The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder

The fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of The Lord of the Rings, the enormously popular and influential masterpiece of fantasy by J.R.R. Tolkien, is celebrated in these twenty papers presented at the Marquette University Tolkien conference of 21-23 October 2004. They are published in honor of the late Dr. Richard E. Blackwelder, who gave his important Tolkien collection to the Marquette University Libraries, long a major center for Tolkien research. Half of the papers focus on The Lord of the Rings, while others investigate the larger body of Tolkien's achievements, as a writer of fiction, and one of the leading philologists of his day.