Excellent news. Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s road-widening contractors have accidentally completely destroyed what was (to my mind) a rather disrespectful sculpture of Wedgwood, a stolid work which few will mourn and which implied he had a ‘mind of bricks’. This had long languished in front of his house on Festival Park. Good riddance.
Monthly Archives: February 2023
Ent vase
Another for a hypothetical “Strange and Surreal Stoke” ceramics exhibition at the Potteries Museum. An “ent vase” by Anita Harris, who works at Longton in the south of the city.
Tolkien Gleanings #37
* Published yesterday, the new book Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist: Second Edition Revised and Expanded. A simultaneous release in hardback, paperback and Kindle ebook.
* On Archive.org, free to borrow, J.R.R. Tolkien: a descriptive bibliography (1993). This is an out-of-print table-trembler of 434 pages. The book is deemed ‘collectable’, and thus appears to be effectively unavailable to scholars except at Archive.org.
* Newly announced at the Avila Institute, SSF279: Healing the Imagination: A Reading Course in The Lord of the Rings. Dates are “to be decided” but, judging by its position on the course-list, summer 2023 seems likely. Avila is a legitimate ‘Catholic online studies’ teaching service, with a global reach.
* A one-hour video from the “Tolkien et le monotheisme” conference in May 2022. On YouTube, with auto-translation of sub-titles to English. The conference was…
“organised by the CUFR of Dembeni in its amphitheatre. The conference is entitled ‘Tolkien and Monotheism: Religion in the life and work of J.R.R. Tolkien'” … “though the Catholic religion had a preponderant place in the life of the writer, his writing nevertheless reveals a cosmogony not simply reducable to this monotheistic religion.”
* And finally, a “family photo” of ‘Bag End’ made by a later owner. Uploaded 2018 by a descendent, and seemingly un-noticed by Tolkien historians. Regrettably a very poor and small picture, possibly taken out of an 8mm cine-reel by the look of it, with an ND grad filter on the lens. This is about the best I can do with it in Photoshop…
Definitely not a pristine glass-plate picture, but better than the source:
My guess would be post-war, maybe the later 1960s? There are of course many half-timbered buildings dotted about Dormston. But for confirmation of the site, cross-reference with the pictures of the real ‘Bag End’ at the Tolkien Library.