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Revision as of 12:54, 16 April 2023

Tolkien's legendarium has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. Review: June 14, 2021. (Reviewed version).

Middle-earth GA‑class Mid‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Middle-earth, which aims to build an encyclopedic guide to J. R. R. Tolkien, his legendarium, and related topics. Please visit the project talk page for suggestions and ideas on how you can improve this and other articles.Middle-earthWikipedia:WikiProject Middle-earthTemplate:WikiProject Middle-earthTolkien GA This article has been rated as GA-class on Misplaced Pages's content assessment scale. Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale. Note: Though it states in the Guide to writing better articles that generally fictional articles should be written in present tense, all Tolkien legendarium-related articles that cover in-universe material before the current action must be written in past tense. Please see Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Middle-earth/Standards for more information about this and other article standards.

This article is written in British English with Oxford spelling (colour, realize, organization, analyse; note that -ize is used instead of -ise) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

Archives

1

Unfinished Tales

I am surprised that Unfinished Tales is not even listed, let alone discussed. It is far more substantial than The Adventures of Tom Bombadil or Bilbo's Last Song, and I see no reason to exclude it, but I don't know Tolkien research particularly well, so I may be missing something?--Verbarson (talk) 21:55, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

We basically have to go by what scholars write; and no text article can (or should) be exhaustive, but I've managed to work in a brief mention. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:29, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

Addition of unused David Day sources

Ok, you put the header here. I'll ask straight out: What is your issue with David Day? - jc37 11:44, 16 April 2023 (UTC) (edit conflict)

Um, if you'll give me a minute...

There has been a sudden addition of wholly unused David Day book citations, across several articles in the past few minutes.

There are multiple good reasons why this is undesirable.

1) These articles are fully (and richly) cited already.

2) The existing sources are either to Tolkien himself (primary, for the facts about what he wrote) or to scholars and critics.

3) Much of Day's output just regurgitates Tolkien's statements in the narrative text, i.e. it adds nothing.

4) Other Day output includes his personal pet opinions, not substantiated by any of the (very large) amount of Tolkien scholarship. He is not and does not claim to be a scholar; but he is writing (when not just copying and illustrating Tolkien) on scholarly matters, that have been covered in great depth.

5) There is no value in adding unused books to these articles; they already contain a plentiful supply of better books and research articles which are used. In other words, these are not "sources" as nothing is sourced to them.

Therefore, it is undesirable to add such materials. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:46, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

An author does not need to be a "scholar" (however we are to define that) to be used as a reference.

Everything else that you note is essentially WP:IDONTLIKEIT or WP:ITSNOTUSEFUL, so none of that holds any water outside of subjective opinion.

I'm not strongly tied to the additions, I just think the removal is more than a little heavy handed, and am really not as yet seeing a good reason for the removals. - jc37 11:56, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for discussing. Your summary of my list of reasons is however incorrect. We do not only use scholarly sources (those by academics with doctorates researching Tolkien Studies and related fields such as medievalism); we freely use newspaper reports, critics who are reviewing books, plays, films, and music, and indeed journalists writing on Tolkien issues. Day remarkably manages not to be any of these.

More to the reason, you have not noted that he is not cited in the articles, i.e. no fact or claim in the text is attributed to him or derived from him: that is a practical matter that anyone can confirm by observation. There are (literally) thousands of claims across the hundreds of Tolkien articles here on Misplaced Pages, and they are cited to hundreds of scholars, critics, and journalists. Usefulness is thus defined practically and operationally – the articles do not need his input. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:01, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

To respond to the first part - If that were the case, where would you put works by Robert Foster or Ruth Noel? Or how about Humphrey Carpenter?

Foster is usable with care, and some use has been made of his work. Carpenter is both the author of an authorised biography of Tolkien, and the editor of his letters, so he's an important source.

As for the second part, the references are there not just to support the text of the article, but also for the reader to go for further information. What's the issue? - jc37 12:12, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

If nothing is taken from a source, then it is not a source for anything. If, despite that, it could be beneficial for readers, then it would belong in a Further reading section.

I do not think that Day's Bestiary belongs anywhere other than, possibly, Works inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien. It certainly adds nothing useful to J. R. R. Tolkien, it is not part of Tolkien's legendarium, and does not make any original contribution worth noting to Middle-earth. If it has something to add to our understanding of Tolkien's writings, then someone should find out where that has been recognised, and write an article for it. -- Verbarson  _edits 12:38, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Indeed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:43, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) - That's a very good answer. Thank you  : )

If we were talking about Robert Foster, I might say that it's not a work"inspired by", but rather an attempt at a scholarly collation. And as such, is a reference work outside of the primary sources concerning the in-universe information.

There are plenty of fantasy works out there that are "inspired by". But in this case, we're (presumably) talking about a non-fiction attempt to collate fictional information.

The trouble with David Day's works is that (to be charitable), he apparently has added a bit of "creative license" when listing the collated information from the Professor's works.

So I'd agree that in the case of his works, at least, "Further reading" makes sense.

Thanks again : ) - 12:52, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages is not a catalogue, and it is not our job to attempt to list all of the very large number of low-quality sources on Tolkien. The sources listed are precisely there to support the text, as the best materials available. That makes them the highest-quality materials for further study. As already stated, the citations are in fact of many kinds, from biography to journalism to critical review to scholarly analysis. In a well-developed article, it's generally not necessary to do much in the way of listing yet more sources, but that depends on the nature of the individual article. The book in question was rapidly spammed across several articles, which indicates (correctly, I think) that it had nothing special to do with any of them individually. To reiterate, the best proof that a source is practically relevant to an article is to add a clearly-helpful fact to the text, cited to a page of the new source. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:42, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

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