Tolkien Gleanings #223
* Added to the latest edition of Journal of Tolkien Research, a new review of the book Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium (2024).
* The UK’s latest Country Life magazine has an article on the wealth of Tolkien letters currently up for sale. No paywall on this article, at least for me.
* “Tolkien: A Thoroughly Modern Medievalist”, a new episode of a one-hour podcast which discusses the links between “faith and beauty”. This episode “featuring Dr. Holly Ordway” for a wide-ranging discussion on Tolkien in historical and national context.
He’s extremely English, and he has very English habits of expression. Which include at times being extremely hyperbolic, and at other times being extremely understated […] I’ve been spending a lot of time in England, for more than a decade now. It sunk in gradually that the English, for all they have outwardly similar appearances to Americans, are very different from Americans. [Tolkien’s English / West Midlands / Oxford manner] has made it extra puzzling for Americans in particular to puzzle Tolkien out.
Since his hyperbolic comments, largely meant to be amusingly offhand and/or playfully conversation-provoking, have sometimes been taken literally. Tolkien’s mumbling, and the nature of printed-word interviews conducted by journalists, also means that the vital role that intonation plays in English speech is missed.
* Also new on YouTube, the Digital Tolkien project offers advice on “How to use Search Tolkien and Cite Tolkien”.
* At Word on Fire, “Celebrating the Epochal Publication of The Fellowship of the Ring 70 Years On”.
* New to me, an abstract for an ambitious undergraduate dissertation from Bangladesh, “Beyond the Walls of Night: Completing Tolkien’s Untold Armageddon”. In English, from 2021…
“Despite the copious amount of notes that Tolkien left behind, no definitive conclusion to this narrative has been released by the Tolkien Estate so far. Various hints and clues, however, have been scattered by the author [and thus the dissertation attempts] to compile into a coherent conclusion [the extant details of the] Final Battle [in which, as prophesied] the world would be destroyed and renewed.”
* And finally, scholars may be interested in easy bulk-backup of a list of precious Web URLs, using the cryptically named Save Page WE. This is the only Windows desktop freeware I know of that can take a .TXT list of URLs, and work through them automatically, saving each URL (Web page) as an encapsulated archival .MHTML file. If you have 100s to save, be sure to first tick ‘Close tab after saving page’ in Settings or you’ll run out of system memory. Free for Chrome-based Web browsers.
