Thomas Honegger

Last updated

Thomas Honegger (born 1965) is a scholar of literature, known especially for his studies of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth.

Contents

Biography

Thomas Honegger obtained an MA in English Studies, Medieval Germanic Languages, and Medieval German Literature from the University of Zurich. He then worked in that university's Department of English as an assistant. He took his PhD in 1996 on the subject of "Animals in Medieval English Literature". He worked as a researcher at the University of Sheffield and at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, before becoming a lecturer at the University of Zurich. He had temporary postings at the universities of Kiel, Berlin, Zurich and Jena before becoming professor of Old English at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena in 2002. [1] He contributed a chapter on Tolkien's academic writings to Wiley-Blackwell's A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien , published in 2014. [2]

Books

Reception

Harley Sims, reviewing Tolkien in Translation, notes that few topics are more interesting or more divisive. He comments that "one might say that translation is Tolkien, and that no analysis of his work can pretend to be complete without some exegesis of his actual wording." [3] Finding the book a good introduction to its subject's theory and practice, and making both the cultural and literary aspects accessible, Sims commends Honegger and the publishers for assembling "specialists in five languages". [3]

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.

<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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mythopoeic Society</span> Nonprofit organization

The Mythopoeic Society (MythSoc) is a non-profit organization devoted to the study of mythopoeic literature, particularly the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and C. S. Lewis. These men were all members of The Inklings, an informal group of writers who met weekly in Lewis' rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, from the early 1930s until late 1949.

The works of J. R. R. Tolkien have generated a body of research covering many aspects of his fantasy writings. These encompass The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, along with his legendarium that remained unpublished until after his death, and his constructed languages, especially the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin. Scholars from different disciplines have examined the linguistic and literary origins of Middle-earth, and have explored many aspects of his writings from Christianity to feminism and race.

<i>Mythlore</i> Academic journal

Mythlore is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal founded by Glen GoodKnight and published by the Mythopoeic Society. Although it publishes articles that explore the genres of myth and fantasy in general, special attention is given to the three most prominent members of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. The current editor-in-chief is the Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft. The Tolkien Society describes Mythlore as a "refereed scholarly journal".

<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.

Martin Simonson is a Swedish scholar, novelist, and translator, specialized in fantasy literature and science fiction. He teaches at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, and is mainly known for being the Spanish translator of some of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The translation of The Lord of the Rings into Swedish has been the subject of controversy. The first version, by Åke Ohlmarks, done in 1959–1961, was the only one available in Swedish for forty years. The book's author, J. R. R. Tolkien, took issue with Ohlmarks's translation, identifying numerous errors and inconsistencies. In response to Ohlmarks and to Max Schuchart's Dutch translation, Tolkien wrote a "Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings", a framework for translating personal names and place names; it gives multiple examples from Ohlmarks's text of what not to do. Ohlmarks rejected all criticism, stating that he had intentionally created an interpretation of Tolkien, not a straight translation. Swedish commentators took a wide range of positions on Ohlmarks's version: some admired it, others did not.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christoph Bode</span>

Christoph Bode is a literary scholar. His fields are British and American literature, comparative literature, literary theory, poetics, and travel writing, but he is mainly known as a romanticist and a narratologist. He was full professor and chair of Modern English Literature in the Department of English and American Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München until his retirement in March 2018.

Janet Brennan Croft is an American librarian and Tolkien scholar, known for her authored and edited books and journals on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy. She won a Mythopoeic Award in 2005.

John Garth is a British journalist and author, known especially for writings about J. R. R. Tolkien including his biography Tolkien and the Great War and a book on the places that inspired Middle-earth, The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien. He won a 2004 Mythopoeic Award for Scholarship for his work on Tolkien. The biography influenced much Tolkien scholarship in the subsequent decades.

Gergely Nagy is a Hungarian medievalist and a well-known Tolkien scholar.

J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the bestselling fantasy The Lord of the Rings, was largely rejected by the literary establishment during his lifetime, but has since been accepted into the literary canon, if not as a modernist then certainly as a modern writer responding to his times. He fought in the First World War, and saw the rural England that he loved built over and industrialised. His Middle-earth fantasy writings, consisting largely of a legendarium which was not published until after his death, embodied his realism about the century's traumatic events, and his Christian hope.

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.

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.

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.

References

  1. "Thomas Honegger". Friedrich Schiller University, Jena. Retrieved 21 August 2022.
  2. Honegger, Thomas (2020) [2014]. "Academic Writings". In Lee, Stuart D. (ed.). A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien. Wiley Blackwell. pp. 25–40. ISBN   978-1119656029. OCLC   1183854105.
  3. 1 2 Sims, Harley J. (2012). "[Review] Tolkien in Translation. Edited by Thomas Honegger. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers, 2011". Mythlore . 31 (1/2): 173–177.