Tolkien Gleanings #97.
* New on Amazon, a pre-order page for Thomas Honegger’s book Tweaking Things a Little: Essays on the Epic Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and G.R.R. Martin. The book is to be a Walking Tree title of 466 pages, and according to Amazon is due on 19th July 2023. Though some other sources say September, while Honegger’s own site says August. No sign of a table-of-contents as yet.
* Newly and freely online, the Presentation Abstracts book PDF for the forthcoming conference Mythmoot X: ‘Homeward Bound’. The talk on “The Hobbit and Middle Age” looks intriguing, considering as it does Tolkien’s appreciation of “the nature and value” of late middle age and old age. That’s an overlooked aspect, and may even have had an especially useful impact on the world at a critical time — in the form of LoTR influencing the heavily youth-oriented student counterculture circa 1966-68.
* ‘J.R.R. Tolkien – the forgotten text interviews’ offers Tolkien’s side of the magazine and newspaper interviews he gave, and has these read by one of the better old TTS generated robo-voices. TTS voices have improved greatly since ye olde days of Microsoft Sam, but are not as good as the new AI voice clones. The older TTS ones are however still useful, in that they make it easy to distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘fake’. ‘Part One’ (40 minutes, March 2023) is on YouTube. It seems that ‘Part Two’ has not yet been posted.
* Nancy Bunting is seeking information about the coastal command structure relating to the First World War Acoustic Mirror at Kilnsea. Tolkien was posted to the coast as an officer, but… “The sticking point is who was in command of the acoustic mirror at Kilnsea? We believe it has to be the Royal Garrison Artillery at Spurn Point, but we don’t have documentation”. Her enquiry, on the Great War Forum, is almost an essay in itself. However, this also notes that…
“I need to make if very clear that even though Tolkien was an experienced and trained Signals officer (we know he had training for and used a Fullerphone in the fall of 1916), he was NOT in the loop for the acoustic mirror [a large sonic monolith, used to track incoming Zeppelin airship bombers]. That was in a different jurisdiction.”
* And finally, Stone Ramblers will be undertaking a 10 mile walk over Tolkien Trail & Great Haywood on 19th October 2023. They’re local, Stone being the pleasant railway/river town between the city of Stoke-on-Trent and the county-town of Stafford.