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).