Tolkien Gleanings #102.

* A new Journal of Tolkien Research has begun to fill up. I was pleased to see “Weather in Middle-earth or Tolkien: The Weather-Master?”. This uses modern word-counting and tabulation software to study… “the use of weather in general and meteorological expressions in The Lord of the Rings”. There’s a statement on page 17 which is astray in time: “When Frodo and Sam arrive in Ithilien, they notice a statue of an old king, with a trailing growth of flowers around its head”. The “arrive in Ithilien” part should read “are about to depart Ithilien”. But it’s a good essay, and one comes away from with the impression that only a man of the English Midlands could have written about inland weather with such range and precision.

* The same issue also has two new Kristine Larsen conference papers rolled into one, as “Arda Remade (and Remade, and Remade…)”. A look at the changing scientific thinking on entropy and time during Tolkien’s life. Another excellent article by Larsen, as usual. She deserves her own book of collected essays and papers.

* “A Pilgrimage to the Wade Center”, with pictures…

“Tolkien most preferred this dip pen as his writing instrument, favoring it over cartridge pens or a typewriter. A close look reveals that the back end of the pen is charred and melted because of Tolkien’s habit of using it to tap and clean out the pipe he puffed as he wrote.”

And toward the end of his life he discovered, and greatly enjoyed, the new no-fuss “Biro” pens.

* I’ve never heard of the book Wheelbarrows at Dawn: Memories of Hilary Tolkien. But a few tickles of Google Search reveals it was cancelled at the last minute, due to action by the Tolkien Estate, even though the book was a work of many years. Yet a few proof copies evidently survive and there’s currently such a copy on eBay, with some naughty peeps inside.

* Free on Archive.org is “Some Backgrounds of Fairyland” (1932) by H.P. Lovecraft. This was an essay extracted from a rushed letter, written at a time when Lovecraft was very busy. But he took the time out to quickly write a 2,800-word overview essay on fairy for a young and curious correspondent, based on the sources he had to hand in his extensively weird library. As such it’s still interesting, being a clear account of the competing in-flux theories and assumptions of the time (though regrettably he does not give the names of the various proponents). His account is that of a hard-headed self-educated layman who was also an imaginative writer of more-or-less fairy tales (“The Cats of Ulthar”, “The Quest of Iranon”, etc). He made only one slip — “Paracelsus and the Comte de Gabalis” should have read “Paracelsus and the [Abbe de Villar’s] Comte de Gabalis”. Of course there is much here that we now know to be factually wrong — archaeology and other sciences have since swept away many of the suppositions. Still, the hasty essay is a ‘snapshot in time’ by a master and as such might interest Tolkien scholars. The above link is to the only copy currently online.

* And finally… found on a Polish site, a rather pleasing set of Middle-earth ‘travel posters’. Though apparently they ship from China, so beware. They might not be as good / large as they look in the room-sized mock-up pictures.

They don’t seem to be AI generated, to one with a keen eye for such things.