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.

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.

Tolkien Gleanings #101.

* The Art of Jay Johnstone, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. These substantial free Substack posts offer extensive commentary on the art, which many will recall seeing an example of on the cover for the recent second edition of Tolkien’s Library.

Jay Johnstone’s website.

* In France, the nation’s Museum of the Great War is set to host a one-day conference on ‘Tolkien and the war: experience and representation’. The venue is a large museum of some 70,000 items, about ten miles east of Paris. I can’t find the speakers and topics, but tickets for Saturday 22nd July are here if you can delve deep enough into the page.

* A free sample article from the latest paid-for Saint Austin Review (July/August 2023, Vol. 23, No. 4) is the two-page “Who is Tom Bombadil?”. The issue also leads with “Chesterton, Tolkien, and Lewis in Elfland”, and later in the same issue there are ‘new voices’ items titled “Galadriel’s Mirror” and “Anduril, Flame of the West”.

* Il Pensiero Storico: Rivista internazionale di storia delle idee reviews Tolkien, l’Europa e la Tradizione (2022) in its Italian translation. The short book is found to offer…

“an essay on the flavoursome soup of studies, readings, passions and professions that fed Tolkien’s existence; the taste of which Berger evokes in every step of his examination. [Though] we are not dealing here with a specialized study, but a taster. Yet it is a seasoned introduction to Tolkien’s world, garnished with mythological materials, archetypal symbols of the European tradition, the vision of heroism and the relationship between technique and nature, and links with the cultural heritage of the West. [The book] recalls that “carrying the weight of tradition” forward is basically a moral duty for all of us.”

* Popping up on Amazon UK, Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology is a forthcoming single-author book of essays. Due in mid September 2023 and pre-ordering now with a £28 ebook. Has an endorsement from Thomas Honegger. Some of the essays also discuss the movie adaptation of LoTR. One advance reviewer usefully writes…

“the essays in Estes’s collection use Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings to explore everyday themes such as friendship, home, and food, as well as more obviously theological concepts, like apostleship, salvation, and theodicy”.

* In English in the latest edition of the Turkish open-access journal Milel ve Nihal, a paper by a University of Exeter PhD student, “The Understanding of Evil in British Romanticism: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Ring as “a running ambivalence”…

“there is a depth in Tolkien’s works, lost between the praise of his supporters and the criticism of his opponents, which exceeds what either group claims to have found.”

* And finally… “The Sound of Tolkien Metal”, a curated 22-hour playlist of what one has to assume is the best Tolkien-inspired heavy metal music. Google suggests it may date from the end of June 2023, and the dates on some of the 250+ tracks it includes seems to confirm this.

“the blasts of it smote the hills and echoed in the hollows, rising in a mighty shout above the roaring” (LoTR)

Tolkien Gleanings #100.

* The latest Providence magazine uses Tolkien to offer thoughts on “Ambiguity and Violence: A Christian Perspective”. Freely available online.

* What looks like a new PhD for the University of Montreal, “Une interpretation semiotique de On Fairy-Stories: la formulation d’un modele Tolkienien du plurimonde et de l’experience fictionnelle” (2023). (‘A Semiotic Interpretation of “On Fairy-Stories”: Formulating a Tolkienian Model of Secondary Worlds and Fictional Experiences’). This appears to ask which of the academic semiotic models might best fit Tolkien, and then derives and refines a new ‘Tolkienian model’. Freely available online, in French.

* Freely available online, the Portuguese essay “Boromir, Um heroi imperfeito” (‘Boromir, the imperfect hero’). A chapter from the new Portuguese book J.R.R. Tolkien: Construtor de Mundos. Personagens, Lugares e Adaptacoes (2023). Which also includes essays in Portuguese on “Sauron and his many names”; “On Beorn”; “Aragorn and Anduril: the representation of the hero and the medieval sword”; “On Norse Mythological Geography” and others. Seems to be the first in a planned series of books. What may be the book’s website at almedina.net is currently not responding to a request from the UK.

* This weekend sees the Tolkien Magellan Society annual Council event, with talks and exhibitions and at least one life-sized troll…

They also do a very nice line in event posters…

The Sociedad Tolkien Magallanes appears to be in Patagonia, South America.

* Nearby in Chile, South America, a two-day ‘Tolkien Opera’ event in July 2023…

“Amigos de la Opera present a two-day cycle of song dedicated to the famous British author J.R.R. Tolkien. The voices of Violeta Juanez Rojas and Lili Cortes will breath life into the writer’s verses, accompanied on piano by Maria Rey Carmona and Toni Pons. They will also perform a series of songs published in 1967. The final day will also feature talks by different experts on the many aspects of Tolkien’s life and work”.

Tolkien Gleanings #99.

* In The Catholic Herald this week, “The untold tale of Tolkien’s faith”. The author has carefully read an advance access copy of the forthcoming Holly Ordway book…

“Holly Ordway, my colleague and friend, has written a fantastic new book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography […] it is a sober and factual treatment of his entire life from a religious point of view. It gave me a totally fresh impression of the man. And I am not alone. Tolkien expert John Garth has said of Ordway’s work that he “learned far more reading it than I even realised I needed to learn” [… this forthcoming book] is not hagiographical or triumphalist, but it is a triumph, a long overdue account of one of the last century’s most prominent and influential Catholics.”

The book is due in September 2023.

* Walking Tree yesterday posted eight new links to new Tolkien book reviews and another one today. Most have already been linked here at Tolkien Gleanings.

* New on Archive.org to borrow, a poor scan of Cor Blok’s A Tolkien tapestry: pictures to accompany The Lord of the Rings (2011). Imagine Tove Jansson’s Moomin book illustrations, crossed with the sort of stylised animals and people of the sort sometimes to found at the edges of early medieval illuminated manuscripts. Seems to be part of the 1960s/70s assumption that The Lord of the Rings was a children’s book like The Hobbit.

* And finally, a new survey article “Traditional Second-Hand Bookshops in Britain”… finds that “the idea that ‘traditional’ bookshops are disappearing is a tradition in itself.”

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.