Tolkien Gleanings #198.
* The “New York Tolkien Conference Returns in 2024” and the guest of honour has now been announced as… “Professor Nicholas Birns of NYU, who will present on his forthcoming book, The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien.” This book is actually available now, albeit at such hefty prices that Amazon offers ‘instalment plans’ for would-be purchasers. But it looks like an interesting read. The TOCs are…
* Full List of Incoming and Returning IRH Fellows 2024-2025… “Sarah Schaefer (Art History, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee), “Tolkien’s Art Histories””.
* Amazon has Tom Shippey’s Author of the Century being published as an affordable ebook in Spanish translation, on 10th July 2024.
* Amazon also shows that Polish translations of The History of Middle-earth are appearing, with Vol 4. due at the end of May 2024.
* The Tolkien Society reports that Peter Jackson is working on a new LoTR film as a hands-on producer. The film is titled The Hunt for Gollum and directed by and starring the Gollum actor Andy Serkis. Some readers will recall this tale has already been a well-reviewed fan-film, and will perhaps also recall last year’s videogame disaster Gollum (May 2023). 2026 is the pencilled-in date for the new Gollum movie.
* A thorough and highly illustrated local history article on the Essex Bridge in mid Staffordshire, along with its nearby iron cousin. The writer has also used one of the book plates of the bridge that I found and colourised. Interestingly, the iron bridge would have been longer in Tolkien’s time…
“the length of the Iron Bridge that spanned over the River Trent was removed during the 1950s. This modification left only the section that crosses the Trent and Mersey Canal intact. Although if you head into the woods opposite the gatehouse to Shugborough, you will find the remains of the footing of the Iron Bridge, and some of the old railings still standing.”
This could have given, even if the way was perhaps barred at the Shugborough end, an alternative vantage point on ‘The House of a Hundred Chimneys’.
* “The Lord of the Rings: An imaginary geography of Europe”, a free chapter from the open-access book Signs of Europe (2023), being the EU-centric proceedings of the 12th conference of the Hellenic Semiotics Society. The chapter notes the… “marked geographical affinities between Middle-earth and Europe”, outlines how Tolkien’s semiotics at the “spatial level reflects the logic of the narrative as a whole”, and then more ambitiously tries to “identify Tolkien’s views on the political structure of his fictional Europe”. Which apparently “represents a pretty good metaphor for the principle behind the EEC [i.e. the EU] of Tolkien’s times.”
* And finally, alien metal from outer space. In the new Stuff To Blow Your Mind podcast… “Before the dawn of the Iron Age, ancient humans had but one source of workable iron for their artifacts and weapons: meteorites. Robert and Joe discuss various examples of meteoric metal artifacts, including several precious sky-weapons of antiquity.” And Part 2 and Part 3. See also Kristine Larsen’s “Swords and Sky Stones: Meteoric Iron in The Silmarillion“ (freely available online).