Here are some more picks from the latest public and free Tolkien scholarship, following my last such. That was posted here back in November 2020.

* “The ‘Polish Inkling’: Professor Przemyslaw Mroczkowski as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Friend and Scholar”. May have something relevant, re: exactly when Tolkien first discovered his true ancestry. (Update, no insight re: ancestry, but it does illuminate Tolkien’s publication-history in Poland)

* “The Tale of the Old Forest: The Damaging Effects of Forestry in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Written Works”. “… Finally the essay reconstructs a linear history of the Old Forest through posthumously published materials such as Unfinished Tales of Numenor & Middle-earth to discover the causes of the Old Forest’s villainy”. (Update: lacks the hoped-for focus on deep-history ’causes’, unconvincing on these)

* “Tolkien and the Age of Forgery: Improving Antiquarian Practices in Arda”. “…Drawing on previously unpublished folios from Tolkien’s undergraduate notebooks…”. Nice, anything that gets access to unpublished items from that period is of interest to me. (Update: the “folios” turn out to be just lecture-notes from a first-year lecture he attended)

* “Alcuin and Cynewulf: the Art and Craft of Anglo-Saxon verse”. Text of the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture for 2019. A section at the end… “considers the authorship and identity of Cynewulf”. Yes, since 1954 he’s no longer been considered by academics to have penned the actual earendel lines, but interesting all the same. (Update: the Appendix is substantial, and reconsiders the neglected ‘was he the Bishop of Lindisfarne’ suggestion, which was an early suggestion that was overtaken by later findings re: Mercia).

* “‘I Dwelt There Once’: Home, Belonging and Dislocation in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”. (Philosophy dissertation from Finland, and it looks fairly sound). (Update: An excellent piece of work, very illuminating of an important theme running through LOTR).

* “‘Her Enchanted Hair’: Rossetti, ‘Lady Lilith’, and the Victorian Fascination with Hair as Influences on Tolkien. “Gitter may claim that ‘the Victorian vision of magic hair did not survive long into the twentieth century’, but in Tolkien’s early- to mid-twentienth-century writing it is alive and well, and even embellished upon.”

The reading of my previous listing of interesting recent work yielded a variety of interesting items. Some observations: The Zeppelin essay was terrific and definitely informs the flying Nazgul and various forms of ‘far-seeing’ in LOTR. Tolkien was no palaeographer, despite his good ‘hand’ with a pen and his interest in ‘hands’ both in the speech-gestural and scribal meanings of the word. He was likely at work for the OED by Christmas 1918. The terrific new book The Transmission of Beowulf (2017) very strongly supports Tolkien’s early dating of Beowulf. The Rohirrim can be said to have early Mercian names, if one investigates the full names in the notes Tolkien made for the benefit of his translators. An Exeter Book photographic facsimile was produced in the early 1930s. A new earendel variant has been found in an early Gothic sermon. I also note that too many Tolkien items are still hidden away in tiny inaccessible journals such as Orcrist or obscure and expensive ‘academic library’ chapter collections, e.g. Larsen, Goering, and also the final reading of the earendel variant.