Tolkien Gleanings #68.

* The John Garth public lecture, given this week as the annual Tolkien lecture at The University of Birmingham, is now online on YouTube as “The Houses of Healing: Tolkien, Fantasy, and the Road to Recovery” (May 2023). A very timely choice of topic, as the pandemic formally ceases but the wider healing is just beginning.

* For sale, “Two Pieces of Correspondence Concerning the Dating of the 14th C. Poem, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'”, with Tolkien’s initial reply and a useful scan of the armour terms in Gawain placed along a timeline. By that measure “composition” should have been between 1364 and 1410, at least according to the armour specialists of the 1960s (the letter was 1971). My own preferred date would be 1377, for the composition.

* Two of the large Tolkien tapestries are to go on display again, as part of a large exhibition in Soreze (south of France, in the hills some way back from the coast) from May to October 2023…

“The intention is to compare styles and show how, from one century to another, a fantastic universe is organised visually, becoming capable of arousing the imagination through the combination of text and printed image. From lithographs by Salvador Dali to tapestries representing the works of Tolkien, passing through the classics of ancient mythology and Robinson Crusoe, you will be surprised by the journey offered by this exhibition.

Also many other items relating to fantastical journeys, including medieval illumination work, Aesop’s animals, Robinson Crusoe, Jules Verne, Don Quixote, and Babar the elephant.

* Also from France, where Tolkien is obviously enjoying a second-breakfast year, news of a new book Un chemin inattendu: La somme sur Tolkien: Le seigneur des anneaux (June 2023) by Diego Blanco Albarova. Apparently a …

“Catholic ‘application’ of the parable of The Lord of the Rings, with an introduction by Bishop Jose Ignacio Munilla, Bishop of San Sebastian”

The title might translate, for sense in English, as something like An Unexpected Path through Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. Seems to be a French translation of a well-reviewed Spanish religious best-seller of 2016, which even has a 2018 audiobook. No English edition, so far as I can tell.

* Now on Google Books with a very extensive selection of free pages, Myth, Magic, and Power in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth: Developing a Model for Understanding Power and Leadership. Otherwise the book is still forthcoming, to be published in mid July 2023.

* And finally, the English Midlands town of Evesham remembers the Tolkien family, as part of the ongoing restoration of two 19th century High Street shops.

Elijah Walton (1832-1880), a Birmingham artist who was ‘the Ansel Adams’ of mountain pictures in his day, pioneering a new approach that was as much about weather as geology, though his geology is said to have been perfectly scientific. Rather amazingly he doesn’t appear to have ever had a proper modern artbook or post-Victorian exhibition. Birmingham Museums have only two on his mountain pictures. But one wonders if he was known to Tolkien, as a fellow Brummie? There’s something of Middle-earth in the pictures, and I’d suggest there may even be scope for his home city to now give him a belated retrospective exhibition, in combination with some ‘Tolkien and mountains’ side-rooms? Perhaps even also a side-room on the early Auden’s fascination with bleak upland landscapes. Auden was also a south Birmingham lad.

Many more are at Elijah Walton Mountain Paintings.

The new fourth issue of my Tolkien Gleanings ‘zine is now available. A free 64-page PDF magazine for scholars of the life and works of Tolkien.

Articles, artwork, a book review, vintage pictures, and the extensive notes on new Tolkien items of interest found from April – May 2023. Designed for easy reading on a 10″ tablet.

Available on Gumroad (no sign-up needed, donations welcome) or on Archive.org.

Contributions, especially reviews of less-known non-fiction books on Tolkien, are welcome for future issues.

Tolkien Gleanings #67.

* On YouTube, a “Christopher Tolkien interview compilation 2022” (September 2022). This is over an hour of segments otherwise stuck in other videos. Also includes some clips of Priscilla Tolkien remembering her father, and one section in French with hard-coded subtitles.

* Doxacon (May 2023) has its presentations from the conference on “Orthodox Faith and Fandom” online, in streaming audio. No downloads, although UBlock Origin | ‘Inspect’ link | open the DIV will find the code with the .MP3 link you need. Tolkien items include…

  – Tolkien Panel (discussion panel)

  – “Biblical Typology in The Lord of the Rings”

  – “Spiritual Portraits from the Tolkien Legendarium”

  – “J.R.R. Tolkien and Flannery O’Connor on Christians”

  – “Middle-earth, Writing About the Real, and the Theology of Community”

* In French from 2020, a Radio France audio tour with Vincent Ferre, curator of the Tolkien exhibition at the BNF [French national museum], and astrophysicist Roland Lehoucq, among other contributors, on “Tolkien and the sciences”. Seems to be a topic-focused tour of the vast Middle-earth exhibition recently staged in Paris?

* A new ebook (short, at 80 pages in paper) from an expert British faerie-folklore blogger. I’ve been following his blog for some years now. His No Earthly Sounds: Faery Music, Song & Verse is…

“on their music and song … to try to provide a comprehensive statement as to why the faeries sing and play instruments — and what exactly those tunes sound like.”

* A Masters dissertation for Washington University, “Legends of Light: Crafting middle-grade fantasy in the tradition of Catholic philosophy and medieval visual culture”. It’s a Fine Arts dissertation, which implies encouraging things about the department. Makes reference to Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, among others, for…

“the writing and illustrating of middle-grade literature that mirrors the wonder-inducing experiences of leafing through an illuminated manuscript and stepping into a Gothic cathedral.”

… and the PDF is designed as if a professional book. “Middle-grade” is an American school-system term that means middle childhood, ages 8-12.

* And finally, over in Germany I see that there’s an adult education course in Duisburg on Tolkien’s art and calligraphy…

“‘The Art of Middle-earth — J.R.R. Tolkien as Visual Artist and Calligrapher’ is the title of the last Jour Fixe in the spring semester of 2023. Axel Voss leads the program.”

Yes, I can see that Tolkien and calligraphy would be a good and natural choice for an adult education evening-course. And easy to market and get local press/blog coverage for.

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.

Tolkien Gleanings #65.

* A new open-access article by the technologies librarian at Marquette University, “Anduin: Transforming manuscripts from The Lord of the Rings into a digital experience” (2023). Incidentally I see the word is claimed as a trademark of Middle-earth Enterprises. But surely there is ‘prior art’ on this? It was long the name used to refer to one of the key Lombard kings, as Anduin (526-572 A.D.). It can be found thus in English as early as Procopius, The History of the Warres of the Emperor Justinian (1653)…

… through 1811, the 1857 in the Jahrbuch fur Deutsche Sprache, Litteratur (‘Yearbook for German Language and Literature’), and the 1928 Harvard ‘Loeb’ Classics edition of Procopius in his History of the Wars (Gothic War). Today known to modern historians as King Alboin.

* Leading Tolkien scholar Michael Drout has revealed that… “W.W. Norton will be publishing The Tower and the Ruin, my book on J.R.R. Tolkien, in spring 2024″. The title presumably relates to Tolkien’s parable of the tower, given in his The Monsters and the Critics.

* Publisher Taylor & Francis has released a date and table of contents for the forthcoming book J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe: Context, Directions, and the Legacy. The planned publication date is set for 29th September 2023, and the chapters cover receptions of Tolkien translations in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and perhaps more — though other nations and peoples are not stated in the blurb or TOCs.

* Details of what sounds like an event on Tolkien and translation, in Italy on 27th May 2023… “The event, organised to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien, is part of a series of events to celebrate the author of The Lord of the Rings”. I also see in a press release that the forthcoming Turin Book Fair has a talk about “a national campaign” happening in Italian schools, to do with the same 50th anniversary.

* The German fan magazine Flammifer von Westernis #68 (April 2023) has been published. My translation of the TOCs suggests that among other items it has an interview with Brian Sibley, an article on Tolkien and Switzerland, and a review of the book The Science of Middle-earth.

* And finally, in the latest Journal of Scottish Thought, “The Angel Creatures of George MacDonald’s Phantastes”. This issue is a special on MacDonald and also has an article on “The Literary and Theological Otherworlds in MacDonald’s Fairy Tales”.

Tolkien Gleanings #64.

* Following the recent conference-panel at Niagara Falls (see Tolkien Gleanings #20), there’s now a call-for-papers for a subsequent edited book. “The Function of Relics and Ruins in Middle-earth” is the topic, and the deadline for abstracts is 1st July 2023.

* Only available as an abstract, but an interesting one, “Who are the True Heroes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth Mythology?” (2023)…

“… concludes that each race in Middle-earth has its own representative heroes with each of these characters’ heroic potential and requirements determined not only by their race, but by their individual family history [“familial curses” or an “innate fallen nature” are both suggested]. This perspective is vital to understanding these texts and Tolkien’s intended message correctly.”

I’d add that being orphaned, or half-orphaned, is also a factor to consider. Consider the casually-told familial back-story for Sam which, in dribs and drabs, serves to explain his humility and eventually to burnish his determined heroism. The reader learns (by implication) that Sam was raised with no mother, while it’s made clear at several points that Sam’s gaffer was always ready with a disparaging word or three for his son. Faramir likewise has lost his mother, and has a disparaging father. Even Smeagol, reading between the lines, was raised by his grandmother. Yet so far as I recall there’s never been a study of orphan-age and its uses in LoTR, with outside reference to the rich historical/literary context of orphans and orphan-age in England from c. 1900s-1950s. Also the mythological and folkloric context. The academic survey-book The Orphan in Fiction and Comics since the 19th Century (2018) has nothing to say about Tolkien. Nor does the dissertation “A Character Analysis of the Orphan Figure in Children’s Literature” (2016). But there obviously is something to say. There may be a dissertation for someone in that.

* And finally, among the authors whose works enter the public domain in January 2024, under the 70 year rule, is T.F. Powys. He was one of the Powys brothers, and wrote many Christian fantasy stories and novels, these often having a rather hobbity back-of-beyond setting. Drout’s Tolkien Encyclopaedia puts it in a more polished way, he… “created isolated and distinct localities emphasising a primitivist vision of the rural Englander.” He was well regarded in the pre-war years, and his tales still seem accessible today. But he’s now very obscure even to Christians. Perhaps it’s the time to prepare a “best tales of” volume, with an introduction which enquires into the possibility that Tolkien might have read some of his tales?

Tolkien Gleanings #63.

* Now online, the YouTube recording from the recent UK event “Celebrating 70 years since J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sir Gawain lecture in Glasgow (1953-2023)”. The first of the three talks starts at 20:00 minutes in.

* I see that Cambridge University Press published two new books, just before Christmas 2022. One offers chapters which survey various modern epics, Epic Ambitions in Modern Times and this has a chapter on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion. The other is Cultural Legacies of Old Norse Literature, though snippets suggest only one chapter (by Geeraert) might perhaps have something to say about Tolkien. Both books are paywalled, though both have Kindle ebooks that are far cheaper than otherwise.

* Now available, the first issue of the new open-access journal The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale. Two articles, plus many book reviews.

* A new Masters dissertation in Philosophy, Lord of the Meaning: An Examination of Interpretive Theories (2023), which revolves around the idea of allegory-hunting in The Lord of the Rings. Freely online at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

* And finally, new to me (thanks to a new listing on da.font) are the Middle-earth Fonts by Nancy Lorenz. These have freely-given permission for commercial use.

“Marigold Wild” has some especially nice capital letters, not well previewed on the mixed demo above.

Tolkien Gleanings #62.

* A new Masters dissertation for Belmont University, “Tolkien’s Legendarium: An Answer to the Eternal Question of Why Warfighters Engage in Armed Conflict” (2023). The author… “examines how Tolkien drew upon Northern Courage, Ofermod, Comitatus, and Þræll to illustrate armed conflict in his Legendarium”. The PDF is freely available.

* The next issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research has begun posting articles. Vol. 16, Issue 1 opens with thoughts on how “The Wanderer” might have drawn on both Gothic and Classical influences. Specifically, a warrior-culture’s desire for… “a Germanic equivalent of Alexander the Great”.

* I see that Amon Hen has shipped issues to members, for February and April 2023. The latter being the big issue #300, with “seven articles” according to one blogging recipient. Table of contents? Nope, it seems not. Regrettably Tolkien Gateway’s ToCs are very patchy and the most recent is April 2022. The last issue with ToCs at the Tolkien Collector’s Guide is #206, which was about 12 years ago now.

* Below is “Anton’s plan of Barnt Green”, rescued from a local article that vanished in 2011. Note “The Hollow Oak Tree” on the edge of the village, in a map from a resident recalling the village he had known as a boy in the 1940s. Admittedly that was some 30 years after Tolkien was there, but big oaks take thing slowly. The map can be tallied with a 1926 air photo and Tolkien’s painting of the still un-located “The Cottage”. If one were to get the very high-res version (feel free, I can’t afford it and ‘Britain from Above’ is a pain to buy from) then one could fully tally it against the roof shape and the distinctive windows and end-row location. Most of the other houses in the village look like they have roofs and windows unlike those seen in Tolkien’s painting. So it would be a process of elimination, also guided by Anton’s map. Anton lived at the “Grey Cottage”.

* And finally, advanced Swedish school “students investigated whether the dragon Smaug can fly”. ‘Maybe’ seems to be the answer from their wind-tunnel tests. But only very fast, and very badly. Ah… but did they take account of his intense heat and the consequent thermal up-drafts?

Tolkien Gleanings #61.

* Call for Papers: Creative Philology… “Signum University Press is pleased to announce a call for papers on Philology for an anthology in honour of Professor J.R.R. Tolkien”. Several suggestions lean towards the ‘invented languages’ crowd, but one may offer scope for historians… “The implicit or explicit role, place, and/or impact of philology and philological awareness in public life and popular culture.” Note there is no time-frame specified in this suggestion. Deadline for abstracts: 31st July 2023.

* A Masters dissertation “Writing for the Fantasy Genre through the Christian Worldview” (2023), for Liberty University. Wide ranging, but a key suggestion appears to be that a tale’s “Christian worldview” should allow an author to depict “magic akin to Christian miracles” — even though some in the Bible Belt might think it looks pagan.

* The Elrond’s Library website has been taken offline. It had a large A-Z listing of known Tolkien translations. The Tolkien Collector’s Guide is said to be ingesting the “data” from the site, but I’m uncertain if they’ll also take the site’s PDF essay on “Tolkien and Iceland” (in French). In which case, the Web link I give here goes to the Wayback Machine and an archived PDF.

* The Retreat, Rednal. You’re welcome… happy bidding.

* And finally, the YouTube channel Mapster takes a new eagle’s-eye view of Tolkien’s Incredible Map of Middle-earth (May 2023, 24 minutes). No wobbly hand-held cameras, dim lighting or clunky sound. This is a slick semi-pro production with a Steadicam and slow pans-and-zooms. As such I guess it stands a chance of being taken off YouTube due to copyright, so you may want to download a copy to keep.