By Bon Bergstrom GoodKnight: Arwen Joy GoodKnight was the daughter of Glen GoodKnight, founder of the Mythopoeic Society, and me, Bonnie Bergstrom; a humble autistic newbie to your world in 1968. As Glen was considered a person of true value by this community, our daughter was and is considered a person of interest. I am stepping up to the plate to share about us here.
Our daughter’s life was cut short by a confluence of terrible circumstances on January 21, 2025, two weeks after our mutual home was utterly firestormed in Altadena. (The day after a certain inauguration we were demoralized by.)
Arwen was born to us on April 21, 1972, having skipped Hitler’s birthday by one day and having landed on the birthday of both John Muir and Queen Elizabeth II; not too shabby. We all went on to share a number of delightful experiences in that which we all call Fandom.
Arwen debuted in our community as one of two infants born the same day and were entered in the 1972 Westercon Masquerade as Romula and Rema, future founders of the Romulan Empire. A gentle German Shepherd served as Mother Wolf. (Richard Finder, daughter Ariel)
On her first birthday she found herself held in the kindly arms of DeForest Kelley at a Star Trek Convention in Los Angeles. I imagined dialogue…”Dammit Jim, I’m an Internist, not a Pediatrician!”
DeForest Kelley and Arwen. Photo and caption by Bon Bergstrom GoodKnight
Later that same day we teamed up with Arwen’s virtual God-Mom Sherwood Smith, a fan-friend since 1968, in line for the gigantic Equicon masquerade that was looming that evening. We won the Popular Vote award. Baby Arwen and I were slathered in lizard makeup, and Sherwood was our slavemaster, an aristocrat from an alien Star Trek planet. She had concocted some genius script out of her own head whilst waiting in line to go on stage. What a gal; she gladly designed and executed a number of courtly costumes for Arwen to wear at more than a few events.
Ultimately, Arwen didn’t feel cut out for our milieu, and decided to go her own way, into the fine arts. Music…Piano, Clarinet. Even played at Cello. Ceramics, painting, music theory. Music, arts, novels of contemporary popular culture. A cultural maven! Being born a self-starter like her father, she was able to facilitate her acceptance into such exalted places as Interlochen, teen classes at Art Center School of Design in Pasadena, Rhode Island School of Design. She had such power that I never understood. Far beyond anything I had never achieved. Uncanny child, not even a 4.0 GPA graduate. But then she was the daughter of the self-starter Glen GoodKnight.
As for the Rhode Island stint…we joked big time about how I prayed that she wouldn’t wake up some morning having sculpted the Horror in Clay. I kept a silly stuffed Cthulhu in our library as a touchstone.
Despite all, she became an accomplished…PASTRY CHEF. In Urban Boston. Grill 23 and Bar, right across from Boston Common from the State House. Where politcos, celebrities and even the Kennedys dined. The experience in ceramics translated to baking. Wow.
As for the rest….Arwen and her father shared an undiagnosed inheritable sleep disorder, a parasomnia. Sleep walking, sleeptalking, nightmares, insomnia. Edgar Allen Poe stuff. A tendency to self medicate with substances, tendency towards suicidality. No hint of any treatment plan, ever.
It contributed to loss of life. That is all I will say. Mental illness kills. Watch yours, please take care!!!
I thank the many of you fen for all the great times over the years; may we continue to experience all the goodness we have shared together! You have added to so much magic in my life, our lives.
…See there are people who will go with the full title Megalopolis: A Fable, and people who will not. I’ll go with it as far as it wants to go. There are people who will be on board with a movie where Adam Driver clambers out onto the top of the Chrysler Building and screams “TIME STOP!!!”—and time actually does stop. I am such a people, I eat that kind of shit right up. There are people who giggle with delight at a character named Wow Platinum and people who roll their eyes—I’m a giggler, baby.
But when the “fable” is so obvious Aesop could see all the twists and turns coming even though he was sight-impaired in life, and is currently dead, and when TIME STOPS but no one uses it to do anything interesting, and when the character Wow Platinum is a boring misogynist cliché—well, to be honest I become frustrated and sad that my willingness to go with a movie has been squandered…
And that’s just the beginning of Schnelbach’s highly entertaining review.
I talk to 10 people about Harlan Ellison and that’s how almost every conversation starts. If I’d talked to a hundred, it would’ve been the same. Because everyone has a Harlan Ellison story. Everyone who knew him, worked with him, argued with him, fought with him; everyone who was friends with him or claimed to be; everyone who was taught by him, learned from him, owes some portion of their career or life to him; everyone who loved him or hated him — they’ve all got a story about Harlan….
…It matters because this book was different. Special in a way that only lost albums or missed connections truly can be. Over 50 years, TLDV (as the cool cats call it) had been promised, anticipated, maligned, dreaded, forgotten, and mythologized by generations of fans. In Harlan’s lifetime, it swelled to over 600,000 words, got split into three volumes (none of which ever materialized), shrunk down to half its size, then a third. It is undoubtedly the most famous science fiction book never published. And it haunted Harlan — physically, emotionally, and spiritually. At his home in Sherman Oaks, California, it literally sat, in pieces, stacked on the railing outside his office until the dust started gathering dust.
But now, decades later, Harlan’s great, unfinished project is finally going to see the light of day. Set to hit shelves on Oct. 1, The Last Dangerous Visions comes with all the weight of decades of impossible expectation and the relief of a last debt finally paid. And its existence as a finished, bound, actually readable object is thanks largely to years of efforts by Harlan’s friend, partner in crime and the executor of his estate, J. Michael Straczynski….
(3) NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. The 2024 shortlists have been released. The complete lists are at Publishers Weekly: “2024 National Book Award Shortlists Announced”. These are the works of genre interest:
FICTION
Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda (Norton)
NONFICTION
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie (Random House)
TRANSLATED LITERATURE
The Book Censor’s Libraryby Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain (Restless)
YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow)
(4) FUTURE TENSE FICTION IS BACK. After a hiatus for much of 2024, Future Tense Fiction once again will be publishing an original speculative fiction story each month, accompanied by illustrations and a response essay from an expert in a related field. Their new publishing partner is Issues in Science and Technology, a publication of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University.
The story for September 2024 is “Parasocial,” by Monica Byrne.
“Do you have any idea how good holography has gotten in the last 10 years?”
In a recent episode of the podcast Women at Warp, the hosts discussed their favorite episodes of the various Star Trek series in which the Holodeck—a fully immersive, interactive virtual reality interface—is central to the plot. On occasion, a Trek character uses a Holodeck to interact with holo-versions of their crewmates, turning their coworkers and friends into unwitting characters in a storyline that they didn’t help to write. Reflecting on the potential problems of that choice, one host observed that Starfleet’s human resources department “would have a binder that was the size of Crime and Punishment for the Holodeck.”
The characters in Monica Byrne’s “Parasocial” should have read whatever is in that binder….
The archive of Future Tense Fiction stories, running through January 2024, is still available on Slate. As they continue publishing new work with Issues, though, they will be resurfacing some favorites from the archives, with new illustrations, and posting them on the Issues site as well.
…It’s true that Marvel moves through films faster than most studios would ever dare to try, but “two and a half years” is in reality more like 11. Jackson’s first appearance in the MCU as Nick Fury, the former spy, Avengers founder, and director of S.H.I.E.L.D., was in 2008’s Iron Man, and his ninth was in 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home.
The character and the conditions at Marvel were clearly agreeable enough to Jackson, because he has starred in a tenth film (The Marvels), three TV series (Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., What If…?, and Secret Invasion), and three video games (Iron Man 2, Disney Infinity: Marvel Super Heroes, and Disney Infinity 3.0) as Fury….
… The old woman, with her legs as skinny as bones, lives deep in the woods in a hut that stands on chicken feet. The structure turns and moves as it likes, but especially away from those who seek to find her. Baba Yaga’s broom isn’t for flying but for sweeping away her tracks. She is rumored to eat her victims for supper if she thinks they deserve it, but she also features in tales of reluctant kindness, of mentorship, and of fairy godmother-like grace. Isn’t it time we all knew her for who she is?
Folktale traditions can be difficult to explore, because how does one capture the whispers at bedtime or recollections told back and forth among family and friends, all of which have been built upon centuries and centuries of tellers? There is good; there is evil. Then there is Baba Yaga….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Mike Glyer.]
October 1, 1941 – Glen GoodKnight. (Died 2010.) I was often in the home of Glen Goodknight and his partner Ken Lauw when I was on Glen’s 1997 Mythcon committee. It was the ideal fan’s home, walls covered with bookcases, though unlike other fans Glen’s shelves were filled with editions of Lord of the Rings in every language it had appeared: collecting these was his passion.
Ken Lauw and Glen GoodKnight at 2007 Mythcon.
Glen founded the Mythopoeic Society in 1967 in the aftermath of the legendary “Bilbo-Frodo Birthday Picnic” held in September of that year. He invited fans to his house on October 12 to form a continuing group. The 17 attendees became the Society’s first members. Within a few years they had planted 14 discussion groups around the country. In 1972 at the suggestion of Ed Meskys of the Tolkien Society of America the two organizations merged and overnight the Society grew to more than a thousand members.
Mythcon I in 1970 was organized to help knit the Society’s different groups together. Glen married Bonnie GoodKnight (later Callahan) at Mythcon II in 1971.
Glen edited 78 issues of the Society journal Mythlore between 1970 and 1998.
After staying away from Mythcons for several years, Glen returned to celebrate the Society’s 40th anniversary at Berkeley in 2007. Greeted with a standing ovation, he delivered an emotion-filled reminiscence of the Society’s early days.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….Superman took on Darth Vader.
Well, not quite. However, this almost happened. Believe it or not, Star Wars was going to crossover with the DC Universe. In 2017 writer Kurt Busiek revealed that he and Alex Ross had once developed a DC/Star Wars pitch, but the project fell apart due to corporate disagreements regarding the money. It’s unknown when this project was first pitched, but it was presumably sometime before Disney acquired Lucasfilm. While details of the pitch are scant, some of Alex Ross’ concept art has been released, including the Superman vs Vader image that acts as a headline for this article.
Speaking to a crowd at Tampa Bay Comic Convention, former DC publisher Dan DiDio elaborated on why he canceled the project, which apparently was about more than money.
“I was brought a DC Universe and Star Wars crossover. There was fighting over what you could and couldn’t do, and who gets the better shot, and who gets the hero moment…it wasn’t worth it. Honestly, it just wasn’t worth it.”
While DiDio didn’t name Busiek, he noted that the creator was not happy.
“The creator who came onboard got really angry because he brokered the deal and brought it to us. I just didn’t want to do it at that time, because it didn’t make sense.”
On Aug. 1, a ship dropped its unusual cargo into a patch of ocean some 70 miles northwest of San Francisco: three orange robots, each more than 20 feet long and shaped like a torpedo. For a day, the aquatic drones autonomously prowled the waters, scanning nearly 50 square miles of ocean floor.
Some 3,500 feet beneath the surface, an apparition popped up on the robots’ powerful sonar. Down in the darkness, the drones saw a ghost.
The robots had spotted the wreck of the “Ghost Ship of the Pacific,” the only U.S. Navy destroyer captured by Japanese forces during World War II. Formerly known as either the U.S.S. Stewart, orDD-224, the ship was resting in what is now the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary.
Three days later, another set of underwater robots captured images of the historic wreck. Though shrouded in decades of marine growth — and home to sponges and skittering crabs — the 314-foot-long destroyer is almost perfectly intact and upright on the seafloor.
“This level of preservation is exceptional for a vessel of its age and makes it potentially one of the best-preserved examples of a U.S. Navy ‘four-piper’ destroyer known to exist,” Maria Brown, superintendent of both the Cordell Bank and Greater Farallones national marine sanctuaries, said in a statement.
The find, which came during a technology demonstration, highlights the efficiency of modern robotic ocean exploration. Ocean Infinity, the marine robotics firm that operated the drones that made the discovery, owns the world’s largest fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles. The drones are used to create high-resolution maps of the seafloor — a major gap in our understanding of the oceans. The technology is also crucial for selecting sites for offshore construction projects such as wind farms and oil rigs, or for laying out routes for undersea pipelines and cables.
These robotic fleets are also proving invaluable to marine archaeologists. In 2020, Ocean Infinity helped find the wreck of the U.S.S. Nevada. In 2022, the company also contributed to the rediscovery of the Endurance, which sank during a 1915 expedition by Ernest Shackleton….
…Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, the community of Spruce Pine, population 2,194, is known for its hiking, local artists and as America’s sole source of high-purity quartz. Helene dumped more than 2 feet of rain on the town, destroying roads, shops and cutting power and water.
But its reach will likely be felt far beyond the small community.
Semiconductors are the brains of every computer-chip-enabled device, and solar panels are a key part of the global push to combat climate change. To make both semiconductors and solar panels, companies need crucibles and other equipment that both can withstand extraordinarily high heat and be kept absolutely clean. One material fits the bill: quartz. Pure quartz.
Quartz that comes, overwhelmingly, from Spruce Pine.
“As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but“Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”
Conway says without super-pure quartz for the crucibles, which can often be used only a single time, it would be impossible to produce most semiconductors…
(12) GETTING THERE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] You know how it is, there you are stuck out 500 light years away on the Galactic rim from the nearest decent real ale pub in Bognor Regis when your motor breaks down. The repair guy says a new engine is required (‘they couldna’ take it Jim’). So what sort of drive should you have?
Many of you wanted me to talk about the different interstellar propulsion ideas out there so we figured a fun way to compare them all would be in a tier list! Today we take a look at 14 different methods proposed to explore the stars. Let us know your rankings down below in the comments.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Michael J. Walsh, Joey Eschrich, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Paul Weimer.]
Priscilla Tolkien in 2005. Photo by Sancho Proudfoot.
Priscilla Tolkien died February 28 after a short illness at the age of 92. She was the youngest of J.R.R. Tolkien’s children and his only daughter.
Priscilla Tolkien interacted with fandom many times over the years. She attended The Friends of Lewis party held at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1975 hosted by Fr. Walter Hooper, where Owen Barfield, Nevil Coghill, Colin Hardie, A.C. Harwood, Fr. Gervase Mathew, Clyde Kilby, and her brother Fr. John Tolkien were among those present. That’s where Mythopoeic Society founder Glen GoodKnight met her – visiting from the U.S. – and discovered she was then selling books for charitable purposes that had belonged to her father (who died in 1973). About half of these were first edition translations of Tolkien in various languages. GoodKnight bought all he could carry away in two empty suitcases. (GoodKnight died in 2010 and his collection is now at Azusa Pacific University.)
For the U.K.’s Tolkien Society, she wrote “My Father the Artist,” published in a 1976 issue of Amon Hen, the Society bulletin. In 1986 she accepted appointment as the Society’s honorary vice-president, and hosted members of the Society at its annual Oxonmoot.
Priscilla Tolkien in 1992. Via Glen GoodKnight.
Priscilla, Christopher, and John Tolkien were all present at The J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, held in 1992 in Oxford by the Mythopoeic Society and The Tolkien Society.
In 2005, when the Tolkien Society celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of The Lord of the Rings at Aston University, Birmingham she opened the event by wishing that “a star would shine upon our meeting.”
She was a probation officer in Oxford, a social worker, and a tutor at High Wycombe College, before retiring.
After her eldest brother John returned to Oxford in 1987, the siblings began identifying and cataloging the large collection of family photographs. In 1992, she and John published the book The Tolkien Family Album containing pictures of the Tolkien family to celebrate the 100th birth anniversary of their father.
She launched the special Tolkien edition Royal Mail stamps commemorating her father’s works in February 2004.
In 2012, as a trustee of The Tolkien Trust, she joined a coalition of British publishers to sue Warner Brothers for US$80 million, accusing them of exceeding their rights by exploiting Middle-earth characters to promote online gambling (see “What Has It Got In Its Jackpotses?”).
Priscilla is the last of the Tolkien’s four children to pass away, following Michael (1984), John (2003) and Christopher (2020).
Glen GoodKnight (1941-2010) lived in a home decorated the way many fans would like, the walls all covered with bookcases. Glen filled his shelves with multiple editions of Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, not only in English but in many different languages — collecting them was his lifelong passion. And now his family has made sure Glen’s collection of Inklngs rarities will remain intact by donating it to Azusa Pacific University.
The 4,000 volume GoodKnight Collection will become a featured part of APU’s Inklings Collection, curated by Roger White, Ed.D., which already includes the Owen Barfield Family Collection, and many other Inklings-related publications and artifacts.
Glen started reading and acquiring the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams as a teenager, writings he valued so highly he founded the Mythopoeic Society in 1967, devoted to the study of mythopoeic literature, particularly the works of members of the informal Oxford literary circle known as the Inklings.
That same year, 1967, Glen’s collection took First Prize in the Student Library Competition at CSULA, though in size it was less than 3% of what it would become. By 1992, the Tolkien portion alone amounted to 700 volumes published in 29 languages and, he told a reporter that he lacked only the versions in Armenian, Moldavian and Faeroese, a language spoken on islands near Iceland. In 2010, Glen’s website devoted to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Editions and Translations showed that series had been published in 47 languages or scripts other than English (including Braille).
Family members transferred the GoodKnight Collection to APU this
summer, where it is being processed and cataloged. In July, Roger White invited
me to see some of the amazing things that will be available to future scholars
thanks to this donation.
The GoodKnight Collection in process.
Perhaps the rarest Tolkien collectible GoodKnight owned is the small paperbound copy of Songs for the Philologists (Tolkien & Gordon, 1936), printed by students in hand-set type as an exercise on a reconstructed wooden hand-press but never distributed because permission had not been requested from Tolkien or Gordon. The stored copies burned when the building where they were kept was bombed during WWII. However, a few copies survived in the hands of the students who printed them.
Another old volume, with some of Tolkien’s early published poetry,
is Leeds University Verse 1914-1924, an anthology with three of his poems.
GoodKnight also
collected examples of Tolkien’s scholarship, such as the 1932 article on “The
name ‘Nodens’” published as an
appendix to Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and
Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, a discussion of three inscriptions found
at the excavations which he concluded is the name of an unrecorded deity.
The GoodKnight
Collection contains 100 English-language versions of The Hobbit – ranging
from the 1938 first American edition, to a 1968 copy from Tolkien’s own library
with his notes.
There are many inscribed books, such as a copy of The Hobbit (1937) signed by the author’s son, Christopher Tolkien, and a boxed set of Lord of the Rings which Christopher Tolkien signed when he attended the 1987 Mythopoeic Conference at Marquette University.
GoodKnight built his collection through a combination of diligence
and good luck. In the days before the internet, he made discoveries by checking
bookstores in every city he visited, combing through book dealers’ catalogs, and
bidding on items auctioned at the annual Mythopoeic Conferences. On top of that,
he had the good luck to visit England in 1975 and meet Priscilla Tolkien, then selling
books for charitable purposes that had belonged to her father (who died in 1973).
About half of these were first edition translations of Tolkien in various
languages. He bought all he could carry away in two empty suitcases.
Among the works once owned by Tolkien as part of his personal library are:
Foreign translations of The Hobbit in Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch (first edition, with Tolkien’s pipe ash where the pages meet in several places), Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish and Swedish.
In de Ban van de Ring (3 vols.), the Dutch first edition of The Lord of the Rings published in 1956; signed by Tolkien.
Mythlore (first issue) – with handwritten comments by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings inscribed by members of the Tolkien family.
Preface to Paradise Lost 1942 first edition inscribed “with kind regards, C.S. Lewis, Jan, 1943.”
The acquisition of the GoodKnight Collection adds greatly to the Inklings-owned books already held by APU, which includes the Owen Barfield Family Collection.
More than 250 books from the
family library
More than 300 family photographs
Postcard collection from the
early 1900s
Assorted personal documents and
household records
C.S.
Lewis called Barfield “the best and wisest of my unofficial teachers.”
Roger White shows Mke Glyer the Inklings Collection room in APU’s Darling Library.
APU’s Inklings Collection also owns a number of books that were formerly part of C.S. Lewis’ personal library, acquired from Lewis biographer George Sayers. One is C. S. Lewis’s annotated copy of E. M. W. Tillyard’s Milton, a book that prompted an exchange between the two men that led to their jointly authored work, The Personal Heresy. Some of Lewis’s books include handwritten notes he made on end pages, plus the dates he read or reread them.
There are 50 books from Priscilla Tolkien’s personal library – for example, a Sir Walter Scott novel received as a present from Christopher Tolkien in 1943.
APU even possesses
the manuscript of Humphrey Carpenter’s group biography The Inklings.
Glen’s friends will
be delighted to know that his collection is being preserved, and that in years
to come scholars will be able to use it to do innovative research projects
about this group of writers.
Books by Inklings Warren Lewis and Charles Williams.
Diana, Lynn Maudlin and I went together to Glen GoodKnight’s funeral at Rose Hills Memorial Park on November 13. Around 50 people gathered in the impressive SkyRose chapel, a vast, airy gothic structure set high on a hill, the sanctuary window overlooking Los Angeles skyscrapers 15 miles away.
We were greeted by Bonnie Callahan, then joined other early arrivers in the narthex beneath a giant video screen to watch a slideshow of fine photos of Glen with Ken Lauw, at events with other friends and family, and posing at tourist spots in Oxford, Paris and Berlin.
When the memorial began, people shared the profound impact Glen had on their lives.
One of Glen’s former teaching colleagues told about her pleasure exchanging ideas with him about things to try in the classroom, and her admiration for his work on teachers’ union issues.
Doris Robin, a founding Mythopeoic Society member, spoke about Glen’s leadership. Sherwood Smith spoke about meeting Glen and other Tolkien fans when she was a 16-year-old high school student, and how great it had been to discover people who took fantasy stories seriously and liked to discuss them for hours. Messages of condolence from other literary organizations were read.
Ken Lauw, Glen’s partner, spoke about their 22 years of friendship, their 2008 marriage and how devastating it was to lose his teacher, mentor, protector and friend.
Later in the day I saw that the online Los Angeles Times had published Glen’s obituary. Because of how these things work in fandom I never really gave a lot of thought to whether GoodKnight was his “real” name – but it was:
For a man preoccupied with all things Tolkien, his name appeared invented: Glen Howard GoodKnight II. But it was authentic, down to the unexpected capital “K” that stands sentry like a castle in Middle-earth….
He was born Oct. 1, 1941, the eldest of three children of Glen GoodKnight, who made his living doing odd jobs, and his wife, the former Mary Bray. His last name was an anglicized version of the German “Gutknecht,” according to his family. Society made in Glen’s memory will go toward helping deserving scholars to attend Mythopoeic Conferences.
Also, Lynn Maudlin has announced that the Council of Stewards of the Mythopoeic Society has decided to rename the “Starving Scholars Fund,” which helps selected academics afford to attend Mythcons, the “Glen GoodKnight Scholarship Fund.” This will memorialize Glen’s focus on scholarship and his encouragement of new scholars.
Update 2010/11/14: Corrected spelling of Doris Robin, per comment.
“….Glen GoodKnight passed away on Wednesday night. He had been in poor health for a number of years, but was actively participating in many online activities, cataloging his collection for eventual sale/donation, and appeared to be in stable condition.”
I was often in the home of Glen Goodknight and his partner Ken Lauw when I was on Glen’s 1997 Mythcon committee. It was the ideal fan’s home, walls covered with bookcases, though unlike other fans Glen’s shelves were filled with editions of Lord of the Rings in every language it had appeared: collecting them was his passion. He was a highly interesting and very knowledgeable fan.
Glen founded the Mythopoeic Society in 1967 in the aftermath of the legendary “Bilbo-Frodo Birthday Picnic” held in September of that year. He invited fans to his house on October 12 to form a continuing group. The 17 attendees became the Society’s first members. Within a few years they had planted 14 discussion groups around the country. In 1972 at the suggestion of Ed Meskys of the Tolkien Society of America the two organizations merged and overnight the Society grew to more than a thousand members.
Mythcon I in 1970 was organized to help knit the Society’s different groups together. Glen married Bonnie GoodKnight (later Callahan) at Mythcon II in 1971.
Glen edited 78 issues of the Society journal Mythlore between 1970 and 1998.
After staying away from Mythcons for several years, Glen returned to celebrate the Society’s 40th anniversary at Berkeley in 2007. Greeted with a standing ovation, he delivered an emotion-filled reminiscence of the Society’s early days. Glen came back to Mythcon the following year, too. I was glad to see him renewing his links with the Society. Now I’m sad to know I won’t be in his company again.
