A Reviewer\'s Complaint

To Whom It May Concern – a Reviewer’s Complaint (forthcoming in Hither Shore 12 [2016]) Readers of my reviews may have noticed an increasing frustration on my part with what I’d call ‘carelessness’ (‘sloppiness’ would be another term that comes to mind) in matters of basic scholarly craftsmanship. Authors seem no longer to care about bibliographical research on the topic they are going to write about – and I’m not talking about chapters hidden away in books, nor even about MLA listed and also otherwise present but possibly not-so-easily available books by smaller publishers (well, Amazon does have them ….), but about publications by big names (HarperCollins) or leading journals in the field (Tolkien Studies). The fact that bona-fide academics writing about e.g. Fate and Free Will in Tolkien without knowing Tolkien’s text with exactly this title (published in Tolkien Studies VI in 2009) or the paper on exactly this topic by no-one else but Verlyn Flieger (also published in Tolkien Studies VI in 2009), not to mention the informed response by Thomas Fornet-Ponse in Tolkien Studies VII, and that they still make it into volumes edited by acknowledged Tolkien-scholars and published by university presses, drives me sometimes to despair. How are we going to advance Tolkien studies if scholars in the field are ignorant of each others research? It may be fun (and is undoubtedly important) to think things through on your own, but before publishing the fruits of these ruminations, it is a scholar’s duty to make him- or herself conversant with the current scholarly discourse on the topic and to position his or her own contribution vis-à-vis the existing scholarship. In second place the editor(s) of a volume or a journal also have the responsibility to guarantee a certain minimal level of professional quality. This does not mean that they themselves have to be experts in the field of the papers submitted (which is why most journals have a board of advisors), but they must ensure that the authors are at least aware of the ‘basic standard procedures’ of academic research and writing. Finally, in the Golden Age (long gone, alas), there would have been a copy-editor at the publishers who would give the text a thorough proofing and would even check some of the dates (I am always astonished how often authors get simple basic facts wrong). A print publication should possess, in theory, all these in-built ‘safety nets’ and could be, ideally, superior to a simple blog entry. Yet this is only true if the steps described are taken seriously and the people involved actually do their work. As author, editor and series-editor, I am painfully aware that this is often no longer the case. It does not lack a certain irony that, on the one hand, we have more and better research-instruments available (online bibliographies, online text-databases etc.) but they seem either ignored or not known. On the other, we notice that the traditional print publications are threatened by open access publications (cf. Journal of Tolkien Research) or by academic platforms such as reasearchgate.org or academia.edu. The latter may not offer peer-review per se, but it features a tool by means of which an author can invite his or her colleagues to comment on a paper and to get thus a qualified feedback before submitting it to a journal or a publisher. However, as with the other instruments, it has to be known to the authors and has to be used – only then will we see a progress and I can, hopefully, stop ranting at mistakes expected in ‘Introduction to Literary Studies 1.0’ but no longer acceptable in academic print publications. Thomas Honegger