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?