Tolkien Gleanings #66.
* The Amon Sul podcast has a new long interview with Tom Hillman about his forthcoming book Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many. Start at 39:00 if you just want the section on pity.
* New at the Bodleian Library, a technical article on “Preparing J.R.R. Tolkien’s drawings for display”. No pictures of the pictures, but lots of lovely corner-hinges.
* A pleasing poster design (and enviable castle venue) for a Tolkien event in Italy, organised by the Associazione Italiana Studi Tolkeniani. One of a series happening in May 2023 on the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death, and with the help of what looks like abundant regional sponsors. Translates as: “Say ‘friend’ and enter”, Tolkien after 50: the professor who loved dragons.
* I see Amazon UK has a Kindle ebook edition of Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth (2005), dated 25th January 2023. I assume this still-expensive £28 ebook version is new. Fimi describes the book as not quite fitting the publisher’s over-broad title. Focused on The Lord of the Rings it is… “rather a study of Tolkien’s characters, focusing on how Norse and Celtic material influenced the process of their creation and development […] not so much on motifs and storylines that Tolkien used from his Norse and Celtic sources. […] thought-provoking and well researched […] written in a simple but elegant style” and thus somewhat accessible to non-specialists. The third and fourth chapters especially so, being on travel and landscape features encountered in LoTR (“Bridges, Gates, and Doors”, and “Iceland and Middle-earth”).
* There’s a fledgling “Tolkien Fanworks Scholarship Bibliography” online (last updated July 2022).
* And finally, the finding of the One Ring as a teaching point for students of data management for provenance recovery in the field of archaeology…
From an archiving perspective, good record keeping turned out to be the real hero of the tale. [The] stewards in Gondor tending to their libraries, and providing access to an interested stakeholder, saved the day. Yet even with high-quality data management strategies and metadata in place, it still took wizard-level research and translation skills – both of which were covered in the NADAC Institute earlier in this semester – for Gandalf to decipher the ‘object biography’ of the mysterious ring [then still] in Frodo’s possession back in the Shire.