Tolkien Gleanings #96.
* A new article at the Archives and Manuscripts Dept. of the Bodleian Library…
“As some of you may know, since 2011 the Bodleian has been archiving websites, which are collected in the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive (BLWA) and made publicly accessible through the platform Archive-it […] you can find websites of societies dedicated to the study of famous authors whose papers are kept at the Bodleian [Tolkien, Larkin, etc]. We are happy to consider suggestions from our users about websites that could be suitable additions to the collection.”
* The journal Fantasy Art and Studies has produced five new issues since I last looked (back then they had just released the “Arthurian Fantasy” issue, Autumn 2019). The journal is mostly in French, but usually has a few English items. I see there was a Spring 2021 “Enchanted Music” issue, which had the essay “Singing into Being: Defamiliarisation as Creation in J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis” in English. Free-to-read online, in flipbook form.
* A two-page article in the latest edition of the British paid-for magazine The Oldie introduces unsuspecting oldies to Tolkien. The article seems quite a reasonable two-page introduction, for those who previously had no idea at all about Tolkien the man.
The article’s author lived in Oxford in the 1950s, and recalls that Tolkien… “lived for a while in what looked like a blackened witch’s house opposite my lodgings in Holywell Street.” This “witch house” would be 99 Holywell Street (1950-53), which today appears to have had its thick black grime partly sand-blasted back to the pale ashlar stone. Historic Oxford has it that his son Christopher Tolkien then had the house from 1954-1967. In which case… was this the primary site at which Christoper and his assistant Guy Gavriel Kay worked on The Silmarillion? Or was that work done elsewhere? Update: No, the work was done elsewhere, in a large barn at the farm where Christopher then lived.
* And finally, composer Paul Corfield Godfrey and the Welsh Volante Opera / Prima Facie have this week released the fifth and final part of his ‘The Silmarillion as opera’ series of recordings.