Tolkien Gleanings #161.

* Amazon is listing the new book Tolkien et l’Antiquite: Passe et Antiquites en Terre du Milieu as set to ship in mid February 2024. The book has the proceedings of the conference of the same name at the Sorbonne in Paris, which examined how Tolkien’s imagination drew partly on classical antiquity. The book lists as an English edition, but also as “English, French”. My guess would be in French but with long English abstracts?

* A new open-access Kristine Larsen article “Rayed Arcs and the ‘Rory Bory Aylis'” and offers a further examination of the Father Christmas Letters, seen through the lens of science. It’s a follow-on to her earlier article, but here focusing… “on Tolkien’s use of astronomy, especially aurorae” [‘the northern lights’].

* New on YouTube, the talk “Rings of Smoke: Pipe-weed, Pipes, and Smoking Imaginary in J.R.R. Tolkiens’s Narrative”. Being, as I recall, the only English talk in the Tolkiendil society’s event of 6th-8th October 2023. Very poor sound-quality and a very heavy accent, but it’s just about comprehensible with the aid of YouTube’s AI-aided subtitles and the presenter’s slides.

* Marcel R. Bulles fisks the Tolkien-for-kids biography book called Little People, Big Dreams: J.R.R. Tolkien (2022), one of a large series. Many biographical errors are found.

* There’s a new UK Court of Appeal ruling, relevant to British scholars and publishers alike…

it confirms that museums do not have valid copyright in photographs of (two-dimensional) works which are themselves out of copyright. It means these photographs are in the public domain, and free to use.

* New to me, though it appeared last summer, there’s an apparently book-correct new Lord of the Rings Roleplaying tabletop RPG, which gives the popular Dungeons & Dragons 5e RPG system a thorough LoTR makeover. The time period is between The Hobbit and LoTR… “It is the year 2965 of the Third Age and the Shadow is returning.” etc, but it could presumably be adapted for other periods. The game’s core rule book and Rivendell expansion book will set you back around £75. Clueless beginners will also need the key D&D Player’s Handbook, as there’s said to be a lot of basic D&D combat knowledge being assumed. This lack regrettably means you have to soil your shiny new game with a Wizards of the Coast product, a company which has tried its best to desecrate Tolkien’s LoTR. Gamemasters looking for the ‘cracks’ into which to insert a new RPG adventure might also add my own book The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth to their order.

Owl? Well, I guess they have to appeal to the Harry Potter crowd. And is Gandalf doing Captain Spock’s Vulcan hand-gesture for the Star Trek crowd?

There are said by the review to be other expansion books, Ruins of Eriador, Tales of Eriador and Shire Adventures (hobbits at home), but either they ship as insert-booklets with the core rule book or they have yet to be published in the UK. Amazon UK knows nothing of them.

Curiously Amazon has found a way to slip past my ad-blocker and wants to also sell me baby stuff, in ads among the listings page for the above. Is the pent-up post-lockdown baby-boom finally happening? Or is Amazon’s dumb taste-matching bot just even dumber than usual?