Major news in the world of Tolkien studies: the Mythopoeic Society has made the entire
Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, 1992 available online
for free. It was originally published jointly as issue number 80 of
Mythlore and issue number 30 of
Mallorn (the Tolkien Society's journal), but it's been out of print for ages. You could get it on Amazon for the low, low price of $200 in paperback or $425 in hardback, but when I needed to read some of its articles for a major Tolkien research project a couple years ago I opted to make the trek to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC instead, since that was the closest library to me that had a copy.
https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/
This is a landmark work including contributions from a veritable who's who of big name Tolkien scholars, as well as a lot of great stuff from less famous folks as well. A personal favorite is
"Historical Bias in the Making of The Silmarillion", which was one of the first (possibly
the first) published pieces to examine the legendarium from the perspective of in-universe historiography--a major focus in my own studies and writing, including stuff I've shared in this thread. Both of the papers about the "mythology for England" are really good, too, and were among the reasons I was interested in the collection to begin with. I have photocopies of all these and several other papers stored on a shelf in my old room at my mom's house, but it's really nice to have those and everything else available at the click of a mouse. I was late getting to the LOC that day so there was only so much I could get through.
There are a lot more issues of
Mythlore available for free on the same site (which is also a new thing), but if you only ever read one issue of any academic journal in the field of Tolkien studies, make it this one.
