Tolkien Gleanings #113.
* My Tolkien book Tree & Star (2022) can now be had in paperback from Lulu.com. It’s produced and sold via the U.S. Lulu.com store, as a standard 6″ x 9″ American ‘trade’ paperback.
* The new book J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe: Context, Directions and the Legacy is on Amazon UK with a shipping date of 26th September 2023. But I see it’s already available for preview on Google Books, and the final table-of-contents is thus available…
* The much-trailed ‘Fantasy Goes to Hell’ Mythopoeic Society seminar event now has downloads online. There are many to choose from, but Tolkien items of interest to me are…
– “Hellish Landscapes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium”
– “Tolkien goes to Hell: From the Deepest Underground to the Utmost Void”
– “Managing Hell: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien on the Infernality of Managerialism”
– Panel discussion: “Deep Places of the World: Journeys in the Underworlds of Middle-earth”
* A new YouTube video on “The Lost Words of Tolkien”. It’s a bit of a ‘quickie’ video, and please don’t imagine I’m suggesting it as a scholarly heavyweight. But it’s a nice idea to try to do explication videos for the spiflicated. I must say that even I was stumped by the word hame, as in “Gandalf Greyhame”, originally “Gray-hame” before the final text. I find that today hame is still in use, but only as a word for the stiff part of a fitted horse-collar. The pair of hames are used to fit the skein of leather control-reins to a working heavy-horse. The maker of the YouTube video suggests this horse meaning in passing, but Tolkien’s source is more likely to be found in the latest Bosworth-Toller. This venerable dictionary suggests the Old English hama (a natural covering or tough thin skin, as in a ‘shed snake-skin’) and for “Gandalf Greyhame” this implies a long cloak of natural material, possibly somewhat tattered and skein-like through much wear (“the most beggar-like…”). Hammond & Scull note the similar “Old English graeghama ‘grey-coated'”. No source is mentioned for this, but it is in The Fight at Finnsburg as graeg-hama, perhaps there applied to hearing the sound of grey mail-ring battle-corslets in motion beyond the hall’s doors, via a poetic comparison to the slavering of grey-coated wolves. The word is also apparently in Gothic as hama ‘covering, of a man’, and in Middle English meaning “coat”. I’d add that the word’s core meaning thus appears to link through to the continental Earendel cognates re: the tale of Orendel and his strange Gray Coat.
* A thoughtful new blog post on “Music and Its Effects in The Hobbit”.
* And finally, dates for the German Tolkien Days 2024 when… “more than 8,000 fantasy fans gather to bring Middle-earth to life”. 24th to 26th May 2024, on the Rhine in Germany.