Now available for download, Tolkien Gleanings issue 3. My free 48-page ‘zine for Tolkien scholars, collectors, and others. Also available via Gumroad.
Among other things, this issue collects my recent ‘Tolkien Gleanings’ blog posts into one handy PDF. The clickable Web links are retained in the PDF.
Tolkien Gleanings #51.
* “The bees of Beorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional Middle-earth” (August 2022), a Bee Histories article by a bee specialist. Warning: the site pops up a page-blocking overlay. If you want more on Tolkien, bees and honey-cakes, then the Tea with Tolkien podcast had a guest episode “On Beorn & Beekeeping” (2019) with beekeeper Daniel Stewart.
* The Archdiocese of Madrid has launched a crowd-funder… “to create the world’s largest geo-location map along a walking trail based on The Lord of the Rings“. This being their… “79 mile ‘El Camino del Anillo’ in the Sierra Norte hills”, about 20 miles north of the Spanish capital city of Madrid.
Launched in 2020, this is an apparently “Tolkien-esque” and openly Catholic eight-day hill-walking trail. The idea seems to be to take a depopulating landscape and — over time, building on what’s already there — to make it a circular journey through varied landscapes evoking those of The Lord of the Rings.
* The Poetic Edda: A Dual-Language Edition (2023). In this new free Creative Commons PDF book of nearly 900 pages… “there are thirty-six texts, giving us one of the fullest translations of the work” into English. Not to be confused with the Prose Edda.
* And finally, The Hollywood Reporter has seen Amazon’s viewing figures for That Recent TV Series, and reports this week that “only 37 percent” of buyers actually finished watching the eight-episode series.
A local book I’d missed, back in 2019, A Brief History of Stoke-on-Trent…
“Seeks to bring some of the city’s history to a general audience in a brief, manageable way”
Apparently written in the 1970s by a Burslem man, and now polished and brought to publication by the man’s grandson. Has almost nothing about pottery making and selling, according to one irked reviewer who seems to have assumed the cover reflected the contents. But that lack is understandable, since such intricate and abundant business history would swamp a short book. Apparently it moves from the district’s ancient history (sounds good to me) into recalling some of the local working-class living conditions that were within living memory in the 1970s.
Who knew? Over 200 issues of the magazine Widowinde (‘Bindweed’). Published out of Leek in North Staffordshire as a membership magazine for The English Companions. The cover typography might be improved, but the contents look fabulous. There’s an index to the first 199 issues. Annual members (£20+) can “purchase a full set”, presumably in PDF, but the cost of this extra purchase is not stated.
New on Archive.org, the vintage spoken-word LPs Owd Grandad Piggott: Stories in Potteries Dialect (1977) and Mower Owd Grandad Piggott (1983).
Other new items on Archive.org of local interest:
North Staffordshire Music (1977).
Tolkien Gleanings #50.
* Forthcoming is a new scholarly book from Kent State University Press, titled Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many. Due toward the end of 2023, with Amazon UK currently offering a shipping-date perilously close to Christmas, “12th December”. The publisher’s blurb has the book as a…
remarkable work of close reading and analysis, Thomas P. Hillman gets to the heart of the tension between pity and the desire for power in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. As the book traces the entangled story of the One Ring and its effects, we come to understand Tolkien’s central paradox: while pity is necessary for destroying the Ring, it cannot save the Ring-bearer from the Ring’s lies and corruption. […] Instead of turning his interpretation to allegory or apologetics, Hillman demonstrates how the story works metaphorically, allowing Tolkien to embrace both Catholic views and pagan mythology.
* Also forthcoming later in 2023, a new graphic novel about the young Tolkien, provisionally titled Tolkien: Lighting Up The Darkness. That title may change before publication, since the Estate would appear to have a clear case of trademark infringement regarding the front-cover’s sizing, styling and colour of ‘Tolkien’…
The book lists as “112 pages”, so it’s not the sort of chunky 240-page graphic novel that an English reader might expect. Indeed, those 112 pages are probably padded, since I see the French site Tolkiendil mentions “82 pages” of actual story. Which suggests it’s a French BD. Yes, turns out that it’s an English translation of a BD already available in French, Tolkien: Eclairer les Tenebres (2019), and in Italian as Tolkien: Rischiarare le Tenebre (2021). A Tolkiendil review picked up some small factual errors, but was generally positive. The interior art looks excellent.
* The new French fannish magazine Generation Cites d’Or #10 (2023) is a “Tolkien Special”, with articles.
* And finally, in May 2023 Canada’s Maple Moot will happen in Toronto, taking the theme of ‘Northern Spirit’…
“an ancient virtue […] we will explore the meaning of Northern Spirit, its thematic influence in Tolkien’s legendarium, and its origins in fantasy and literature.”
Tolkien Gleanings #49.
* Newly published in the UK, the hardcover edition of the Tolkien book The Battle of Maldon: together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth. The previously unpublished material here is reported to be Tolkien’s own prose translation of the Anglo-Saxon “The Battle of Maldon”, and his unpublished lecture “The Tradition of Versification in Old English” (late 1920s?).
* A one-hour YouTube lecture on “J.R.R. Tolkien on Homes and Havens” (2021). The audio is excellent. This has now become a paywalled scholarly article of the same title, published in the new edition of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture (Spring 2023).
* A recent Texas Tolkien Talk Podcast discussed the recent biography The Gallant Edith Bratt with the book’s author Nancy Bunting.
* A Signum University announcement this week, Introducing “Tolkien Illustrated: Picturing the Legendarium”. This being a trailer for a Summer 2023 online course at Signum, booking now and starting…
“Monday 1st May 2023, with a one week break from 19th-23rd June for Mythmoot. […] ‘Tolkien Illustrated’ will include two 90-minute live lectures Mondays and Thursdays 10:00-11:30 AM ET (3:00-4:30 PM GMT) and one one-hour discussion session per week as assigned (four hours total weekly).”
* And finally, a demo of a fragment of The Silmarillion as read by an ElevenLabs AI-generated TTS voice. Rather pleasing and clear, considering it’s just a quick demo generated from YouTube clips of the older ‘grandpa’ Tolkien speaking to the media in the 1960s. So far as I’m aware, there’s no legal infringement. You can’t copyright the sound and accent of a voice, due to the ‘prior art’ spread among millions of previous voices.
An interesting visual idea for a ‘viewing tower’ variant on Stoke’s bottle-kilns, as seen in the latest edition of The Critic…
“in County Kildare, a giant helter-skelter of a building put up in 1743 as a granary.”
Perhaps the city might one day want to consider putting up some ‘new’ bottle-kilns, while grabbing some worldwide publicity for such via an open architectural design competition.
New on Libivox a free reading of “The Cone” by H.G. Wells. Regular readers of this blog will recall the local Stoke-on-Trent setting of the Basford Bank / and the ironworks (not yet a steelworks) at Etruria. I have a fully annotated version of this this macabre revenge tale, to be found in my book H.G. Wells in the Potteries.
As with all Librivox audio readings, this one is in the public domain (i.e. is free to re-use in any way you want).
