Bradford Lee Eden

Tolkien scholar

Bradford Lee Eden is a librarian and musicologist, best known as a Tolkien scholar.

Biography

Bradford Lee Eden was born in 1960. He has a degree in religion from the University of North Texas and a Ph.D. in Medieval Musicology from Indiana State University. He was Dean of Library Services at Valparaiso University, Indiana. He has written several books on librarianship.^[1]

Eden is a Tolkien scholar. He edits the open access Journal of Tolkien Research. He has edited two collections of scholarly essays on Tolkien themes, written several research papers, and contributed six articles to the 2006 J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, including on Elves and Music in Middle-earth.^[2]

He was nominated for a 2011 Mythopoeic scholarship award for Inkling Studies.^[3]

Reception

Emily A. Moniz, writing in Mythlore, calls Eden's edited collection of essays Middle-earth Minstrel "strong right out of the gate", with interesting and useful contributions, some of them "truly excellent", on such Tolkien research topics as linguistics, pedagogy, music, and alliterative poetry. She found David Bratman's essay on music in Middle-earth a "marvelous survey" of a vast subject, spoilt by repeated complaints about Howard Shore's music for The Lord of the Rings film series: she wished that "the editorial pen ... had been slightly more ruthless."^[4]

David L. Emerson, reviewing the edited collection The Hobbit and Tolkien's Mythology for Mythlore, commented that while it was worth reading and contained "many noteworthy essays", it had been edited rather too timidly. Thus, Emerson writes, the editor should have asked authors to cut down on digressions, and should have assisted authors whose first language was not English to select the correct words when terms were being misused. Further, the pairs of juxtaposed essays by different authors contained too much repetition that "a more aggressive editor" could have fixed by discussion with the authors. The collection suffered, too, from only having access to the first of three Peter Jackson films of The Hobbit; in Emerson's view, the editor should have waited until all were available.^[5]

Works

Books

(2010) Middle-Earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien (edited). McFarland.
(2014) The Hobbit and Tolkien's Mythology: Essays on Revisions and Influences (edited). McFarland.

Essays

(2018) "Music, Time, and Light in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Verlyn Flieger: A Reflection"
(2019) "Sub-Creation by Any Other Name: The Artist and God in the Early Twentieth Century"

References

^ "Bradford Lee Eden". Library Thing. Retrieved 26 November 2022.
^ "Bradford Lee Eden, Ph. D. (Editor)". Journal of Tolkien Research. Retrieved 26 November 2022.
^ "Mythopoeic Awards – Scholarship". Mythopoeic Society. Retrieved 26 November 2022.
^ Moniz, Emily A. (2010). "[Review] Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien by Bradford Lee Eden". Mythlore. 29 (1/2): 183–186. JSTOR 26815552.
^ Emerson, David L. (2018). "[Review] The Hobbit and Tolkien's Mythology Ed. Bradford Lee Eden". Mythlore. 37 (1). Article 23.

External links

Articles by Bradford Lee Eden at Valparaiso University

J. R. R. Tolkien

- Bibliography
- Letters

Poetry
and songs

Songs for the Philologists (1936)
- "Bagme Bloma"
The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son (1953)
"A Walking Song" (1954)
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962)
- "Errantry"
- "Fastitocalon"
- "The Sea-Bell"
- "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late"
The Road Goes Ever On (1967)
Bilbo's Last Song (1974)
List of Tolkien's alliterative verse

Fiction

The Hobbit (1937)
"Leaf by Niggle" (1947)
The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun (1945)
Farmer Giles of Ham (1949)
The Lord of the Rings:
- The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
- The Two Towers (1954)
- The Return of the King (1955)
Tree and Leaf (1964)
The Tolkien Reader (1966)
Smith of Wootton Major (1967)

Posthumous
fiction

The Father Christmas Letters (1976)
The Silmarillion (1977)
Unfinished Tales (1980)
Mr. Bliss (1982)
The History of Middle-earth (1983–1996)
Roverandom (1998)
The Children of Húrin (2007)
The History of The Hobbit (2007)
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009)
The Fall of Arthur (2013)
The Story of Kullervo (2015)
Beren and Lúthien (2017)
The Fall of Gondolin (2018)
The Nature of Middle-earth (2021)
The Fall of Númenor (2022)

Academic
works

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Middle English text, 1925)
"The Devil's Coach Horses" (1925)
"Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad" (1929)
"Sigelwara Land" (1932–34)
"Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale" (1934)
"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (1936)
"On Fairy-Stories" (1939)
"On Translating Beowulf" (1940)
Sir Orfeo (1944)
Ancrene Wisse (1962)
"English and Welsh" (1963)
Jerusalem Bible (as translator and lexicographer, 1966)

Posthumous
academic

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (translations, 1975)
Exodus (1981)
Finn and Hengest (1982)
The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays (1983)
Beowulf and the Critics (2002)
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary with "Sellic Spell" (2014)
A Secret Vice (2016)

Scholars

Writers	Biographers Humphrey Carpenter John Garth Popular authors Lin Carter Robert Foster Glen GoodKnight J. E. A. Tyler
Christian	Stratford Caldecott Matthew T. Dickerson Colin Duriez Peter Kreeft Joseph Pearce Fleming Rutledge Ralph C. Wood
Literary critics	Douglas A. Anderson Nicholas Birns Bradley J. Birzer David Bratman Janet Brennan Croft Patrick Curry Bradford Lee Eden Dimitra Fimi Jason Fisher Verlyn Flieger Michael Foster Wayne G. Hammond Randel Helms Thomas Honegger Charles A. Huttar Paul H. Kocher Stuart D. Lee Jared Lobdell John D. Rateliff Robin Anne Reid Christina Scull Amy H. Sturgis Richard C. West
Linguists	Anthony Appleyard Helge Fauskanger Carl F. Hostetter Tom Loback David Salo Arden R. Smith
Medievalists	Marjorie Burns Jane Chance Michael D. C. Drout Gergely Nagy Tom Shippey Elizabeth Solopova Sandra Ballif Straubhaar