J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia

• 1. Introduction

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  The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia arrived in bookshops in 2006, the product of 127 scholars spread across many countries, packed into 720 pages. It promised to be the definitive scholarly guide to one of the most studied authors of the twentieth century. What it delivered was something more complicated: a work simultaneously praised as "seething with insight and opinion" and condemned for a "multitude of errors in word omission, grammar, spelling, spacing, word division, and bibliographic format." How does an encyclopedic project of this scale go so wrong before it even reaches readers? The answer lies in a corporate takeover, a case of pneumonia, and a decision that broke a promise made to the man who built the whole thing.

• 2. Building the Encyclopedia

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  Michael D. C. Drout, a scholar of medievalism, set out to make the encyclopedia appealing to the widest possible group of readers. His co-editors were Douglas A. Anderson, Verlyn Flieger, Marjorie Burns, and Tom Shippey; Anderson and Flieger were already Drout's colleagues on the journal Tolkien Studies. The volume recruited over 125 contributors from a broad range of countries, and the themes they tackled ranged from cinema, stage, and television adaptations to Tolkien's invented and real languages, from the monsters and peoples of Middle-earth to the theological and philosophical ideas underpinning his fiction. Entries were designed to connect each concept to Tolkien's specific works, to literary criticism, and to scholarly theory. Drout gathered illustrations to accompany the text, and planned redirect entries such as "Balrog: see Monsters" to help readers navigate the volume. That navigational architecture would become one of the encyclopedia's most painful losses.

• 3. The Taylor & Francis Disruption

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  Taylor & Francis acquired Routledge while the encyclopedia was still in production, and the restructuring that followed cancelled many projects and shuttered the Routledge encyclopedia division entirely. Drout's project was close enough to finished that it was allowed to proceed, but the acquisition stripped away the copy-editing infrastructure the work depended on. Drout later described the proofs as "a hideous mess." He worked through them, marking every correction he could find, then fell seriously ill with pneumonia and was unable to verify that the corrections had been applied. When the volume appeared, he was "shocked" to discover that the corrected proofs had never been sent back to the individual article authors for their approval. Every planned illustration Drout had gathered was cut without explanation, leaving the printed work with none at all. The redirect entries he had designed into the encyclopedia's structure were dropped, breaking what Drout described as a promise made to him. He called the decision to remove them "inexplicable."

• 4. What Reviewers Found

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  Kelley Wickham-Crowley was the most detailed of the volume's critics. He observed that entry quality ran "the gamut from masterful to pedestrian," and identified a specific weakness in character entries that simply rehearsed a character's attributes and deeds rather than offering analysis or a new direction of inquiry. He pointed to redundancy as a structural problem: the entries on "Hobbits" and "Shire" repeated most of the same content with only minor variation, and topics such as "Environmentalism and Eco-Criticism" alongside "Environmentalist Readings of Tolkien," or "Comedy" alongside "Humor," arguably did not warrant separate entries at all. He also found some inclusions surprising, citing the entry on Thomas Aquinas and an entry on law that focused on theology rather than civil or in-universe examples. Wickham-Crowley attributed the work's failings directly to insufficient copy editing driven by the Taylor & Francis restructuring, and concluded that while the project was ambitious, execution was marred by its accumulated flaws.

• 5. Highs and Lows Within the Volume

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  David Bratman observed the same unevenness Wickham-Crowley described, noting that many entries were tiny while all of Elvish linguistics was treated in a single, very long section written by Carl Hostetter. Bratman found that section so much better than the surrounding material that he wished the entire work had been produced at that level. John Garth, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, took a more generous view, arguing that the encyclopedia benefits from contributions by major Tolkien scholars including Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger, and that Drout's own expertise in medievalism is visible across the many articles on that theme. Jennifer Goodfellow, while noting the uneven organization and variable depth of entries, ultimately called the volume "an excellent resource for serious scholars of English literature as well as those with a general interest in Tolkien." Tracy Carr offered a narrower verdict: the encyclopedia aimed to engage with real-world theories more than to describe Tolkien's fictional world, making it better suited to scholars than to fans, and a "suitable starting place" for budding Tolkien researchers.

• 6. Drout's Reckoning

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  On his own website, Drout addressed the encyclopedia's problems directly, using the word "imperfections" to describe what reviewers had catalogued in sharper terms. He described the whole construction process as "weird," a word that carries particular weight from the man who supervised it. His public account of the pneumonia, the unchecked corrections, the vanished illustrations, and the dropped redirect entries reads less like a defense and more like testimony: the record of what happens when a project of this scale loses its institutional support midway through. The encyclopedia Drout had assembled with 127 scholars across 720 pages was published without the hundred or so illustrations he had gathered, without the navigation tools he had promised his contributors, and without a final check that might have caught the errors that still embarrass the text. Reviewers like Wickham-Crowley endorsed Drout's own assessment that the work came out unfinished. What remains is a volume that the Times Literary Supplement found to "seethe with insight and opinion" even as its production history turned it into something less than it was designed to be.