Tolkien Gleanings #103.
* A new issue of the journal An Unexpected Journal is themed “King Arthur Legendarium: Prose, Poetry, & Scholarship”. This latest issue being Vol. 6, Book 2 (Summer 2023). This had a four-hour launch party on YouTube. Subscribe to the channel to hear about future events. Looking at the current journal contents I see it’s all Arthurian items in this issue, though some Gawain and some C.S. Lewis. But the appearance of this new issue spurred me to systematically look at what else is available in the list of back issues and contents. Of interest I see, free in PDF and here in date order…
A Holly Ordway special issue, including among others:
– “An Interview with Holly Ordway” and a review of her book on Tolkien’s Reading.
– “Peak Middle-earth: Why Mount Doom is not the Climax of The Lord of the Rings“.
– “A Passage to Something Better” (on Tolkien and virtue).
– “Gandalf: The Prophetic Mentor”.
– “Middle-earth and the Middle Ages”.
– “Thorin and Bilbo: Image Bearers”.
Then the 2020 and some 2019 issues are listed by theme but these are not online. Of these, “The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien” issue can be had in Kindle ebook at £7 UK (about $10). The listing on Amazon UK has the TOCs for this issue.
Moving further down the list of back-issues, the free PDFs return. I see…
– “The Imaginative Power of Sub-Creation” (Tolkien).
– “The Lord of the Rings and Consolation Concerning Death”.
– “The Heroism of the Ordinary in The Lord of the Rings“.
* Free on Archive.org, Songs for the Philologists (2023 Kyrmse edition). This was also noted a while back in Tolkien Gleanings. But this is newer… “This version (July 2023) has been revised, edited and set in the Gentium typeface by Ronald Kyrmse […] with one additional poem (“Grace”)”.
* A PhD for Vanderbilt University, free in PDF, Enduring Worlds, New Horizons: The Nature of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Three Re-Imaginings of the Nibelung Legend (June 2023). One of which is The Lord of the Rings. Considers that LoTR qualifies as an innovative and (in time) successful Gesamtkunstwerk (‘the total work’) alongside the works of Wagner and Fritz Lang. Finds that… “Tolkien’s work offers a valuable lens through which Lang and Wagner can be profitably explored”.
Yes, I can see how Tolkien’s stated desire to leave… “scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama” could be understood as a desire for something approaching ‘the total work’, albeit not all by his own hand. A sort of dispersed and cumulative Gesamtkunstwerk. With Tolkien more akin to a slow preparative gardener of culture, than the impresario of a brief hill-top Ragnarok of a multimedia rock-opera. And with his ‘other hands’ comment said of a time when one might have justifiably trusted that other hands and minds could carry on a steady and sympathetic cultivation of his rich soil. In this he was somewhat akin to his contemporary H.P. Lovecraft, who shared his Mythos with an ever-widening circle of young writers and artists, a generous gift that in time spiralled out and then further out and made him the most influential writer of the 20th century — in terms of his vast and ongoing impact on popular culture. In 2023 it’s now increasingly possible to think that Tolkien is set to do the same for the 21st century, as his ideas move beyond the writers of doorstop fantasy trilogies and spread out into the wider culture. His grander ambition for the Legendarium was of course somewhat frozen in time by the Medusa-glare of copyright, but that won’t last for all that much longer.
* And finally… Arte.tv has a new short but well-made video preview of the current one-man exhibition “John Howe, l’illustrateur de Tolkien” in Brittany, France. Not on YouTube.