Tolkien Gleanings #112.
* New on Archive.org, Tolkien’s “English and Welsh” seen in its original context, along with other lectures. As the volume Angles and Britons: O’Donnell Lectures.
* A new second edition of The Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (June 2023), though sadly aimed at university libraries and thus a whopping £150 for some 590 pages. Surely there would be more profit in making it a mass-market £30 title, given the thousands of fans who would buy it VS. a few hundred university libraries? Now the fans will just pirate it instead, whereas they might have ordered a paper edition. Anyway, it has…
“a chronology, an introduction, an extensive bibliography, and cross-referenced entries on more than 800 authors, ranging across the entire historical spectrum. More than 200 other entries describe the fantasy sub-genres, key images in fantasy literature, technical terms used in fantasy criticism”
No reference is made in the blurb to the venerable Brian Stableford’s Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (2005), but it seems possible the new book is a second expanded edition of his work under a new editor. Since I can find no first edition credited to the second edition’s author.
* The Oxford Tolkien 50 event’s website has some details of the forthcoming small exhibitions at the University of Oxford Tolkien at Exeter College and Tolkien at Merton: Fellowship and Friendship.
* In France, the Tolkiendil society has a scholarly event to… “celebrate the 50 years of the first French translation of the Lord of the Rings”. In French, but one talk appears to be in English as “Rings of Smoke: Pipe-weed, Pipes, and Smoking Imaginary in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Narrative”. I’d hope to see this on YouTube later in the year. The event is set for 6th-8th October 2023. I see there’s also a re-issue of the French edition of the Carpenter biography, Tolkien: une biographie, due in September 2023.
* The proceedings of the Tolkien Society Autumn Seminar are on YouTube as video, uploaded in July 2023. Due in book form in October 2023, with the title Translating and Illustrating Tolkien (Peter Roe Series XXIII). Not yet on Amazon UK.
* Signum University’s Australian OzMoot, set for 26th-28th January 2024. ‘Above All Shadows: Tolkien and Uncertain Futures’ will be on the theme of Tolkien’s depictions of hope in the face of future uncertainty.
* Coming soon to the former mill-town of Barnsley in northern England, the touring Middle-earth exhibition. This time it will be free. Barnsley is about ten miles south of Leeds, and thus a visit to the show might be combined with a Tolkien-oriented visit to Leeds. Local walker Chris Tye has a Tolkien’s ‘walk to work’ route at Leeds.
* And finally, the Catholic Irish writer Rosa Mulholland’s vivid children’s fantasy The Walking Trees, now freely available in PDF. This is not the later handsome illustrated edition, which is utterly available except physically in a few Irish libraries. This version has been assembled from the original magazine serial. It has some Tolkien-like moments. Walking, talking trees. Flying on the back of an eagle. It ends rather abruptly, but perhaps the book editions gave it a better ending? Anyway, enjoy.