Tolkien Gleanings #237
* Yesterday saw the happy event of the publication of Tolkien’s Collected Poems as a three-book slipcase edition and ebook. But note also the substantial new free Addenda and Corrigenda page for the book… “noting a few errors we failed to see before our book went to press, as well as inevitable additions”.
* A joint review of the new Collected Poems, at the Tolkien Collector’s Guide website. Freely available online. The unpublished poems discovered here are said to be “many more than were reported” by the advance publicity. Also noted is that this is partly a biographical work, since “the informative commentaries also contain much new biographical and bibliographical information”, especially in terms of pinpointing various dates in his life. Physically this first printing is reported to be fine in hardback, as judged by the high standards of book collectors, being printed in “Italy by Rotolito” and nicely bound and shipped.
* John Garth reviews The Collected Poems in this week’s TLS ($ paywall).
* Nothing on YouTube and only one lone Amazon UK review of the book, at present. The Amazon reviewer thinks well of their purchase, but states that on browsing the contents-list he finds it… “leaves out many of his shorter poems, especially most of his unpublished compositions written in languages other than modern English”.
* In other newly-published books, The Critic magazine has a glowing review of The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (2024), said to be the first such general history “since Humphrey Carpenter’s Secret Gardens in 1985″. Haunted Wood gives Tolkien a joint chapter with T.H. White. The review is freely available online. The book is now available as a Kindle ebook and in hardback. Judging by the review and the contents-list, this book offers a distinctly British view. Which of course is quite justified by history. But… not even Anne of Green Gables (British Canada)? Nope. According to the Haunted Wood author, the Anne-girl is “not a central part of the canon” of children’s literature. Which will be news to many. At least the Molesworth books are mentioned a few times, in passing.
* On a more mundane but equally timely note, Bondwine Books looks into the matter of Aragorn’s likely tax policy…
“I can tell you Aragorn’s tax policy in seven words that used to be famous in England, and that Tolkien certainly knew well: ‘The King shall live of his own’. Meaning, the daily expenses of government are met by the income of the royal estates, without direct taxation. In wartime, the King depends upon his people to fulfil their feudal obligations and report for unpaid (short-term) military service.”
We also know that when the King grants lands in a huge place such as Middle-earth, he can ask no more than that the new colonists keep up the key bridges and roads, and speed the King’s messengers. As in the Shire, which only has to maintain the key bridge leading to the greenways and Bree.
* New to me, the substantial Ghosts in Middle-earth: Germanic, Norse and Anglo-Saxon Remnants in Tolkien’s Fictional World (2009). Freely available from Academia.edu. Or (for non-members) by searching for “Ghosts in Middle-earth” in quotes on Google Scholar. Scholar has an arrangement with Academia.edu for seamless free downloads of PDF files.
* And finally, the new scholarly article “Ofer Hronrade — Defining the Long-Enigmatic Hron of Old English” ($ paywall), offering… “an exhaustive contextual study of the Old English word hron — and its relationship with the common word hwael — as well as statistical analysis of British marine biology, this paper seeks to demonstrate that the meaning of hron should indeed be separated from the Modern English word ‘whale'” [which is as Tolkien had suggested, though his suggestion was widely disregarded].