Tolkien Gleanings #228
* Exeter College, Oxford, will be hosting a public talk on the “70th Anniversary of The Lord of the Rings”. With Holly Ordway, on 17th October 2024. Tickets available from 9th September. This will be first of another series of eight seminar talks at Exeter College, to be given in person during the Autumn 2024 term. It appears the new series will focus on the initial publication and reception of The Lord of the Rings. No details of topics, as yet. Only the names of the speakers and the dates.
* At The Washington Stand, another fisking of the recent New York Times article which appears to have misunderstood Tolkien…
“Tolkien’s view, expounded throughout his work, is not [as the NYT article claims] that power is evil, but rather that authority is good, and power must be subject to that authority. Aragorn is not evil for seeking dominion over Gondor and Arnor; in fact, that is itself, in Tolkien’s view, a good, because Aragorn has the authority to wield that power: he is the King.”
* A new Masters degree dissertation, “Coining Personal Names to Build Connections among Characters: Lexical Creativity in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” (2024). Freely available as a .PDF file.
* Newly posted on YouTube this week, the Lore of the Ring podcast 084: ‘Interview with a Tolkien Journalist, Larry D. Curtis’ (2023).
* “The Inklings Yearbook Goes Open Access” at The Stacks…
“Starting with volume 40, the Inklings Yearbook will be published in our online repository, The Stacks. [There you can freely] download all individual texts [or] a PDF of the whole volume. We are currently in the process of digitizing older editions of the Yearbook as well – volumes 23-27 are available in part already…”
* Reading the latest Amon Hen magazine (August 2024), I notice the editors say they are still seeking a Graphic Designer.
* A pleasing if rather sickly-yellow map of the Shire, found freely available to view at Max’s Maps.
* And finally, a new free 1920 x 1080px widescreen wallpaper, ‘Hill End, above Little Delving on the western moors of The Shire’. Free to use, as I’m placing it under ‘Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’.
Max’s Maps look very nice, but there is no indication that they are freely available; rather the opposite. “All images © copyright Maxime PLASSE or clients. No use permitted.“
You take things far too literally, it seems. And you read into simple statements far more than they say. I said nothing about freely “available to use” etc. I simply mean that this and his other maps are free to view online, and to download (if one looks at the HTML) or to screen-capture, and they are evidently free to index in image search-engines, since they can also be found there. As for my unreadable screenshot, I think you’ll find that an unreadable 560px blog picture falls under ‘fair use’.
I’m glad you see it that way. I’ve been involved in one or two…discussions…about copyright; some people don’t get the distinction between ‘freely available (to enjoy and consult online)’ and ‘freely available (to copy, appropriate, and do as you like with)’. Perhaps it has made me too sensitive. Happy Gleaning!