Delighted to share with you the cover of our Call for Papers 2021, Not the Fellowship. Dragons Welcome! The beautiful and very fitting painting, is by Jay Johnstone, and it's called "Smaug's Attack on Erebor".
Jay's Tolkien art is known to and admired by many people. You can explore more of Jay's work on his official website.
We also have an official release date: June 14, 2022. Pre-orders will open in May, and in the run-up to the release, we will share with you more details on the individual contributors.
If you've missed it, this was the Call 2021:
"Writers are invited to engage with a fictional character of choice from any of Tolkien’s works who is not part of The Lord of the Rings’ Fellowship. Though they can be characters of LOTR.
Friends, foes or neutral; dead or undead; divine beings, beasts (of the mythical or animal variety), or other. We welcome all. Bill the Pony, though undoubtedly an honorary member of the Fellowship at least according to Sam, is - for our purposes - fair game.
The purpose of this Call for Papers aims, on the one hand, at bringing to the fore more of Tolkien’s characters who do not receive the same attention as the Fellowship. On the other hand, we want to tackle these less appreciated characters in new ways, and in the light of a contemporary sensibility."
Here are our contributors and their papers. Let there be dragons!
From top left:
Amie Angèle Brochu (Canada) “Steward of Trees and Forests: Treebeard’s Symbolic Role in Folklore, Environmental Protection and Eco-Critical Awareness”
Scott Chaussée (USA) “The Last Prince of Cardolan: Memory and mediation in the mortuary archaeology of Middle-earth”
Catherine A. Coundjeris (USA) “Éowyn as Light Bearer”
A J Dalton (UK) “What is so fabulous about Smaug?”
Brendan Dyer (USA) “Glorfindel: Tolkien’s Intertextual Link Between The First And The Third Age”
Jyrki Korpua (Finland) “Master of Fate, yet by fate mastered” – Tolkien’s Túrin Turambar and Kalevala’s Kullervo”
From bottom left: Elise Caemasache McKenna (USA) “The Dyscatastrophe of Túrin Turambar” Angela P. Nicholas (UK) “Finrod Felagund: His Life, Influence and Legacy” Enrico Spadaro & Mauro Toninelli (Italy) “The Gaffer: between cabbages and potatoes” Renée Vink (Netherlands) “Tal-Elmar and the Unrepresented Natives of Middle-earth”
Dawn Walls-Thumma (USA) “Cartography of a Character: On (Re)Writing Nerdanel”
The book will be out June 14, 2022, and as always, you can follow updates on our monthly newsletter.
There will be more details about the papers and the contributors, in the coming months.