Tolkien Gleanings #194.

* Walking Tree has just published the book The Songs of the Spheres: Lewis, Tolkien and the Overlapping Realms of their Imagination (2024). They have a table-of-contents and description. I see the book includes, among what sound like heavier articles, “The Nostalgic Fantasy of “Good Plain Food” in Narnia and Middle-earth”.

* The Herbal History Research Network will have a… “celebration of 15 years since the network was founded”, in London on 16th October 2024. At their blogs you can find things such as an overview of the curious Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm which talks of “waybread” as one of the nine ingredients. The relevant section is given in translation.

* A new Masters dissertation “J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit in ELT”. ELT being edu-speak for English Language Teaching, in this case with children in a “lower secondary school” some 100 miles east of the city of Prague. Lesson plans are included. Freely available online, in English.

* One I seem to have missed in the Christmas 2023 rush. The blog Tolkien & illustration posted “John Howe in Tolkien’s footsteps: exhibition review”, illustrated with photos. The solo art show was in Brittany and ran until the end of January 2024. Howe’s exhibition has since been shipped to Finland, where it will be on show again from 6th July to 18th August 2024.

* New at Signum University for May, the first session of “A Journey Through The History of the Hobbit”. Booking now.

* I’m still skimming my way back through the 300+ Amon Hen issues, focusing on reviews and articles. Found in Amon Hen No. 173… a note on “Vinyar Tengwar Number 41 (July 2000). This issue boasts of three unpublished linguistic items by Tolkien to which Carl Hostetter provides notes. […] The third piece is Tolkien’s exacting study of the word “óre”.” I find that the Vinyar Tengwar Web Shop now offers a link to the Collected Vinyar Tengwar 41-50 as a 400-page paperback for less than £10. However, this must be óre the Quenya word, and Tolkien Gateway website confirms this. Thus it’s not a study of the first part of the primary-world name Orendel (12th century German cognate for the Anglo-Saxon earendel).

* Talking of Orendel I stumbled on the book Bridal-Quest Epics in Medieval Germany. A Revisionary Approach (2012). Still available from The University of London at £20 (Amazon UK has it, but at high ‘academic library’ prices), the book covers four epics including Orendel and has “a detailed history of the textual scholarship” given in English. If the book has a concise and complete overview in English of the pre-1939 black-letter German scholarship on Orendel, then it would certainly be of interest to me. A review of the book is encouraging. Not only do we get a lucid history of the scholarship in English, it seems, but also… “The chapter on Grauer Rock: Orendel was my favorite. Its brilliant analysis puts at the center of its inquiry the text’s eponymous gray robe, a wonder-working robe or tunic worn first by Christ and later by the epic’s hero, Orendel.”

* On YouTube, Tolkien’s poem: Bagme Bloma, but in Proto-Germanic… “Tolkien wrote this poem in Gothic, but I have reconstructed it for you in its father language.”

* And finally, The Exeter Book, source of the word earendel, has been newly read aloud by the Librivox audiobook volunteers. Now available, free and public domain.

Tolkien Gleanings #193.

* An update on the forthcoming Tolkien’s Collected Poems, from the editors. The book will be in three volumes, not one volume as previously mooted, and these will be slip-cased in a box. 1,620 pages in total. The mid-September dead-tree release date is currently holding. There will be an index (my guess: presumably an index to the names, places, and themes in the poetry, as well as all the other material). I can add that Amazon UK also now lists a £45 Kindle ebook version, set for the same release date.

* Peter Jackson’s “remastered” and “extended” original LoTR movie trilogy is to be shown in cinemas for the first time. Sadly it’s not a general-release run for the “4K Ultra HD” extended versions, despite cinemas desperately needing box-office after suffering strings of flops. It’s just a very limited showing in the USA. Tickets on sale now, for June 2024.

* Released early next week, the short book J.R.R. Tolkien: A Catholic Life. From an American writer who apparently worked on the topic for a number of years, independently of and unconnected with Holly Ordway. It will be interesting to see if he can fill any of the ‘gaps’ in Ordway’s work (e.g. early influence of the poet Francis Thompson, late religious life while in Stoke-on-Trent with his son), although it seems it’s not a table-trembler — Amazon UK has it at just 126 pages. The cover is artfully blended, but one hopes the licencing fees have been paid… it contains a collage of movie-actor stills above a central Tolkien picture rights-managed by Getty Images.

* A new undergraduate dissertation, “Where the Blue Flowers Grow: Sehnsucht and Eucatastrophe in Christian Fantasy Literature” (2024). Freely available online.

* New on YouTube, The Catholic Current podcast on “Hope for the Hopeless/The Philosophy of Tolkien”, talking with the author of the book The Philosophy of Tolkien (2005).

* John Garth is set to give a talk in Leeds tomorrow. Last time I looked, £15 tickets were still available…

* Late news of an American lecture which was set for 26th April, “Ariosto, Tolkien, and the Italian Way to Fantasy”. The event has now been and gone, but one can hope a recording will show up on YouTube at some point. I believe Tolkien is on record as never having read or encountered Ariosto.

* The British Fairies blog has a new post on “Faery cups — thefts & punishments”.

* And finally, a new PhD thesis on Mythical Middle England: A Quest to Capture Cinematic Imagery in Suburban Worcestershire which among other things… “provides a theoretical toolkit for academics and artists to better understand how genius loci can be represented” on the screen. Or will provide, since it’s under embargo at the Kent University repository until March 2027.

Tolkien Gleanings #192.

* New in the Durham postgrad journal, the article “Archaic Pronouns in The Lord of the Rings”. Freely available online. I wasn’t previously aware of this open-access journal, and it’s now been indexed in Jurn. Jurn is my custom search engine (CSE) for open arts & humanities journals and, as with all CSEs, please note that it responds best to a sophisticated search query. Just tapping in a couple of keywords won’t cut it.

* New on YouTube, a recording of John Garth discussing “Tolkien and Lewis – Friendship That Redefined Fantasy” at the Bradford Literature Festival.

* Mercator reviews Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023).

* The Spanish Tolkien journal Nolme has just published its sixth issue. Articles include, among others, “Not of This World: Landscapes of the Imagination in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, and “Oral tradition in The Lord of the Rings“. (Titles here translated, articles in Spanish).

* New on Archive.org, the Yorkshire Dialect Society Transactions for 1928, in which George Taylor reviews the then-recent book A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District. One Professor Tolkien provided what the reviewer calls a “valuable” introduction to this, and the book is found to be relevant to Sir Gawain…

“It is a pity that the author has not come across kei, meaning “left”, used in the expressions kei neiv (left hand), kei-bokt (left-handed), and kei-boki (a left-hander, as at cricket). This is the O. Dan. [Old Danish] kei, and occurs in the fourteenth century Sir Gawayn [Gawain]. The most recent editors of which state (erroneously), that “kay [is] found only in Lancashire and Cheshire dialects.””

* New on YouTube, the April 2024 Update for the Digital Tolkien Project.

* In continuing to read back through the Amon Hen back-issues, I learned of a book I wasn’t yet aware of. Or may have just glanced at briefly some years ago, but discounted as not scholarly enough for my recent book. The short guidebook Tolkien’s Oxford (2008) looks entertaining and probably useful for pavement-pounding visitors. Across 144 pages many photos and maps are said to accompany… “a concise, knowledgeable and charming textual narrative which takes you chronologically from the likely route of Tolkien’s first journeys to Oxford as an aspiring student up to his grave in Wolvercote Cemetery” (from the very short review in Amon Hen #214). Still available, in paperback. I wonder if it will have information about exactly where The Silmarillion was assembled and written?

* And finally, the Wormwoodiana blog on “Radio Ghosts of the Mid Twentieth Century”, discussing the book Radio Camelot: Arthurian Legends on the BBC, 1922-2005 (2007).

Tolkien Gleanings #191.

* The latest Touchstone magazine reviews Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology ($ paywall).

* As part of the one-day Leiden University symposium on Religion and Fantasy, a short talk on “Tië eldaliéva (The Elven Path): The First Legally Recognised Tolkien Church in the World”. There’s a long abstract available… “To distinguish itself more clearly from the movement of self-identified Elves, Tië eldaliéva recently decided to rebrand itself as The Way of Arda’s Lore (WAL).”

* At Leeds, “Uncovering a C.S. Lewis poem in Special Collections”. The poem is now published with commentary in the latest Journal of Inklings Studies: Vol. 14, No. 1 ($ paywall).

* I’m reading back through more than 300 issues of The Tolkien Society’s Amon Hen. I was pleased to reach #232 (Nov 2011) and there learn of a kindly gift to Birmingham. In 2011 the Tolkien Trust gave substantial funds for free scholarships at Tolkien’s old school in the city, restoring these to the level they were in 1911. In #231 it was further noted, in an Amon Hen conference report, that… “Tolkien’s family had been extremely generous to King Edward’s in the past, in grateful recognition of Tolkien’s time there”.

* Amon Hen #232 also had interesting details of… “his mother Mabel’s family […] Mabel and her sisters Edith May and Jane, and a younger sister, Rose, who died in the mid 1880s.” I don’t think I was aware of this before, and it throws a poigniant light on Tolkien’s choice of ‘Rose’ for Sam in LoTR.

* At the University of Glasgow online repository, the scholarly article “Tolkien, Shakespeare, trees, and the Lord of the Rings” is to be released… “on 9th October 2025 … under Creative Commons Attribution”. It appears to be a survey of Tolkien’s changing attitudes to Shakespeare, leading into a special focus on Hamlet as a source for walking trees and then a discussion of Shakespeare’s Warwickshire-bred “arboreal sensibility” as a unconscious influence on LoTR.

* My speculative article musing on “A site for a new national Tolkien Centre?”.

* The venerable Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction now has a substantial part of the run of its Gramarye journal in e-book form. #16 has “In Search of Jenny Greenteeth” & “‘A Fairy, or Else an Insect’: Traditions at Fairy Wells”; #14 had “From Ogre to Woodlouse: A Journey through Names” [possibly on woodwose?]; while #13 had “Tolkien’s style”. Regrettably one needs to register before ordering, and there’s no indication if PayPal is a payment method or not.

* In the USA, Boise State University needs people who can lead discussions on constructed fictional languages, for a forthcoming course to be run by the Department of Linguistics.

* And finally, for those too young as yet to enjoy The Hobbit… I’m pleased to see that the Dragons Friendly Society now has the classic original Noggin the Nog on DVD and also a Pogles’ Wood four-DVD set including the 14 lost episodes. PayPal accepted.

If some sort of national Tolkien Centre were to be established, where would be a suitable location? It would have to be somewhere with a genuine connection, of course,

The city of Birmingham has long given ample evidence of a sniffy official attitude toward him, and the fabric of the city that Tolkien left in 1911 has essentially been destroyed. The Oratory probably lacks the space. And student politics would likely rule out The University of Birmingham, which has a relatively pleasant green campus. So, probably not Birmingham.

Unless perhaps… in the rural Lickey Hills that lie to the south of urban Birmingham? These are the home of the Oratory’s Retreat and the adjacent cottage where Tolkien experienced some of his happiest times as a child. Or perhaps at Barnt Green at the end of the Lickey hills? Or both, as a split site, one for the tourists and the other for scholars and with a funding-friendly walking trail between them.

Oxford is already over-stuffed with centres and — while the city could lend a certain academic kudos if a centre tilted that way — a new-build Centre would likely be expensive to develop in the historic city. Also expensive to visit. Still, not impossible, and there would no doubt be powerful backers and donors. Not least collectors donating their collections at the end of their lives.

Leeds? A cheap and no doubt welcoming northern city, though rather unappealing for tourists and train travellers. But not impossible if the centre were to be largely about a superb working library and research facilities.

Yet I’d say mid Staffordshire offers the best chance for a balanced centre both tourist-friendly and scholarly. Cannock Chase is already over-run with local leisure users. So perhaps adjacent to Shugborough (Great Haywood) and thus near to Cannock Chase but not on it? This district has many genuine Tolkien connections, plenty of relatively affordable land, lots of nature, relatively dark skies, and (for now) a friendly Conservative county council. Historically it has connections too, being in the heart of early Mercia and is co-incidentally also near to the Sir Gawain sites and substantial Staffordshire Hoard exhibitions. Now of course Shugborough is National Trust, which means leftist gesture-politics and tight bureaucracy. So, little chance of shoe-horning something into the existing Georgian mansion. Though room might be found somewhere within reach of the bridge there that Tolkien has made famous? One drawback to somewhere around Great Haywood could be the lack of local overnight accommodation, but no doubt welcoming B&Bs would spring up in adjacent Great Haywood and Little Haywood. Transport connections are perhaps the biggest stumbling block, with no train access. A rail line does go through the Shugborough estate, but we can’t expect a new station to be built.

From the military point of view, the National Memorial Arboretum near Lichfield in mid Staffordshire might be interested. Tolkien was a soldier who loved trees, and that would fit perfectly. He was from nearby Birmingham and trained locally, though he was of course not someone who died in combat. That could be a stumbling block. Yet the Memorial Arboretum has the space and the long-term vision for the site, even if it is some way from Great Haywood. As with somewhere near Shugborough, it would have to be very car-centric and there’s little local overnight accommodation. Which might rule out something that was more of a working research centre for scholars, with overnight stays. Though I can certainly see myself walking into a lavish permanent exhibition there (or nearby) titled “The Soldier Who Loved Trees”.

Hmmm… I guess Oxford is the most likely, on balance. It would have the money and the kudos to make it all work, when faced with all the bureaucracy and foot-dragging that such major projects entail. Indeed, in the rich and ongoing Tolkien 50th Anniversary Seminar Series of talks at Oxford, one wonders if we’re not seeing the opening salvos of a bid for such a new centre?

Tolkien Gleanings #190.

* Another round of Oxford’s Tolkien 50th Anniversary Seminar Series talks on Tolkien. The first is on 22nd April 2024 and will examine his reaction to his late fame. Also set to include “Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon Calendar” and “The characterisation and narrative value of landscape over the fields of Rohan”, among others.

* Four earlier Tolkien 50th talks newly online at YouTube.

* A new issue of Mythlore, with a lead article on “Tolkien Augustinian Theodicy, and ‘Lovecraftian’ Evil”. Freely available online.

* In the latest Journal of Inklings Studies “C.S. Lewis on Female Scholars: A Reply to John D. Rateliff” ($ paywall)… “What Lewis rebukes is academic complacency and vanity, not female researchers, many of whom Lewis respected and even befriended.” The new issue also has a number of free reviews of recent books on Tolkien.

* Now online, Tolkien Society 2024 Seminar Paper Abstracts. This is the forthcoming one on Romanticism in July 2024, with papers including ““Fiery the Angels rose”: The Romantic Prometheanism of Tolkien’s Enemies”.

* ‘Arcastar Lerinosse: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Arda’, a one-day Tolkien Workshop at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Seemingly a student-focused event, and set for 28th June 2024.

* Newly listed on Amazon UK, Tolkien Spirituality: Constructing Belief and Tradition in Fiction-based Religion. Set for publication in July 2024, a 350-page book as part of academic publisher De Gruyter’s ‘Religion and Society’ series.

* And finally, Tolkien’s ““Broad Relic” in the Notion Club Papers is the island of Flat Holm” in the Bristol Channel, England.

Tolkien Gleanings #189.

* Another overlooked early review of Tolkien, found. Douglas A. Anderson writes in his Tolkien and Fantasy blog that…

“The fact that Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, was one of the first reviewers of The Silmarillion on its publication in 1977, seems to have long escaped Tolkienists, and Tolkien bibliographers.”

* Finland will host John Howe’s first Finnish art exhibition in the summer… “Especially known for his artwork portraying J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy worlds, Howe’s art exhibition will be open at Tampere Hall from 6th July to 18th August 2024.”

* Birmingham’s annual Tolkien lecture seems to be on hiatus or moved (the last was May 2023, with no sign of a 2024 event so far). But the University of Oxford fills the gap, as they announce “Neil Gaiman to Deliver the 2024 Tolkien Lecture”… “The lecture will take place on Wednesday, 12th June 6pm BST at Oxford Town Hall. Tickets will be released on Wednesday, 1st May at 12pm.” The Town Hall only has 500 capacity, according to the local Council which appears to run it. So you’ll have to be quick, though it’ll also be posted on YouTube. Hopefully they’ll state very clearly: “audience questions about the books only, please, no TV / games / movies”.

* A podcast interview I think I missed back in January 2024, an Anselm Society Interview with Austin M. Freeman on Tolkien and theology.

* At Oxford, one of those very expensive short summer-school courses. This one on “The Making of Middle-earth: Tolkien and the First Age”. Application deadline 1st May 2024.

* And finally, more Oxford. In the 2024 Update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) one Christopher Tolkien has been added… “Tolkien, Christopher Reuel (1924–2020), literary scholar and editor [see under Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel]”.

Tolkien Gleanings #188.

* Tolkien researcher Oronzo Cilli now has a new blog at tolkienarchive.blogspot.com. New there is a freely-available post headed “Tolkien’s Undisclosed 1946 Lecture on The Notion Club Papers at Stonyhurst”. The blog’s RSS feed is here.

* Now available for download for Tolkien Society members, Amon Hen #306 (April 2024). This has interesting articles on religious pilgrimage and LoTR, on the signalling handbooks in Tolkien’s library in relation to signalling in LoTR, and a detailed look at Carcharoth the Wolf, among much else. The October 2023 advert for a graphic designer is likely still ‘in play’, judging by some of this issue’s rough edges. Two new copy-editors are reported, but no-one to streamline the layout and sequencing. Hopefully that someone, when found, will re-design without destroying Amon Hen’s current comfy and homely feel. A sympathetic makeover wouldn’t need much. Coherent font choices and sizes, columns of text for easier reading, an indicative colour for each regular section, jettison some DTP-isms such as the ill-fitting header-frames, do much better copy-fitting, and don’t squish the photos. I’d probably also have all the full-page art as a coherent ‘Gallery’ section at the back, with an extra four gallery pages as a small incentive to get the digital edition.

* The Naples stop for Italy’s medium-sized touring exhibition, titled ‘Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author’, has reportedly been a big hit… “in just three weeks, from 16th March to 7th April 2024, the exhibition had 34,795 entries”.

* Seemingly newly posted(?), a “An Interview with Howard Shore”, recorded in 2003. Shore being the composer of the superb soundtrack for the original LoTR movie trilogy.

* On YouTube, Prof. Tom Shippey on Beowulf, Sci-Fi, and Tolkien. Being a 90 minute Patreon Q&A from last October, which I appear to have missed at that time.

* Interesting to see that the novelist John Cowper Powys (A Glastonbury Romance etc) was also a lucid thinker on culture. Archive.org has his book The Meaning of Culture (1929) as a new ‘to borrow’ item. This led me to the Digital Library of India’s open PDF version for the book’s 1932 reprint in Jonathan Cape’s ‘Life and Letters’ series. Note however that the 1932 book has a new and far less forthright author’s introduction, which voids his pithy 1929 summary of the Englishman’s view of other major strands of culture. This older introduction still seems useful today as a snapshot of the national-literary worldview in which Tolkien was also immersed…

* I’ve now heard the new 2023 version of Phil Dragash’s full-cast unabridged fan-project of Fellowship. I find that Farmer Maggot and Merry and even the early Strider have been re-voiced, and that I rather prefer the voices in the older 2013-14 version. If asked I’d thus still recommend the older 2013-2014 version, with the 2023 version only for the Moria sections. 2023 containing as it does the previously inadvertently-omitted section at the Doors of Moria (the latter part of the wading of the pool-edge, the first encounter with the likely site of the Doors of Moria and the holly trees, and then the short but poignant section involving Bill the pony).

Just one instance of the voice changes:

2013/14 version: “Strider” at 2:28, in the Inn at Bree. “But one thing interested me. Please remember, said one of them that the name BAGGINS (emphasised) must not be mentioned”.

2023 version: “Strider” at 2:30, in the Inn at Bree. “But one thing interested ME (emphasis). Please REMEMBER (semi-emphasis) said one of them, that the name of Baggins must not be mentioned”. (No emphasis on “Baggins” here, in fact the opposite).

It appears the changes appeared in a “2014” version, unknown to me, from which the 2023 version was apparently created (simply by splicing in the missing section).

Tolkien Gleanings #187.

* Newly listed on eBay, an interior postcard of St. John the Baptist at Great Haywood, in mid Staffordshire. The buyer would, theoretically and with a hi-res scan, be able to identify the pictures on the walls.

* Now freely available in open-access, “A milestone in BBC history? The 1955-56 radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings”. Being a chapter from the multi-author book The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien (2022). Fellowship was done in six episodes in 1955, but then in 1956 BBC executives decided to cram both Two Towers and Return of the King into another six episodes. The shows were measured as reaching only 0.1% of the adult population. No tape-recordings of these national broadcasts are known to survive, though the scripts and some of the music does. More of a missed opportunity than a “milestone”, the chapter concludes.

* Now online, the speaker programme for the 20th Annual Tolkien at UVM Conference in the USA in April 2024.

* A new article in Quadrant scrutinises recent claims of Tolkien’s roundabout influence on the form of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). Freely available online.

* In the latest Brno Studies in English, the article “Elven chora: feminine space and power in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”. Discusses the feminine aspects of the Elves. Freely available in open-access.

* An Estate-approved Tolkien opera, due for full release as a 15-CD recording and printed score in 2025… “The text is (of course) abridged, but uses as closely as possible Tolkien’s own words”. It’s reported that the Bombadil section (and presumably also Goldberry) has not been cut.

* On YouTube, a new Wyrd Wessex panel discussion with guest speaker and live audience. The topic is “Tolkien and Barrows”. Being the British landscape’s ancient burial-barrows which date as early as the Bronze Age, not the garden barrows used for hauling home your ‘taters and apples.

* And finally, in Finland… “32,000 tickets have already been sold for a new stage-play adaptation of The Lord of the Rings”, a show set for August 2024. Presumably it’s in a Finnish translation?

Tolkien Gleanings #186.

* New on Archive.org, Transactions Of The Yorkshire Dialect Society 1922. An “extraordinarily interesting” talk by Tolkien is noted in the “1921 Report”…

The Chronology dates this as “20th January 1922”.

* The latest issue of VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center has open-access book reviews of The Wonders of Creation: Learning Stewardship from Narnia and Middle-earth; The Nature of Middle-earth; and Tolkien Dogmatics.

* “Tolkien and Lovecraft”, tracking down Honegger’s articles on the topic, and adding to his 2017 ideas on the points of comparison between the two masters.

* Announced in hardback, the book Aubusson tisse Tolkien, l’aventure tissee, set for publication in French on 27th June 2024…

“The Aubusson Tapestry project celebrates the completion of the ‘Aubusson weaves Tolkien’ hanging, begun in 2017 in partnership with the Tolkien Estate. Sixteen weavings – fourteen tapestries and two rugs – were made from original illustrations by J.R.R. Tolkien, intended to accompany his written works. For more than seven years, their implementation mobilized six workshops and factories and more than thirty professionals in the tapestry sector. It is this extraordinary adventure that this publication intends to relate…”

* The Hungarian National Library of Foreign Literature is hosting “a full day of family Tolkien events on 6th April 2024”, which is to include the Hungarian Tolkien Society… “making a formal presentation to the National Library of a core Tolkien collection of nearly 100 volumes”.

* For illustrators using a local install of Stable Diffusion, the new free ParchArt v1.0 LORA style plugin. Have your image-generating AI put any image on a nicely age-shaded parchment.

* An important new update for the excellent Anytxt desktop search freeware. Regex is now supported in the latest version, enabling sophisticated search across and inside your PC’s local files. Of obvious use to scholars with large local collections in .PDF and .ePub etc, provided you know a little search regex.

* New on Librivox as a public-domain audiobook, Early English Hero Tales (1915), as given for a modern audience by an American academic.

* And finally, the German Tolkien Society had an amusing April Fools Day article. The University of Oxford was apparently advertising a Professorship in Elvish Languages.

Tolkien Gleanings #185.

* The publisher Walking Tree announces the book The Songs of the Spheres: Lewis, Tolkien and the Overlapping Realms of their Imagination. An edited volume of essays, due in “mid April” 2024. The table-of-contents is here.

* Spotted during my ongoing read-through of Amon Hen back-issues (#261, page 27), a mention of Henry Wansbrough writing in The Tablet. He is quoted as noting that Tolkien had worked on… “the four chapters of Jonah and a literary revision of Habbakuk”. I knew about Jonah, but not the other. According to a reliable source the short Old Testament book of Habakkuk is about a circa 600 B.C. prophet “who stands at the watchtower awaiting God’s answer”, after the man’s frank and pointed questioning about why God permits the great distress then being inflicted on his chosen people.

* The University Bookman reviews the new Tolkien letters, in “The Mind Of Middle-earth”.

* New in open-access and in English, “The Fellowship of the Ring: A comparison of three Italian translations with the original text” (2024).

* Lovecraft and Tolkien, considered in relation to new scientific findings about ivy on the walls of buildings. In the blog article “… ivy so dense that one cannot but imagine it accursed or corpse-fed”.

* The Catholic Herald had an Easter article on “The Harrowing of Hell, according to J.R.R. Tolkien”.

* A new revised and expanded edition of Tom Shippey’s book Beowulf Translation and Commentary, shipping now.

* And finally, a public wall-plaque for Tolkien illustrator Pauline Baynes, in her home town of Farnham. Set to be unveiled on 20th October 2024.