by Rahel Orgis

In last month’s post I argued for the centrality of lists in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, discussing how the lists in the opening poem both encapsulate the narrative’s core interest and call for further narrative development. In this post I turn to the appendices following the third part of the novel, in which Tolkien interweaves prose sections with lists to organize and condense an extensive amount of information. Tolkien’s rich fictional universe, including beings like elves, dwarves, humans and the small human-like hobbits, is arguably one of the reasons for the continuing fascination of his work, which, in the twentieth century, figured among the most-read books worldwide. Continue reading “Creative Lists in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – Part II” →

by Rahel Orgis

Lists of various types are at the centre of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings and, tightly bound up with the narrative, they serve as creative tools that both sustain and generate the fictional universe of Middle-earth. While readers might not immediately notice their importance, lists pervade the text, both framing the narrative—in the guise of a motto and in the appendices following the third part of the novel—and occurring within the narrative proper. Tolkien presents readers with a fiction of the novel’s composition that motivates the lists in the appendices and uses them to give substance, historical depth and an impression of authenticity to his fictional universe. Continue reading “Creative Lists in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – Part I” →

by Laura Moncion (University of Toronto)

The premodern period was full of lists, as many of this blog’s previous entries have shown. Medieval monasteries in particular, as the bureaucratic centres of medieval Western Europe, produced and dealt with a large number of lists: the monastic hours of each day, calendars of saints’ days, monastic rules and customaries, charters, profession and patronage records, and many others. Among these types of monastic lists are lists of the dead, including the monastic necrology and liber vitae (book of life), both types of lists intended to memorialize the deceased members of a monastic community. Continue reading “Medieval Lists of the Dead: What Are They and Who Reads Them?” →

by Amanda Gerber

Eva von Contzen’s previous Listology post about Namwali Serpell’s story “Account” drew our attention to a list whose readers convert it into a narrative by inferring meaning from its items’ juxtaposition and sequencing. This post returns to the idea of the list as a narrative in order to examine the Temple of Glas by John Lydgate, a fifteenth-century poet whom modern scholars often denigrate for being a compiler and list-maker.^[1] In the Temple of Glas, a partial adaptation of Chaucer’s House of Fame, one such narrative in the form of a list stretches past a hundred lines to describe several thousand lovers who come to present their love complaints to Venus. Continue reading “A Roll Call of Lovers’ Roles in Lydgate’s Temple of Glas” →

by Eva von Contzen

Can a work of visual art be a list? In The Broad in Los Angeles, there is a painting by the Californian artist John Baldessari (b. 1931) entitled “Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell, 1966–68”. On a white canvas, written in black capital letters, he writes: “Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell”, followed by a list of three such tips, each item introduced by a black bullet point: artists are advised to use light rather than dark colours, choose a subject that sells well (such as still lives – but without any disturbing details – or nudes), and pay attention to the subject matter (bulls and roosters are better than cows and hens). Have a look at the picture here: https://www.thebroad.org/art/john-baldessari/tips-artists-who-want-sell Continue reading “Lists as/and Artworks” →