I found what appears to be an offshoot of the January 2022 YouTube Tolkien Day lectures, which I discovered and noted here back in the summer. The offshoot video is an excellent short YouTube lecture on “The Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien”.

Many good clear points are made in just 11 minutes, but the young speaker makes the especially pithy point that Tolkien — who must surely be the most read poet of the 20th century due to all the poetry and lyrics in his books — is…

“not even mentioned in any general account of 20th century English poetry, so far as I’m aware”

I recently found what appears to be a similar state of affairs in art history bibliography, judging by the massive new unified art history bibliography for 1910-2007. Just six hits for a simple search on “Tolkien”, and one of those spurious…

* Drawings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1976)

* Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien (1979)

* The invented worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien : drawings and original manuscripts from the Marquette University Collection (44 page exhibition catalogue)

* J.R.R. Tolkien : artiste et illustrateur (1996, French)

* “Elements of myth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and selected paintings of Paul Klee” (1980 microfilm dissertation, probably tangential)

* A collector’s guide to costume jewelry (spurious result, author is also named Tolkien)

… which seems odd. Because some of the many contributing mega-libraries must surely have at least one or two key pre-2007 Tolkien art books in their collections. Although, being charitable, I suppose such books may have proven so popular that they were either stolen, had the best pictures razored out, or simply fell to bits and were discarded.

Perhaps some kind soul could send the relevant publication data to the new openbibart.fr art history bibliography, in the hope that they might add the missing books and articles on Tolkien’s art? Alternatively, perhaps someone might make a comprehensive annotated bibliography on the art, fully up to date?