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THE MYTHOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF NEIL GAIMAN. Anthony S. Burdge, Jessica Burke, and Kristine Larsen, eds. 290 pp. $15. Crawfordsville, FL: Kitsune, 2012. $15.00 978-0-9827409-9-2. THIS BOOK, THE FIRST COLLECTION OF ESSAYS on the contemporary British writer Neil Gaiman's multifarious body of work--comics, adult novels, children's novels short stories--is an edited volume composed mainly of contributions from independent scholars, graduate students, and junior academics--in other words by people writing from multiple contexts and vantage-points. It is edited by three scholars well known for their work on Tolkien as well as their previous co-editing of Mythological Foundations of Doctor Who. Neil Gaiman now has enough of an oeuvre and sufficient recognition to gather a body of scholarship around him--as recently evidenced by the undergraduate senior project of my Lang College student, Jessica Bailey--and this collection comes just at the right time, when his work is known and appreciated but needs a thoughtful mediation to academia and the more general public. This book certainly provides that--every essay is well written, informative, and sheds new light on both Gaiman's work and his sources. word 'sources' is perhaps particularly operative here, Gaiman's highly intertextual approach means one can hardly read even a short story of his without thinking of what Leslie Drury terms its allusions and re-envisioning of familiar myths (109). Gaiman's tremendous learning in multiple traditions, his ability to convey them sympathetically, and the lack of pretension with which he carries these off indicate that this writer's greatest feats of creation are also ones of continuation. There is almost a medieval sense of the combination of imitatio and inventio here. In his piece on Gaiman, Tolkien, and Beowulf, the always superb Jason Fisher gives a thorough overview of Tolkien's' debt to Beowulf (and Beowulf's debt to Tolkien for daring to read the Old English poem as literature), and their myriad interlacings, to which I would add Tolkien shares the Beowulf-poet's ability to combine economy and eloquence. In analyzing Gaiman's Beowulf movie adaptation, Fisher defends the right of Gaiman and his collaborator Roger Avary (famous for having worked with Quentin Tarantino) to innovate upon the original by having Grendel be Hrothgar's son and the dragon be Beowulf's son. Fisher argues that these shockers are responses to gaps in the narrative, which Gaiman and Avary, albeit clearly interpolating (31) are legitimately trying to fill. Much like Tolkien defending the poem's greater interests in monsters and the fear they represent, rather than the diplomatic relations of Geats, Swedes, and Danes which nineteenth-century scholars wished the poem was about, Gaiman's adaptation enriches the text, speaking to central themes of embodiment, change and terror. But one could argue that Gaiman and Avary re-domesticates the plot, bringing the monsters within a Freudian family romance, eliminating what Tolkien prized about them--their uncanny otherness. If Freud could also be called, like Tolkien, a twentieth-century mythographer, he believed far less in the autonomy of the subcreated world. Perhaps this is another way of just saying Tolkien is the greater artist than Gaiman, which surely is no disrespect to the latter. But it cannot be denied that Gaiman's fascination with Beowulf, also seen in his 2006 short story The Monarch of the Glen, is a significantly inventive one. Fisher's essay is one of two in the book of particular salience to Mythlore readers, the other being Chelsey Kendig's piece on Gaiman's 2004 short story The Problem of Susan. This story addresses the unpleasant fate of Susan Pevensie in Last Battle, the final book of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. By having Susan live in a trivial world of nylons and invitations (really not preoccupations that different from those of a Jane Austen heroine) while her siblings go to a sublime Narnia-in-the-sky, Lewis, in the view of both Gaiman and Kendig, exhibits a fear of female sexuality and adult women in general. …
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