curriculum is very innovative and history is at the heart of it (it is the "universal connector" -- I'll explain that in another post). The campus is about 30 miles south of Boston. It's a 30-minute commute against the traffic if you live in the southern Boston suburbs, 45 minutes from the city itself and maybe a little longer from Cambridge. I believe that the commute is about 40 minutes from Providence (which is less expensive and is where a plurality of our faculty live). There are trains and buses, but probably you need a car. The town of Norton, where Wheaton is located, is pretty sleepy itself. Cost of living in the Boston metro area is very high (higher than Chicago, slightly lower than San Francisco or NYC, but not too much); Providence is less expensive. Wheaton pay is competitive with other small liberal arts colleges.

I personally think this is a very good job and I'm hoping that whoever History hires will want to collaborate with me, Joel Relihan in Classics (a superb Latinist and translator of Boethius) and Evelyn Lane in Art History (expert on stained glass, among other things). There is strong support for medieval studies on campus, with professors from Biology, Religion and Math/Computer Science doing various collaborations.

Good luck to those who apply!

Medieval/Ancient World

The Department of History at Wheaton College (MA) seeks a tenure-track assistant professor with scholarly and teaching expertise in the fields of classical, late-antique, and/or medieval history. The History Department is especially interested in social or cultural historians whose thematic expertise includes gender, popular religion, material culture, cross-cultural contact, or the history of science or the environment. Geographic field open; preference for Celtic world, northwestern Europe, or southeastern Europe. Ph.D must be in hand at time of appointment. Send letter of interest, CV, and three letters of reference by November 26, 2007 to Alexander Bloom, Chair, Department of History, Wheaton College, Norton, MA, 02766. Preliminary interviews will be conducted at the 2008 AHA annual meeting. For more information, please contact hr@wheatonma.edu. AA/EOE. Wheaton College seeks educational excellence through diversity and strongly encourages applications from women and men from historically underrepresented groups.

ISAS 2007: London

Sorry no posting of late. Came back from fishing (the fish won, mostly, but I did hook a snook on my fly rod, though he cut the leader with his gill covers) to finish up my paper for the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists conference in London. I was a last-minute substitute for someone, so I hadn't been working on the paper as steadily as I otherwise would have, and it took a lot of work to sweat it down to under 20 minutes (I hate papers that go on too long and I figure the only way to be truly obnoxiously holier-than-thou about it is to make sure my papers don't go too long by reading them aloud again, and again, and again -- my poor family).

I only did this because ISAS is absolutely the best conference in my field, which is the only reason I would ever have agreed to do something this last-minute. The conference only happens every two years and I missed it last time (my son was too small to leave my wife stuck with both kids for that long) but it is always so incredible, with brilliant work being showcased, that I come home inspired to write. Each ISAS I've attended (95 in Stanford, 97 in Palermo, 99 at Notre Dame, 01 in Helsinki and 03 as Arizona) has led to an article, book or computer program, so I'm hoping to come back and be incredibly productive after listening to a passel of good papers.

On the other hand, I am a total homebody and hate traveling, so I'm not looking forward to the trip. But in the end it should be worth it.

The paper is: The Invention of Cynewulf: Albert S. Cook, Philology, Romanticism and English Studies in America.

Crazy Sheep DNA Project Progress

Heading off on the first vacation in a long, long time, so this blog and my email and Anglo-Saxon Aloud will be on hiatus for a little while, and I won't be able to fill Beowulf Aloud orders for a while (though you might want to order anyway, as I am going to have to raise the price for the next print run as soon as this one sells out). I had thought to bring the computer with me, "for emergencies," and my beloved wife quickly brought me down to earth: "You are the Chair of an ENGLISH department!" she said. "What POSSIBLE emergency could happen that couldn't wait until you get back?" I did not have an answer.

So I'm goin' fishin'. But I wanted to give a little progress report on the Crazy Sheep DNA Project. Like many ideas that sound good from an outsider's point of view, the science is turning out to be both harder and more interesting than I had realized. Today my research partner, Amanda Shorette, and I had a good meeting in which we realized how each of our areas of research will feed into the other, and how all are interdependent. We came up with the chart below, and I'll explain how we're tackling each problem so that others who are doing complex interdisciplinary research can steal ideas.



We begin with the historical research, which tells us what questions are most worth asking. Thus I am training Amanda in paleography (she's right now gotten a pretty good grip on writing basic scripts and is now moving to uncials) and she is reading the introduction to Ker's Catalogue and scanning through Gneuss's Handlist. This work tells us about manuscript distributions and what particular problems might be solved by knowing the relationships of the sheep that gave up their skins.

Then we move on to the physical research. We need to find a non-destructive method of testing; otherwise, libraries won't let us near them. We believe we have a patentable testing kit that could be manufactured very cheaply and distributed to thousands of libraries and researchers, but getting it right requires work in microscopy as well as engineering (conveniently, I'm married to a brilliant engineer; I recommend this approach to all researchers). We have to figure out the thickness of the parchment or vellum, its physical structure, and where we are likely to get the most DNA. Then we prototype the extraction kit and hope somebody gives us money to manufacture them.

The next level, which I've labeled "Chemical," but which should really be called "Chemical/Biological," is where Amanda is teaching me. She is learning well enough to teach the processes by which DNA is extracted from material (using Proteinase K, for example, which breaks down all the protein, leaving the DNA behind), identified (using gel electropheresis) and amplified (using polymerase chain reaction). This is all the wet lab work that we'll practice in the fall under the supervision of my previous co-author, Professor of Biology (and diamondback terrapin expert) Barbara Brennessel.

Then there is an additional Chemical/Biological step that is more on the biological side: we need to figure out the best way to characterize the information we get, whether in terms of complete sequences, or microsatellites, or single nucleotide polymorphisms, or other aspects of DNA. Amanda knows about these, but she needs to teach me.

Then we have to learn how to take the next step, to go from the chemical/biological to the bioinformatic: how to we get our amplified DNA into sequences of base pairs such as TTCSGATTACA, etc.? I don't know, and Amanda is just learning.

But when we do that, my work with Prof. of Computer Science Mike Gousie begins. We will be designing a database with a visual interface to hold all of the information that will, we hope, pour in from libraries and researchers all over the world once we get the whole prototype project running. For a mock-up of the interface (which has been re-designed and much improved thanks to input from Tiruncula, see this post).

Then, and here is where the magic happens, the results from the database feed back to help answer the original historical questions and help us pose new and interesting questions.

So that's the status of the Sheep DNA project right now. Most of the "work" is happening in our heads, as we teach ourselves what we have to do. But I've learned from hard experience that the most important work you do may be the planning that occurs before you ever set foot in the lab, and so my desire to monkey around with PCR must be frustrated for a few more months. But in the end, we hope to end up with some very solid foundations for the research: and maybe a patent or two. Any patent attorneys out there who want to help, given that the value of this particular patent would probably approach zero in financial terms but would be a good contribution to human knowledge (do you think I have to mention that zero-money part when I talk to the college attorney?).

Really Interesting Call for Papers

First, apologies for very limited posting, and thanks to those who offered condolances and support after my last post. It has been a very challenging month or so, and it is not over yet. I just got back from recording another course for Recorded Books' Modern Scholar series (A Way with Words 2: Understanding and Discussing Literature) and still have to finish that course book as well as many other things.

But I wanted to publicize this Call for Papers for Kalamazoo that just came in over ANSAX-net, both because it looks fascinating and because I think this kind of approach is exactly where the action is likely to be in literary studies in the near future. Unfortunately, my own work in this area is probably not yet advanced enough to have an abstract ready to submit (neuroscience turns out to be really hard: who knew?), but hopefully some of you readers are further along. So, kudos to Ron Ganze. I know one session at Kzoo 2008 that I will definitely be attending.

International Medieval Congress 2008
Call for Papers: Cognitive Approaches to the Medieval Texts

The use of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology in literary criticism has increased exponentially in the last decade; several monographs and essay collections on the subject have appeared, and entire issues of journals, both in literary studies and in the cognitive sciences, have been dedicated to the study of literature using a cognitive approach. We are also beginning to see conferences dedicated to the cognitive study of literature, with at least two national conferences in 2006 alone.

This approach has important implications for the study of medieval literature and culture, as it both supplements and acts as a corrective to the predominant social constructionist model through which we usually read texts and their characters. In some very important ways, it opens the medieval texts to understandings and interpretations that the social constructionist model often closes off, and calls into question some of the assumptions made by both medievalists and theorists about the nature of the self. It also provides a useful way of understanding narrative, as cognitive psychology and neuroscience now understand the impulse to narrative as hard-wired into the human brain, and as the primary means by which we make sense of reality.

This session seeks to bring work in this area to the Middle Ages and to the attention of medievalists, who may find this new approach useful and illuminating. Papers on such topics as the neurology of narrative, the impact of cognitive approaches to literature on perceptions of medieval authorship or the medieval sense of self, and particularly papers investigating similarities between medieval psychological models and those forwarded by cognitive psychology are welcome, though the panel need not be limited to these subjects.

Email submissions preferred (MS Word—save as Word 2003 or earlier—or rich text format, please). Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent by September 1, 2007, to Ronald J. Ganze at one of the following addresses:

(before August 10):
Department of English
1409 Chapel Drive
Valparaiso University
Valparaiso, IN 46383
Ronald.Ganze@valpo.edu

(after August 10):
Department of English
212 Dakota Hall
University of South Dakota
414 E. Clark Street
Vermillion, SD 57069-2390
ronald.ganze@gmail.com

Marilyn Todesco, R.I.P.

This evening my closest friend at Wheaton College, Marilyn Todesco, passed away after a difficult and intense battle with renal cancer. Marilyn became sick back in late November, had what seemed like successful surgery, and was supposed to back to work at the beginning of June. On Memorial Day weekend we learned that her cancer had returned in very aggressive form.

The great things a person does in life should define them, not their disease, so I want to use the rest of this post to talk about how important Marilyn was to me personally, to our department and to our building.

Marilyn was the building secretary for Meneely Hall, which meant she handled the needs of English, Hispanic and Italian Studies, and German as well as every faculty member who couldn't figure out the copy machine, every student confused about classes and every other possible problem that arose.

Her office was, in the words of the poet Sue Standing, our hearth, and the fire burning in that hearth was Marilyn's personality. Always ready with a laugh or a word of comfort, always calm even in the midst of chaos, always caring even at the most stressful times, Marilyn held everything together. If our building was a remarkably collegial place, it was mostly due to her, to our desire to please her (she disliked conflict) and her ability to listen.

Marilyn was the first person I met at Wheaton after being hired there. She sent me around on all my errands across campus (locksmith, human resources, mail room, information technology), and then she chatted with me about her family, her dog and life in general. This started a pattern. Every day I would come in 15 minutes early so that I'd have time to stand in Marilyn's office and talk to her.

Her granddaughter was born about a year after my daughter, and so Marilyn and I would swap child stories and show artwork and pictures and enjoy raising kids together. Marilyn was very good on life advice. When my wife was pregnant, she and I had one of those fights that are in retrospect idiotic, but at the same time impossible to stop. I was telling Marilyn about it the next day. "Go home, unplug the electric pencil sharpener" (this was the source of the stupid fight) "and bring it down and put it in your office," said Marilyn. Her advice worked, and she always got a laugh out of telling the story.

Marilyn had me keep my eye out for students who might want to work in the office. She trained them, trusted them, befriended them, and in the end often did more good than any other individual on campus. I know of more than one student whom she physically walked over to the counseling center and into an appointment. I can think of two students whose lives, it is only a minor exaggeration to say, she saved. I saw her put band-aids on students' hands, give out water, candy and tissues, and more importantly, provide a ready ear and a mind that knew every single thing about Wheaton College.

If it weren't for Marilyn, there would be no Tolkien Studies, no Bibliography project, no high level of productivity. If it weren't for her, I don't think I would have survived my first few years at Wheaton. If not for her, I might not have gotten through the really difficult months of adjusting to a new child and then, later, to a second child.

My children loved Marilyn and couldn't wait to see her. She was one of the first adults outside of the family with whom they had a relationship, and she was the first person at Wheaton I brought my kids to meet when they were only a month old and I carried them in the baby bucket.

She loved the college, and she loved each of us, "her professors." She knew us, understood us, and took care of us. Only her family was more important.

I joked once to Marilyn, about three years ago, that there were only four people on campus who were impossible to replace. Everyone else, all the faculty, the administration, etc., could go, but there were four people Wheaton couldn't do without. She was number one on that list. No one in the room disagreed.

I don't know how we will go on without her. I think we have already learned how much of a difference one person can make, and it will only get worse as we realize that she really is not coming back. Now we will have to try to live up to the standard she set.

I am heartbroken, but also grateful that I got to spend 9 years of my life with such a good, true friend. I will always miss her.

The Dream of the Rood and other things

Posting has been light here due to workload and also because the person who has probably been my closest friend at Wheaton for the past ten years has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and is rapidly slipping away. It's a very difficult time. She has been such an important part of encouraging me with my work and helping me along, and I'm at a loss.

But I am trying to keep up with my projects. Over at Anglo-Saxon Aloud, I've posted The Dream of the Rood. It is one of the most beautiful poems in Old English, and I know it very well, so I think that the recording isn't too bad. If you haven't listened to an Anglo-Saxon poem yet, this might be a good one. It is about 11 minutes long.

This past weekend I gave an invited lecture, "Engineers as Heroes: Science Fiction from the 1930s to Today" to the Sigma Xi (the Scientific Research Society) chapter at General Motors in Warren, Michigan. This one of of the most well-informed, intelligent audiences I've ever spoken to, and I had a great time visiting the Tech Center and giving the talk. Great people (and one of them was a Wheaton alum from 1978--in anthropology!).

Also, I'll be giving a research seminar at the Santa Fe Institute next week. And, it turns out, I will be presenting at the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists' conference in London at the beginning of August (despite what I told everyone at Kalamazoo).

But before then, I have to write all fourteen lectures for A Way with Words Part II: Understanding Literature for Recorded Books. I think it's funny that I, a Theory skeptic who thinks Derrida is wrong about many things because he didn't read his Wittgenstein, got hired to write a Theory-related course. But I'm really happy about working with Recorded Books again, not the least because my colleague in Biology, John Kricher, has agreed to do a course on Dinosaurs for them and I will get to be in the studio when part of that is recorded. Dinosaurs! So cool.

Andreas now complete

I've just posted the final segment of Andreas over at Anglo-Saxon Aloud, so the entire poem should now be able to be downloaded either from the site or from iTunes.

I found recording Andreas very challenging. The poet uses some formulas and other set pieces that are similar to Beowulf, but they never completely felt right when I was reading them. I found myself getting tangled or losing the rhythm much more in Andreas than any other poem, even Christ and Satan.

But in terms of content, Andreas is really interesting, and if you haven't read this poem, I recommend it, even in the S.A.J. Bradley prose translation: it contains all kinds of weird and interesting things, from cannibalism to drugs that drive people insane to rivers pouring out of marble and drowning the bad guys... God Himself makes a number of appearances, some of them in disguise. I have read Andreas many times since first reading it in grad school, but I still don't know what to make of it.

Next up are a few short poems--"Fates of the Apostles," "Soul and Body I," the excitingly named "Homiletic Fragment I" and the great "The Dream of the Rood." Then the Vercelli Book poems conclude with Elene, about Saint Helen and the finding of the True Cross. That poem is almost as long as Andreas and possibly even more interesting. I estimate that I'll finish the Vercelli book sometime around mid to late June. The Exeter Book will take at least the rest of the summer.

By the way, a few people have been kind enough to ask if they can use these recitations in their Old English classes. Of course! It's what they are there for. I also intend, once the entire recording process is done, to put them on CDs so that people can buy the entire ASPR as a set. But until then (and even after then), everything I've recorded and edited is available at Anglo-Saxon Aloud, except for the Beowulf recording, which you can buy at Beowulf Aloud. But, I only have 1 more undamaged Beowulf Aloud left from the first pressing. Another print run is in progress.

A New Stage
(follow-up Kalamazoo)

Tiruncula writes about Kalamazoo feeling different this year and attributes this change not to her new affiliation with a fancy-pants university, but to having several cohorts of grad students at different stages in their careers at the conference. In this post Dr. Virago and her commenters discuss the complexities of the dance, noting that a person's relationship to that event changes with the years as well. Medieval Woman talked about being pretty much filled up with conference by Saturday afternoon and skipping the dance. New Kid on the Hallway discussed how there can be a conference with >600 sessions and yet so few that you are excited to attend.

I recognized a lot in those posts. I've felt exactly the same ways at other times. Kalamazoo, because it is so large, because of the dance, and the dorms, and the continuity year after year, works as some kind of psychic amplifier. There was one year when, after listening to a paper that went on forever speculating about how many lines are missing from the beginning of Judith, I just had to get out of there. Luckily, Jenny Adams, who was sharing a ride with me, had just at that point also gotten fed up, so we drove back to Chicago and then I felt stupid for missing the dance.

Kalamazoo for me is now a lot more pure fun. I enjoy seeing my undergraduates show up as successful grad students, and I like meeting people I've otherwise been introduced to at invited lectures, etc. I have enough friends there that I'm always rushing to see one or the other, and this year a couple of people whose work I really admire were willing to sit down and talk about work (not job possibilities, gossip, job shuffling; just intellectual work--it was great!).

However, this year there was a new feeling, and it was not entirely a pleasant one (though I would have guessed it would be). That feeling, I think, was a kind of fear.

At least three times, people came up to me to talk and said that they were using my work. Two of them were dissertations, and one is a book-turned-into-a-dissertation. This is, of course at one level very gratifying, and my enormous ego enjoyed it a lot. But I walked away from each discussion with my heart pounding and sweat running down the back of my neck, and I didn't figure out why until later. I realized that really until now I had been unconsciously assuming that everything I published, even at the highest levels, was fairly likely to be wrong but that this was ok, because at some point a senior person would come along and say "no, not exactly," and fix it. Yes, even for work that's gone through double outside anonymous review, or appeared in JEGP or Studies in Philology or Neophilologus or Anglo-Saxon England, I've been unconsciously assuming that the grown-ups will eventually come along and straighten everything out.

Now I realize, in a way I hadn't before, that at least one or two (possibly exactly three) people have read my work working under the assumption that it's right and that they can build from it. I had no idea how profoundly scary that would be, but it certainly gives me a nice adrenaline shock when I think of it, even right now.

Hanging on the wall in my office is a quote from Max Planck: "new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." I have always found this line encouraging when struggling to get people to engage with my ideas.

But it's scary as well. Because if it starts to happen, all of a sudden you have a responsibility to be right, not just to the best of your ability, but to be right enough that you don't lead astray some poor, overworked, underpaid graduate student (like you yourself were not that long ago) with any bits of sloppy thinking or unclear expression. Thinking about this in more detail makes your blood run cold: what if one of your discursive footnotes ends up not proving what you think it proves, but the student runs with it, and then he or she ends up suffering for your mistake...

All of a sudden you want the grown-ups back. And thinking of yourself as one of them is not a very comforting thought.

I think this was all brought home even more by the memorial session for Nick Howe (I have my own two "this is how unbelievably generous Nick Howe was..." stories, but I'll put those in another post), the fact that Nick Doane is retiring from Wisconsin, and Steve Glosecki's untimely death. These people, and Patrick Wormald and Phil Pulsiano in previous years, weren't tottering ancient scholars. They were the very active heart of the field. And I know that I, and my colleagues of the same age and experience, will just never be capable of taking their places. And yet, due to the structure of academia, in some weird way new generations of scholars, who don't know any better, will assume that we have.

I'm sure this is all related to my own anxieties about becoming Department Chair, and others' experiences are likely to be very different, but for me, right now, getting the things I have always wanted--real engagement with my ideas for what they are, not where they come from--is turning out to be one of the most intellectually frightening (and with that, exhilarating) times of my life thus far.

But I close by saying that I will not grow up and will continue to stay in the dorms. Do you realize that, if you've been to more than ten Kalamazoos, that you've spent at least a month of your life in those dorms? The day I give up and move to a hotel with a real bed, an unshared bathroom, and no rooster outside my window is the day I am officially old.

Obligatory Late Kalamazoo Post
So much to write, no time to do it. I returned from Kalamazoo to Mother's Day, a pile of laundry, a Red Sox game, and a huge steaming heap of grading. I am only now digging out, and not so efficiently, either.

This Far Side explains how I felt at Kalamazoo (and still feel now):


But before the moment passes, this is a good time to make a comment or two. The actual details, including the blogger meet-up (which was fun) have been better discussed by others: Scott Nokes (scroll down), Another Damn Medievalist (Blogenspiel), Medieval Woman (whom I knew in a completely different context), Tiruncula (more on later), History Geek, Shana Worthen of Owlfish, Lisa Spangenberg, Elisabeth Carnell and others. I was also moved into a kind of awed awkwardness by meeting Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light.

In the tradition of weird things happening at Kalamazoo, I was woken by a rooster on Friday morning at 4:30 a.m. I assumed I dreamed this, but then I was talking to a woman who works on staff and she told me that there are some people who have backyard chickens who live off campus near the Valley dorms. So it really was a rooster: the first time I've been woken up by one. Just another surreal Kalamazoo moment.

I'm glad that a couple people (Behold a Pale Horse and Scott Nokes) at least liked my paper with the plastic animals. It was a lot of fun to give, but because there was no time for questions, it was hard to tell whether people were convinced at all or just liked, well, the plastic animals.

The papers I attended were very good, although all the things I wanted to see were at the same times. Also, this year everything I had to go to was on alternating sides of the campus: first Fetzer, then Valley III, then Schneider, then Valley II, then Bernhard. Got a lot of good exercise, though.

Best part of the conference was getting a chance to talk to my former undergraduate student who has gone on to great things (and who will be teaching in my department this fall) and to catch up with people I'd met previously. Next best part was to say to a graduate student "Oh, you really need to meet Christina Lee, who is working on that" and, not 30 second later, have Christina Lee walk by and say hello. One of those weird Kalamazoo coincidences.

Most embarrassing moment: at dinner with Don Scragg and others, I started in with "What did you think of Drew Jones' brilliant piece in the new Speculum." No one else had read it. "What is it about?" asked Don, not unreasonably. And then, my friends, I had a complete Alzheimer's moment that lasted a very, very long time. I could not, for the life of me, remember the name of the text or the author. So I basically said "Hey, wasn't that article great? Can't remember what it's about, though." Very sad. Two hours later, I suddenly recalled that it's on Odo of Cluny. How hard is it to remember Odo, I ask you?

Almost as bad, and demonstrating how sleep deprivation in dorms that are worse than the prison Paris Hilton is going to leads to poor thinking, was my brain's performance at one interesting paper. About 2/3 of the way through, the presenter started talking about a medieval commonplace of a serpent with a jewel in its head that presses its ear against a rock and then tucks the tip of its tale into its other ear to block out temptations, etc. Interesting, right? Well, all I could think about, for the remaining five minutes of the paper, was "Snakes don't have ears." That particular problem so consumed my stupid brain that I totally lost the line of argument and didn't understand what the paper concluded.

I did manage to buy a manuscript fragment and leaf for the Crazy Sheep DNA Project, a Roman coin for my daughter, and the conference copy of Mechthild Gretsch's Ælfric and the Cult of Saints (I never get the conference copy of books that I really want, so I was very happy). Also, thanks to Phil Kaveny, I sold all of my copies of Beowulf Aloud, giving me a lovely I-told-you-so moment with my beloved spouse (these are quite rare).

The dance was also fun. I had a chance to chat with Another Damn Medievalist and dance with various friends, old and new. I still think that the dance should have been painted by Hieronomous Bosch (I think Korncrake would agree), but I always have a good time and I only know one person who left the profession after bad choices at the dance. It is a much more civilized event now that it's no longer in the Valley dorms, and I think the distance from the dance to the dorms protects many marriages and relationships just as the cash bar protects many reputations. As James McNelis said: "When medievalists have parties, we rock!" It may be it's own kind of weird medievalist rocking (involving belting out Bon Jovi songs -- who knew medievalists like Bon Jovi?), but it's rocking all the same. Try doing that, Americanists!

If I can dig out from all the other work I'll try to write something substantive and respond to insightful comments by Dr. Virago, Another Damned Medievalist and Medieval Woman in particular, but until then: this was my 14th out of the past 15 Kalamazoos and, despite the fact that it falls at exactly the wrong time of year and always creates work and family hardship, I'll keep going. Because you really can't ever run out of fun things to do when surrounded by medievalists for four days.

Kalamazoooooo

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimmages... to Western Michigan, in search of friends, books, power and position, maybe love, and that one night during an otherwise far-too-tense life in which rhythmless people will dance frenetically to Beyonce's "Check on it."
This year I go looking to buy a roman coin for my daughter and a medieval parchment for my research project. To visit with my old friends, to have dinner with a few mentors, to have a few meetings and some good company, and above all to sit in on papers that will give me good ideas for future teaching and research (the "New Voices in Anglo-Saxon sessions are almost always worth it for that alone).

Unfortunately, when I come home, on the afternoon of Mother's Day, the lawn will be as high as an elephant's eye and no one will be mowing it but me. Ah, the sacrifices we make for Lady Philosophy. True, Boethius was executed, but did he ever live in a Valley dorm?

Things I'm learning from Anglo-Saxon Aloud

Because it is unlikely that my pre-Kalamazoo post, if I can ever write it, will be as good as that by Kornkrake (though I'll try), instead I want to talk about what I'm learning by doing Anglo-Saxon Aloud.

The first thing is that if the Junius Manuscript poems were occasionally outside of my comfort level (established with Beowulf, after all), then Andreas is way outside of my comfort level. Particularly at the beginning of Andreas, I regularly had difficulty at getting a rhythm going, at expressing the sense of a sentence through inflection, at even understanding exactly what was going on while reading on the fly (What is God's problem, anyway, with the whole disguise thing?). But when I got to the set pieces, many of those problems went away. Sea voyages, torture, destruction: those the poet did well and the meter matched the Beowulf meter with which I'm familiar. It definitely feels to me if Beowulf is the most effortlessly accomplished of the poems I have read thus far and that Andreas (and perhaps Christ and Satan) is derivative, with the metrical structure not being as perfectly internalized by the poet.
I also am more convinced that Exodus is more like Beowulf than any other poem, far more like Beowulf than Andreas is, although Andreas has a much higher percentage of shared lines.
But listen to the poems yourself (via Beowulf Aloud and Anglo-Saxon Aloud) and see what you think.
And see you at Kalamazoo, I hope.

Beowulf Aloud: Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who has purchased a copy of Beowulf Aloud. I hope those who have received it will post some feedback, and if anyone is still interested, I do have a few more copies available.

(this paypal link is for domestic US shipping only)

(this paypal link is for domestic US shipping only)
Beowulf Aloud is my dramatic reading of the entire poem in Old English. I can sell the 3-CD collection, which includes every single line of the poem plus an introductory lecture, for 15 dollars US. Packaging and shipping to anywhere in the US is 3 USD, so the total would be $18.00. Overseas shipping will whatever it costs me, checked on an individual basis (but so far, not more than $5 to Europe) . You can use the button above for my PayPal account or use my PayPal address, mdrout@wheatonma.edu. I am also happy to take personal checks.

If you are enjoying Anglo-Saxon Aloud, I think you will like Beowulf Aloud even more, as the sound quality is somewhat better because it was recorded, edited and mixed professionally.

And owning a copy of my chanting/singing Finnsburg has to be worth something, if only for the opportunity to use it as embarrassing material at just the right occasion years from now...

Medievalists Use Annoying Words, Too

I was just reading the new Speculum (a journal my wife won't allow me to keep in the house, by the way) on Monday and came across Milton Gatch's review of Mechthild Gretsch's Ælfric and the Cult of Saints in Late Anglo-Saxon England. Now, as readers of How Tradition Works know, Mechthild Gretsch is the medievalist whose work I most admire. Her The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform absolutely changed my scholarly life (and I would be willing to bet good money that I am the only person in the world who has read it four times). So when I got to the part of the review where Gatch is ready to make some criticisms, I was ready to rise in defense of whatever it was that Gretsch had done.

But instead, I found myself in total agreement with Gatch, who objects to the use of the verb "culted" throughout Gretsch's new book. Gatch attributes this usage to Gretsch's being German, and he's wrong about that, but boy is he right that "culted" is a barbarism (though he does not use those words).

When I was in graduate school and reading all the then-current scholarship on the English Benedictine Reform, no one used "culted" as a past-tense verb. But sometime around 2000-2001, it started to show up everywhere. Phrases like "Swithun was culted at Winchester" became commonplace in Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere. Before this time, people would write something like "a cult of St Swithun was started at Winchester." Now it's "was culted."

In other words, the use of "culted" is a meme, one that has spread rapidly through the ranks of elite Anglo-Saxonists (though thankfully, nowhere else).

I understand desire for shorthand, and I think that "culted" is marginally better than "imbricated" ("imbricated" is a bad metaphor, while "culted" is a bit of insider jargon with only one real meaning). But "culted" is still loathsome. It's ugly to look at, and it works immediately to alienate nearly all readers. It is also unnecessary, as scholars were able to write about the cult of the saints, etc. for a couple hundred years without using "cult" as a verb.

Look, Milton Gatch has read more Anglo-Saxon scholarship than nearly any person alive. When he thinks the use of a word is due to the author's not speaking English as a native language, it's obvious that "culted" isn't helping with communication. I'm all for jargon when it's necessary or even particularly useful, and I love teaching my students to use "hapax legomenon" or "homoeoteleuton" in the appropriate situations, but "culted" is just too foul. Please don't use it any more.

My Review of The Children of Húrin

This review was just published here, in the Providence Journal, if you want to read it with a nice cover image from the book and a more attractive layout.

J.R.R. Tolkien. The Children of Húrin.
Edited by Christopher Tolkien.


Houghton Mifflin. 313 pages. $26.

By Michael D.C. Drout
Special to The Journal

More books by J.R.R. Tolkien have been published since his death in 1973 than appeared during his lifetime, but The Children of Húrin, painstakingly edited by Tolkien’s youngest son Christopher, is the first since The Lord of the Rings that is both a self-contained story and set in the same Middle-earth as Tolkien’s great work. Because Christopher Tolkien has now incorporated contextualizing passages that he had omitted from the version of the story given in Unfinished Tales (1980), this book is the most reader-friendly of Tolkien’s posthumous works.

It is also physically beautiful, from the cover, color plates and line drawings by artist Alan Lee, to the fold-out map by Christopher Tolkien, to the design itself. But readers should be forewarned: there are no hobbits in The Children of Húrin, but there is murder, inadvertent brother-sister incest, and suicide. It is a dark story, a meditation on fate, pride, and that virtue Tolkien called “Northern courage,” the refusal to stop fighting even when a cause is hopeless and defeat certain.

The Children of Húrin is set 6,000 years before the action of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, when the immortal Elves are locked in a hopeless war with Morgoth, the diabolic first Dark Lord. In this struggle, some mortal men have chosen to fight on the side of the Elves. The mightiest of these is Húrin, who is valiant in battle but is eventually captured and brought to Morgoth. When Húrin refuses to submit to the Dark Lord, Morgoth curses him and his family. This curse drives the intricate plot: although Húrin’s children may temporarily evade their doom, in the end it finds them.

But not before Húrin’s son Túrin, the book’s real protagonist, has accomplished many deeds of heroism. In his greatest triumph, Túrin slays Glaurung, the first of all dragons, which, until this point, had seemed to be the Dark Lord’s invincible weapon. But, countering his heroism, Túrin’s pride and arrogance lead to multiple disasters. The seed of the Túrin story was the tale of Kullervo in the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. But Tolkien is also engaged in a revision of the Germanic legend of Siegfried the dragon-slayer. Túrin may be as brave and valorous as Siegfried, but Tolkien’s damaged hero is no Nietzchean uber-mensch dominating through will and power. Instead he is a psychologically scarred and tragic hero.

Stylistically, The Children of Húrin is between The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, whose elevated style reads more like the King James Bible than a 20th-century novel. The Children of Húrin has more dialogue than The Silmarillion, and significant portions of the story happen at a novelistic rather than historical pace, but aspects of the style will nevertheless be a challenge for readers who assume all writing should conform to traditions of modernist realism. Much dialogue is filled with archaisms. Characters, and the narrator, use grammatical inversions. Words from Tolkien’s mellifluous invented languages appear frequently, usually only translated the first time (there is a helpful glossary). “To Brethil three men only found their way back at last through Taur-nu-Fuin, an evil road” is characteristic.

For those who already love Middle-earth, The Children of Húrin will be a chance to return there. For others, it may be an opportunity to question some deeply rooted assumptions and to learn that literature that rejects the canons of modernism and realism can nevertheless have great emotional power.

Beowulf Aloud: Now Shipping
[updated, with buying info]

(this paypal link is for domestic US shipping only)

Finally, my long labor of love is ready to send out into the world. Beowulf Aloud, my dramatic reading of the entire poem in Old English, has finally arrived from the studio and copies are sitting right in front of my as I type this.

Having now gone over all the expenses, I see I can sell the 3-CD collection, which includes every single line of the poem plus an introductory lecture, for 15 dollars US. Packaging and shipping to anywhere in the US is 3 USD, so the total would be $18.00. Overseas shipping will whatever it costs me, checked on an individual basis. You can use the button above for my PayPal account or use my PayPal address, mdrout@wheatonma.edu. I am also happy to take personal checks, and for overseas folks who want to buy a CD, we can use the very clever system devised by Walking Tree Press (involving exchanges of Amazon.com gift certificates) if need be.

If you are enjoying Anglo-Saxon Aloud, I think you will like Beowulf Aloud even more, as the sound quality is somewhat better because it was recorded, edited and mixed professionally. (this is also the the reason I am charging for the latter and not the former: I had to pay for studio time, editing, art design, etc., for Beowulf Aloud, whereas I've done everything for Anglo-Saxon Aloud on my own, with only the investment of hundreds of hours of my labor [and how much could that be worth, really?]).

And owning a copy of my chanting/singing Finnsburg has to be worth something, if only for the opportunity to use it as embarrassing material at just the right occasion years from now...

Reviews and Critics

I haven't posted the second part of my Children of Húrin review for a couple reasons. First, this was the first weekend of spring weather we've had in New England, so I was outdoors from sunup to sundown for the past couple of days, cutting up trees for firewood, planting and teaching my kids to hit a wiffle ball (my son bats lefty!!). Second, the Red Sox swept the Yankees in three amazing games, so my evenings were pretty full of baseball. Finally, the Providence Journal asked me to do a review for their Sunday book section, and I had to write that (I'll post it here once the ProJo publishes it).

But in snorkeling around the web I've come across a variety of reviews and criticism, and I wanted try to grab a minute before classes to address one of them.

I came across [correction, I had Time, but as N. E. Brigand notes, it was actually in ] Entertainment Weekly review, in which the critic calls Tolkien's prose "swampy." This is a perfect example of what I've called "hand-waving" in a bunch of other places (in fact, I need to stop using that phrase). I am a professor of English and one of my interests of study is prose style and I have no idea how I would formally characterize "swampy" prose (sentences long and tangled? Too many adjectives? Sentences, like those used by politicians, that can't hold up to logical scrutiny -- i.e., they sink beneath your feet?). I was wondering if this is some kind of specialized vocabulary like that for wine-tasting, but at least for wine-tasting, people basically agree on what the smells and tastes are. I don't know of any such agreement about "swampy" prose, so really all that phrase says is that the critic doesn't like it.

Now in one sense there’s nothing wrong with this approach. You don’t like something, so you come up with a term to express your displeasure, ( “swampy,” whatever it means in this context, is at least obviously not a compliment). And if the purpose of the review is simply “I liked/disliked this book/movie/play and you will, too” then imprecise language is perfectly acceptable. Such reviews are valuable in guiding a reader towards things he or she might like or dislike, and they may be useful in giving a quick snapshot of the lowest-common-denominator of what a certain class of people think (and I guess you can extrapolate and argue that they indicate what the “culture” thinks of something), but that’s about it.

It is a mistake to take them too seriously, just as it is a mistake to take too seriously anything by Edmund “Bunny” Wilson (I use his ridiculous nickname to indicate my derision for his kind of old-boy, in-the-club, puffed-up book review masquerading as scholarship). Wilson’s infamous “Oo, Those Awful Orcs!” doesn’t actually say anything beyond “I didn’t like it,” but it dresses up that dislike as if it were some kind of analysis. Tolkien scholars, present company included, should probably stop jousting with the shade of Bunny Wilson. Book reviews (mine included) are what Schopenhauer said of newspapers in general: the second hand of the clock of history “it is not only made of baser metal than those which point to the minute and the hour, but it seldom goes right.”

Nevertheless, we sometimes want to look to see just what second it seems to be.

Corrections and Clarifications

Because I'm still learning how to do live radio, I made a few slip-ups in this story on Here and Now on NPR. None majorly significant, I think, but I just wanted to correct that I knew Unfinished Tales was published in 1980, not 1983. Also, the request to "speak Elvish" threw me for a loop, so the pronunciation probably wasn't perfect.

I also wanted to correct This St. Petersburg Times piece. I must have been unclear to the reporter, because, although I have corresponded with Christopher Tolkien (with regard to Beowulf and the Critics, it is not at all accurate to say that I have "long corresponded with him." Not unless you define "long" and "corresponded" in some very weird way. And I think he is now 83, not 82.

Hopefully I will get the second half of my review finished later.

Daniel Complete over at Anglo-Saxon Aloud

We are now most of the way through the Junius Manuscript over at Anglo-Saxon Aloud, with the final installment of Daniel (which includes the "writing on the wall" incident) posted this morning. Tomorrow I'll start posting podcasts of Christ and Satan, the weird poem that is the final one in the manuscript. Lots of good lamenting by the Devil.

Also, finally, Beowulf Aloud shipped from the studio yesterday, so I should have copies to tell by tomorrow. I think I have a list of everyone who wants one, but if you have asked, and haven't heard from me by, say, Friday, drop me another email, please, and we can make arrangements. Price is $15 plus shipping (which shouldn't be much) for the 3-cd set.

Later today I'll post a few links to other materials related to Children of Húrin, and I hope to have the second part of my review done tomorrow (Thurs).

The Children of Húrin Review

##Below Contains Some Minor Spoilers##

My hypothesized reconstruction in this post was wrong. As could be inferred from the table of contents that came out later, The Children of Húrin is not all the Túrin / Húrin material from all the previous published works gathered in one place, but rather a somewhat different version of the "Narn i Hîn Húrin" published in Unfinished Tales in 1980. As Christopher Tolkien explains in the very useful and interesting appendix, the biggest additions are the account of Huor and Húrin in Gondolin and the part of the story of The Fifth Battle, Nirnaeth Arnoediad (but only the western portion of the battle) as well as some changes and expansions in the section on Túrin among the outlaws. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote versions of these episodes for inclusion in the "Narn," but Christopher Tolkien left them out of the version in Unfinished Tales because very similar material had already been used in The Silmarillion. (More on this editorial practice later).

We have here, then, a straightforwardly chronological treatment of the lives of Húrin and children from Húrin's birth through Túrin's death. However, the narrative does not include Húrin's attempt to reach Gondolin (which gave Morgoth a general idea of the location of the hidden city), nor his journey to Nargothrond, his killing of Mîm the petty-dwarf there, and his return to Doriath with the Nauglamír, the Necklace of the Dwarves (which is indirectly responsible for the death of Thingol and the destruction of Doriath).

Like the "Narn," the story is quite readable, and like the "Narn," it is somewhat of a hybrid between the historic/annalistic style of The Silmarillion and the novelistic style of The Lord of the Rings. In this particular form, as a stand-alone book, the "feel" of the style and structure is very like that of Ursula Le Guin's recent short novel Gifts, though it obviously deals more with kings and princes and matters of greater import in its sub-created world. Also like Gifts, it is basically a novella published a stand-alone volume due in great part to the author's reputation.

There are not a lot of surprises and not much previously unknown material, but I was surprised at how much pleasure I got out of the book. I've read The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales many times, but I still thoroughly enjoyed reading The Children of Húrin and felt that treating the material as a single narrative brought out the emotional power of the Túrin story. It also helps, I'm sure, that it's a beautiful book: I'm more of a Ted Nasmith than an Alan Lee fan, but give Lee his due here: his illustrations are beautiful and atmospheric. The book design as a whole is very good also: the typeface, size and layout all work (and work partially to conceal the relative brevity of the book). Editors and producers should think more about the physical pleasure that well-designed books can give, and in particular academic presses might want to think about making their books beautiful.

Analysis: Form and Sources

I am more convinced than ever that Gergely Nagy's article, "The Great Chain of Reading," in Jane Chance's Tolkien the Medievalist is the most effective explanation of how Tolkien's writings create their aesthetic effects. Nagy shows how Tolkien's incorporation of poetry, annals, key turns of phrase, stock tableaux--from his own previous writings--creates the "mythopoeic" effects of the writing: Tolkien's work feels like myth rather than invention because it contains the same bricolage of previously existing texts that long-established mythological traditions seem to contain. A reader comes across a bit of writing from a previous source and, even without knowing the existence of the previous source, recognizes that the text he or she is reading is some kind of assemblage. Tolkien is unique, however, in having all the separate and recognizable pieces coming from one mind rather than from centuries of separate writers and adapters.

I found Tolkien's engagement with the Sigfried legend more obvious in this version of the story than in others, though that may reflect my own reading rather than the text itself. Of course the seed of the Túrin story is the Kullervo cycle from the Finnish Kalevala, but I think that at least one impulse in Túrin is to tell the story of a dragon slayer who isn't some kind of Nietzchean/Wagnerian "ubermensch" (a bit piece of evidence, I think, is the inclusion of a dwarf named Mîm). Tolkien detested the kind of heroism that Wagner drew out of the Nibelungenlied and the Völsungr Saga: the hero who is superior in some existential way to everyone else and thus somehow deserves to crush everything in his path. By taking the physically most powerful hero, the original dragonslayer, but putting him under the curse of Morgoth and showing how he suffers, Tolkien approaches the Sigfried story in a very different, and more humane, way.

Analysis: Editorial Practice

I'll have more to say when everything has sunk in more, but let me close on a word about Christopher Tolkien's editing. I think nearly all critics of Christopher Tolkien have been exactly, precisely, 180-degrees wrong. The idea that Christopher Tolkien is churning out the same material over and over or is desperate to squeeze out profits from his father's work, or that the Tolkien Estate needs to drum up sales, is to me silly (and smacks of jealousy when I hear it said). It is clear from his published comments that Christopher Tolkien's consistent purpose has been to complete his father's dream of publishing his Silmarillion material. Obviously great, great pains have been taken not to put forth Christopher Tolkien's words as being those of J.R.R. Tolkien. But this extremely rigid editorial practice has, in the past, made texts somewhat less "readable" than they otherwise would be.

It seems to me that the republishing of previously published material (exactly what Christopher Tolkien was unfairly excoriated for) would in fact (as it does in this book with Huor and Húrin and the Fifth Battle) make the story easier to follow as a self-contained whole (as self-contained as it could be given the required background knowledge from the Silmarillion tradition). Thus The Children of Húrin shows that Tolkien's unpublished works can be put into forms that are less scholarly and easier to read: I think this is a good thing, both because it will introduce more people to the literature and because it will produce more pleasure in more readers. I am grateful for the scholarly editions, but I also love the pleasure of just reading the text. And now that we have the scholarly editions, I would more than welcome Christopher Tolkien "re-cycling" or "re-publishing" the other Great Tales (Fall of Gondolin, Beren and Lúthien, Nauglafring) in similar, one-volume, readable forms. And if he needs to write bridging material, I'm happy to read it (as long as there's an end-note somewhere). In fact, I would have liked to see Children of Húrin continue through to Húrin's death, although I understand why this was not done (we can assume that there is not a version of the "Narn" that does so continue). The story would have been even better, and we can at least theorize that J.R.R. Tolkien would have liked to have it complete. So, contra some traditions in Tolkien criticism, I say "More Christopher Tolkien, please."

In my next post I'll talk about themes and prose style. But I want to end on a summarizing note: Good book. Enjoyed it much more than I expected to. I think a great many readers will as well, despite the lack of hobbits.

How to Critique Tolkien's Prose Style

[update: My point here was to show how it would be possible to critique Tolkien's prose style without simply saying that it lacks [undefined] "depth." The comments below, and others on internet forums, show exactly how I think this approach can be successful: people are debating the quantity and quality of the landscape writing. They are making suggestions as to how the particular elements I flagged as being problematic might actually contribute to the aesthetic effects of the piece (i.e., that my assessment was incorrect). I chose the particular passages (except for the fox, for which I must confess an irrational dislike that I should probably exorcise) simply because that was the section I was reading to my daughter last night. My point was to illustrate that people of good will can disagree about the specific merits of the individual passages and that this disagreement demonstrates that 1) hand-waving and invocations of a lack of "depth" are useless as criticism; 2) those who like Tolkien do not mindlessly defend his every aesthetic choice (as do, by the way, many critics of the "greats," who will explain away even a typographical error as a point of genius; see my "spoiled eel" post), but actually practice analysis and criticism. I think these points stand demonstrated. I assert that specific and detailed discussion makes for better scholarship, criticism and intellectual practice than blanket condemnation.
Also, I am coming around to the idea that "pinnacles or pillars" is actually effective rather than flabby: it illustrates the temporary confusion in Frodo's perceptions quite well. I am still not sold on "thrawn trees].

At the end of my my previous and far-too-long post criticizing Bryan Appleyard's review of Tolkien's The Children of Húrin, I said that I would next discuss how Tolkien's prose style could be critiqued without resorting to the undefined notion of "depth" that Appleyard uses. I also said that Tolkien's prose style is, in my view a major stumbling block for contemporary critics.

As I wrote in the first volume of Tolkien Studies, it is possible to analyze and critique Tolkien's writing without falling back on hand-waving and invocations of depth (I think I showed that the prose style even in particulary harshly criticized passages had plenty of depth). There I tried to show how the prose style worked to convey complex meanings beyond those of the literal text. Here I'll suggest some of the flaws that could be legitimately criticized as failing to achieve their intended effects or working at cross-purposes with the rest of the narrative.

The first of these (and my students are already laughing) is the narrator's giving us the thoughts (in English) of a fox in Chapter 3 of The Fellowship of the Ring. I think this is a failure of tone (moving us back towards the intrusive narrator of The Hobbit) and jarring to the readers, who, after getting through all of the cute hobbit-business and small jokes of Chapter 1, have all of a sudden entered into a much more serious world in Chapter 2 (The Shadow of the Past). Tolkien scholar Marcel Bülles, when he was visiting my Tolkien class, suggested that the fox's thoughts worked as comic relief, but my judgment is that the comic relief was too slight to justify the intrusion of the animal narrator, the making of his thoughts into English, etc. "Sam was content, if logs can be said to be contented" works much better as narrative lightening without jarring the reader into the thoughts of an animal, though others might quarrel that the play on the "sleep like a log" cliche is too gentle for the seriousness of the story.

The second significant critique of Tolkien's prose style, and one that is obvious when you read the story aloud, is the amount of space given over to description of landscape. Without doing tedious tabulation, I would venture to argue that something more than 50% of the novel is devoted to landscape description. Defenders might argue that this vast quantity to description leads to the feeling in many readers that Middle-earth is a real place, but I wonder if Tolkien could have been just as effective with fewer words. On the other hand, this critique smacks of the emperor's critique from the film Amadeus: "there are too many notes. Remove some of them." But let's just look at one (very good) passage from the end of The Fellowship of the Ring:

Nothing happened that night worse than a brief drizzle of rain an hour before dawn. As soon as it was fully light they started. Already the fog was thinning. They kept as close as they could to the western side, and they could see the dim shapes of the low cliffs rising ever higher, shadowy walls with their feet in the hurrying river. In the mid-morning the clouds drew down lower, and it began to rain heavily. They drew the skin-covers over their boats to prevent them from being flooded, and drifted on: little could be seen before them or about them through the grey falling curtains.

In general this is very effective, clear, unornamented landscape writing. It could, with a little stylization, be made to fit into a Hemingway, "Nick Adams" story. I would critique "shadowy walls with their feet in the hurrying river"; the collocation of "hurrying" and "feet" seems to me ineffective, as the image the author is creating is quite the opposite of feet hurrying (the river, obviously, is doing the hurrying). That said, I can't come up with an obvious synonymn for "feet" off the top of my head. I would be tempted to delete the entire phrase. You can also criticize "grey falling curtains" as a cliche, but I'm a little hesitant to do that, because the recurrent image of the rain as a curtain is significant elsewhere in The Lord of the Rings, and here were could have the kind of layering through repetition which creates the "myth" feel of the book.

The rain, however, did not last long. Slowly the sky above grew lighter, and then suddenly the clouds broke, and their draggled fringes trailed away northward up the River. The fogs and mists were gone. Before the travellers lay a wide ravine, with great rocky sides to which clung, upon shelves and in narrow crevices, a few thrawn trees. The channel grew narrower and the River swifter. Now they were speeding along with little hope of stopping or turning, whatever they might meet ahead. Over them was a lane of pale-blue sky, around them the dark overshadowed River, and before them black, shutting out the sun, the hills of Emyn Muil, in which no opening could be seen.
Frodo peering forward saw in the distance two great rocks approaching: like great pinnacles or pillars of stone they seemed. Tall and sheer and ominous they stood upon either side of the stream. A narrow gap appeared between them, and the River swept the boats towards it.

Again, nice, clear prose that advances the story and provides a very effective description of the landscape. "Speeding along with little hope of stopping or turning" is particularly good because it can be read as an apo koinu construction: A: "speeding along with little hope" (which is true in general for this part of the story); B: "of stopping or turning" (ah, it's more specific). I think that such tiny re-constructions of sentence meaning are very important in poetry, but others disagree.
The use of the Sindarin name, Emyn Muil, is well done; the text clearly explains what this is, and the name in an elvish language puts the reader more fully in Middle-earth--Tolkien illustrates what the Emyn Muil are, but he doesn't stop the narrative to give a lecture, as so many other fantasy writers (Stephen R. Donaldson, for instance) are wont to do.
I do have two critiques: the "thrawn" trees: everything up to that point is good, but "thrawn" seems to me merely an ornamental archaism. You could make the argument that it provides additional color, but I wouldn't necessarily accept it as giving an important technical description the way that eyot, laving, louver, dwimmerlaik, etc., do in other places. I also question "pinnacles or pillars of stone." I think the sentence would have given the reader a better image without the "or," or without both pinnacles and pillars. On the other hand, I can see what Tolkien is aiming for, to produce a moment of confusion in the reader's mind (as there is in Frodo's) when it is not clear if the giant, pillar-shaped things are really carved by men or are natural formations (pinnacles).
As you can see, it's not easy to critique Tolkien's prose style -- which may mean that its much better than it is given credit for being. Most choices can, upon consideration and reflection, be seen to be contributing to particular aesthetic effects. I think critics sometimes displace their discomfort with other elements of Tolkien's writing onto a prose style that they have not considered carefully enough.
My critique in this post was on prose style, not speach style, so I'll stop short of critiquing Aragorn's speeches that begin with "Behold!" and save that for another post, where we may find some of the elements of Tolkien's writing that are most objectionable to modernist critics.