Tolkien Gleanings #222

* New to me, and published without fanfare a few days ago, the new book Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien’s Legendarium. 13 essays on the topic. There was a call-for-papers exploring Tolkien’s built places, back in 2019 in Amon Hen #279. Then a series of panels on the topic at a Mythcon a few years ago. Essays in the finished book include, among others: “Re-Enchanting Built Spaces: On Dwarves and Dwarven Places”; “Stone Monuments and Imperfect Cultural and Personal Memories in The Lord of the Rings”; and “The Many Faces of Lake-Town”.

* B&W artwork relating to 1981 BBC Radio adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Destined for the BBC’s Radio Times listings magazine, by the look of them.

* More recently newly at the auctioneers, and still for sale, a long letter under the title “Sherlock Holmes letter from 10th January 1947”. Original and signed by Tolkien.

The letter describes Sherlock Holmes and Mycroft as having “quite a sniff of priggery about these two precious gents” and Conan Doyle as “not himself distinguished as a particularly acute thinker”.

The “gents” concerned might instead be Holmes and his creator Doyle, it’s left a little ambiguous. But on balance I think the letter-owner’s description is probably right. Doyle had died in 1930, and he had long been deeply deluded by spiritualist charlatanry. Thus I doubt any Sherlockians will quibble with Tolkien’s other assessment. But evidently Tolkien in 1947 was familiar enough with the Holmes tales to feel able to make his judgements. Did he perhaps re-read Holmes to pass the long nights of fire-watching duty during the Second World War? Just my guess.

Update: the letter sold for £20,000.

* New in the Sage journal IDS, the article “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium as Heterodox Palaeoscience” ($ paywall)…

“… the influence of a range of palaeoscience topics on Tolkien – some of which were outside the mainstream of his time before becoming accepted – are [not] well known. This article synthesises research into the conception of Tolkien’s usage of heterodox palaeoscience in his works, [in order to then] explore the reception of those themes in his fiction.”

* Tolkien scholar David Robbie is launching his new book Great Haywood, Past and Present, People and Places, at Rugeley Public Library on 9th September 2024. “Pre-booking not required. A short talk, followed by Q&A and discussion”. The village of Great Haywood, in mid Staffordshire, was well known to the young Tolkien during the First World War. The talk is part of the nation’s annual Heritage Open Days at various venues, which will take place in early September.

* From the Italian Tolkien scholars, a new article in Italian on “Tolkien in Bulgaria”, this being a profile of Lyubomir Nikolov who translated The Lord of the Rings. This follows this week’s news from Radio Bulgaria that “Bulgarian writer Lyubomir Nikolov has passed away at 74”.

* And finally, The Lord of the Rings is 70 years old tomorrow. Imagine popping down to the local bookshop, on what the untampered original weather records show was a dry and pleasantly cool summer day, at the end of July 1954. A Thursday appropriately enough (the day being named after the thunder-god Thor, as you’ll recall). Then strolling home with a crisp newly-printed Fellowship hardback neatly wrapped in brown paper.

Tolkien Gleanings #221

* In Switzerland, the exhibition “In Tolkien’s footsteps”. A wide variety of works, presumably all inspired by Tolkien and Middle-earth, have been placed… “along an easily accessible hiking trail behind the historic village of Blatten” and these form an outdoor ‘walking’ exhibition. From 20th July until 10th August 2024.

* Newly added to the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, the long paper “Holding His Attention: Tolkien and ‘Modern’ Science Fiction”.

* At Signum, an online summer-school course in “The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium”. Now a confirmed course, starting 5th August 2024 and running through the month in eight sessions. Booking now.

* Signum will also be marking three years of their online short-courses, with a showcase event on 16th November 2024. This will be a free online event, open to all.

* New on Archive.org, Period Homes magazine for July 2007. With a three-page photo-feature on a custom-built private museum, which houses a large Tolkien collection including many “books, manuscripts and artifacts.”

* New on YouTube, the July 2024 Update for the Digital Tolkien Project.

* New to me, Rudyard Kipling’s Songs from Books (1913), a large collection of songs drawn from his books up until that time. I’m no expert on the topic, but it’s perhaps evidence that Tolkien was not without forerunners in the heavy inclusion of songs within Edwardian popular / imaginative literature. Note also Kipling’s elaboration of a vividly realised future-world, with various appendices and extra matter appended to his seminal “With the Night Mail” which birthed ‘hard’ science-fiction.

* And finally, an oldie from 2011 but new to me. The tobacco-scented Pipes Magazine on “C.S. Lewis: Novelist, Scholar, Broadcaster – and Pipe Smoker”. His… “shorter pipe is a Tetley’s Lightweight, and the longer pipe is a Cub Foreign”. His favourite… “pipe tobacco blend was Gold Block … also smoked the original Three Nuns”. A quiz-question stumper and ice-breaker follows naturally: “What might Tolkien have understood by the words ‘Tonight I’m packing Three Nuns into my Tetley’s Lightweight, Tollers'”.

Tolkien Gleanings #220

* The Telegraph ($ paywall), gushes that…

“a newly unearthed document has revealed it was an ‘instrumental’ meeting with his friend, C.S. Lewis, in 1930 that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to begin sharing the imaginary languages and mythologies of Middle-earth with the world. The document, which was hidden away in the records of Magdalen College in Oxford, indicates that Tolkien spoke his secretly invented Elvish tongues and told stories about Middle-earth for the first time at a previously unknown meeting with Lewis and other members of Magdalen’s elite, intellectual Michaelmas Club”.

* The Italian press report that the Tolkien exhibition in Turin has now closed. This was the second venue and the show was again a great success, welcoming over 149,000 paying visitors in just over three months. The next venue will be the city of Turin at the Reggia di Venaria, said to be opening there “in a few months”.

* A 2023 article in the undergraduate Drover Review asks “Did Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Influence Tolkien While Writing The Lord of the Rings?”

* Looks like a new book will be ‘flying wingman’ alongside John Garth’s long-awaited next book on a very similar topic, The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945. The book is coming in June 2025 according to Amazon… “historian Joseph Loconte tells for the first time how the dark shadows cast by the Second World War utterly transformed the lives and literary imagination of Tolkien and Lewis.”

* New at Theology of Law, the article “Shire Justice: What hobbits can teach us”… “‘shire justice’ is akin to the Biblical idea of shalom, something that every society needs if it is to flourish.” Was in a 2013 collection of essays, but is here freely available as what looks like a pre-print PDF.

* The Thoughts on Tolkien blog considers “The Prayers of Sam Gamgee and Sir Gawain”.

* Now free on Archive.org, a basic scan of Ralph Elliott’s book The Gawain Country (1984). Long out-of-print and difficult to obtain as a personal reading-copy, until now. Here the scan is extended, by appending some of Elliott’s later work on the topic.

* The Church Times reviews the sumptuous new book C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (2024).

* And finally, University of Oxford Podcasts: A Walk around C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (2021). Which, in large part, was also Tolkien’s Oxford.

Tolkien Gleanings #219

* J.D. Vance is likely to be the next U.S. Vice-President by November, barring further assassination attempts. He tells the enquiring media… “A lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien”. See also the new article “The Political Vision of The Lord of the Rings”, posted at the Gerald R. Ford Leadership Forum. This appears to be intended as a brief backgrounder, for those in the American political class who are now curious about Tolkien.

* “Death and the Soul in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, a recording of a conference paper given by Stratford Caldecott in 2013, but which has only now surfaced online (via his family).

* In the latest ANQ journal, “Two Norse Literary Analogues of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beacons of Gondor” ($ paywall). The first page is free.

* Now on Archive.org, a scan of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine #45 (Fall/Autumn 1999). This has an interview with Guy Gavriel Kay, who helped Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion.

* A poetry and plaques walking-tour in Oxford…

“We stood outside the former rooms of C.S. Lewis and read the feverishly atheistic poems he’d written there as an undergraduate, long before he became a noted voice for Anglicanism. We read wayfaring poems by Tolkien, playfully claiming him for Univ’s history (our [University College Oxford] College Archivist notes that early in his career, Tolkien was a peripatetic tutor and taught the occasional Univ student; Merton’s Fellows were graciously amused to hear that we included Tolkien in our tour and several have already signed up for Univ’s 2024 poetry tour in Michaelmas term.)”

* An online Signum University course potentially starting September 2024, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Text, Translation, Film”. It will only run if enough people sign up for it.

* And finally, TheOneRing.net has a new Exclusive Interview with Sir Richard Taylor of Weta Workshop. For the movie’s Minas Tirith…

“we literally piled a whole lot of cardboard boxes together, sprayed them with urethane foam, carved them back, and then started building onto them. Never could we think that this miniature would end up going on to be exhibited in a museum, having a life well beyond the movie. If we had known, we would have built it a little better. But we were building them so cheap, so fast, that I really was of the view that the only thing that mattered was that they just needed to hold up for the filming.”

Tolkien Gleanings #218

* Those with a small dragon-hoard to hand may be able to swop it for Tolkien’s calligraphic transcripts of the poems “Namarie” and “A Elbereth Gilthoniel”, along with his notes…

“… As a ‘divine’ or ‘angelic’ person Varda/Elbereth could be said to be ‘looking afar from heaven’ (as in Sam’s invocation); hence the use of a present participle. She was often thought of, or depicted, as standing on a great height looking towards Middle-earth, with eyes that penetrated the shadows, and listening to the cries for aid of Elves (and Men) in peril or grief. Frodo (I 208) and Sam both invoke her in moments of extreme peril. The Elves sing hymns to her. There is said to be no religion in The L.R., but if this is not ‘religion’, what is it?…” (Tolkien)

* Also recently at auction in the UK, the original of Eric Fraser’s map of Middle-earth. The map was “…drawn by Eric Fraser in connection with the 1981 BBC radio adaptation. It appears, however, to be entirely unpublished”. Looks to me like it was made to be a double-page pull-out for the BBC’s flagship Radio Times magazine, anticipating a listing of programme dates in small type as a side-column. Now sold.

* Now on YouTube in full, Neil Gaiman’s recent major Tolkien Lecture 2024 in Oxford, in which he talks about “Libraries and the Fantastic”.

* The Catholic Herald podcast this week talks with Holly Ordway about Tolkien and faith.

* The new book Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020 (July 2024) has Tolkien scholar Thomas Honegger on “Visualising the Elves throughout the Centuries”. Also a chapter suggesting William Morris has had an enduring influence on fantasy visuals, and another on the challenges of fantasy map-making. I find the book can be freely had in open-access from the publisher as a single .PDF file.

* Happening this weekend, the 3rd Faith, Art and Myth Congress in Argentina, 19th-21st July 2024. Centred around Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Chesterton.

* And finally, Warwick Castle Hotel re-opens with a full-size…

“Animatronic Knight and Horse which comes to life. […] The 60-room Warwick Castle Hotel officially opens on 22nd July 2024. Blending beautifully into the castle’s surroundings, the exterior of the hotel resembles a medieval long hall, with a rough-cast render, timber cladding and shingle roof tiles.”

Sounds like a possible location for a small select Tolkien conference, especially given Tolkien’s Warwick connections in his youth?

Tolkien Gleanings #217

* The French journal Rencontres No. 612 (spring 2024) is themed around Tolkien et l’Antiquite (‘Tolkien and antiquity’). I see it can now be had via Amazon UK and with UK shipping. Note that single chapter PDFs can also be purchased on the publisher’s site for a few $s, thus opening an easy route to affordable auto-translation. Titles, in English translation:

    – The Third Age as Medium Aevum.

    – The Vergilian Golden Age in Tolkien’s Legendarium. [in English]

    – “All … that walk the world in these after-days”: Classical Receptions as Gothic ‘Haunting’ in J.R.R. Tolkien. [in English]

    – The Language of Knowledge: The Influence of Latin on Quenya by J.R.R. Tolkien.

    – Vestiges of Antiquity among Hobbits.

    – From Babylon to Numenor: The Reception of Near Eastern Antiquity and the use of Akkadian sources in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.

    – Rome in Middle-earth: Echoes of a Past to Come.

    – Velleda and Galadriel, the Antiquities of Chateaubriand and Tolkien.

* Publisher McFarland plans a new monograph series under the title ‘Critical Explorations in Tolkien Studies’. This sounds to me like it might start publishing in 2026, since this week the editor states that… “The series will open for proposals in 2025 after I assemble an advisory board.” McFarland produce a vast range, and they have developed a questionable reputation for their fan / genre studies books, with some items being excellent while others are dire. But hopefully some firm editorship will keep this new Tolkien series on an even keel.

* An M.A. dissertation from the University of Toronto, Shakespeare’s Faerie Art of Enchantment through Tolkien’s Lens: A Historiographical Introduction (November 2022). Freely available online.

* Don’t know where to start with The Silmarillion? Forthcoming from Signum Press is…

“a bit of ‘popular scholarship’ called The Silmarillion Primer. This is the revised and upgraded version of the Primer that first appeared on Tor.com back in 2017. […] yes, [after much revision] it will be a real book! — published through Signum Press.”

* Online and zoom-able as a large crisp scan, the large-sheet Ordnance Survey Map of Britain in the Dark Ages (1965 edition).

The more attractive 1939 edition, showing woodland as well as elevation, is on Archive.org as a poor scan.

One assumes Tolkien had a copy of the two 1939 editions (‘South’ and ‘North’ separately, the latter being effectively Scotland). I recall having a later Dark Ages O.S. map when I was a lad, but these earlier editions were discovered via the long article “On ‘Tom Bombadil and the Anti-Matter of England'”, from the Institute of Intellectual History, St. Andrews, UK. This 2020 article addresses, at length, the important intellectual historian Professor J.G.A. Pocock’s misunderstandings of Tolkien in his essay “Tom Bombadil and the Anti-Matter of England”, in terms of the frameworks of what Pocock termed “paleo-English” prehistory.

* From Reactor magazine this week, a quick popular guide-article on “Tracing the Origins of Modern Fantasy in Five Classic Viking Tales”, with the article also suggesting accessible translations.

* In Catholic 365 this week, an article on why “Aragorn’s Coronation Needs the Priesthood”…

“Aragorn’s kingship only follows the priestly act of Frodo carrying the ring to Mount Doom. Aragorn wisely recognizes this, and will not accept his kingship without acknowledging its dependence on the priestly work of Frodo and the prophetic leadership of Gandalf. [… yet the film adaptation] removes Frodo’s participation in the coronation”

* The latest Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment is a themed issued on ‘Plant Tendrils in Children’s and Young Adult Literature’. The journal is freely available online. Nothing specifically tree-ish in the Tolkien sense, but the book review of Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts may interest. The book…

“successfully identifies a broadly shared Anglo-Norman understanding of animals and humans as creatures with ineluctably shared destinies. As the chapter on St. Francis makes especially clear, humans and animals become subjects by making meaning through the production of noise, song, and sound.”

* And finally, Harvard Magazine reports “Harvard Lampoon Donates Historic Materials to University Archives”. Including the paperback Bored of the Rings, the 1969 student parody of LoTR.

Tolkien Gleanings #216

* Leeds International Medieval Congress call-for-papers for the July 2025 conference. The 2025 Tolkien sessions are to be: “Tolkien: Medieval Roots and Modern Branches”; “Learning, Lore and Craft in Tolkien’s Medieval World”; “Oral Tradition and Medieval Transmission in Tolkien’s Works”; “Tolkien as Teacher and Mentor at Leeds and Beyond”; and “Teaching Tolkien”.

* Another two additions to the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, “A Medievalist Myth-making Crisis: Tolkien’s Tychonic Cosmology” (on Tolkien’s late attempts to reshape Middle-earth’s cosmology, to conform with 20th century science); and “From Ghitterns to Harps” (Tolkien’s personal musical sense, awareness of British ‘early music’ movement, preferences for song). Freely available online.

* The latest John Henry Westen Show on YouTube… “in this special episode, music theory expert Paul List explores how music’s complex language is central to Tolkien’s Catholic vision of Middle-earth”.

* “The Responsibilities of the Reader”… “This thesis will discuss Tolkien’s ‘applicability’ and how it differs from allegory. The main concern is how Tolkien’s view of allegory, and consequently applicability, has been misunderstood as wanting to control the reader’s interpretative freedom”.

* The July edition of The Critic magazine has an article responding at length to the sumptuous Bodleian Library book C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (May 2024), by relishing what are apparently new or up-to-date biographical details. Not a review of the book, as a book. Freely available online.

* The Priestly Fraternity of St Peter’s latest Dowry magazine No. 62 has a short article in which… “Tolkien scholar Prof. Robert Lazu Kmita explains how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, honouring chastity, influenced the author of The Lord of the Rings.” Freely available online.

* On Amazon I see a follow-up book to The Wisdom of Hobbits, Mimetic Theory & Middle-earth: Untangling Desire in Tolkien’s Legendarium (March 2024). Judging by the blurb it cleaves to the unconvincing explains-everything French social theory of Rene Girard. Thus the “desire” in focus is the desire to be like others who we admire and/or who have things we want to possess. No amorous hobbits.

* New on Archive.org and free to download in .PDF format, a good new scan of Lewis Spence’s A Dictionary of Medieval Romance and Romance Writers (1913). Handy to have in your pocket when hacking your way through thickets of passing mentions of obscure authors.

* And finally… Andrew West’s 2008 BabelStone Goblin, two .TTF fonts for Tolkien’s ‘Goblin’ alphabet, mapped to the modern keyboard. Also the Moon Runes from The Hobbit, again as a font. Still freely available online.

It strikes me that there’s a potential small art/museum show on “Tolkien’s Runes”. Paired with actual historical runic artefacts (from stones to Cynewulf’s runic signature), plus artistic interpretations of Tolkien’s invented runes by undergraduates on an illustration degree.

Tolkien Gleanings #215

* Signum University’s fledgling Signum Press has a repeat of the call for papers for an edited volume to be titled Creative Philology: Studies in Speculative Fiction — Tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien. This new call is dated 1st July 2024. I guess the previous call didn’t yield enough contributors, or some have since dropped out, and they now need more? Just my guess.

* A pre-Christmas two-day seminar from the Tolkien Society, on Tolkien as Heritage. Set for 7th-8th December 2024, at the University of Belgrade and online. To be specifically focused on… “the idea of Tolkien’s work as heritage in and of itself”.

* New on YouTube, Word on Fire magazine interviews Holly Ordway on exploring Tolkien’s Catholic faith.

* From 2022 and 2023 but new to me, a long blog post on “How Tolkien Disguised Ice Age Europe as Middle-Earth”, followed by a part two. Presents the case, with maps, that… “Tolkien’s Middle-earth, when correctly scaled, perfectly matches the landscape of Ice Age Europe”. The outlines of the old coasts were indeed newly known by the time Tolkien was writing, in the 1930s. For instance what is now called ‘Doggerland’ off the east coast of England, long ago totally submerged by ongoing natural sea-level rise.

* Also from circa 2022, The Tree Of Tales — Virtual Tolkien Exhibition. Online and freely accessible. Including a one-hour video introduction to the Italian exhibition, which YouTube will auto-translate from Italian if you switch on subtitles.

* The travelling exhibition The Magic of Middle Earth is now at St. George’s Guildhall in King’s Lynn. This is a former port town in Norfolk, on the east coast of England. Free entry, for this stop, and the exhibition runs until 14th September 2024.

If you can’t get there, take a look at this new article on another Lord of the Rings collection, which with fine photographs gives a flavour of the high quality fan-items and merchandise that is being produced.

* A potential Tolkien art show / open studio in Brooklyn, New York City. Muddy Colors writes…

“This coming fall [autumn] I will host another Open Studio showcasing “The Bridge of Khazad-dum” among other works here in Brooklyn. The date is tentatively set for Saturday, 21st September 2024.”

* This autumn the Malvern Festival 2024 (Malvern Hills, England) will include a John Garth public talk on Tolkien, which I assume will reference the associations that Tolkien, Lewis and Auden had with Malvern. Bookings open on 1st August 2024.

* Now scanned and on Archive.org, the manuscript studies / palaeography review journal Scriptorum, as annual issues from the 1940s and 50s.

* The British Fantasy Society is currently seeking mentors…

“We’re recruiting mentors from around the publishing industry, which means we’re seeking not just writers, but also editors, publishers, agents, and anyone else involved in the world of publishing (not just tradpub, either; indie and self-pub are more than welcome!).”

* And finally… a forthcoming major exhibition in 2025 at the Musee d’Orsay museum in Paris, “Christian Krohg: The People of the North” (spring-summer 2025). Krohg was a Norwegian realist artist who recorded the folk life of the nation in his paintings, before modernity hit. The show will include, one hopes, the recently censored “Leif Erikson discovers America” (1872), which was removed from the walls of the National Gallery in Oslo due to its apparent political incorrectness. The Krogh painting was itself a replacement for a painting (originally on the museum’s grand staircase) banished from the walls because deemed even more politically incorrect, “The Ride of Asgard” (Asgardsreien) (1872) by Peter Nicolai Arbo.

Christian Krohg, “Leif Erikson discovers America” (1872)