Tolkien Gleanings #177.
* The obituary of Richard Douglas Plotz (1948-2024), the organiser in 1965 of the Tolkien Society of America, publisher of the early Tolkien Journal.
* Now on YouTube, the recent John Garth lecture at Oxford titled “Inventing on the hoof: How the Riders of Rohan suddenly became Anglo-Saxon”. One of a series of talks from different scholars. The audio for this one is quite listenable.
* The blog of the venerable Tolkien scholars Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull has re-awakened after many years, with a post that ends with a teaser for their new book. More news on the book is due “next week”.
* A new attempt to succinctly summarise the various “Tolkien Middle-earth Rights” as they currently stand and mostly for film and TV. In ten minutes. As with all legal advice, obtain a second-opinion before embarking on making your own Middle-earthy production.
* An exploratory academic project on Tolkien’s Green Knight, at Inverness in the UK. Google Search dates the page’s appearance as February 2024, but… Google.
* Long listed as “currently unavailable” on Amazon UK, I see publisher Cambridge Scholars is listing their hardback of the book The Mirror Crack’d: Fear and Horror in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Major Works (2008) as available to buy.
* “A snippet on Stoke”, adding a new 1962 date to Tolkien’s many visits to the West Midlands city of Stoke-on-Trent.
* Note that December 2024 will be the 20th anniversary of the release of the ‘Extended’ “Director’s Cut” DVDs of the LoTR movies. Even if you don’t care for the visuals or plot-chopping of the screen adaptation, the extended movies can still surely be celebrated for their magnificent soundtrack and superb voice-work. One imagines the 20th anniversary might then be the occasion for a scholarly event perhaps titled “Tolkien’s Tones and Timbres”, to discuss the sounds and delivery of voices in the literature, the three movies, and the audio fan-work (e.g. Phil Dragash). Perhaps also with a nod to that out-of-reach aspect of the historical voice that Tolkien was tantalised by, the silent modulation and inflection of the spoken word by the speaker’s simultaneous non-verbal communication. In some cases there is also the aurality of the texts to consider, and for instance Tolkien once wrote “The Hobbit was specially written for reading aloud”.
* And finally, The Great British Spring Clean is set for 15th-31st March 2024. Pick up at least one bin-bag of litter (U.S.: ‘trash’) in your area. Tolkien died just as the scourge of litter began to be recognised circa 1972-4 (the years of Keep Britain Tidy campaigning and The Wombles). But I can quite see him with a litter-picking stick and a bin-bag today, wombling around his local woodland paths. It’s surely a cause he would have approved of.