Monthly Archives: January 2025

Tolkien Gleanings #267

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #267

* Lingwe has a review of The Mythmakers, a new biographical book/comic about Tolkien and Lewis. The review has a short list of the most obvious errors and typos.

* Another batch of four long video-lectures from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown. These were formerly in her huge paid-for course ‘The Forge of Tolkien’, but are now slowly being posted for free on YouTube. Aule and the Nephelim is already available; while What did Tolkien read? (unusually halting-and-stumbling delivery makes it a difficult listen); The Two Trees; and The Mischief of Elves are all scheduled for January 2025.

* In the first issue of the new Taylor & Francis journal English Studies, “Eldarin Cosmotechnics: Posthumanism, Ecology and Techne in Tolkien’s Portrayal of Elven Paradises” ($ paywall)…

“Contrary to prevailing ecocritical beliefs that Elves depict a simplistic relationship with nature, this research posits that their profound bond stems from advanced technology, understood as either craftmanship or magic”

Yes, I’d agree (or probably would, if I could read the article rather than the abstract). Though I suggest it’s perhaps both at once, plus a sort of ‘infusion’ of the maker’s potent emotional visualisation (akin to an ‘Elves-to-object telepathy’). Recall… “we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make” — says ‘the leader of the Elves’ speaking to Pippin, in Fellowship. I’ve sometimes also wondered if some magic-infused things in Middle-earth are ‘charged’ or ‘activated’ by the emotions of the bearer. For instance would Merry’s spell-woven barrow-dagger have had such potency in the end, if it had not been first christened with orc-blood, then offered humbly with love and fealty to Theoden, then later wielded with a greater love?

* Italy gets Tolkien’s The Fall of Numenor for the first time in translation. First as a preview in the La Repubblica Sunday-supplement magazine Robinson, and then as a book on 15th January 2025.

* John Garth blogs at length about “2024: My year of Tolkien and tribulation”…

“Tolkien’s Mirror, my book-length study […] Here’s my underlying principle [for the book]: to fully understand why Tolkien invented something, you need to establish when he did so.”

Quite so. And exactly where, I’d add. There’s nothing like tracing the footsteps to start you on the right track. I did it with H.G Wells, ill and coughing blood and struggling up a very steep hill to Basford in Stoke-on-Trent… and this led me to his likely model for The Time Traveller (his then world-famous Physics examiner, who was living a few roads over); I did it with Sir Gawain and he led me along the Earlsway to Alton Castle, a site formerly completely overlooked by scholars, and… then a hundred or so facts and dates all fell into place; then I sort of did it again with Tolkien and the historical Earendel, by starting with the market-garden farm from which Tolkien made his fateful observation of a bright Venus being ‘hunted’ by the Moon. Many academics instead start with the texts and think that’s all there is and all there needs to be. Nope. If you have a mystery to solve, you go to exactly where and when the text stands in the biography and start from there. Of course, if one can afford it, also dig in the archives. Garth’s new blog post reports he’s done that, and he appears to have “the 1939 lecture text itself” (thought lost) for the later-revised “On Fairy Stories”.

* On Swedish TV channel AxessTV, the mini-series Fantastic Worlds – From Carroll to Tolkien, with the final 48-minute broadcast due on 18th January 2025…

“Part 4 of 4 – Tolkien and Childers. A four-part documentary series combining biography, quotes and film clips from a range of unforgettable British children’s book worlds.”

“Childers” must presumably be the author of The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service?

* And finally, a new YouTube video flip-through of the catalogue for the exhibition J.R.R. Tolkien – The Art of the Manuscript.

Tolkien Gleanings #266

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #266

* In English in the latest 2024 edition of the Transylvanian journal Revista Philobiblon, “‘We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I’: The Symbolism Of The Dragon in J.R.R. Tolkien’s and C.S. Lewis’s Fairy Stories”. Freely available online.

* The forthcoming academic collection Dragons in Fairy Tales has a 20th January 2025 deadline for chapter abstracts. There are still four or five slots available in the book.

* Set for 2025 from academic publisher Palgrave, the book J.R.R. Tolkien and G.B. Smith: A Special Relationship.

* Due in 2025, the book The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination which… “shows how the plots, themes, and characters of Tolkien’s beloved works can be traced to the patterns of the Church’s liturgical year.”

* Also due in 2025, from the University of Chicago Press, the book Chasing the Pearl-manuscript. This will draw… “on recent technological advances (such as spectroscopic analysis) to show the Pearl-manuscript to be a more complex piece of material, visual, and textual art than previously understood”.

* Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2025: ‘Rituals and Ceremonies’, which would appear to be relevant to topics related to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

* Taruithorn (the Oxford Tolkien Society, a student society at the University of Oxford since 1990) has announced plans to revive its journal Miruvor… “We are looking for contributions! If you would like to write or create anything inspired by Tolkien, please feel free to contact us!” I assume contributors will need to be a student or perhaps have some connection with the University. The last issue of the earlier run of Miruvor appeared in 2016. Back issues can be had here from 1990-2004, as PDFs for open download.

* Signum University now has the March 2025 online short-courses listed. Learn a language in ‘Beginning Quenya’ (two parts); or study ‘The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Mature Years 1 (Volume 2: The Years 1919-1931)’ (three parts); or dive into ‘Tolkien and the Sea’. Some are ‘candidate courses’, meaning they only run if enough people sign up for them.

* And finally, some Gleanings readers will have a number of Amazon WishLists with substantial user comments appended. But you’ll likely find that some useless tea-boy at Amazon has tinkered with your WishList comments, making them miniscule and also hiding more than the first line of text. So, here’s a useful free UserScript for your Web browser, ‘Amazon Wishlist item user-comments / user-notes – fix’. This should fix this new problem. Requires TamperMonkey or similar, to run UserScripts on Web pages. You’re welcome.

Tolkien Gleanings #265

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #265

* Mallorn #65 (Winter 2024) is now available for download by Tolkien Society members. Among other items there are long articles on “The Horror of the Unnarrated” in LoTR, and another try at “Cracking the Bombadil Enigma”. Plus a shorter essay on the ur-spider Ungoliant, followed by several book reviews (in one, the pithy complaint that “Christopher Tolkien gets as many mentions as Karl Marx”). Also has excellent colour illustrations.

* The Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination (2025) is a bumper collection of chapters which includes the long and dense chapter “Into The Storm”, on the band Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-earth and the reception of Tolkien in German metal music. This is followed by the chapter “Time Travel Through Tolkien”, which surveys Tolkien in classical (Swann etc), folk rock and psychedelia circa 1962-69.

* The exemplary and long-running localist publication The Hockley Flyer (for Hockley and the Jewellery Quarter, just to the north of the centre of Birmingham UK) lists an event on 12th January 2025, a walking tour of Key Hill Cemetery in Birmingham. Apparently “Tolkien used to visit” when living in Birmingham, when it may still have been marked on maps as the ‘General Cemetery’. The weather for the afternoon of Sunday 12th is currently looking crisply cold and dazzlingly sunny… take sunglasses.

* Canadian magazine Catholic Insight has the new article “Apostles of Joy: J.R.R. Tolkien and St. Philip Neri”. Freely available online.

* Contemplations on the Tree of Woe has a new long article on “Goethe and Faust for a New Age”, which considers the possibility that, like Goethe, Tolkien is to now be considered as… “a world-historical figure whose work is emblematic of an entire civilization”. Doomer Vox Populi responds, with the shorter blog post “We are the Elendilans”, which broadly agrees, but doomily suggests rather that we are a civilisation in inevitable decline.

* Note that Archive.org have just put a mass of 1930 books online “to borrow”. Technically, they will not be public domain in the U.S. until 1st January 2026. Not a very exciting bunch, judging by a ten-minute scroll through the titles. But I did spot the book Fairy tales from Baltic shores: folk-lore stories from Estonia.

* And finally, as ‘global boiling’ reaches new extremes of… erm… deep cold and ice… here’s a timely reminder that there is also a British summertime. Newly posted on YouTube, a simple video recording of the View from J.R.R. Tolkien Memorial Bench in Oxford Parks – June 2024.

Tolkien Gleanings #264

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #264

* From Italy, new on YouTube, Franco Manni interviews Tom Shippey on Tolkien, mainstream literature and providence. Telephone call-box sound, but it’s steady and clear and has no drop-outs. Shippey offers amusing observations on Ugluk (an orc in LoTR). Comparing Ugluk’s difficulties in managing and directing orc-rabble, aggravated by squabbling orc factions, to the task of managing a university department.

* The book Tolkien’s Faith (2023) is now also available in Spanish, and this week ReL published a freely-available profile interview and book outline in Spanish. I translate…

“an educated Spanish Catholic today will learn peculiar things about the Catholicism that Tolkien experienced 100 years ago in England. His peculiar time and context [i.e. Edwardian England, initially] had practices and devotions different from those many practising Catholics know today. […] The Spanish translation of Ordway’s book is careful and attentive; it was done by Monica Sanz, a great connoisseur of Tolkien’s work, who in recent years has collaborated in correcting new Spanish editions of the British author’s books.”

* Karen L. Kobylarz’s blog this week reviews Tolkien’s Faith (2023). Talking of this book, one wonders when there’s going to be an audiobook version. Surely there would be enough demand?

* TradKitty has posted a new annotated reading-list of ‘Tolkien-related Books Interesting to Catholics’.

* A new book review in the latest Journal of Tolkien Research examines The Songs of the Spheres: Lewis, Tolkien and the Overlapping Realms of their Imaginations (2024).

* I think I missed this one. Back in November, there was an online event for two new books from Tom Shippey’s Uppsala Books.

I see that one of these books, Easter: A Pagan Goddess, A Christian Holiday, and their Contested History is now available (it was still ‘forthcoming’, last time I looked) and it is now also now listed on Amazon UK. Following a lot of neo-pagan confusion and confabulation, this book aims to clearly state and examine…

“the principal claims and counter claims that now surround the goddess Eostre (recorded once by the Venerable Bede in 725 AD) and the origins of the Christian paschal festival. It critically examines the substance and history of these ideas from their earliest sources to the present day.”

* Forthcoming from Uppsala Books, I see the title Northern Lore: A Thematic Guide to the Proverbs of Medieval England, Germany, and Scandinavia.

* And finally, Michael Kurek’s third symphony, the English Symphony, is to be released 7th February 2025. YouTube has a long sample from his Symphony No. 2 – Tales from the Realm of Faerie (2022).

Strange Country: Sir Gawain in the moorlands of North Staffordshire – an update

by futurilla

I thought it was about time for a short survey of some of the academic findings that have emerged, or been found, after my book Strange Country: Sir Gawain in the moorlands of North Staffordshire.

1. I’ve since found that Ordelle G. Hill’s now-unobtainable book Looking Westward: Poetry, Landscape, and Politics in Sir Gawain (2009) opens by examining the similarities with… “the two most significant Welsh poets … Iolo Goch (1325-98) and Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320-80)”, wandering Welsh bards “well known throughout Wales”. Their dates certain align exactly with my timeline, since my candidate has the dates 1326-1383. And also note the major minstrel court meeting at Tutbury in Staffordshire from 1372 onward, supported by lavish patronage. Just the sort of thing to lure the best poets out of Wales. And with Tutbury being just 13 miles SE of my Gawain candidate (then 46 years old).

2. I read that in 2012, a lecture by Joel Fredell made a good argument that the Cotton Nero ms. (containing the surviving copy of Gawain) was scribed in York in the early fifteenth century. Quite possible, given that my candidate had strong connections to York as well as to Alton in Staffordshire. However, Fredell’s additional claim that this new… “evidence refutes many assumptions about the Gawain-poet’s connections” to Cheshire etc seems rather a dramatic over-reach. The man simply had, on my evidence, homes in North Staffordshire and York and moved between them as was common in the period.

3. In 2020, I spotted a new M.A. dissertation which considered “The Gawain-poet as Monastic Author”. I read this and found the case unconvincing, but the author usefully highlighted the work of Philip F. O’Mara (1992). O’Mara had proposed that one Robert Holcot could have been a possible tutor for the young Gawain-poet. I found the dates matched well, since the timeline for my candidate would have had a 16-18 year-old available to lodge with Holcot for a year. Perhaps so as to ‘polish him up a bit’, in terms of education and also spirituality, perhaps even after previously lodging at somewhere like Swythamley near Alton. The polishing would thus have been when Holcot was assigned, c. 1343, to serve with a Dominican religious house in Northampton. So the dates fit. But… it could just be that the Gawain-poet came to know Holcot’s writings later and a literary and philosophical influence came that way.

4. I was unaware of Helen Cooper’s 2021 Gollancz lecture (not online), which is reported to have suggested the patron could have been Richard Scrope. He became Bishop of Lichfield in Staffordshire, from 1387 onward. This connection with Staffordshire is too late in time, by my timeline. And there seems to be no prior connection of Scrope to Staffordshire. But it’s not impossible there was an interest in such works. One should note that Walsingham wrote of Scrope’s “incomparable knowledge of literature”, and that in 1378 Scrope became chancellor of Cambridge University. It is not therefore impossible that in 1378 or next year this friend of literature read a copy of the new Gawain-poem, originally written (as I reckon it) in time for a possible visitation at Alton Castle in Christmas 1377. Scrope was a northerner from Bolton, so may have been able to read the Midlands dialect.

Later, Scrope was the new Archbishop of York from 1398. Scrope would thus have been located in a city that still had strong family connections with my candidate, some 15+ years after the man’s death.

5. In 2022 there was another try at the claim for Sir John Stanley (1350-1414). I blogged about this journal article here. But by my reckoning, Stanley was too late in time by a good 20+ years. Further, it seems to me unlikely that such an ugly and murderous character would also have been one of our finest and most sensitive poets.

I’d further note re: the claims for Cheshire, the telling point in Bowers, An Introduction to the Gawain poet (2012), that (summarising Bennett, 1979)… “The Poll Tax returns of 1379 found that Cheshire and South Lancashire had only four university graduates who could have appreciated, never mind written, an intellectually challenging poem like Pearl”. I further note that I’ve also since heard a podcast with Tom Shippey, who pours very cold water on the idea that the Gawain-poet hailed from Cheshire.

6. In 2024 I noted Leo Carruthers new book Pearl / Perle: suivi de “Tolkien et Perle”, in paperback in French. The introduction apparently proposes… “a new theory about the poem’s patron … one of the most famous English princes of his time, son and father of kings”. I have not yet seen the book, or a review. However, a Google Books snippet in another French book of 2024 usefully informed me that (I translate)…

“Carruthers advances a series of arguments suggesting that Perle was composed for the family of John of Gaunt in memory of Blanche”.

Not strictly “new”, I think. Since I recall I’ve heard Gaunt named as a possible patron before. But possible in terms of dates, if a bit early by my reckoning. Not his wife who died 1368, at age 23. Rather his granddaughter Blanche of Portugal (1388-1389), who died as a babe. Rather late, I’d say, and if he were that close to John of Gaunt then surely we would know more about the author?

I’ve also found a Country Life magazine feature of 1960 on Alton Castle, that would have made many aware that the castle was built atop a mediaeval castle. Country Life having an immense readership at that time. Thus it’s all the more puzzling that Gawain academics have completely overlooked a mediaeval castle that is a near-perfect ‘fit’ both in terms of location and architecture.

Tolkien Gleanings #263

by futurilla

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]”.

Tolkien Gleanings #262

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #262

* On YouTube, another apparently “rare audio … hidden for 50 years”, Tolkien sings “Chips the glasses” from The Hobbit.

* RR Auctions is shortly to sell a Tolkien letter dated 14th May 1955…

Tolkien reflects on the anticipated publication of The Return of the King [to] Mrs. L.C. Beckett Frost in Ravello, Italy. He expresses his hope that readers will not be disappointed, comparing his work to Homer’s epics and discussing the delays caused by his commitment to provide extensive appendices and information.”

* The J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscripts collection at Marquette University has posted their 2025 dates for free public showings.

* A new rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research has begun, with a review of Parma Eldalamberon #23 (2024). The PE issue under review contains Tolkien’s own texts, his three descriptions of the Feanorian Alphabet, and his five texts on Eldarin Pronouns.

* The latest issue of the open-access journal RUDN: Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism is a special issue on ‘The Magical and Horrible in Literature’. Has the Russian-language article “Rhythmic prose in The Lord of the Rings“.

* In The European Conservative this week, “Rediscovering Our Wordhoard”, being a review of the book Ōsweald Bera: An Introduction to Old English (2024). The reviewer finds it…

“an exceptional work deserving of swift adoption by universities and independent scholars alike. Gorrie ditches the dry and difficult approach of learning a language’s rules almost independently of its vocabulary.”

* From 2016 and still available to buy, a special edition of the long-running French intellectual journal Europe, No. 1044: Lovecraft – Tolkien.

Tolkien Gleanings #261

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #261

* On YouTube, apparently “Rare audio … hidden for 50 years”, in which Tolkien reads “Roast Mutton” and “Misty Mountains” from The Hobbit.

* A new podcast with Graham McAleer, author of the new book Tolkien, Philosopher of War.

* Colorado’s Mountain Moot, set for the end of May 2025, will take as its theme ‘Tolkien and the Green: The Environment of Middle-earth’. Proposals are invited, for what appears to be podium/microphone presentation rather than via streaming.

* New on Archive.org, Greenwood’s out-of-print reference book Fairy Lore: A Handbook (2006). With a downloadable .PDF file.

* This week Changing Lanes blog make an interesting observation. He sees Tolkien as being a prime influence in a long-term cultural shift. A shift away from heroes who actively seek out… “fortune and glory and great deeds”. Toward ‘Reluctant Heroes’, and cultural forms in which… “shying away from opportunity is now coded as the right thing to do, and [open] aspiration to greatness coded as villainous, or at least villain-adjacent”.

* The OnePeterFive blog has a new footnoted post on Ratzinger & Tolkien on the Novus Ordo and Organic Development. Specifically, Tolkien in relation to the idea of ‘the living tree’.

* Wormwoodania blog’s new “Second-Hand Bookshops in Britain: 2024 Report”. Here in the West Midlands, a shop I never even knew existed is reported closed…

Candle Lane Books of Shrewsbury, an archetypal story-book bookshop in an early 18th century house, with four floors, two creaking staircases, rooms at odd angles and a dusty attic.

A pity I missed the chance to visit, since the town’s only an hour away by train (and one can even get there via Crewe now, and thus avoid the nightmare stations of Wolverhampton and Telford). The good news is that, despite the occasional bargains on Amazon and eBay, Wormwoodania reports that… “there are more second-hand bookshops now [in the UK] than there were for most of the 20th century”.

* On the BBC 1 broadcast TV channel (yes, apparently broadcast TV still exists), the Antiques Roadshow‘s 5th January 2025 episode will have a short segment in which… “Clive Farahar finds a collection of signed Tolkien books, dedicated to a man whose relatives were neighbours of the author”.