Tolkien Gleanings #89.

* Found, another survey-book on nature and landscape in Middle-earth. This time it’s the Italian book Paesaggi della Terra di Mezzo: La Natura nelle opere di Tolkien (2021) (‘Landscapes of Middle-earth: Nature in the works of Tolkien’). From Eterea Edizioni in 266 pages, it appears to be a brisk and systematic trot through most the well-known regions of Middle-earth. Plus some specific looks at…

  – The gardens of the Shire;
  – Goldberry’s flowers;
  – In white, green and gold: the colours of the Rohirrim;
  – Ithilien between permanence of the past and resistance to change;
  – The deserts of Sauron;
  – Hortus Conclusus, body and soul care in the healing garden;
  – On the Istari and their staffs;
  – The stars and celestial objects.

* I see that the book’s publisher Eterea Edizioni also has a themed scholarly Tolkien journal in Italian, currently at issue #3. #1: Tolkien and the Fourth Age, #2: Tolkien and Translation; and #3: Beowulf in Oxford: Tolkien’s Literary Style. This last is the latest 2022/23 edition. Looking though the auto-translated contents lists I see, among others…

  – #1. “Make It Modern! Tolkien, Pound and the Search for the Lost Eden”; “Tolkien and Yeats: With Mythology to Meet the Challenge of Immortality”; and “Re-enchanting an Unenchanted World: Tolkien and Lovecraft”.
  – #2. “The Name of The Map: Cartographic Translations of the World of Tolkien” and “What meteor, that night, came down”: Tolkien and the Victorian Man-in-the-Moon”.
  – #3. “Like A Beat: The Rhythm of The Lord of the Rings“.

I see that Eterea Edizioni are also partners in the forthcoming Italian conference ‘The Animals of Middle-earth’, set for 21st-23rd July 2023.

* At Mount Saint Vincent University, “Dr. Anna Smol receives award for research excellence” for her work in Tolkien scholarship. Mentioned in the news release is her relatively new Tolkien and Alliterative Verse website.

* And finally, Stoke-on-Trent & Newcastle-under-Lyme Ramblers will be walking the “Tolkien Trail & Great Haywood” (10 miles) on Thursday, 19th October 2023. Two of their scheduled walks may also interest researchers who are visiting boots-on-the-ground Sir Gawain & The Green Knight landscape walkers: Rushton Spencer and Bosley Cloud; and Wildboarclough.

Tolkien Gleanings #88.

* An event on the visual adaptations of Tolkien’s works, to be held at the University of Gottingen, Germany. Billed as a “seminar”, but looks rather substantial and taking place over three days on 27th-29th October 2023. I’m thus guessing that “seminar” has a very different meaning to Germans-using-English, compared to its use in the English-speaking world. Good to know, if that’s the case.

* “Les portes de la Terre du Milieu : La notion du seuil dans l’univers de Tolkien” (‘The Doors of Middle-earth: the idea of the threshold in the worlds of Tolkien’). A paywalled book chapter in French, but with an English abstract. Examines… “the symbolism and the role of the door in […] The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings [using three] approaches, namely the symbolic, the mythocritical, and the actancial”. The latter method is unfamiliar in English but arises from linguistic semiotics (of the early ‘sender-receiver’ type), and was influenced by attempts to systematise European folk-tales. The approach tried to boil down a quest story to its simplest parts. In plain English these might be: archetype/hero/actor, the quest, the helper, the enemy, the intermediary, the gift-giver or ‘receiver’ of the hero — all examined in a quasi-scientific manner in relation to the motivated actions they take in the expected narrative.

* In Ad Fontes: A Journal of Protestant Letters, and freely available online, the long “Tolkien: Naive Storyteller or Political Realist?” (November 2022).

* In the VoegelinView, and freely available online, thoughts on “Gardening and Nobility in Tolkien” (September 2018).

* A Lewis/Tolkien religious retreat-course in America, Poets for the Kingdom: The Sacramental Stories of Lewis and Tolkien. Booking now for November 2023.

* And finally, new on Archive.org to borrow is The Study of Names in Literature: A Bibliography (1978).

Tolkien Gleanings #87.

* Details of a forthcoming paper in the paywall journal Tolkien Studies, “An Archaeology of Hope and Despair in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen”. Abstract only. Uses drafts… “available in the Tolkien Archives at Marquette University, only some of which have been previously published in The Peoples of Middle-earth, as well as one discovery in the Bodleian”.

* The latest Vol. 16 | No. 1 issue for the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research has posted the first two articles, including ““We Could Do with a Bit More Queerness in These Parts”: An Analysis of the Queer against the Peculiar, the Odd, and the Strange in The Lord of the Rings. This tries to detect some parallels with the sexual use of the word, but along the way has a very useful survey of similar words. These examples are presented in even more useful word-tables.

* A call for a forthcoming Tolkien Society Online Seminar 2023 on ‘Tolkien and Religion’, set for the end of November 2023. Deadline for papers: 8th September 2023. Seems to offer a wide scope, within the topic…

* “Tolkien: sua vida, suas obras”. Some details, on YouTube, of a June 2023 conference. Held in Brazil. The page lists five speakers, but not what they were speaking about.

* And finally, new on Archive.org to borrow is a so-so scan of Smaug: unleashing the dragon. A 100-page “making of” artbook which details the making of the magnificent Smaug in the movie version of The Hobbit. Whatever the many faults of the cinema release of The Hobbit, the 15-minute Smaug section wasn’t one of them. Actually, The Hobbit on the screen can be kind-of rescued. /Spoilers/ The “Empty Sea Edit” fan-edit is really very good… right up until the dwarves tip out of their barrels at Laketown. At that point you immediately stop watching and switch to Bluefax’s unabridged cast + music audio version. Listen through Laketown, finding the secret entrance to the mountain, and right up until the point when Bilbo goes down the tunnel. Then go back to the movie for a visual Smaug. After the short Smaug section, nothing can rescue the rest of the movie… so it’s back to Bluefax and headphones to finish.

Tolkien Gleanings #86.

* I was very pleased to find the book Loremasters and Libraries in Fantasy and Science Fiction: A Gedenkschrift for David Oberhelman (2022). Who knew? I hadn’t heard even a whisper of it. This chunky 400-page book contains, among other things, a reprint of “A Brief History of Libraries in Middle-earth: Manuscript and Book Repositories in Tolkien’s Legendarium” (otherwise trapped in the out-of-print Inklings hardcover Truths Breathed Through Silver). It has several others relating to Middle-earth, and also the Tolkien scholar Kristine Larsen on “‘Books! Best Weapons in the World’: How Libraries Save the World in Popular Culture”. Looks fun, and doesn’t appear to drift off too far into TV and film. It even has a somewhat affordable Kindle ebook edition at £7.39 ($10).

* The Music of Paul Corfield Godfrey website anticipates his upcoming recording of the final part of his grand Silmarillion opera set. This final part, plus a full boxed collection-set with a 128-page booklet, are both set for release on 23rd June 2023.

* The Imaginative Conservative has a new essay which asks “Tolkien’s Traditionalism: Conveniently Forgotten?”

* Rather too late now, but YouTube has a recording of Professor Nick Megoran, Newcastle University, on “What’s the point of university during a pandemic?” (Summer 2020)… “This talk draws on the wartime writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, professors of English Literature, who grappled with similar questions during the Second World War.”

* New to me is Tolkien & illustration – Artists in Middle-Earth: from text to image… “This academic blog is dedicated to the illustrations for Tolkien’s texts in English editions.” Appears to have begun in 2020, part of the writing of a PhD thesis. The researcher will be presenting at the forthcoming Oxonmoot.

* And finally, some advance notice from the eminent scholar of the weird and fantastic S.T. Joshi. He has joined with the Nightlands festival team, which recently delivered an excellent festival, and…

We are now planning a much larger event in two years’ time, with panel discussions, perhaps an art show, and much else. In all frankness, we will consciously plan this event as an antidote to the increasingly narrow and hyper-political conventions that now dominate the realms of science fiction and fantasy. We shall have freewheeling discussions (without any attempt to censor unpopular views) and avoid political ranting in its entirety. Let’s see what happens!

This is more at the spooky end-of-the-lane footpath signposted to ‘the weird’ / ‘literary horror’, but some Gleanings readers may be interested in making contact to find out more.

Tolkien Gleanings #85.

* The new online Guide to Tolkien’s Letters is starting to fill up.

* In Italy, the hill-village of Chianciano Terme rises from the hills about 40 miles south of Florence and 60 miles north of Rome. The place is set to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien…

over three days, from 30th June to 2nd July 2023, offering insights from internationally renowned speakers, and multiple cultural events in Chianciano, from the Parco Fucoli and Parco Acqua Santa to the historic centre. “Chianciano Terra di Mezzo: Journey into Tolkien’s genius” was developed by the town with the ViviChianciano (‘Living Chianciano’) public-private network which is made up of over 50 companies from Chianciano, and which obtained the patronage of the national Ministry of Culture and the Associazione Italiana Studi Tolkieniani (‘Italian Association for Tolkien Studies – Tolkien Society of Italy’).”

* A talk by Tom Shippey on “Politics in Tolkien: What We Can Learn From Hobbits” (2015). As AI-cleaned audio, newly made from this almost un-listenable ‘big ballroom, massive echo’ recording on YouTube.

* New on Archive.org to borrow, a good scan of Essays And Studies: Collected for the English Association (1953, Vol. 6, New Series). With Tolkien’s “Beorhtnoth” as the lead item.

* The March 2023 issue of ICMA News had a review-report on the 2022 ‘J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript’ exhibition.

* And finally, “The 16 types of graduate supervisor, by J.R.R. Tolkien”.

Tolkien Gleanings #84.

* Following on from my idle musing about elvish handicraft in Gleanings #82, “Medievalism, the Lost Book, and Handicraft in The Lord of the Rings” (2022), a Masters dissertation for Laurentian University in Canada. Freely available online. Suggests, among other things, that Tolkien’s eventual mass-market success helped to keep alive the connection in the thinking public’s mind between fine handicrafts and the medieval…

Clearly the association of handicraft and the Middle Ages exists before and beyond The Lord of the Rings, as evidenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, but the continued popularity of The Lord of the Rings and subsequent medievalisms have only heightened the association between handicraft and the Middle Ages.

* Somewhat related, a Masters disseration for the Dept. of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University, Australia. “Harmony and folklore: the function of the forest in Middle-earth” (2022). Freely available online. Offers, via Tolkien…

“a close reading of the texts to track how forests function within the medievalism of Victorian England, and the changing medievalism of the [early] twentieth century.”

* A Masters dissertation for Leiden University “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Modern Philosophies of Death and Immortality” (2022). Freely available online. Looks rather interesting, in that I would never have thought to use both Existentialism and Posthumanism to address Tolkien’s concerns on these topics.

* A page for the new Amon Hen #301, with a full table-of-contents. A new addition to the gappy coverage of the title at Tolkien Gateway wiki.

* In Gleanings #83 I admired the new cover for a forthcoming 2024 book. Why the in-filling on the letters marking “Gondor” I wondered? To get around an Estate trademark, presumably.

This led me to note some clear ‘prior art’ in the word “Gondor”. For instance it’s trivial to find…

  – “At Gondor is the residence of the king, Elias by name, Ate or Nogoos, called by the Abyssinians” (Missionary Journal and Memoir of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, 1829).

  – “the most important prince was the party called by Europeans an Emperor, but known to Abyssinians as the Athie or Negus, whose capital was Gondor, in Amaraha, or the south-western division of the kingdom [of what is now Ethiopia]” (Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 1868).

Page scans show these are not OCR errors. The use of the word in English has continued to the present day, though it is now sometimes also called Gonder or Gondar by aid/development agencies. Capital, seat of the king (an ancient Christian ruler, indeed), in the south… it all sounds rather familiar. Much later, in 1971, Tolkien mused that the 1935-37 Italy-Abyssinia war may have brought it frequently to his eye in the newspapers, but he also recalled that it had entered the legendarium early and related to ond = ‘stone’.

* And finally, Lord of the Rings Stamps for Postage – 10 x Royal Mail 1st Class (2004). I’m faintly amazed to see these still available at summer 2023, on Amazon and at non-collector prices. £15 for ten, at present, not much more than it might cost to buy 10 x regular 1st’s these days. The Christmas and themed picture-stamps are said to be still valid, while the plain ones are defunct unless they have a bar-code on the side.

Tolkien Gleanings #83.

* The Digital Tolkien Project has posted abstracts for three upcoming talks. Talks on how an innovative interactive “digital reading environment” might help scholars visualise and navigate the 12-volume History of Middle-earth; on “the relationship of the Second Age Tale of Years to the text of Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales“; and on “Linguistic Variation in Tolkien’s Writing Styles”.

* News of a new ‘for academic libraries’ book of the £85 variety, Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Cartographies. Due 22nd Feb 2024 from Bloomsbury Academic. Presumably based largely on the freely available 2019 PhD thesis from the same author. The new book has added a pleasing cover…

I assume the filling-in of the word “Gondor” is because of the Estate’s trademark.

* And talking of book covers, here’s a peep at the cover for the book and exhibition catalogue Sur les traces de Tolkien et de l’imaginaire medieval: Peintures et dessins de John Howe, due to ship in a few weeks.

Also “Online ticketing is open” for the French summer show for which this is the catalogue. “Online” here meaning tickets to the show, not an online virtual tour (yet).

* Somehow I’d completely missed the book The Mirror Crack’d: Fear and Horror in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Major Works (2008). Not even my Lovecraft blog had noted it, at the time. Issued in hardcover only, and Amazon UK suggests it’s now well out-of-print and unavailable. Among others, Mythlore gave it a review. This and other reviews suggest a usefully unique volume of patchy quality, though The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies noted that the essays do “cohere clearly in their investigation of Tolkien’s medieval sources”. Also useful, I’d suggest, for not spending half the book on the movies.

* A new study offers a useful reminder to scholars that articles by academic historians in leading journals have a 24.27% error rate in their use of quotation references. And that’s after peer-review and proof reading. The new study in the journal Scientometrics asked if the references actually… “substantiate the propositions for which they are cited”. Around 25% don’t. That sounds about right to me, from my experience. If planning to rely on an evidential quote from such a source (usually time-pressed university academics, rather than independent scholars) always dig back to get the source, if that’s possible. Be wary of their use of titles, too. For instance, in the academic book Horror in Architecture (2013) I recently found mention of “the cursed De La Poer family of Lovecraft’s The Drowned”, for which the title should of course be “The Rats in The Walls”. No-one had picked up this obvious error regarding one of the greatest horror tales of the 20th century. Tom Shippey has often also amusingly observed similar errors in literary academia. All this is why, in my opinion, full footnotes are required (ideally with the full reference, which is what I do). Hiding ‘endnotes’ at the back of the article or chapter, which then need to be again tracked down in the bibliography, greatly aids such fudging and fakery.

* And finally, the excellent $70 desktop back-of-the-book index maker PDF Index Generator. Version 3.3 (May 2023) has “fixed footnotes, as it was showing footnote number & normal page number too!” A useful fix.

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.

Tolkien Gleanings #81.

* A new Inklings Variety Hour podcast interview, “Michael Drout: The Liberal Arts and Beowulf”. Starts at 6:40 minutes.

* New on YouTube, “Charles Coulombe on Kingship and Tolkien”… “Daniel Cote Davies speaks to Charles Coulombe, the American Catholic author and historian, on the topic of kingship, as well as J.R.R. Tolkien’s own interpretation of the topic.”

* Kent State University Press now has a page and a date for the forthcoming book Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring… “Thomas P. Hillman gets to the heart of the tension between pity and the desire for power” in LoTR. The $40 book is currently due December 2023.

* New on John Garth’s site, an article on “The mood music of G.B. Smith, T.C.B.S.”.

* New on Archive.org, to borrow, The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference (2008). The conference was held in Birmingham in 2005. Archive.org only has “Volume One”, although even that is a table-trembling 434 pages. Appears to be well out-of-print, with only one paper copy on Amazon (used at £85).

* And finally, a rare Twitter-trawl reveals… the usual utter piffle. But also something of the latest Amon Hen #301, the publication from the Tolkien Society. It has a ‘centrefold’, no less. In the form of a 1960s-style Frodo Baggins cut-out paper-doll. Yes, really, in a two-page colour spread. I’ll spare you the picture.