Allan Turner

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Allan Turner is a linguist and medievalist, best known as a Tolkien scholar. His 2005 book Translating Tolkien and his 2013 book Tolkien's Poetry have been welcomed by other scholars.

Contents

Life

Allan Turner was born c. 1949. He was educated at Deacon's School, Peterborough. His bachelor's degree was in German at the University of Reading, where he also gained an M.Phil with a dissertation on Christi Leiden, a medieval manuscript. He took another master's degree, in linguistics, at St John's College, Cambridge. He obtained a certificate in education at the University of Leeds. His PhD was in translation studies, from Newcastle University. He taught successively in the universities of Basel, Trier, Greifswald, and Marburg, and most recently in the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena until his retirement. He has written or edited several books on the fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien, [1] [2] and has appeared as a keynote speaker at Tolkien conferences. [3]

Reception

Tolkien's Poetry

Joe Christopher, reviewing Tolkien's Poetry in Mythlore , calls the volume "valuable" as the first scholarly collection on Tolkien's verse, while noting that the essays are "uneven". He praises the contributions by Tom Shippey, Carl Phelpstead, and Nancy Marsch on Tolkien's metre and style, and Petra Zimmermann's essay on how Tolkien uses poetry in The Lord of the Rings . [4]

Andrew Higgins, reviewing the book in Journal of Tolkien Research , calls it "a very interesting and compelling group of articles" in an under-studied area. He praises Turner's own chapter on influences on Tolkien's verse, including the Christian poet Francis Thompson. He notes however that Turner largely discounts the influence of Thompson's "introspection and ... late Victorian sentimentality", except in "The Cottage of Lost Play"; and that Tolkien avoids being as "self-consciously 'arty'" as Thompson. He remarks, too, on Turner's suggestion that Tolkien's practice of embedding varied kinds of poem in a prose work may have come from William Morris. Further, Turner suggests that Tolkien's "hobbit poetry" may have been inspired by the Georgian Poetry movement, which was "markedly English and rural in character". [5]

Translating Tolkien

David Doughan, reviewing Thomas Honegger's books on translating Tolkien, to which Turner contributed, comments that Turner is "not only a highly intelligent and (dare one say) perceptive scholar—[but] he writes comprehensible English." He writes that Turner deals with "many matters [of translating Tolkien] ... sagely", including the issue of handling Tolkien's pseudotranslation from the Common Speech, Westron, mainly represented as English in the text. [6]

Arden R. Smith, reviewing Turner's Translating Tolkien: Philological Elements in 'The Lord of the Rings' in Tolkien Studies , writes that the book is "the first single-author, book-length examination of the difficulties inherent in translating Tolkien into any other language." He describes it as systematic, and well-grounded in relevant theory, including Shippey's philological criticism. [7]

Honours and distinctions

In 2014, to mark Turner's 65th birthday, Thomas Honegger and Dirk Vanderbeke edited a festschrift in his honour, entitled From Peterborough to Faëry: The Poetics and Mechanics of Secondary Worlds. [1]

Works

Books
Chapters

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bag End</span> Fictional location in Tolkiens novels

Bag End is the underground dwelling of the Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. From there, both Bilbo and Frodo set out on their adventures, and both return there, for a while. As such, Bag End represents the familiar, safe, comfortable place which is the antithesis of the dangerous places that they visit. It forms one end of the main story arcs in the novels, and since the Hobbits return there, it also forms an end point in the story circle in each case.

In J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional legendarium, Beleriand was a region in northwestern Middle-earth during the First Age. Events in Beleriand are described chiefly in his work The Silmarillion, which tells the story of the early ages of Middle-earth in a style similar to the epic hero tales of Nordic literature, with a pervasive sense of doom over the character's actions. Beleriand also appears in the works The Book of Lost Tales, The Children of Húrin, and in the epic poems of The Lays of Beleriand.

<i>The Adventures of Tom Bombadil</i> 1962 poetry collection by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil is a 1962 collection of poetry by J. R. R. Tolkien. The book contains 16 poems, two of which feature Tom Bombadil, a character encountered by Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings. The rest of the poems are an assortment of bestiary verse and fairy tale rhyme. Three of the poems appear in The Lord of the Rings as well. The book is part of Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Shippey</span> British medievalist (born 1943)

Thomas Alan Shippey is a British medievalist, a retired scholar of Middle and Old English literature as well as of modern fantasy and science fiction. He is considered one of the world's leading academic experts on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien about whom he has written several books and many scholarly papers. His book The Road to Middle-Earth has been called "the single best thing written on Tolkien".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late</span> Poem in The Lord of the Rings

"The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" is J. R. R. Tolkien's imagined original song behind the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle ", invented by back-formation. It was first published in Yorkshire Poetry magazine in 1923, and was reused in extended form in the 1954–55 The Lord of the Rings as a song sung by Frodo Baggins in the Prancing Pony inn. The extended version was republished in the 1962 collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

<i>The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelms Son</i> 1953 J. R. R. Tolkien poem

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son is a work by J. R. R. Tolkien originally published in 1953 in volume 6 of the scholarly journal Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, and later republished in 1966 in The Tolkien Reader; it is also included in the most recent edition of Tree and Leaf. It is a work of historical fiction, inspired by the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon. It is written in the form of an alliterative poem, but is also a play, being mainly a dialogue between two characters in the aftermath of the Battle of Maldon. The work was accompanied by two essays, also by Tolkien, one before and one after the main work. The work, as published, was thus presented as:

Walking Tree Publishers was founded in 1996 by members of the Swiss Tolkien Society with the aim of publishing the proceedings of the Cormarë conference held that year to mark the 10th anniversary of the Swiss Tolkien Society. The company is run by volunteers and on a nonprofit basis, with surplus money reinvested into new products. It is dedicated exclusively to the publication of English-language works concerned with J. R. R. Tolkien and Tolkien studies.

J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has been translated, with varying degrees of success, into dozens of languages from the original English. He was critical of some early versions, and made efforts to improve translation by providing a detailed "Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings", alongside an appendix "On Translation" in the book itself.

"The Sea-Bell" or "Frodos Dreme" is a poem with elaborate rhyme scheme and metre by J.R.R. Tolkien in his 1962 collection of verse The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. It was a revision of a 1934 poem called "Looney". The first-person narrative speaks of finding a white shell "like a sea-bell", and of being carried away to a strange and beautiful land.

<i>The Road to Middle-Earth</i> Book of literary criticism of Tolkien

The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology is a scholarly study of the Middle-earth works of J. R. R. Tolkien written by Tom Shippey and first published in 1982. The book discusses Tolkien's philology, and then examines in turn the origins of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and his minor works. An appendix discusses Tolkien's many sources. Two further editions extended and updated the work, including a discussion of Peter Jackson's film version of The Lord of the Rings.

The poetry in The Lord of the Rings consists of the poems and songs written by J. R. R. Tolkien, interspersed with the prose of his high fantasy novel of Middle-earth, The Lord of the Rings. The book contains over 60 pieces of verse of many kinds; some poems related to the book were published separately. Seven of Tolkien's songs, all but one from The Lord of the Rings, were made into a song-cycle, The Road Goes Ever On, set to music by Donald Swann. All the poems in The Lord of the Rings were set to music and published on CDs by The Tolkien Ensemble.

<i>Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon</i> Book of literary criticism of Tolkien

Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon is a 2003 book of literary criticism by Brian Rosebury about the English author and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien and his writings on his fictional world of Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings. A shorter version of the book, Tolkien: A Critical Assessment, appeared in 1992. Rosebury examines how Tolkien imagined Middle-earth, how he achieved the aesthetic effect he was seeking, his place among twentieth century writers, and how his work has been retold and imitated by other authors and in other media, most notably for film by Peter Jackson.

J. R. R. Tolkien, a fantasy author and professional philologist, drew on the Old English poem Beowulf for multiple aspects of his Middle-earth legendarium, alongside other influences. He used elements such as names, monsters, and the structure of society in a heroic age. He emulated its style, creating an impression of depth and adopting an elegiac tone. Tolkien admired the way that Beowulf, written by a Christian looking back at a pagan past, just as he was, embodied a "large symbolism" without ever becoming allegorical. He worked to echo the symbolism of life's road and individual heroism in The Lord of the Rings.

J. R. R. Tolkien used frame stories throughout his Middle-earth writings, especially his legendarium, to make the works resemble a genuine mythology written and edited by many hands over a long period of time. He described in detail how his fictional characters wrote their books and transmitted them to others, and showed how later in-universe editors annotated the material.

J. R. R. Tolkien was both a philologist and an author of high fantasy. He had a private theory that the sound of words was directly connected to their meaning, and that certain sounds were inherently beautiful. Scholars believe he intentionally chose words and names in his constructed Middle-earth languages to create feelings such as of beauty, longing, and strangeness. Tolkien stated that he wrote his stories to provide a setting for his languages, rather than the other way around. Tolkien constructed languages for the Elves to sound pleasant, and the Black Speech of the evil land of Mordor to sound harsh; poetry suitable for various peoples of his invented world of Middle-earth; and many place-names, chosen to convey the nature of each region. The theory is individual, but it was in the context of literary and artistic movements such as Vorticism, and earlier nonsense verse that stressed language and the sound of words, even when the words were apparently nonsense.

Literary devices in <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> Literary techniques in Tolkiens work

The philologist and fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien made use of multiple literary devices in The Lord of the Rings, from its narrative structure and its use of pseudotranslation and editorial framing, to character pairing and the deliberate cultivation of an impression of depth while constructing the novel. The narrative structure in particular has been seen as a pair of quests, a sequence of tableaux, a complex edifice, multiple spirals, and a medieval-style interlacing. The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, on the other hand, has a single narrative thread, and repeated episodes of danger and recuperation in five "Homely Houses". His prose style, too, has been both criticised and defended.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tolkien and antiquarianism</span> J. R. R. Tolkiens literary approach

J. R. R. Tolkien included many elements in his Middle-earth writings, especially The Lord of the Rings, other than narrative text. These include artwork, calligraphy, chronologies, family trees, heraldry, languages, maps, poetry, proverbs, scripts, glossaries, prologues, and annotations. Much of this material is collected in the many appendices. Scholars have stated that the use of these elements places Tolkien in the tradition of English antiquarianism.

A pseudotranslation is a text written as if it had been translated from a foreign language. J. R. R. Tolkien made use of pseudotranslation in The Lord of the Rings for two reasons: to help resolve the linguistic puzzle he had accidentally created by using real-world languages within his legendarium, and to lend realism by supporting a found manuscript conceit to frame his story.

J. R. R. Tolkien decided to increase the reader's feeling that the story in his 1954–55 book The Lord of the Rings was real, by framing the main text with an elaborate editorial apparatus that extends and comments upon it. This material, mainly in the book's appendices, effectively includes a fictional editorial figure much like himself who is interested in philology, and who says he is translating a manuscript which has somehow come into his hands, having somehow survived the thousands of years since the Third Age. He called the book a heroic romance, giving it a medieval feeling, and describing its time-frame as the remote past. Among the steps he took to make its setting, Middle-earth, believable were to develop its geography, history, peoples, genealogies, and unseen background in great detail, complete with editorial commentary in each case.

Elizabeth Whittingham is a former lecturer in English at the State University of New York College, Brockport, New York. She is known for her Tolkien studies research, including her 2008 book The Evolution of Tolkien's Mythology, which examines the development of his legendarium as published in the 12-volume The History of Middle-earth.

References

  1. 1 2 Honegger, Thomas; Vanderbeke, Dirk, eds. (2014). "Introduction". From Peterborough to Faëry: The Poetics and Mechanics of Secondary Worlds (PDF). Walking Tree Publishers.
  2. ↑ "Allan Turner". Tolkienists.org. Retrieved 17 June 2024.
  3. ↑ "Interview with Allan Turner". Tolkien.hu. 20 August 2015. Retrieved 17 June 2024.
  4. ↑ Christopher, Joe (2013). "[Review:]Tolkien's Poetry". Mythlore . 32 (1): 164–169.
  5. ↑ Higgins, Andrew (2014). "Tolkien's Poetry (2013), edited by Julian Eilmann and Allan Turner". Journal of Tolkien Research . 1 (1). Article 4.
  6. ↑ Doughan, David (2006). "Tolkien in Translation, and: Translating Tolkien: Text and Film (review)". Tolkien Studies . 3 (1): 218–222. doi:10.1353/tks.2006.0012.
  7. ↑ Smith, Arden Ray (2006). "Translating Tolkien: Philological Elements in The Lord of the Rings (review)". Tolkien Studies . 3 (1): 228–231. doi:10.1353/tks.2006.0031.
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