Tolkien Gleanings #201.

* Forthcoming, the book Catalogue de l’exposition permanente «Aubusson tisse Tolkien», now listed on Amazon as Aubusson tisse Tolkien, l’aventure tissee. This will be the catalogue for what has become a large collection of Tolkien tapestries at Aubusson in France. The book will include a section on “Christopher Tolkien, interpreter and creator: the map of Middle-earth”, related to the tapestry that is auto-translated as “a carpet”. Whatever it is, it’s made after a map of Middle-earth drawn “for the first edition of The Lord of the Rings“. The catalogue is apparently due in early July 2024.

* New at Word on Fire and freely available online, an essay on “Tolkien and the Machines”… “Tolkien’s critique of the Machine is not intended to have us flee from making things.” Bear in mind also that his everyday machines were just machines, for the most part. Bicycles for instance, which he enjoyed. But ours are now often ‘connected’ devices tethered to remote and unaccountable bureaucracies. One thing we might do to counter the tendency toward machine-isation is to always aim for the machine that gives us the most personal autonomy possible. Open-source local-AI desktop PCs, for instance, rather than AI laptops controlled and snooped on by corporations.

* In Argentina in July 2024, 3rd International Congress on Art & Myth, with a focus on Tolkien, Chesterton, and Lewis. The organisers have improved their AI image-generation skills since the last promo splash, though their Tolkien still doesn’t look quite right.

* The Italian Tolkien association’s third ‘Tolkien Studies Days’ event, happening this weekend.

* Tolkien on the word ‘losenger’ (1951). Freely online, though two pages of the essay are missing. A rare philological essay which comes from the same period of The Lord of the Rings. The word eventually devolves into ‘idle sluggard’ in the late period, and one thus wonders if part of the interest for Tolkien was its possible influence on ‘lob lie-by-the-fire’? It’s possible this essay may be reprinted in full in the forthcoming Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-1959 OUP book, since Tolkien opens by saying that he found the word in Chaucer. But that’s just my guess.

* Up for auction, Tolkien’s gift-copy of a first-edition of The Hobbit, inscribed to “Margaret from Ronald”. Margaret was the sister of Christopher Wiseman, and had become a nun at Oulton Abbey — which is just north of the town of Stone in mid Staffordshire.

* A new book this month, The Music of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings: Sounds of Home in the Fantasy Franchise, written by a Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Huddersfield in the UK. Available now from Routledge. The author tells his university’s PR fire-hose wranglers that… “my next large-scale project will focus on the music of children’s media, starting with an initial symposium on the music of early-years television”, which may interest some Gleanings readers.

* “A 9th-century church room has been recreated in the Viking town of Ribe”. Apparently authentically. Is it dark and dingy? Far from it. More like a bright 1920s comic-strip, judging by the photographs. I imagine the original makers of such things would have bees-waxed the rather plain floor planks, though. And/or strewn them with rushes.

* And finally, something tree-ish. Yorkshire Post reporter fully vindicated in his reporting on the long-running Sheffield tree-felling scandal. The city council had developed a strange Saruman-like hatred of its own trees, and for years felled and lopped them at seemingly every opportunity.