It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door…You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.
http://www.middle-earth-journeys.com/forums/
http://www.middle-earth-journeys.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=21
Ironically enough it's in my back yard.Merry wrote:This looks interesting:
http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2007/10 ... more-27938
I have no idea where this college is!
However, I've only just found out about it after the fact when I posted an article from his discussion in the news thread just now. 
By Jason Fisher (Dallas, TX USA)
Most people know Tom Shippey by his two seminal books on Tolkien (The Road to Middle-earth and Author of the Century), and rightly so. But he has also published a great many individual essays and reviews on Tolkien over the years. The present collection brings together 23 essays by the man most of us consider the primus inter pares of Tolkien studies.
The collection is grouped into four broad categories, each representing a part of the larger metaphor of the ramifying Tree of Tales. These are 1) The Roots: Tolkien and His Predecessors, 2) Heartwood: Tolkien and Scholarship, and 3) The Trunk: The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and 4) Twigs and Branches: Minor Works by Tolkien.
Of the 23 essays, five of them are previously unpublished (having been delivered as conference papers but never printed). Many of the others have been expanded or revised, making this a fresh and up-to-date body of work easily the match of any comparable collections being published on Tolkien today. The topics and approaches to Tolkien are varied, as are the works Shippey considers. Even the Peter Jackson film trilogy is not left out.
The only criticism I would make is that most of the essays are in fact still in print and could -- with time and expense -- be assembled by any dedicated collector. This seems to be in contradicton with the stated purpose of the collection, as stated by Thomas Honegger in his Preface. In fact, many of Shippey's older, more genuinely rare essays are not reprinted here, though one expects they could have been. And this would have made the collection even more valuable. But regardless, the book is a tremendous coup for Walking Tree and deserves a place on the (overburdened) bookshelves of any serious admirer of Tolkien.
I do think it would be interesting to muse about the place of plants in M-e. It's obvious JRRT loves them more than animals, and they tell us a lot about where in the world we are. But maybe that's what the critic meant by 'filler'!