The location of Marquette's J.R.R. Tolkien Collection
Marquette University, founded as Marquette College in 1881, is a private university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.
The university's Raynor Memorial Libraries are a home of certain materials important to J.R.R. Tolkien and his creation of Middle-earth, kept in a collection currently overseen by William Fliss. This J.R.R. Collection had begun when Tolkien sold manuscripts of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to the university in 1957, as prompted by William Ready, Marquette's Director of Libraries at the time. The Collection received thousands of more manuscripts from Tolkien or from Christopher Tolkien over time, such as a full, illustrated text of the children's tale Mr. Bliss and the drafts of Farmer Giles of Ham.
Tolkien experts such as John Garth, Holly Ordway, and John D. Rateliff have given lectures at Marquette.[1][2]
Marquette University has given five Tolkien exhibits: "The Manuscripts of J.R.R.T." in 1983, "J.R.R.Tolkien: The Hobbit Drawings, Watercolors, and Manuscripts" in 1987, "Selections from the Marquette J.R.R. Tolkien Collection" in 1987, "Selections from the Marquette J.R.R. Tolkien Collection" in 2004, and "J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript", in 2022. These exhibits were each followed by a published catalog, featuring key materials, the most recent of which was released in August, 2022.
The university's publishing press was responsible for Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull's collection, The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder.
Like the even more significant Bodleian Library in Oxford, England, Marquette University possesses many manuscripts of J.R.R. Tolkien that are still unpublished.
External links[]
- Marquette University homepage
- The J.R.R. Collection webpage
- Video about Marquette's Tolkien Collection