Tolkien Gleanings #156.
* The Brazilian journal TeoLiteraria: Revista de Literaturas e Teologias has a new issue themed as Anti-nihilistic literature and its use of variations on the divine in music, romance, poetry, and fiction. One article on Tolkien, with the title translating as “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fairyland: faerie as the ‘Middle-earth’ between the world of senses and the world of ideas”.
* Over Christmas the Amon Sul podcast had podcasts about or related to Earendel: 1. These Are the Voyages [of Tolkien’s Earendel]; 2. The Star-Ship Vingilot [the ship of Tolkien’s Earendel]; followed by Brightest of Angels, with the latter being on the Old English poem in which Tolkien discovered the mysterious and beautiful word earendel. This starts at six minutes in, then gets bogged down in fifteen minutes of tiptoeing around some modern scholarly and Christian sensitivities, re: Eastern and Western Christianity. But persevere, as it is otherwise a good and learned explication of the larger text in which earendel was discovered, even if some of the public-domain translations used are iffy. They get to the earendel section at about 43:00 minutes.
* The latest Unreliable Narrators podcast discusses the book Meditations on Middle-earth (2001), in which a number of fantasy writers wrote about Tolkien and his influence.
* Freely available online and possibly useful for those interested in the wider context of the initial reception of The Lord of the Rings, a new academic article in Romanian Journal of English Studies, on “Pacifist Literature During WWII: T.H. White’s Once and Future King”, a major fantasy work which appeared in 1958. The author sees the work as another reaction by a fantasy writer to the experiences of modern warfare, with White further using his fiction to explore solutions which would forestall strife and war.
* Tables are not unknown in the worlds of Tolkien scholarship, especially among the linguistic material. Thus readers may be interested to know of two table-extracting utilities. One works in your Web browser to extract any HTML table on a Web page to a .CSV file. The other can OCR any purely visual table, i.e. one presented as a fixed graphic, retaining the table form as it saves to a .CSV file.
* Freely available in the new edition of the journal Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies, “In Faery Lands Forlorn: The Fantastic Narrative Poetry Of Queen’s Early Lyrics”. Queen here being the famous British 1970s rock band, and with the article focusing on…
“early narrative songs by the band Queen, which all feature fantastic characters and seem to share the same setting. They can be interpreted as parts of the same story that takes place in Freddie Mercury’s imaginary land of Rhye. This paper argues that the songs in question can be understood and analysed as narrative poetry”.
The bibliography doesn’t reference a book-length survey-study of the poetic ‘faery rock’ of the period and its bards (Marc Bolan et al). I don’t know of one. Perhaps it still needs to be written?
* And finally, another kind of mist-enchanted rock. An ‘as-if by Tolkien’ map of The Isle of Man, a real place in the sea between Northern Ireland and northern England.
