Карл Хостетер: от NASA к языкам Толкина.

Tolkien scholar and NASA scientist
Carl Franklin Hostetter is a Tolkien scholar and NASA computer scientist. He has edited and annotated many of J. R. R. Tolkien's linguistic writings, publishing them in Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon.

Carl Hostetter joined NASA as a computer scientist at its Goddard Space Flight Center in 1985. In the 1990s, he edited the proceedings of the Goddard Space Conference for some years.

Hostetter is a Tolkien scholar and key figure in the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship. He has written numerous articles on the linguistics of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle earth. He ran the scholarly mailing list Lambengolmor from 2002 to its closure in 2020. He is the editor of the Tolkien linguistics journals Vinyar Tengwar and Tengwestië. By arrangement with Christopher Tolkien, he edited and published a large quantity of J. R. R. Tolkien's writings on his constructed languages in Vinyar Tengwar (in various issues between 1991 and 2007) and in Parma Eldalamberon issues 11 (1995) to 22 (2015).

John S. Ryan, reviewing the 2000 collection Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle earth (edited by Hostetter and Verlyn Flieger) for VII, called it a "luminous companion" to the 12 volumes of Christopher Tolkien's The History of Middle earth, and "clearly indispensable". The book won the 2002 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies. The Tolkien scholar Douglas C. Kane, while welcoming the 2021 book The Nature of Middle earth, writes that Hostetter "appears to overstep his role as editor" by presenting the materials according to his personal point of view. In particular, Kane states that Hostetter wrongly applies Tolkien's remark that The Lord of the Rings was fundamentally religious and Catholic to the whole of the legendarium. Kane calls this contrary to Christopher Tolkien's editorial practice, and "a blatant statement of intent". Kane quotes Verlyn Flieger's remark that Tolkien's work reflects the two sides of his nature; the work can be seen both "as Catholic [and] not Christian."