Tolkien Gleanings #242
* The long-awaited Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-1959 book should have been released today, in hardcover and Kindle ebook.
* Now recorded and freely available on YouTube, Tolkien’s Collected Poems – Livestream chat with editors Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond.
* The European Conservative on “Worlds of Delight: The Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Being an appreciation of the wealth of Tolkien’s poetry, now newly available in the Collected Poems.
* The £25 paperback of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics is due at the end of October 2024.
* The new German collection Marchen und Gesellschaft (‘Folk and fairy tale and society’) has an essay on “J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories”: what is a fairy tale good for anyway?”. A 16 page summary and commentary, in German.
* A new Journal of Inklings Studies: Vol. 14, No. 2 (October 2024) ($ paywall, free reviews). Reviews, among others, of Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives of Tolkien’s Legendarium; and Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many.
* New in English in the Serbian journal Interlitteraria “Fictionality in ‘Fog on the Barrow-downs’: Myth and Reference”. Despite the enticing title it turns out to be almost all academic-literary theory, rather than steeped in a deep understanding of British folklore, tales, landscape and weather. Freely available online.
* New and free on Fanac.org, scans of three 1970s issues of Mythprint.
* The Malvern Gazette local newspaper reports that “Tolkien expert’s talk cancelled after hurricanes destroys his home”…
“John Garth, who was due to speak at the Coach House Theatre on Sunday (13th October), is unable to attend after his family home in the southern USA was damaged by hurricanes Helene and Milton.”
I had no idea he had moved to the USA. Very sorry to hear of the calamity, and I hope that everyone is safe along with the copies of his scholarly work. I imagine this event may also affect his forthcoming Oxford University talk (24th October), “Quisling and Prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard”?
* Joseph Loconte’s book The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 is now set for a June 2025 release.
* The Sentient Tree in Speculative Fiction is due to be published by Palgrave Macmillan just before Christmas 2024, as a £100 academic book. It’s a relatively short single-author book, and I’d guess it will have at least half a chapter on Tolkien.
* Difficult to find anything to link these days, among all the quickie cash-for-clicks clickbait that floods YouTube every day. But I guess I should mention this admittedly very-popular form occasionally (15,000-50,000 hits, compared to 5 or 6 hits for a Gleanings issue), and this week these two items look promising. The Lotus Eaters podcast discusses Tolkien the traditionalist in “Tolkien Hated Motorbikes and Loved Housewives”. While the Jess of the Shire podcast asks “Did Tolkien Hate…Everything?”…
“The Internet really loves to push the idea that J.R.R. Tolkien hated… well, everything. So, did he?”.
* And finally, Archive.org is still offline, after a serious hack. Once back, it will probably be a good idea to get the magnet links for your uploads, and host them on a blog page somewhere. If you’re still seeding the torrent, the file(s) should then remain available even if the Archive goes down again. Someone may also wish to do the same with all the vital free-access Tolkien research books and materials. It won’t be me.