Tolkien Gleanings #164.
* A free recording of “‘Dreaming in the Margins’: Tolkien’s Engagements with The Battle of Maldon”, a recent event at Wade College in the USA.
* The new scholarly book Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-1959 now seems firmly set for release by Oxford University Press on 25th April 2024.
* A free recording of the lecture by Holly Ordway, “Tolkien’s Faith and the Foundations of Middle-earth”, recently given at Christendom College in the USA.
* The book The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopeia and the Recovery of Creation is set for a 1st April 2024 release, from the Catholic University of America Press. In the context of the balm and healing experienced by certain types of readers, the authors discuss how Tolkien explored…
“the relation of language to reality, the nature of evil, the distinction between time and eternity and its relation to death and immortality, the paradox of necessity and free will in human action, and the grounds for providential hope”.
* The new article “Ramer contra Lowdham: comparing Tolkien’s alter ego characters in The Notion Club Papers”.
* Coming soon is a new graphic novel adaptation of The Kalevala, an early Tolkien favourite, told in a suitably chunky 300-page book. Due at the end of February 2024 according to the publisher, or May 2024 according to Amazon. It’s not a reprint of the 2005 attempt at a graphic novel version. Regrettably the publisher is misleadingly touting it as… “the basis for Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”.
* A blog review of Greg and Tim Hildebrandt: The Tolkien Years, picked up in a second-hand bookshop.
* On YouTube, a January 2024 update for the Digital Tolkien Project.
* A free 12th Century Gothic Art LORA. A LORA being a ‘style-guidance’ plugin, for use with AI models deriving from the Stable Diffusion 1.5 image generator. Note that this one usefully outputs at 768px, rather than the usual 512px.
* And finally, a free audio reading of The Art of Pipe-Smoking Pleasure (1946), the “Introduction” of which puts Tolkien’s pipe-smoking into brief historical context re: the prevailing attitudes to pipe smokers before and after the First World War. Tolkien may not have read this American title, and in a British context was perhaps more likely to have encountered Alfred Dunhill’s classic The Pipe Book (1924, revised 1969), of which note its chapter on “Pipes of the Far North”. He certainly had the 60-page booklet Art of Pipe Smoking (1958), which at a guess would probably have referred him to the earlier works of 1924 and 1946.