Tolkien Gleanings #205.
* Amon Hen #307 (June 2024) is now available to Tolkien Society members. Note they are looking… “for a Layout & Graphic Designer for Vingilot, with the potential to move up to Amon Hen as well with experience”. Vingilot being the relatively new digital magazine which seems to offer a home for longer linguistic or similarly technically-complex essays, while at the same time also soaking up some of the poetry being submitted. The latest Amon Hen also has details of a weekly art challenge for Society members, with theme-prompts for July through to September.
* In the April 2024 edition of Omnes, Giuseppe Pezzini, professor at Oxford, interviewed. He is…
“currently participating in the conference ‘Tolkien: the actuality of myth’, held at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. In this interview, he talks about fundamental concepts of Tolkien’s thought, such as subcreation or his theory of fantasy.”
* In the ground floor gallery of New York City’s Grolier Club until 27th July 2024, an exhibition on dictionary-making titled “Hardly Harmless Drudgery: Landmarks in English Lexicography”. This offers…
“more than 100 objects, from early printed books to CD-ROMs, that tell stories of the people who struggled to define English vocabulary […] The exhibition also features letters to lexicographers from dictionary aficionados [including one by] J.R.R. Tolkien”.
* Another pick from Archive.org’s ongoing ingestion of open-access books, From Clerks to Corpora: essays on the English language yesterday and today (2015). This has two essays on Tolkien, “‘Mythonomer’: Tolkien on Myth in His Scholarly Work” and “Reflections on Tolkien’s Use of Beowulf”.
* A further open-access book of possible interest is Northern Archaeology and Cosmology: A Relational View (2019). This seeks to place animistic–shamanistic cosmologies in the context of the landscapes, animals, weather, and skyscapes of the early North, all informed by the most up-to-date archaeology and finds in material culture. Most of the focus appears to be on Finland and its wider region.
* A new Manchester University Press academic-theoretical book A Book of Monsters: Promethean horror in modern literature and culture (June 2024) has a chapter on “Spectres of Marx in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth”. A copy can be yours for a mere £70, comrade. Though only when discounted by kindly woke megacorp Amazon. The capitalist fat-cats at De Gruyter would like to charge you over £200 for a copy.
* Due in August 2024, the French language book Allers et retours du Hobbit: Des mots aux images. Appears to be about the adaptation(s?) of The Hobbit. Traces the story of The Hobbit from its genesis, all the way to the world-premiere of the movie version.
* And finally, a Welsh nationalist press article this week on “Yr Hobyd: Tolkien’s The Hobbit to be published in Welsh”. With background information, publisher quotes, and a view of some interior pages of the forthcoming book. In English and freely available online.