By Sarah C. Schaefer
Being a C21 fellow in 2021-22 meant joining the Center in a period of transition. This is likely most evident to the UWM community in terms of the exciting slew of programs already initiated under the leadership of Anne, Nicole, and Jennifer. Moreover – and serendipitously for me – it meant a re-envisioning of the Center’s physical space on the 9th floor of Curtin Hall. The library, catty-corner to my C21 office, was an obvious candidate for reform (2022 Summer Fellow Kayla Daspit discusses the process of reorganizing the library collection in a recent blog post). As these changes were percolating in fall 2021, a particular object perched on one of the library tables caught my attention: an old microfilm reader. As a fan and collector of outmoded media, and well-aware that this machine was likely destined for the Surplus department (or recycling bin), I asked if I could claim it for the time-being and it lived in my office for the remainder of my fellowship period.
It was not just nostalgia or an accumulating impulse that drove my interest. Throughout my time at C21 I was deeply immersed in the co-curation of an exhibition now on view at the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript. Our aims with the show are to demonstrate the ways in which manuscripts – real and invented, ancient and modern – wend their way into Tolkien’s scholarly and creative output. A key point of interest for me and Bill Fliss (co-curator of the exhibition and the Tolkien archivist at Marquette’s Raynor Memorial Libraries) was the way that Tolkien would have encountered the medieval manuscripts that he studied as a professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford. Importantly, he relied primarily on facsimilesin his day-to-day work as a scholar and teacher. The availability and quality of manuscript facsimiles had grown immensely in the decades before Tolkien began working at Oxford in the 1920s. As photomechanical reproduction became more and more common, publications that included pictures of manuscript pages (rather than just transcriptions or transliterations) became windows into the material qualities of these objects. They also allowed scholars to examine items that might be damaged or degraded without seeing the object in person or counting on published transcriptions whose claims may have been inaccurate or disputed. A key point in the photographic documentation of manuscripts came with the advent of microfilm and microfiche around the turn of the twentieth century. Suddenly, vast quantities of documents could be stored in scaled-down form, making the storage and circulation of these reproductions vastly more feasible than they were in book or codex form.
It is not unlikely that Tolkien would have encountered microforms over the course of his long career, but that was not main reason for my interest in the Center’s microfilm reader. Instead, it became a means of connecting the history of manuscript reproduction, with which Tolkien was so familiar, and the history of Tolkien’s manuscripts at Marquette. Bill has written at length about how these works came to be in Milwaukee, so I won’t go into detail on that subject here. But something to note is that since the 1980s, researchers visiting the Raynor Archives to view Tolkien’s manuscripts have only had access to them in reproduction – specifically, on microfilm. Like any media form, microfilm carries its own benefits and drawbacks. A microfilm reader allows you to scan through pages quickly (as opposed to pulling individual pages out of boxes and file folders). But the organization of the documents, the order that they appear on the microfilm reel, may not always seem logical – this is the inevitable outcome of a working writer like Tolkien who used every scrap of paper that was available and was constantly revising his own work.
The exhibition coincides with the sunsetting of the Tolkien manuscript microfilm reels and the birth of a new research tool called Anduin™ that Bill has been spearheading for a number of years. This digital database is now available for use at the Raynor Archives and gives researchers access to high-resolution scans of every Tolkien manuscript page. Moreover, a sophisticated framework of meta-data allows for on-going research to be incorporated directly into the database, meaning scholars will be able to access and build off each other’s research.
The meticulous thought and dedication that goes into processing an archive like Tolkien’s is the focus of the exhibition’s final gallery. Here, alongside a map and kiosk that give a sense of AnduinÔ’s functionality, sit two microfilm readers loaded with reels from the Tolkien archive. While it may seem immediately apparent how superior the capabilities of the digital database are, the microfilms help to make the point that one should always be aware of the transitional nature of media, that every system will inevitably come to a point of obsolescence.
When we were installing the exhibition in August, I buckled the Center’s microfilm reader into the front seat of my car and brought to the Haggerty. We ultimately decided, unfortunately, that it was not the ideal platform for the Tolkien microfilms – this particular model was fairly bare-bones and it would have been difficult to thoroughly secure the reels. But of the fond memories I have of my time as a C21 fellow, one that particularly sticks out is Anne’s enthusiastic response to my interest in that microfilm reader. For me, it speaks not only to the Center’s support for creative engagement with the humanities, but also for its recognition of the value of critical perspectives in moments of transition – whether in terms of space, ideology, or media.
Sarah C. Schaefer is an art historian at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, where she teaches courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and visual culture. Her first book, Gustave Doré and the Modern Biblical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2021), explores biblical imagery in modernity through the lens of French artist Gustave Doré (1832-83), whose work continues to have a profound impact on how the Bible is visualized today. Current research interests include reproduction and religious kitsch, and representations of faerie and fantasy in nineteenth-century Europe.
