Tolkien Gleanings #93.

* ‘Collecting Tolkien: A History of a Tolkien Obsession’, a talk at Brighton library (at Rochester, near Buffalo and Toronto)…

“Tolkien enthusiast Georg Nadorff will describe … four decades of book collecting, encompassing tens of thousands of individual volumes and items.”

The talk has been and gone (22nd June) but university collections staff may be interested in making contact, and perhaps there’s also a recording of the talk available?

* I wonder if Mr. Nadorff has this one? New on Archive.org to borrow, the book What’s the name, please? A guide to the correct pronunciation of current prominent names (1936)…

Presumably had via, and quoting, a letter from Tolkien himself.

* A new blog post on “Tolkien the Realist” in relation to Romanticism. Being a response to a recent interview… “In a recent interview in The Bookmonger [the podcast] by John J. Miller of the National Review, Carol Zeleski describes the Inklings as “the last of the Romantics.” In the case of J.R.R. Tolkien, I could not disagree more.”

* Open-access in the new 2023 edition of British and American Studies (Romania), “Negotiating Meaning in The Translation of Riddles in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit”.

* And finally, a new blog post in Wormwoodiana, “Those Were the Days of the Comet” suggests why the birth of fantasy and science-fiction was accompanied — or in some cases perhaps spurred by — bright comets in the sky…

“One explanation offered for the sequence of spectacular comets during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is that a perturbation of the Oort Cloud, out on the boundary of interstellar space, caused them to be jolted from their remote orbits and sent curving inwards towards the Sun on millennia-long parabolic paths.”

Those who have read my new book Tree & Star will know that the birth of the Legendarium was accompanied by such a naked-eye / day-visible comet over England.