* As posted here yesterday, my new musings on the question “Could Tolkien have seen the pre-Raphaelite collection at Birmingham?” along with my newly colorised picture of the interior in 1911.
* I came across a 2017 paper I’d not heard of before, from Tolkien scholar and astronomy specialist Kristine Larsen. The Harvard aggregator for astronomy papers has it as “Oxford Astronomer John Knight Fotheringham (1874-1936) as Unwitting Godfather of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fictional Luni-solar Holiday “Durin’s Day””, with a substantial abstract but no PDF link. My guess is this paper was later partly folded into her Journal of Tolkien Research article on Durin’s Day. The latter is freely available as a full-text .PDF file. But some researchers may also want the original abstract re: some details on Fotheringham.
* The two Mallorn issues produced in 2020 have now popped their locks, these being issues 60 (Summer 2020) and 61 (Winter 2020). They appear to be the latest. Despite still being labelled on their landing pages as “not open-access as it was published within the previous two years”, on a hunch I found I could download the full PDF downloads. I assume some auto-bot has popped the locks for 2023 without any human intervention. Included and of interest to me are…
# 61:
———— “Tolkien on Holiday” surveys Tolkien’s uses of holidays, and his personal thoughts on the real thing. Doesn’t note that a chunk of the early part of Fellowship was written while on holiday.
———— “In the Moon Gleaming” on Tolkien’s uses of ‘Man in the Moon’. Unaware of the Shropshire and Hereford links, which would have been well known to Tolkien as a West Midlands medievalist.
———— “The Tolkien Art Index”, giving a history of building “an online catalogue raisonne of all published Arda-related artwork created by J.R.R. Tolkien” and a short guide to the structure and usage.
———— “There and Back Again? Tolkien’s Brief Visit to Sussex in 1904”. He went for a long extended stay, and most likely also took day-trips out. The article discovers a likely address in Hove (of ‘Brighton & Hove’). With a rider in the form of “Tolkien in King’s Heath” in the following issue, which picks up a misinterpretation of the 1901 census (though relating to King’s Heath in Birmingham, rather than Hove).
———— A good review of Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist and yet another short review of Tolkien and the Classics (it must have had 20 or more by now).
———— A long letter of reply to the earlier “Checking the Facts” article, which had been critical of certain aspects of Tolkien studies.
# 62:
———— “Tolkien’s Fantasy Landscape”, a fine lead article which examines a Tolkien “1915?” dated painting in detail, and with painstaking topographic and astronomical cross-referencing. Also has much to say about Tolkien’s brother Hilary.
———— A joint review of the recent Oxford, New York City and Paris Tolkien exhibitions. Notes the great popular successes, each in a different way but alike in terms of vast visitors numbers and red-hot catalogue / book sales. Has nothing to say about any serious notice given to the shows, if any, by weighty art-world critics. I had to laugh at the glowing description of the ticket system at Oxford… “a cleverly designed ticket booking system guaranteed that every visitor had the impression of entering a shrine of peace and quiet with enough space and time to take it in”. When I was there the ushering in/out was abandoned and the place was rammed. I managed to stay in for well over two hours.
———— Reviews of the books Something Has Gone Crack, Tolkien’s Cosmology, and a rather pickily critical one for Garth’s The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien.
* Birmingham Museums now have their long-awaited CC0 collections online. It’s been around in various forms since 2018, but now at last it has good-sized downloads freely available without sign-up. My searches suggest there’s not a great deal of Tolkien interest in there, but there is a pleasing old pencil sketch of what appears to be the Library entrance corridor in Tolkien’s school on New Street. Possibly an unfinished drawing, or meant to evoke the original appearance of the interior… as I see lines hinting at a tall bookcase on the right-hand wall.
* And finally, one for the book-sniffers. Dr. Joe Schwarcz on the smell of old and new books at YouTube (2021).