Tolkien Gleanings #144.
“Together we score one hundred and forty-four.” (Bilbo in LoTR).
* A starter list of errors found in the new book of Tolkien letters…
“most of them are OCR errors. Obviously the publishers didn’t have a native digital file for a decades-old book, so they used OCR. … Hundreds of similar typos can be found in [recently published OCR’d] Tolkien books.”
I’d guess that finding and flagging OCR errors is probably a good task for an AI, and I’d hope someone’s already working on that one — if it isn’t already built-in to the better professional OCR engines.
* “J.R.R. Tolkien Offers an Antidote Against New Forms of Paganism”… “This article is an adaptation of a lecture, “Tolkien, Heroic Christianity and the Dangers of Neo-Paganism”, delivered at the Sept. 17-19 EWTN Gotland Forum in Sweden.” The video version was previously noted here, but the heavily accented English of the speaker may mean that the text transcript is welcome.
* The Colorado Catholic Herald has a long and glowing review of Holly Ordway’s new book Tolkien’s Faith.
* The G.K. Chesterton Society has a new podcast interview with Holly Ordway.
* A thoughtful consideration of “Tolkien & [R.E.] Howard: similarities in literature & life”. R.E. Howard being the creator of Conan and progenitor of the commercial sword & sorcery sub-genre. To perhaps save some readers time after reading the article, note that my 2019 Tentaclii examination into the question ‘Did Tolkien read R.E. Howard?’ found…
“it all boils down to what L. Sprague de Camp remembered in 1983 of a snatch of conversation had with Tolkien in a garage in 1967, so it’s pretty slim as evidence goes.”
* A new review of the book Beowulf as Children’s Literature. Paywalled at Project MUSE, but the mention of a chapter on Tolkien is part of the free sample…
“Amber Dunai tackles the monumental and imposing figure of J.R.R. Tolkien and his relationship with Beowulf within the context of his theory of fairy stories, focusing on his use of Beowulfian themes and motifs in the two versions of The Lay of Beowulf, his effort to reconstruct the fairy tale ur-text of Beowulf in Sellic Spell, and his use of the skin-changer Beorn in The Hobbit as an analogue for Beowulf.”
* Call for Papers: Tolkien Society Seminar 2024 on “Tolkien’s Romantic Resonances”. By which they mean not the fluttering hearts and heaving bosoms of the fan-fiction, but the broad historical movement called Romanticism and its aesthetics and histories.