Tolkien Gleanings #263
* The Italian Tolkienists have identified Tolkien’s letter of 14th May 1955 as unpublished. The letter will shortly be auctioned. The Italian blog post quotes from the letter and also investigates the recipient, who lived in Italy.
* The Tolkien and Fantasy blog pins down the dates and places of Borges on Tolkien. Or on what Borges mistakenly thought was Tolkien. Since it seems the blind and ageing author only had “Concerning Hobbits” and the first chapter or so of Fellowship of the Ring read to him, before he became bored and asked his reader to abandon the reading. How much he missed.
* The latest Ancient History magazine has yet another review of Tolkien and the Classical World. There will soon be enough of these to fill another book with reviews-of-the-book! 🙂
* Four more long video-lectures from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown. These were formerly in her paid-for course ‘The Forge of Tolkien’, but are now slowly being posted for free on YouTube. The Music of Creation; Melkor and the Leviathan; The Breath of the Gods; and Melkor’s Fall.
* Newly officially free on the Poe Society website, the book Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (1986). Includes the chapter “In the Perilous Realm: The Fantastic Geographies of Tolkien and Poe”.
* Now free on Archive.org after being placed under Creative Commons, the book Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (2019). Examines the Gawain-poet (aka the poet of the Pearl c. 1378-79) in the context of the mediaeval plagues of the time.
* No Birmingham Oratory, no merry Christmas? First Things has a new article on “How the Oxford Movement Saved Christmas”. A movement led by Cardinal Newman, who was later a strong influence on the young Tolkien (and also via Tolkien’s guardian Fr. Francis Morgan, who had been Newman’s private secretary). His movement pushed back against dour puritanism and…
“they were instrumental in revitalizing old rituals and practices, and even renewing interest in celebrating lapsed Christmas festivities” [and] “succeeded in changing many facets of Anglican [i.e. mainstream British Christian] worship, even among those who did not entirely agree with the movement. To the extent that by the 1870s, ‘Christmas decorations in churches and special Christmas observances were no longer’ merely characteristic of the [Oxford Movement] Tractarians. These observances included the widespread implementation of musical services on Christmas [and other changes]”.