Tolkien Gleanings #283
* John Garth spots Tolkien’s 1935 train-window poem on the Black Country landscape, in the new collection of Tolkien’s poetry. Garth’s new and long blog post “Mordor on the Oxford express” considers the journey and digs out the railway timetable with route. The poem definitely adds firm evidence that Tolkien saw the Black Country. Albeit through a train window, as Auden also did. But, so far as I know, we still have no evidence he ever set foot in the place. The named stops on the railway-line timetable suggest he would have had a fairly good look at the terrain, for instance passing through such dreadful places as Bilston and Wednesbury. Bilston is still fairly grim, even today. Garth’s post confirms my hunch of a year ago, that Tolkien may at least have seen the Black Country grimscapes from the train prior to writing LoTR.
I’d add that this encounter with the Black Country would have seemed even grimmer because, less than an hour before, Tolkien’s train would have been passing through the loveliness of the Shropshire countryside and villages in June. “Birmingham” is not elaborated on the brief timetable, but (given the approach stations) it would have been the old Snow Hill station (now demolished) rather than Birmingham New St. Thus Tolkien was on the old Wolverhampton Low Level route from Wolverhampton Low Level station (also now demolished) to Birmingham Snow Hill. He was therefore not entering “Brum” through the vast Egyptian-scale earthworks of the Galton Bridge cutting.
* In France, the College Les Bernardins – Events and Conferences page for spring 2025. Evidently, their Paris display of Tolkien tapestries has been greatly expanded on. Around it there are now lectures, events featuring music and song, film screenings, plus three evening mini-conferences and even a big three-day conference.
– “Tolkien and Nature” 24th March 2025.
– “Tolkien the Man” – 3rd April 2025.
– “Tolkien and Mystery”, 24th April 2025.
– “Christian [consonance??] in Middle-earth”, 16th to 18th May 2025.
* New in open-access, the book Horror in Classical Antiquity and Beyond (2025).
* Joseph Loconte’s website posts his previously paywalled 2024 article “The Meaning of J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Leaf by Niggle’”.
* Dune News reviews Finding the Numinous: An Ecocritical Look at Dune and The Lord of the Rings (2025).
* A free sample of a new book review, for the new Pearl translation into French by Leo Carruthers, reveals more about the introduction and its authorship claims…
“Carruthers addresses the problematic issue of the [Pearl/Gawain] author’s identity which can be partly established through his North Staffordshire dialect and may lead to the formulation of a plausible hypothesis for the aristocratic background of the poem, possibly composed at John of Gaunt’s request (pp. 20–21) to commemorate the death of his grand-daughter Blanche of Portugal.”
Ah, that Blanche. The distant grand-daughter Blanche of Portugal (1388-1389), who died as a tiny babe. Not Gaunt’s wife Blanche of Lancaster, who died in the Black Death of 1368, as I had previously suspected from a tiny snippet found on Google Books. Thus the new claim would make the writing of the poem about 11 or 12 years too late, by my timeline.