Tolkien Gleanings #167.
* The Tolkien Society has a new set of free video recordings on YouTube. The short talks from a recent event include, among others, “Pagan Magic and the Marvelous: Songs of Enchantment in The Silmarillion” and “Tolkien’s Depiction of Cremation in the Context of Catholic Canon Law”.
* A new illustrated article on “Tolkien and The Swan Press”, a venture for which Tolkien wrote contributions during his tenure at Leeds University.
* A new article muses on “Introducing Tolkien Fans to the Western Canon”, with the author suggesting that Tolkien readers may like to initially sample Beowulf, Ivanhoe, and Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse.
* A fine cover illustration by Matt Stewart for the latest Amon Hen #305, the bulletin/magazine of the Tolkien Society. Now that I’ve found a regular job at last (if only cleaning toilets in Stoke-on-Trent) I’ve been able to justify the £30/$40 cost of joining the Society to access their publication back-issues and presumably the coming issues for 2024. Thankfully PayPal didn’t freak out at the unusual payment, and the Society’s membership bot didn’t confuse me with the apparently-banned David Day (phew). In due course I hope to post a listing of the most interesting-to-me articles, which are (only) obtainable via membership.
* The YouTube video series My Life In Objects flips through and discusses Journeys of Frodo: An Atlas of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. A fine book which is in need of a reprint, as used prices continue to soar. If you’re quick there’s currently a paperback copy on Amazon UK for £28, with shipping from Amazon itself — which means it can be conveniently sent to a locker for pick-up.
* Been and gone in January 2024, a talk in Liverpool on “To the boy most cunning in Thucydides: the classical world of J.R.R. Tolkien”. I don’t yet see a recording on YouTube.
* Recommended for scholars, the Windows genuine freeware AnyTxt Searcher. This speedily indexes inside your PC’s documents and then lets you search across them. It was a bit iffy five years ago when the old DocFetcher was still the best free option, but the developer has kept at it and 2023 saw a big spurt of development. It’s now very useful for scholars, has a dark mode, and appears to lack only proximity search Update: for proximity-search, turn on Regex by selecting ‘Regular Match’ in the search type drop-down, and use…
\b(?:hobbits\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,6}?supper|supper\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,9}?hobbits)\b
This example will find all instances of ‘hobbits’ within 9 words of ‘supper’.
* And finally, talking of the tech world… the craze continues for naming new technologies after Tolkien characters. The lastest is Smaug-72B, the apparently hottest open-source AI chatbot that… “surpasses other advanced open-source models [and] excels in reasoning and math tasks”. Though with the current blistering pace of AI development, ‘Smaug’ likely won’t stay top-dragon for more than a few weeks.