Tolkien Gleanings #95.
* “Clambering Hobbits and Marching Soldiers: Finnish and English Translations of Manner of Motion in Tolkien’s The Hobbit or There and Back Again and
Linna’s Tuntematon Sotilas“ (2023). A Masters dissertation in English for the University of Eastern Finland. Some may may not be too interested in the tumbling and back-flips involved in translation work, but the extraction of all the motion-words from The Hobbit could be a useful time-saver for those writing about motion/ walking / distances. Has extensive colour-coded tables at the back.
* New to me, and uploaded to Archive.org last April, Tolkien and Gordon’s Songs for the Philologists in a 2007 OCR edition with Tolkien’s contributions starred. Has a different version of Sam’s “A Bump o’ the Boot” troll song, than that given in The Lord of the Rings. Tom Shippey has expert translations of four of the more personal poems by Tolkien, to be found in the back of his book The Road to Middle Earth.
* New in Spiked!, “Collecting old books is now a radical act”, an article on recent book censorship. So far as I’m aware, there have only been two such instances affecting Tolkien’s text. Tolkien’s own early removal from The Hobbit of a reference to Bilbo seeing “a tinker” (i.e. itinerant, nomadic hobbit, of a type elsewhere mentioned) ambling by when the dwarves were making their way out of the Shire. And Elrond’s use of “lesser men” at the Council of Elrond in LoTR never made it to Christopher Tolkien’s Silmarillion: while LoTR had “the blood of the Numenoreans became mingled with that of lesser men.”, the Silmarillion had “For the blood of the Numenoreans became much mingled with that of other men”. Those are the only instances I know of.
* Now freely available online “Middle America Meets Middle-earth: American Publication and Discussion of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, 1954-1969” (2003). Described as a Masters degree “paper”, for the School of Information at the University of North Carolina.
* The Urbana Theological Seminary’s Tolkien Conference. I see there have been six conferences so far, the last in 2022. There are some videos online for 2021 and there’s a new 50-minute podcast interview (June 2023) with the main conference organiser.
* And finally, the unfinished teenage novel “The Quest of Bleheris” by C.S. Lewis… “In 2021, Inklings scholar Don W. King was able to provide a full transcription of “The Quest of Bleheris” in Sehnsucht journal. Recently, Sehnsucht has become an open-access journal.” It’s thus freely available. His youthful attempt at a novel was an Arthurian romance in the William Morris style.