My last big Mega-Tolk round-up was only a month ago, but there are already more items of interest freely available.
* In Mythlore, “Soup, Bones, and Shakespeare: Literary Authorship and Allusion in Middle-earth”. Includes observations on what are claimed to be Tolkien’s “literary allusions to Shakespeare’s Macbeth” in The Lord of the Rings.
* In Journal of Tolkien Research “Hearing Tolkien in Vaughan Williams?”. Explores the “juxtaposition of their approach and philosophies” re: the much-loved English music (and now apparently adopted as Tolkien-ish) “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), The Lark Ascending (1914), and Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934)”. Excellent. Also notes a Birmingham connection…
Samwise Gamgee in Lord of the Rings sings the tale of the Stone troll “to an old tune” — and Tolkien himself sang this poem in Sayer’s tape recorder with slightly different words in a tune that, according to Sayer, is “an old English folk-tune called ‘The Fox and Hens.’” This tune, as Bratman notes, is a Birmingham variant tune for the folksong “The Fox and the Goose” or “The Fox Went out on a Chilly Night.”
* Mythlore “Review of Musical Scores and the Eternal Present: Theology, Time, and Tolkien (2021).”
* A Kirk Center review of In the House of Tom Bombadil (2021). A slim but apparently perceptive new study of Bombadil by a pastor. Sounds interesting, if rather short.
* A review in Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research of Middle-earth, or There and Back Again (2020). The review has a misleading comment on the Pearl, re: the casket.
* Review of Eternal Light and Earthly Concerns: Belief and the Shaping of Medieval Society (2021). On the medieval practice of always… “lighting the altars of churches” [at all times. This] “Christian practice of lighting in fact stemmed from ‘pagan’ practices and Old Testament precedents.”
Also noted along the way was a not-free retail book new to me, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders (2018). Mostly historical (though makes no mention of scriptorium/library cats), and only has one chapter that is a rather scattergun survey of various libraries in fantasy fiction. But this chapter has a substantial section which usefully surveys the range of books and libraries in Middle-earth — this boil down to about six pages once the superfluous publication history of the Hobbit/LoTR is discounted. You do have to wonder if an author who talks of “the elf-city of Rivendell” has actually read The Lord of the Rings, but the survey does appear comprehensive. A passing aside also claims that Tolkien was influenced by Borges, though any glance at the relevant dates would have cast doubt on this. While it’s not impossible that Tolkien saw “The Garden of Forking Paths” in English in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (Aug 1948), Borges otherwise only arrived in English in 1962. True, Tolkien had learned to read some Spanish in his youth, and perused Father Francis’s library which included books and dictionaries in Spanish. But I doubt he then went to enjoyed Spanish contemporary fiction, or that he would have even encountered Borges in Spanish print form. There was no love the other way, with Borges finding his sampling of Tolkien (probably just the first chapters of Fellowship) “rambling on and on” and tiresome. Elsewhere he calls the tale “pointless”.