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.