Tolkien Gleanings #82.

* Forthcoming, a look at “Dyeing in Middle-earth”. The author blogs that…

“my talk on ‘Dyeing in Middle-earth’ [has been] accepted for online presentation at this year’s Oxonmoot […] investigating textiles and the dyes that create the distinctive colours worn by various characters […] This means that my work on Sir Bevis will alternate with the new Tolkien project and one will refresh the other”.

Good to know that that Forest-Hill is continuing to work on Bevis, and a look at my new book may interest her in that regard. In Chapter 3 my book has about 12,000 words on Bevis and Arundel, and makes a number of new discoveries. On the interesting matter of dyeing and what dyestuffs might imply about Middle-earth, I wondered the other day if “we put thought of all that we love into all that we make” implied more that it said, re: the making of what Pippin thinks of as “magic” cloaks in Lorien. Could there also be a sort of Elvish ‘emotional infusion’ into such material things, working in combination with that of the physical dyestuffs?

* Locked down for now, a new study of Alterity in Central and Eastern European Illustrations for The Lord of the Rings 1981-1993 (2023), for the University of Plymouth here in the UK. Has a good abstract and centres on… “the comprehensive analysis of five Central and Eastern European illustrated translations of The Lord of the Rings published between 1981 and 1993″. Difficult to tell from the repository’s record-page if it really is a PhD thesis, or just a dissertation being called a thesis (in the UK “thesis” is in most universities a prestigious word reserved only for PhDs, whereas in America it is freely applied to undergraduate and Masters dissertations). But my guess is it’s probably a PhD.

* A possible PhD thesis for the University of Aberystwyth in the UK, “Our Elves, Ourselves” (2023). The “thesis sets out to contest the still prevalent infantilisation and marginalisation of elves and fairies, and to conversely prove their lasting relevance for understanding our own cultural identities as an eerie distorted reflection of humanity’s deepest fears and desires.” The PDF file is currently away with the fairies and ‘404 not found’, so I can’t determine if it really is a PhD thesis.

* Freely online in PDF, a PhD thesis for the University of Georgia in the USA, To Cuivienen There Is No Return: English and American Fantasy Literature as a Second Hagiography (2023). Considers if the writing of fantasy can sometimes be a religious practice, comparable to writing the lives of the saints.

* Signum Press has an innovative new patronage concept, their $25 a month Author’s Circle. Too complex an idea to summarise here, but it appears very worthy. More importantly, yesterday’s podcast interview with Drout suggests it works well.

* On YouTube from this time last year, Συμπόσιο J.R.R. Tolkien | Ελληνικός Σύλλογος Φίλων Τόλκιν. As the saying goes “It’s all Greek to me…” though not quite in this case. From 1 hour and 18 minutes this Greek symposium, held in Athens in May 2022, has an hour in English on…

‘The Hobbits and I: My Travels in Middle-earth’: online talk by English author Brian Sibley, award-winning producer of radio adaptations of Tolkien’s works for the BBC.”

* And finally, a new Google Middle-earth, in the style of Google Earth. The maker says… “I started adding all the names and markdowns in the style of Google Maps using Corel Draw. Took me some days.” The 50Mb “PDF is in CMYK mode and ready for printing.” No Street View, but one imagines someone will cook up an AI for that soon enough, by hooking into one of the more canonical game-worlds. The map’s a touch dark for me on Windows, so I’ve tweaked it a bit in this small preview…

If you want to have a go yourself, the source is here in 5k. It’s made by gamers and described as “the canonical map described by the author”. Though places a forest between Lorien and the Gladden Fields, has the Old Forest be far larger and further south, and adds a large island in the Sea of Rhun. Possibly it’s meant to be earlier in time than Tolkien’s maps? Or perhaps it’s been influenced by games? Still it’s a good starting point, with a few tweaks. Once again it’s very dark and I’ve here tweaked it up in Photoshop…

Don’t try to get a height-map from this, for projection into 3D. That’s been done.