Tolkien Gleanings #241
It’s the two-year anniversary edition of Tolkien Gleanings. New Patreon supporters are always welcome.
* New on YouTube, “1967 footage of Donald Swann performing Tolkien’s songs”. Apparently the only such footage.
* MIT’s Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium presents Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull on editing Tolkien. 12th November 2024 at MIT. Looks like it’s MIT students-only, though I guess we may see a recording posted in due course?
* The Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference page now has a speaker-list, though no titles of their papers or talks.
* A new edition of Amon Hen (#309, October 2024) ($ paywall), now available for download by Tolkien Society members.
– Editorial [the magazine is “no longer accepting any fan-fiction”].
– Tolkien’s Greater Project [is there an arc that crosses all the Middle-earth works?].
– The Role of Inns in The Lord of the Rings.
– Tolkien and Old Norse.
– Art in Tolkien Books [brief considerations of some ‘illustrated Tolkien’ books]
– Review: Reading Tolkien in Chinese.
– They Also Serve [on the figure of Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs].
* Signum University’s list of online short-courses for December 2024 include ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas‘ and ‘The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Early Poems 2 (Volume 1: The Years 1910-1919)’.
* New at the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Wizard, Demon, Cat; Reformer, Satanist, Bureaucrat: a diachronic analysis of three modes of Sauron in the Legendarium in light of The Book of Lost Tales“.
* Anna Smol has posted her First Impressions of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.
* A ComicCon Interview With John Hendrix, maker of the new illustrated children’s book and part graphic-novel The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (2024).
* From the Ukraine, a long abstract in Ukranian for a 2024 article that… “analyses the colours in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which play an important role as key elements of creating images and atmosphere” in Middle-earth.
* New at Archive.org, Rambles in Cornwall (1928). Though not an entire scan of this chunky book. Just the two chapters on The Lizard and the Mount. These are relevant to what Tolkien might have seen on his extended walking holiday on the Lizard in 1914, a decade or so before the book’s author made several walks in the district from a base at Helston (Tolkien, by contrast, was based in Lizard Town). The author observes the landscape and coast with a critical eye, and dutifully notes any interesting features of the older local churches. He occasionally notes standing stones, prehistoric rock chambers and ancient wells.
* And finally, ‘Little Sword’: Denmark’s oldest runes found on knife blade.