Jonathan Evans

B.A. Asbury College 1976

M.A. Indiana University 1978

Doctoral Certificate Indiana University Medieval Institute 1982

Ph.D. Indiana University 1984.

He is the editor of a volume of Semiotica entitled Semiotica Mediaevalia (1987), coeditor of the annual proceedings of the Semiotic Society of America (1982, 1983, 1986), and coeditor of Semiotics and International Scholarship: Towards A Language of Theory (1986). He has published essays and reviews in numerous reference works and edited collections including The Facts on File Companion to Pre-1600 British Poetry (2008), The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (2007), J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances (2000), The Encyclopedia of Medieval Folklore (2000), Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia (1993), The Dictionary of Literary Biography (1990), and Mythical and Fabulous Creatures: A Sourcebook and Research Guide (1987),  His articles on medieval literature and contemporary theory have appeared in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology (2000), NOWELE: North-Western European Language Evolution (2000), The Journal of English Linguistics (1999), The Simms Review (1999), The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (1998), Semiotica (1986, 1987), Poetics Today (1987), Style (1986), and The Journal of Folklore Research (1985).  His review article, "The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and The Lord of The Rings, and: Light Beyond All Shadow: Religious Experience in Tolkien's Work" was published in Tolkien Studies 9 (2012).

Dr. Evans's book project, An Introduction to Old English, currently in press with the Modern Language Association of America's "Older Languages" series, is scheduled for publication in early 2019.  The manuscript of Dr. Evans's scholarly essay "Beowulf's Bane, Fáfnir, and the Firedrake of Erebor" is in press with Arizona State University Press for a festschrift, edited by Eric Bryan, entitled Speaking of Sloth and Slaughter: Essays on Medieval Literary Speech Acts: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Shippey.  His most recent book -- Dragons: Myth and Legend (Ivy Press, 2008) -- is a lavishly-illustrated and modern popular retelling of 20 myths and legends concerning dragons and dragon slayers from ancient, classical, and medieval literature and culture.  He is co-author of Ents, Elves, and Eriador: J.R.R. Tolkien's Environmental Vision (University Press of Kentucky, 2006) with Matthew Dickerson.  His essay "Wörter, Sachen, und Wahrheit: Philology and the Tree of Language in Tolkien" was published in Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth: Essays in Honour of T.A. Shippey (Amsterdam: Brepols, 2007).  His study of racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth was published in Tolkien the Medievalist as "The Anthropology of Arda: Creation, Theology, and the Race of Men" (ed. Jane Chance, Routledge 2003). His essay titled "'As Rare as They Are Dire': Old Norse Dragons, Jacob Grimm, and the Deutsche Mythologie" was published in The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous (ed. Tom Shippey, Arizona State Univ./Brepols, 2005). 

His long-term scholarly interests include Scandinavian loan-words in the Peterborough Chronicle -- a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle -- and elements of medieval dragon-lore and the dragon-slayer legend in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.  His interest in medieval mystical motifs in 17th/18th-century German pietistic hymnody, particularly in Das Kleine Davidische Psalterspiel der kinder Zions : von alten und neuen auserlesenen Geistes-gesangen (1744), is on long-term hold.