Tolkien Gleanings #123.
* Video from the recent Oxonmoot 50 – Day 3. Four talks are covered by the three-hour video. Including two with titles which had previously made me interested, “Dyeing in Middle-earth” and “The Animals That Are Not There”. In the Questions, the “Dyeing” presenter later has a superb put-down of a “…but what about the TV series?” question.
* Been and gone, a Civic Society public talk on “Tolkien’s Connections with Malvern”. This was on 8th September 2023…
Dr. Bradley Wells will talk about J.R.R. Tolkien, the twentieth-century literary genius and famous author in the realm of fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings and his understated connections with the Malvern Hills and Great Malvern.
The talk was part of a surprisingly rich selection of cultural festivals and events being held in the town during autumn 2023. I note that Auden was also in the town, in his younger days as a teacher at Malvern school. Like Tolkien he had grown up in Birmingham, in his case in the slightly more southerly suburb of Harborne, from 1919-1939. Thus the Malvern Hills were very much ‘on the doorstep’ in Auden’s youth, as they were for Tolkien. Like Tolkien he retained few ties to the city after he left, although in Auden’s case there was at least one early ‘on the Malvern Hills’ poem and a rather sad Larkin-esque ‘farewell’ 1937 poem which evoked the urban topography and voices of the city. His “the most lovely country that I know” poem doesn’t really count, as that was about the view from the train “from Birmingham to Wolverhampton” and thus mostly evoking the eastern part of the Black Country. But that was the way of it, in those industrial and industrious days. The clever kids in smoky cities such as Birmingham or Stoke-on-Trent worked hard at school, assiduously avoided picking up the heavy local accent, noticed the industrial views from the train, and then… they mostly left as soon as they were able — never to look back.
* Catholic World Report has a short musing this week on “The magnanimous faith of J.R.R. Tolkien”. The author suggests that Tolkien’s feeling for magnanimity comes through in his writing, and this may be something that many readers find subtly appealing.
* And finally, the presumably new stage play Lewis and Tolkien is set for its premiere run in the USA…
Set in Oxford, England in the autumn of 1963 at the ‘Rabbit Room’ of the Eagle and Child Pub, [the events of this play are] something of ‘a return to the familiar’ for Lewis and Tolkien. Filled with humour, rousing debate, and reconciliation, the two men learn the true value of their friendship with a little help from a few pints of beer and the energetically curious barmaid, Veronica.
This is a Los Angeles theatre production, billed as a “world premiere”. It is not to be confused with the still-forthcoming Web series which filmed in London last year.
