Tolkien Gleanings #246
* Several things happened in America this week. A sudden and unexpected national shortage of therapy-puppies, and the election of a new U.S. Vice-President who tells the enquiring media… “A lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien”.
* The forthcoming French book Les Mondes de Christopher Tolkien now has a page on Amazon UK, as a £14 ebook for pre-order. No table-of-contents, as yet.
* A short review of the young children’s picture-book Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the Worlds of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien…
“Baynes is presented as a relatable character whose quiet, dreamy perseverance with the art she loved enabled her to serve her country as well as herself. By emphasizing the roadblocks Baynes overcame to finally reach the pinnacle of her career as an illustrator, the story helps readers understand that it is okay if your path through life is not straight and simple.”
* A long review of the new book Oxford’s War 1939–1945…
“The vast New Bodleian Library building, not formally opened until 1946, became a vault for national valuables, an air-raid shelter and the headquarters of the remarkable British Red Cross Prisoner of War Postal Book Service, run by Ethel Herdman. The Service sent reading matter to the thousands of British and Commonwealth ‘kriegies’ languishing in Axis [Germany, Japan, Italy] prison camps, as well as exam papers. The English literature [exam] scripts were marked by Professor J.R.R. Tolkien.”
I imagine this will be a useful shelf-companion to Garth’s forthcoming book on the influence of the Second World War on The Lord of the Rings, when it appears.
* Some details of a recent October 2024 talk at Stanford University in the USA, “Fighting the Long Defeat: Tolkien and Ancient Narratives of Decline”….
“Narratives of decline [from a Golden Age] are also at the core of Tolkien’s mythology, and this is just another, neglected aspect of classical influence on Tolkien. The talk will discuss the reception of narratives of decline in Tolkien’s legendarium, pointing out similarities, but also contrasts and differences [with classical models from antiquity]”
* A curious scholarly item listed for pre-order on Amazon UK, The 1879 Theft of Royal Ms 16 E VIII From the British Museum: Wars and Tolkien’s Teacher’s Role. Not Tolkien himself, but one of the young Tolkien’s teachers in Birmingham. The book reconstructs the theft and also the lost 13th century manuscript itself, which contained the only copy of the oldest French poem ‘Le Voyage de Charlemagne a Jerusalem et a Constantinople’.
* Doubtful Sea watches the excellent 1978 Charles Darwin mini-series, and is prompted to consider “Paleo-Tolkien” and his possible dino-debt to Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. The pterodactyls were quite well known to the late Victorians, the first complete scientific description being in 1891. Presumably this ‘flying dragon’ aroused a certain interest among the Edwardian public, and among boys in particular. It took various uncertain forms in book illustrations, museum postcards, etc, until our modern conception of the beast solidified in the 1950s.
* MindMatters proposes a new test for AI, alongside the well-know Turing Test, “The Tolkien Test”…
“The Tolkien test for AI is whether it can ‘create’ genuinely original work that bears no correspondence to anything a human has ever sub-created, as an extension of the original creation act and ultimate expression of originality.”
Well, yes, but that rather ignores the deep debt Tolkien had to all sorts of sources. His work has all sorts of “correspondence” to past works.
* And finally, The Folio Society Unveils £600 Edition of The Hobbit. I suspect Tolkien would have been happier to see £500 go to some good tree charity (restoring Britain’s lost Elm trees springs to mind), and for the remaining £100 to be spent on a clean second-hand Hobbit from eBay.