Tolkien Gleanings #203.

* A new edition of The Hobbit in Welsh translation. Pre-ordering now, and it seems to be for sale by pre-order only. Shipping in June 2024, so be quick to pre-order…

This is the first publication of any work by J.R.R. Tolkien in the Welsh language. [Translated] by Adam Pearce, who has previously translated H.G. Wells into Welsh. [The book] been prepared in accordance with J.R.R. Tolkien’s own instructions for translators of his work, and officially licenced by the Tolkien Estate.

* Another open-access / Creative Commons book, one in the big new ingestion of such on Archive.org, Ancrene Wisse: From Pastoral Literature to Vernacular Spirituality. Although, curiously, Tolkien appears to have been all but erased. Only being mentioned in one footnote… “Dobson follows Tolkien in using linguistic evidence to place the author of Ancrene Wisse on the Herefordshire/Shropshire borders”.

* It has been confirmed that Tom Shippey will be speaking at the scholarly convention Mythmoot XI: ‘The Resilience of Imagination’. 20th-23rd June 2024, at the National Conference Center in Virginia, USA. Booking now.

* Another recent podcast appearance for Austin Freeman, again talking about his book on J.R.R. Tolkien’s theology as it can be determined from the works and letters.

* Malvern Hills cultural walks: the Tolkien trail & the Lewis loop. Guided walks with an expert local man, available this summer. Well-reviewed and bookable now via AirB&B.

* My searches led me to “Tolkien and the Vikings: On J.R.R. Tolkien and Victorian Literature About The North”, in the 2017 edition of the journal Creatio Fantastica. In Polish, with an English abstract. Freely available online (see the tiny ‘Download’ link). This same issue of the Polish journal Creatio Fantastica was a “John Ronald Reuel Tolkien” special issue, and (with a little hunting) the entire issue turns out to be freely available from a University Repository. The journal is under Creative Commons Attribution, meaning you are free to translate articles and publish elsewhere. Note that the creatiofantastica.com website appears to be defunct, and the journal home is now creatiofantastica.wordpress.com — albeit with back-issue links back to the defunct .com site (tip to orgs: don’t buy expensive prestige .com domains if you can’t afford their hefty running costs). The last issue of the journal was 2020, and the last blog post spring 2020, so I guess it’s possible the journal was yet another casualty of the lockdowns? Thankfully Archive.org’s Wayback Machine has archived most of the back-issue PDFs.

* Another oldie, from 2014, but new to me. The scholarly blog article “A ‘Sorcerer’s Stronghold’ in Anglo-Saxon Nottinghamshire”. Informed placename musing, about a site about nine miles north of Tolkien’s Gedling (although the author of the article hadn’t spotted how close the two places are). Interesting also for its mention of the apparent Anglo-Saxon fuzziness between the concepts of ‘sorcerer’ and ‘painter’, which (if correct) casts a new light on Saruman’s making of a ‘cloak of many hues’ for himself.

* The long-running science-fiction fandom newsletter Ansible #443 (June 2024) reports that the old Middle-earth Festival — a long-vanished family-friendly ‘cos-play + market + song and talks’ event formerly held around Sarehole Mill in the south of Birmingham — is not to be revived in 2024 due to lack of funding. There had apparently been hopes that it would be. The unmentioned back-story here is that the city’s local authority is currently bankrupt, and nearly all the city’s arts funding has had to be cut as a result. Further, £750m of the city’s public property is mooted to be for sale, possibly even including (for those with deep pockets) Tolkien’s Sarehole Mill itself. A documentary film which delved into this ultimately put the blame on “decisions by council bosses stretching back decades”. Including the city suffering a massive legal claim over equal-pay (indoor and mostly female office cleaners claimed they should have had the same pay-rate as outdoor bin-men), and a disastrous new IT system that became “a financial black hole”. The ‘killer blow’ was then the loss of business rates (i.e. the UK’s local tax on all businesses) during the lockdowns, as well as post-lockdown inflation and the ever-rising ‘social care’ costs.

* And finally, and on a happier note, the mighty Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope in Cheshire. The site has a midsummer “day of panels, screenings, and walks celebrating novelist Alan Garner” […] “In this, his 90th year, hand-picked specialists from the realms of archaeology, physics, and literature will gather at this key site to discuss how Garner’s fiction has inspired them, and explore how time and place are re-imagined in his classic novels.” 21st June 2024, booking now.