Tolkien Gleanings #173.
* A talk by Tom Shippey on “H. Rider Haggard and J.R.R. Tolkien”, set for 9th March 2024. Online, but it’s a $20 ticket for the live talk. Booking now.
The talk is organised by Uppsala, who will also have Tom Shippey discussing Woden on a new YouTube video — set to air on 2nd March 2024. This one looks free.
* A free YouTube recording of the talk “Tolkien and/or Jackson? Filming Tolkien’s legendarium”, given recently by the chairman of The Tolkien Society at the venerable Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction in the UK. The listenability is just about acceptable, though it can sometimes be difficult to catch what’s being said.
* Available now, the new book Tolkien’s Transformative Women: Art in Triptych (January 2024). Here are the TOCs…
* A new post at The Green Man Review rounds up the links to past Tolkien-related reviews. Who knew there was an audiobook of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, read by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame?
* At The Imaginative Conservative, “Sir Martin Gilbert and the Inklings”…
“Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill, knew J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Inklings personally. At one memorable lunch, Sir Martin gave me his impressions of these great men and of the Oxford of their day.”
* New to me, paid-for Tolkien Fonts, hand-drawn and digitised. Nice, but pricey. There’s always been a big gap between what font makers think their fonts are worth, and what people (who are not £40k-a-year graphic designers) will pay.
* U.S. publisher Abrams has announced a new graphic novel, The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, due in September 2024. By the Christian illustrator John Hendrix. He has a hand-drawn storybook style that’s also heavily influenced by 1990s/2000s graphic design.
John Hendrix cover illustration for an article on Viking DNA.
And a cover preview…
* And finally, a new Viking houses and standing stones LORA. Meaning, a free style-guidance plugin for use in generating AI images with Stable Diffusion 1.5 on a PC.
