Emily A. Moniz, writing in Mythlore, calls Eden's edited collection of essays Middle-earth Minstrel "strong right out of the gate", with interesting and useful contributions, some of them "truly excellent", on such Tolkien research topics as linguistics, pedagogy, music, and alliterative poetry. She found David Bratman's essay on music in Middle-earth a "marvelous survey" of a vast subject, spoilt by repeated complaints about Howard Shore's music for The Lord of the Rings film series: she wished that "the editorial pen ... had been slightly more ruthless."[4]
David L. Emerson, reviewing the edited collection The Hobbit and Tolkien's Mythology for Mythlore, commented that while it was worth reading and contained "many noteworthy essays", it had been edited rather too timidly. Thus, Emerson writes, the editor should have asked authors to cut down on digressions, and should have assisted authors whose first language was not English to select the correct words when terms were being misused. Further, the pairs of juxtaposed essays by different authors contained too much repetition that "a more aggressive editor" could have fixed by discussion with the authors. The collection suffered, too, from only having access to the first of three Peter Jackson films of The Hobbit; in Emerson's view, the editor should have waited until all were available.[5]
^Moniz, Emily A. (2010). "[Review] Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien by Bradford Lee Eden". Mythlore. 29 (1/2): 183–186. JSTOR26815552.
