Mythlore

A scholarly, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of mythopoeic literature

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Mythlore Style Sheet

— Scholarly articles should be about 5,000 to 10,000 words and will be double-blind peer reviewed by at least one referee.
— Notes and Letters may be as short as 500 words and up to 7,000, and are not peer reviewed. Notes and Letters are generally short, of a factual or speculative nature, or express opinions or responses to material in Mythlore, in contrast to scholarly articles.
— Full-length reviews should be 1,000 to 7,000 words. Briefly Noted reviews may be as short as 500 words. They are not peer reviewed.
— Submitted works that are not in compliance with this style sheet may be reviewed by the editor but will not be passed on to a referee until corrected.

MLA Style

All in-text citations and your works-cited list should conform to MLA 9 style. See the current MLA Handbook 9th ed. (2021) for complete details.

• Use parenthetical in-text citations rather than footnote or endnote citations:
  • "It needs but one for to breed a war", said Éowyn (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings VI.5.937). (Note the punctuation after the citation, and for the preferred style for citing LotR by volume, book, and page, see additional details below.)
  • For block quotes (quotations that take up over three lines and are indented from the rest of the text), the punctuation goes at the end of the quote, before the parenthetical citation.
• Abbreviations or short titles are acceptable in in-text citations but should be spelled out the first time used:
  • (Lewis, The Horse and His Boy [HHB] 32); subsequently, (HHB 45).
  • (Tolkien, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" ["Monsters"] 10); subsequently, ("Monsters" 15).
• See the MLA Handbook for further guidance on shortening subsequent in-text citations and standardized abbreviations for Shakespeare and the bible.

Works Cited/Bibliography

In MLA style, short citations in the text refer the reader to a bibliography at the end of the work. Any full citations in your text should be replaced with abbreviated citations and moved to your bibliography. Use MLA format (with year at the end rather than after the author) for works cited list. MLA 9th no longer requires the place of publication for most publishers, and has changed the abbreviations used in citing periodical articles. It's best to refer to MLA 9th for specific information, as the examples below are for only the most common usage of each type of entry. The Purdue OWL site for MLA Formatting and Style is also a good resource.

• Example of a book:
  Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. 50th Anniversary ed., Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
• A journal article:
  Gaarden, Bonnie. "'The Golden Key': A Double Reading." Mythlore vol. 24, no. 3/4 (#93/94), 2006, pp. 35-52.
  • Also please note that items from Mythlore should be cited following this pattern, with both volume/issue number and whole issue number.
• A book section:
  Lewis, C.S. "De Descriptione Temporum." Selected Literary Essays, edited by Walter Hooper, Cambridge UP, 1969, pp. 1-14.
• A web site:
  Pratchett, Terry. "Words from the Master." The L-Space Web, 2002, http://www.co.uk.lspace.org/books/apf/words-from-the-master.html.
• An episode of a television show:
  "Hush." Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon, season 4, episode 10, Mutant Enemy / WB Television Network, 14 Dec. 1999. BBC Worldwide, 2019.

Footnotes

Use footnotes, not endnotes. Use Arabic numerals. In Word, use the "Insert reference" function to insert your footnotes in proper format. In MLA, footnotes expand on a point in the text, rather than providing the citation for something in your text. Citations within footnotes should also be in MLA format, and cited materials should appear in your bibliography.

Additional Mythlore Style Points

• Your submission should include page numbers, preferably at the bottom of the page.
• We do double-anonymous refereeing. DO NOT include your name on the first page of your paper or in page headers or footers, and if you refer to your own previous work in your paper, anonymize the references as much as possible.
• Use US English spelling and punctuation except when quoting original text that uses other spelling and punctuation styles.
• Titles should be italicized, not underlined.
• Commas and periods generally go inside quotes; colons and semicolons outside. All go after parentheses in most cases. Use “curly” quotes, not "straight" quotes.
  • “Up Eorlingas! Fear no darkness,” he shouted (LotR V.6.840). This was Théoden's ‘battle-cry’; it struck fear into the Southrons.
• Parentheses nested inside parentheses should be replaced with brackets.
  • Tolkien enjoyed Haggard (and Lewis is known to have liked him too ["Haggard" 97]).
• When you leave words out of a quotation, replace them with ellipses enclosed in brackets. Ellipses in the original should be spaced out.
  • "Why, it's like a young cathedral. [...] How big is your parish, then?" (Sayers, Nine Tailors 7).
  • "[D]ear me! have you any luggage? . . . Ah! down at Frog's Bridge?" (Sayers 6).
• Use the serial or Oxford commastrong> after the next-to-last item in a series:
  • Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams; Dickens, Austen, or Twain
• For the possessive of a name ending in s, add ’s:
  • Lewis's, Williams's, James's
• Mythlore does not use spaces between the initials of an author's name:
  • J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, but H. Rider Haggard
• Use the em-dash with no spaces to indicate a dash between words:
  • Chesterton—who enjoyed his pint—wouldn't begrudge a drink . . .
• Also use the em-dash to indicate additional works by the same author in the works cited:
  • Tolkien, J.R.R. Farmer Giles of Ham.
    —. Leaf by Niggle.
• Citing websites: use black text and remove underlining.
  • http://www.mythsoc.org
• Preferred editions:
  • —The 50th Anniversary one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings (2004 and later printings) is our preferred edition. For in-text citations, cite your quotations including the book and chapter number so we can easily change them to this edition if you use a different one. For example, LotR VI.5.937 refers to Book 6, Chapter 5 "The Steward and The King," page 937 in the edition cited.
  • —Tolkien's Letters: Because the print and electronic editions have different methods for indicating what letter is being cited, our preference for in-text citations is: Cite by page AND letter number (i.e., Letters 51, #43). List in bibliography under Tolkien, not Carpenter. NOTE: This will be updated when we see how the expanded edition of Letters handles newly added material.
  • —For important standard fantasy texts like the Narnia books, The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, the Harry Potter books, Lewis's Space Trilogy, and so on that are available in multiple editions with different pagination, please include the chapter number for the page you cite. It is especially crucial to do this if you are citing from a Kindle or other electronic edition without fixed page numbers. For example, Hobbit XIII.150, Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" 5.55.
    • "[T]hey can make as much noise as they like" (Roverandom 2:20).
  • —Similarly, in in-text citations, cite a scene number from a movie or TV show wherever possible. Generally a time stamp is NOT required, but may be added if appropriate, for example, in close analysis of a single scene.

Proofreading

Proofreading tips before final submission (you will be expected to correct these yourself if your submission is accepted in spite of not adhering to our style):

• —If you own or consult multiple editions of a text, settle on one for your citations and make sure your bibliography cites that edition only and your page citations match. (Your editor finds it particularly frustrating when an author carelessly mixes citations to multiple editions!)
• —Pay particular attention to the rules above for book-chapter-page citation requirements.
• —Make sure your submission is in MLA 9th format and your footnotes are NOT just the citations for your quotations.
• —Make sure any sources cited in your text or footnotes appear in your bibliography.
• —To reiterate: Submitted works that are not in compliance with this style sheet may be reviewed by the editor but will not be passed on to a referee until corrected.

Style sheet updated 21 July 2023 JBC

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Editor of Mythlore

mythlore@mythsoc.org


Guidelines for prospective reviewers: Mythlore Reviewer Guidelines.