Tolkien Gleanings #212.

* New thoughts from the venerable Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, on “The Literary Power of Hobbits”…

“Hobbits were no part of Tolkien’s original plan. They entered rather late and through a side door [ … Their addition] shouldn’t have worked. But it did. The world can be grateful.”

* Listings for the heavily delayed book Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-1959 now show a pleasing cover.

“He lectured on Chaucer, edited Chaucer, and published essays on Chaucer. Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-59 reprints many of these works for the first time, and documents Tolkien’s career-long engagement with the poet and traces [Chaucer’s] influence in Tolkien’s own works.”

* The Thoughts on Tolkien blog, exploring Tolkien’s use of a Latin phrase, sursum corda.

* The annual Aelfwine Essay Awards, for which the Spanish Tolkien Society invites entries. Essays can be up to 10,000 words and can be submitted in English, but must also have an accompanying Spanish translation. Deadline: 31st October 2024.

* Due 26th September 2024, and well-timed for the “back to university, got my grant-cheque” period, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Very Short Introduction. Part of the ‘Very Short Introductions’ pocket-book series from Oxford University Press. The author is a lecturer in Mediaeval Studies at the University of York.

* On YouTube, the Digital Tolkien Project has another monthly progress update, for June 2024.

* A YouTube recording of Holly Ordway on Tolkien’s Faith, speaking recently in a lecture at an American theological seminary.

* New on Project Muse, “The Character of Time in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ($ paywall), which seems to me relevant to the development of Tolkien’s own thinking on time…

“Gawain elaborates its own vision of dynamic, social time in its descriptions of time and characters. Through its evasion of teleologies, the poem offers a critique of discourses of inevitability. Gawain complicates an already complex picture of medieval time-schemes”.

Talking of Gawain, I have acquired a crunchable copy of The Gawain Country (1984). I’ll hope to produce an expanded free edition soon, which will include the author’s later follow-on essays.

* A links-listing of Columbia University undergraduate prizes for 2024 dissertations. Note the list includes “The Enduring Impact of World War I in the Works and Lives of Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis, and on British Society between the World Wars”. Freely available online in PDF.

* Tolkien’s great nephew, Tim Tolkien… “will be sculpting a life-size statue of Cardinal John Henry Newman for Birmingham’s Cofton Park.” I’m fairly sure the article is a little misleading, in casually saying Newman was buried at the “Birmingham Oratory”. So far as I know his grave is still out at Rednal in the Lickey Hills, in the grounds of the Oratory’s Retreat House (which Tolkien knew well as a boy).

* And finally, a fantasy fan. No, really… Gustave Dore’s vision of butterfly-riding cherubs vs. dragon-riding demons, painted on a ladies’ flutter-fan. Now at the Fan Museum in London.