Tolkien Gleanings #210.

* New on YouTube, the recent lectures “A Veritable “Middle Earth”’: Tolkien and the Palaeoanthropological Imagination” and “Riddles in the Grass: the characterisation and narrative value of landscape over the fields of Rohan”, both recent parts of the ongoing Oxford 50 series of public talks. Turns out the first talk is about the study of the anthropology of prehistory — prehistoric man etc — rather than (as I had idly supposed) a witty way of referring to the Victorian-era history of folk anthropology and ethnography as a field of study.

* A new book from France’s Le Dragon de Brume imprint, On Cartography, Maps & Locations in Middle-earth (2024). This joins their previous On Some Stars, Flowers & Places in Middle-earth (2023). Both are freely online. They contain translated essays selected from the publisher’s French-language journal (2011-2017). To see the PDF download button for each book, open the Google Docs preview in full-screen mode.

* Looking at Le Dragon de Brume’s French journals (see above), I see Leo Carruthers, “Homme elfique, peuple elfique: Sire Gauvain et le Chevalier vert”, (Elven man, elven people: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) at the end of the final issue in 2017. This however is an issue only available in print, via Lulu.com. At a guess, though, it’s possible the essay was folded into his new book Pearl / Perle: suivi de “Tolkien et Perle”. Which apparently also presents some new ideas about Gawain.

* Note also that Le Dragon de Brume are still active in terms of planning new publications. There’s a current call-for-papers for a 2025 linguistics issue, with papers ideally to be sent in under Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA).

* The Oxford Mail notes “Letter J.R.R Tolkien wrote to boy in Oxford could fetch £20k”, and gives details of its contents.

* The forthcoming The War of the Rohirrim animated animé movie is now issuing some pre-release publicity. Whatever it turns out to be at Christmas 2024, one can’t blame the artists who worked on it. Their work is set be collected in the forthcoming artbook The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim Official Visual Companion, due on 7th November 2024.

* I’m pleased to find “Middle-earth, Narnia and Lovecraft’s Dream World: Comparative World-views in Fantasy”, from the now unobtainable Crypt of Cthulhu No. 13 (1983). I was too poor to afford a set of Crypt when they were newly in PDF, and now… the older PDFs are no longer available to buy due to a falling out between publisher and editor. But at least this item is freely available online.

* And finally, the faery ‘dreamland’ tales of H.G. Wells. Yes, Wells, not Tolkien or Lovecraft. Three of these were published in his late prime in 1901-1906. These are carefully considered in the undergraduate dissertation “”I Have Dreamed a Dream…”: An Analysis of H.G. Wells’ Short Stories “Mr Skelmersdale in Fairyland”, “The Door in the Wall” and “A Dream of Armageddon”” (2008). The original dates make them of possible interest re: influence on Tolkien, and they were later to be easily found in book collections. Such as the Wells collection Tales of the unexpected (1924) which has all three. The dissertation is freely available online, as are the stories since they are now ‘public domain’.