Tolkien Gleanings #208.
* Up for auction, Tolkien’s hand-drawn diagrams showing the changes in Old English speech over time. Drawn in 1942.
Also recently auctioned, for $24k, a short dash of Tolkien’s penmanship… “In all my works I take the part of the trees as against all their enemies.”
* A peep at the Pembroke College memorial to J.R.R. Tolkien, unveiled a few days ago.
* The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien (2023) now has a more affordable ebook version. I’m fairly sure Amazon UK only had the £135 print version, a few weeks ago. The ebook gives the table-of-contents…
1. History in the Archives and on the Road.
2. Forehistories: Prehistory to the Pre-Roman.
3. From Ulfilas to Appendix F: How Tolkien Yearned for, and Gave Up, the Goths.
4. Interhistories: Tolkien, Byzantium, and the Worlds of Modern Fantasy.
5. Hobbits, the Rohirrim and the Modern Histories of Politeness.
6. Sylvan Historians: The Silvan Elves in Nature and History.
7. Philology and History: Tolkien, Auerbach, Said.
8. Afterhistories: Or, Why Moria Was Not Restored?
* There’s now a Kindle ebook edition of the book Tolkien e Lovecraft: Alle origini del fantastico. In Italian, a 26,000-word survey of similarities, mostly skating through the two men’s shared reading in fantasy during their younger days (Dunsany, Edgar Rice Burroughs, E.R. Eddison, with other writers also discussed but less certain). I’ve auto-translated the short book (who knew that a Kindle tablet would allow a Kindle ebook to be screenshot-ed?) and this gave me the gist of it. The author seems weaker on Lovecraft than on Tolkien, for instance mistaking W.H. Hodgson’s influence on Lovecraft’s writing — Lovecraft did not encounter his tales until 1934.
* Also from Italy but this time in English, the article “‘Suspension of disbelief’ vs. ‘Secondary Belief’: fictional worlds in Coleridge and Tolkien”. Freely available online, and part of a substantial new special-issue of the journal Between (Italian Association for the Theory and Comparative History of Literature), an issue which is themed around the idea of ‘Other Possible Worlds’.
* Another book review has been added to the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, a short review of From Imagination to Faerie: Tolkien’s Thomist Fantasy (2022). Freely available online.
* America’s only mediaeval art journal requires an editor.
* And finally, The Ring of the Niblung, free on LibriVox. Dramatised and with narration, drawn from Margaret Armour’s 1910 ‘plain prose’ translation. But here (oh bliss…) produced in audio without 7½ hours of incomprehensible operatic screeching and wailing. Amazingly, this seems to be the first time the Ring has been done this way. Because I went looking for a similar but more professional production, but could find none.