* Tolkien Gleanings is now available as a handy 96-page PDF magazine, free on Archive.org and also on Gumroad. All my previous blog Gleanings and MegaTolks are here neatly collected and presented, back to 2019. Plus additional scholarly articles, a review and an interview. Easily searchable, and the Web links have also been checked for obvious breakage.
Drop me a comment on this blog, if you have something to contribute to the next PDF issue. Such as a scholarly review of a little-reviewed book. Unlike the academic journals, I’m not averse to reviews of self-published scholarly books. No poetry or fiction please, unless you’re Pauline Stainer or Alan Garner. Each issue will collect my Tolkien Gleanings blog posts into a bundle, and add some additional texts and pictures of interest. Expect perhaps two issues per year, produced when I feel the urge.
* ““The Ring in Your Voice Tells It”: Voice and the Essential Self in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium” (2021). A free preview of a Masters dissertation, though it has a lengthy abstract.
* “Theology and Fairy-Stories: A Theological Reading of Tolkien’s Shorter Works”, seemingly newly in open-access at a university repository. This was a chapter in the book Tolkien’s Shorter Works (2008). From the same author as the above, and again seemingly new in open-access, is his “Freedom and Providence as Anti-Modern Elements”. This examines… “the depiction of freedom and providence in Tolkien’s fictional works”.
* The Times newspaper ($ paywall) has a Priscilla Tolkien obituary.
* News of the forthcoming book The History of the Hobbit by John D. Rateliff. Being… “a re-issue of the revised 2011 edition”. Pre-ordering now and due to ship on 16th March 2023. The book… “presents the complete unpublished text of the original manuscript of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, accompanied by John Rateliff’s lively and informative account of how the book came to be written and published.” Also has the revised “rewrite” version of The Hobbit, supposed to make it more adult like The Lord of the Rings. Thankfully that was never finished. The 2023 book appears to only have a new cover, to make it uniform with other such volumes? Harper Collins also lists a “Deluxe edition” in slipcase, shipping on the same date.
* And finally, Shropshire Tourist Board on The Wrekin… “It has been suggested that it may have been the inspiration for J R R Tolkien’s Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings”. What kind of tourist actually believes such airy marketing piffle? The ones who ‘spend big’ at the Gift Shoppe, I guess.
The wording is a verbatim filch from the Amberley book 50 Gems of Shropshire (2018), including the mangling of Middle-earth as “Middle Earth”. In this 2018 book the claim is given in passing and is un-referenced. The only likely source I can find, in print, is William Cash’s book Restoration Heart: A Memoir in which he recalls his “Uncle Jonathan” from his childhood, his Uncle being a local amateur archaeologist and hill-walker in the mid/late 1980s… “Jonathan explained that Tolkien used to walk up the Wrekin and used the famous defensive hill as a model for the shire in The Hobbit.” So it sounds like that claim could have seeded a small cloud of local oral confabulation.