Tolkien Gleanings #98.
* The new Jerusalem 365 podcast looks at the history of “The Hebrew Translation of Tolkien”… “After their plane was downed over Egypt, Israeli soldiers translated J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit while they were in captivity.”
* Last week Hither Shore: Power and Authority in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien – Band 16 (2019) popped up on Google Books, and on Amazon UK and Amazon DE. No delivery is yet possible from the UK, but the German Amazon has it as “27th June 2023” and shipping. I seem to recall it was delayed by the lockdowns, and so it may be indeed be new despite the 2019 date. Anyway, the German Amazon has a ‘Look Inside’ and so the contents can be known…
* Walking Tree Press has a new page for the forthcoming Thomas Honegger book of essays, to be titled Tweaking Things a Little. Though it doesn’t give much away about the contents, just the sections under which the essays are collected…
– Worldbuilding, Icebergs, Depth, and Enchantment.
– Names, Onomastics, and Onomaturgy.
– Languages.
– Riders, Chivalry, and Knighthood.
– Ethics.
* On Archive.org to borrow, the book The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the romance of history (2007). This appears to place Tolkien in the wider cultural context of an attempt at “a robust revival of Christian humanism”, at a time when relativist modernism was rapidly growing in power and mainstream acceptance. I’m no historian of such things, and as such I wonder how much of a coherent programme that pushback was at the time. Though I guess one might see it that way in post-1968 hindsight, and perhaps this arc of cultural-religious history bolstered Tolkien’s sense that he had fought in ‘the long defeat’ in the 1930s-1950s?
* Spain’s Universidade de Santiago de Compostela has a four-day Tolkien summer school, the title of which translates rather awkwardly as ‘Tolkien: a classic of our time’. Though a ‘classic vintage’ might work nicely and poetically in English. Anyway, the application deadline has gone and it starts tomorrow. But some may be interested in the list of introductory talks and names.
* And finally, the Oxford Mail has a glowing Theatre Review: The Hobbit at the Oxford Playhouse.