Richard Eliot Blackwelder (January 29, 1909-January 17, 2001) was an American biologist, professor and author specializing in entomology and taxonomy. After a distinguished professional career, he retired in 1977, and in 1978 he discovered the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, which were to be the focus of his energies for the remainder of his life.[1] Over the next twenty years, Blackwelder amassed a large collection of Tolkien-related books and other materials, which he sorted and indexed. The Blackwelder Collection, donated to Marquette University in 1982, is believed to be the largest single body of secondary sources on Tolkien ever to be developed.[2]
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Blackwelder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and earned his Ph. D. degree in 1934 from Stanford University. He married Ruth MacCoy in 1935 and from 1935-1938 served as a W. R. Bacon Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. He served as Assistant Curator of Entomology at the U.S. National Museum (now the National Museum of Natural History) from 1939 to 1955. He was Associate Professor at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, for two years before becoming Professor of Zoology at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, a position he held until is retirement in 1977.
In 1947, Blackwelder's colleague Waldo L. Schmitt and George W. Wharton established the Society of Systematic Zoology. Blackwelder was actively involved in the Society, serving as Secretary-Treasurer (1948-1959), and becoming its President in 1961. Blackwelder was a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and a Timothy Hopkins Lecturer.[3]
The knack for organizing and categorizing that drove Blackwelder to excel in taxonomy also colored his post-retirement passion for Tolkien's legendarium. Blackwelder amassed a large collection of Tolkieniana, which he sorted and indexed before arranging to donate the collection to the Archives of Marquette University. The Blackwelder Collection consists of "ten linear feet of documents in 140 ... three ring binders, ... over 1,200 volumes ... and over 70 theses and dissertations."[4]
He spent four years compiling a concordance to the names of characters, animals, and plants in Tolkien's work, which was published in 1990 by Garland Press as A Tolkien Thesaurus. A fifteen-page companion booklet, Tolkien Phraseology, was published by Marquette in 1990.[5]
During these years, Blackwelder was actively involved in Tolkien fandom, contributing frequently to Beyond Bree.
Blackwelder died on January 17, 2001, twelve days before his 92nd birthday.[6] His ashes are interred with his wife's in the MacCoy niche at Sunset Mausoleum near Berkeley, California.[7]
In 1987, Blackwelder established the Tolkien Archives Fund at Marquette University to catalog Marquette's manuscript collection, sponsor public programming, and to provide support for the acquisition and preservation of Tolkien research material in the Department of Special Collections. The fund is endowed by Blackwelder's estate. Among the acquisitions funded by this bequest is the Grace E. Funk Tolkien/Fantasy Fiction Collection of 2,376 books, articles, films, documentary videos, photocopied articles and newspaper clippings.[8].
The Tolkien Archives Fund also contributed financial assistance to the Marquette University Tolkien Conference (October 21-23, 2004) "The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder". The proceedings of the conference were published in 2006.
Blackwelder published many books of interest to specialists in zoology and entomology. His other significant works include: