Tolkien Gleanings #151.
* A new keynote conference lecture on YouTube, “The ‘Modern’ Tolkien: The Keys to the Enduring Appeal of Middle-earth”. Start at 28:00 minutes in, to skip the very general ‘introduction to the impact of modernity and rural nostalgia in England’, and get to Tolkien. The lecture concluded the Seventh International Conference on Myth in the Arts (November 2023), held at The University of the Basque Country in the north of Spain. Tracking this event down led me to find the entire conference in video form. Includes, among others…
– Glaurung, Heir of Fafnir: Tolkien’s Reading of Old Norse Dragon Myth (UBC website);
– Faerie is a Dangerous Land: J.R.R. Tolkien and Fairy Tales (YouTube);
– Gandalf: One of the Maiar in Tolkien’s Middle-earth (YouTube);
– The Mythopoetic Value of the Tree of Gernika and its Impact in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (YouTube);
– In the Beginning there was Music: The Interrelation between Music and Philology in Tolkien’s Work (YouTube);
– The Sea as a Threshold in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium and Modern Media (YouTube).
* In the late summer I see that the Sarehole Mill pizzas were reviewed in the article “A Margherita in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”. The food reviewer also remarked that for food…
“Tolkien would normally visit the Eastgate Hotel on Merton Street, Oxford, a gloomy inn next to the college where he taught philology while writing The Lord of the Rings. There is [today] something insatiably unhappy about the Eastgate, as if the Boer War[s] were still ongoing. Even so, Tolkien liked it, and he ate there when he lived next door at No. 21.”
The Eastgate was also the site of a seminal debate that one would love to have had recorded on tape…
“[The] clash of ideas culminated in 1954, when Arthur C. Clarke met with [C.S.] Lewis at the Eastgate hotel in Oxford; the former brought with him fellow [British Interplanetary Society] member [and leading British rocket engineer] Val Cleaver, the latter was accompanied by another distinguished Oxford don and fellow writer, none other than J.R.R. Tolkien, and there the interplanetary debate was thrashed out over several hours”. (The British Interplanetary Society and Cultures of Outer Space, 1930-1970, citing From Imagination to Reality – An Audio History of the British Interplanetary Society, 2008).
2024 will be the 70th anniversary of that debate. One wonders if it might be recreated in 2024, patched together from the writings of the four men and presented in a promenade performance at the Eastgate?
* The latest Art of Manliness podcast discusses “The Hobbit Virtues” with the author of Hobbit Virtues: Rediscovering J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ethics from The Lord of the Rings (2020). The show-notes include a link to the interesting article “Against the Cult of Travel: or What Everyone Gets Wrong About The Hobbit” (2021).
* And finally, booking now is an expensive 2024 summer school at the University of Oxford, “An Introduction to Tolkien’s Mythology”.