Final approved proof just went to the printer.  Subscribers should get this in about 2-3 weeks.  There's still time to subscribe at www.mythsoc.org!

Mythlore  Issue 107/108  Volume 28, Number 1/2   Fall/Winter  2009

Perilous Shores: The Unfathomable Supernaturalism of Water in 19th-Century Scottish Folklore

            Jason Marc Harris

The Noldor and the Tuatha Dé Danaan: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Irish Influences

            Annie Kinniburgh

Tolkien’s Sigurd & Gudrún: Summary, Sources, & Analogs

Pierre H. Berube

Amanda McKittrick Ros and the Inklings

            Anita G. Gorman and Leslie Robertson Mateer

Ancient Myths in Contemporary Cinema: Oedipus Rex and Perceval the Knight of the Holy Grail in Pulp Fiction and The Sixth Sense

            Inbar Shaham

The Heart of the Labyrinth: Reading Jim Henson’s Labyrinth as a Modern Dream Vision

            Shiloh Carroll

No Sex in Narnia? How Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen” Problematizes C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia

            Jennifer L. Miller

Innocence as a Super-power: Little Girls on the Hero’s Journey

            David Emerson

Naming the Evil One: Onomastic Strategies in Tolkien and Rowling

            Janet Brennan Croft

And reviews of: Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Douglas A. Anderson; The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, by Laura Miller; Projecting Tolkien’s Musical Worlds: A Study of Musical Affect in Howard Shore’s Soundtrack to Lord of the Rings, by Matthew Young; Esotericism, Art, and Imagination, edited by Arthur Versluis et al.; three new books on The Wind in the Willows, including two annotated versions; Truths Breathed Through Silver: The Inklings’ Moral and Mythopoeic Legacy, edited by Jonathan B. Himes with Joe R. Christopher and Salwa Khoddam; and Volume VI of Tolkien Studies.

For Mythlore subscribers -- the labels to cover the printer's error on the spine are here, they work, and they look just fine. For those of you whose renewals/subscriptions/orders were processed in the last week or so, I'll be mailing out the issue with the spine corrected today. For those of you getting the issue as it was sent from the printer, there are two options -- if you are going to Mythcon, I will bring labels; if you aren't or can't wait, email me your address and I'll send you one.

In-person absentee voting started today in Oklahoma.  I arrived at the County Election Board just after 8:00 and the line already stretched around the corner of the block. It took me 90 minutes, and by the time I was done I'd estimate the wait was well over two hours.  The weather was beautiful -- sunny, with just a hint of chill from a south breeze--but it will be getting up to around 80 this afternoon.  The crowd was cheerful and strangers were happily chatting away with each other, but studiously avoiding politics. It was mostly an older crowd; I didn't see too many students this morning, but there were people with babies in tow.  You can see a picture of the line here:

http://www.normantranscript.com/localnews/local_story_305100720.html
 

Please pass this CFP on to anyone else who might be interested!

Reports are this was one of the worst storms in Oklahoma history, with the most widespread power outages ever. The pictures you are seeing on the news of whole trees uprooted are not exaggerated!  Somehow conditions combined so the ice built up very quickly and very thickly on every exposed surface. Many trees (like the sycamores and weeping willows here on campus) were still holding on to their leaves, and the weight was just too much. 

Our house was okay – we were just outside the worst of the storm, and while we did get pretty thick ice and lost power for 13 hours, we really didn’t have much damage to our trees. We’re long-term country dwellers, so we already had the generator, kerosene heater, Coleman lanterns, port-a-potty – the whole survivalist works. In town, though, it’s another story.  The trees are all so horribly damaged – it would break Tolkien’s heart to see them.  A lot of the town is still without power, so many off-campus students are spending a large part of the day here in the library.  The local public schools are closed the rest of the week. Most of the dorms are okay – Little Ferret didn’t lose power, and took some amazing pictures of the damage on campus.  Finals were cancelled Monday, with make-ups on Friday and Saturday, so we’ve extended our already extended library hours.  What a horrible mess, and the kids who already had plane tickets for Friday or Saturday are scrambling to make other arrangements with their professors.

But I lived through a similar storm in Tennessee – I think it was 1995 or thereabouts.  In about two years the trees were pretty much back to normal.  I think this was worse here, but bad as it looks, an intense pruning won't kill a tree that’s healthy to begin with.  A lot of the trees may bounce back.  But the clean-up is going to be very hard work and take many months. And we're expecting snow and high winds Friday night into Saturday morning -- any branches just hanging on will probably come down.

So the big project right now is the Mythlore Issues 1-100 Index.  All the data entry is complete -- it includes articles, book reviews, and some columns, with abstracts and subject headings.  Edith Crowe did the original work on this; I transcribed her entries into EndNote and brought the whole thing up to date with the issues since her original project.  I've been using the database a lot myself already!

But here's the question, and I'd love to get some input.  We want to post the index as a searchable database on the Mythsoc website -- but we also want to do a print version through the Mythopoeic Press.  Would you still buy a print version if it's available online?  What if the print version had some added features, like an essay on the history of Mythlore or some illustrations? What if the abstracts were only available in the print version? Would it depend on the price? (It's too big already to just include in an issue of Mythlore -- it'll be the size of a whole issue in itself!)

Personally, I'd make use of both, depending on what I'm using it for!

It's really been amazing, going through the old issues.  There are so many articles I need to go back to and read thoroughly.  And all the book reviews -- wow!  Alexei Kondratiev's reviews in particular make me want to rush to my bookshelves and start reading all those great books I set aside for a rainy day years ago.

And for those of you eagerly awaiting Mythlore 99/100, I heard from the printer that it will be ready to go to the mailing service on Thursday. Yay!