Tolkien Gleanings #53.
* Available now, a new edition of the open scholarly journal Mythlore, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2023). A half-dozen or so articles are of Tolkien interest, including “Delving Too Greedily: Analyzing Prejudice Against Tolkien’s Dwarves as Historical Bias” (asks if his dwarves were really antagonistic to and destructive of nature, as is often casually assumed). Also a short article by Verlyn Flieger in pursuit of a possible trace of wartime code-breaking in Tolkien, and another book-review for The Gallant Edith Bratt.
* Book publisher Walking Tree has a large round-up of recent reviews of their books, although the Web links are spread across multiple posts. Start at the publisher’s 31st March post and then move forward (i.e. click on each “Newer items” link), downloading the most interesting PDFs as you go.
* Various multi-paper Tolkien sessions are scheduled for the giant International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, 11th-13th May 2023. Including: “Religion along the Tolkienian Fantasy Tradition: New Medievalist Narrative”; “Tolkien and the Middle Ages: Tolkien and the Scholastics”; and “Christopher Tolkien: Medievalist Editor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium I: The Works” followed by “II: The Interactions”. The papers are not (yet) online, but the titles are…
* A new one-hour YouTube recording of a lecture on “Hope Beyond the Walls of the World: J.R.R. Tolkien and Christian Virtue”, given this Easter at Bethlehem College and Seminary, Minneapolis, USA. High-quality audio, of a good clear speaker.
* Thanks to Sebastiano Tassinari, who drew my attention to the fact that the “70 years since J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sir Gawain lecture in Glasgow” event now has tickets available on Eventbrite. The date is 27th April 2023.
* And finally, the blog Tolkien: Medieval and Modern has a new post on the current thinking on the history of ancient Welsh and English…
“the archaeological community until fairly recently [thought] that the Anglo-Saxon invasions were overblown and that the English had a large amount of Briton in them. But a very recent genetic study of Anglo-Saxon graves (Gretzinger, Sayer, Justeau et al, 2022) proved that they indeed had overwhelmingly Germanic heritage.”
This seems to me to be over-claiming for this new study of ancient DNA. What the research actually found was that…
“the individuals who we analysed from eastern England [i.e. mostly what were then the fenlands and coastlands] derived up to 76% of their ancestry from the [adjacent] continental North Sea zone, albeit with substantial regional variation and heterogeneity within sites”.
Many were women. Thus it’s open to question if some of these were descendants of women brought from overseas as ‘old country’ brides for the new settlers of eastern England.