Tolkien Gleanings #294

* Sotheby’s auction house has a new Books & Manuscripts article totting up the totals on “The Most Valuable Tolkien Works of All Time”.

* New at Archive.org, a good scan of the 1974 Village Press edition of Colin Wilson’s pioneering booklet of serious Tolkien criticism Tree by Tolkien. There’s no flip-book, since the page scans are unbundled .JPG files. Thus the quickest way to get the book is to download the .torrent for it.

This gives you a good scan of the British edition, which I think was expanded? If you want the U.S. edition (also on Archive.org) it was noted and linked by Gleanings back in 2023.

* New to me, a very completist annotated listing, in French, of “Panorama des cartographes de la Terre du Milieu” (2018) (‘Overview of the map makers of Middle-earth’). It’s a long single .HTML Web page, thus is easily auto-translated and then saved locally to an encapsulated .MHTML file. But might it be an idea to inquire about human-translating and updating, for publication in somewhere like Amon Hen? Now there’s an idea for Amon Hen, when they eventually find a new designer — perhaps a dedicated map-art page in each issue, mapping some little regarded nook of Middle-earth.

* Also in French, Tolkien’s Beowulf: Traduction et commentaire, plus the ‘Sellic Spell’. With a rather handsome cover design.

Despite the ‘Pocket’ brand, French readers will need a big pocket… since Amazon has it at a hefty 464 pages. The translation is to be released on 5th June 2025, according to Amazon UK.

* A new PhD from the University of Sussex in the UK, “Sound Symbolism in Character Names: A study of the representation of morality in J.R.R. Tolkien’s character names in The Lord of the Rings” (2025). Freely available online. Brings the latest ‘sound symbolism’ research to bear on the names, and then tests (via online questionnaire at Facebook and Twitter, 76 valid respondents) to see if… “people can determine the morality of a character based solely on the phonological properties of the character name”. An earlier conference paper by the same author is also freely available from the same repository, “Phonaesthetic shadows: the phonetic dichotomy of light and dark in The Lord of the Rings” (2023).

* What appears to be an advanced undergraduate paper from Marquette University, “Tolkien and Hume’s Problem of Evil” (2025). Freely available online.

* This week Cobalt Jade’s blog considers “The Russian Hobbit” of the 1970s, and shows some pleasing interior illustrations. Part one of a planned series of posts.

* Tolkien scholar Dimitri Fimi has begun a Substack blog, with the first post being on On Tolkien’s Letter 131 (1): Capturing “timeless Elvish enchantment”.

* Tolkien scholar John Garth has a new blog post musing on the growing power of AI tools, in Tolkien and the machine war against imagination.

* Theatrical Musings in Minnesota has a long review of the three-hour stage play “Tolkien” at Open Window Theatre (February 2025)…

“The set looks very much like how one would imagine Oxford in the mid 20th Century, with dark wood and rich greens and old books everywhere. The backdrop has 2-D paintings of bookshelves, along with some real shelves with glasses, bottles, and other props, and the space is populated with gorgeous period furniture. […] Completing the look are the period costumes – appropriately professorial with tweed jackets, sweater vests, elbow pads, and hats.”

* And finally, a new National Folklore Survey for England is planned for 2026. Likely to be highly skewed by post-1970s media influence, and also the modern confabulations of neo-pagans and ghost-hunters plus the blatherings of local tourist boards. But maybe the organisers will find a way.

Tolkien Gleanings #293

* The Bodleian Library shares a glimpse of Tolkien’s annotated fold-out map from the first-edition of The Lord of the Rings.

* Up for auction in 2014, with good photos still online, a 1961 Tolkien letter hand-written as a reply to a boy who had enjoyed The Hobbit. Tolkien writes back that he regrets… “there is not much fun in” The Lord of the Rings for the young boy, other than perhaps Bilbo’s birthday chapter.

* In the new academic book Vikings, Knights, Elves, and Ogres: Essays in Honor of Shaun F.D. Hughes (2025), the chapter “Thoughts on J.R.R. Tolkien’s and E.V. Gordon’s ‘Viking Club’ Songbook at Leeds, and Related Nordic Songbooks”.

* Fanac.org has newly added a PDF scan of Tim Kirk’s 1969 Tolkien Calendar, in their Calendars section. Pleasing pencil and wash work, though mostly with garish colour overlays added. They welcome donated scans of similar vintage rarities.

* And talking of entering the mighty gates… currently advertised is the position of Chief Executive Officer of The Tolkien Society, on a whopping £45-£55k. Deadline: 13th April 2025.

* A series of events centred around nature and imagination, running 1st April to 1st May 2025 on the Ile de Re. This being a tourist destination-island in France, half-way down the Atlantic coast and between the cities of Nantes and Bordeaux. Apparently free, and to include public talks, temporary land-art (they have many beaches), exhibitions, concerts and more. The island’s website is currently down, but check iledere.com when online again. As part of the events, note…

– Conferences and meetings
“Tolkien and the science of his imaginary creatures. Paleontologists, naturalists, and illustrators come together to discuss nature and the imaginary.”

* Mythmoot XII, 19th-22nd June 2025, Virginia, USA. The call-for-papers closes on 31st March 2025. The theme is “Drawn to the Edge” — edges, thresholds and edgelands of all sorts, and also the allure of such things.

* And finally, a new Tolkien sculpture in East Yorkshire in northern England, part of their Tolkien Triangle…

“One statue will show the young Tolkien standing in the woods and will be around eight-and-a-half feet high [in carved wood], while the second installation, beside it, will depict Edith dancing in silhouette etched into a thick oak slab.”

Due to be installed on-site and officially unveiled later in the spring of 2025. It sounds like they have ambitions to create a larger Tolkien sculpture-trail in future.

Tolkien Gleanings #292

* New to me, in the paywalled academic Journal of Fandom Studies I find the article “Tolkien fanzines, fandom and the literary tradition in the 1960s” (2024). A quick search also reveals the journal’s earlier special-issue on the professional archiving of fandom, which had “From the hobbit-hole: The Lord of the Rings fanzines of the 1960s and archival limitations” (2021). So far as I can tell, neither article is online elsewhere in open-access.

* On eBay, up popped an academic book that had passed me by. The Map of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections on Tolkien’s Myth of Wilderness (2022), from Kent State University Press. I must have noticed the review in Mallorn, when I ploughed through their back-issues last year. But looking back on that review I find it focussed heavily on the Beowulf discussion in the first chapter — which probably put me off. Anyway, I find that there’s more to the book than that and it’s now available as a £36 ebook via Amazon.

The eBay listing of the hardback revealed the contents-page, and this made the book sound rather interesting with — modern eco-politics aside — the core of the book… “tracing some of the ancient Celtic, Germanic, and English mythic roots of Tolkien’s work; examines how those roots influence Tolkien’s own depictions of the wild natural world”. Apparently also considers the landscapes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of my special interests.

* New on YouTube in Spanish, a 100-minute recording from a recent conference, discussing La filosofoa en la obra de J.R.R. Tolkien (‘Philosophy in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien’).

* From Turkey, in English and open-access, a 2025 journal article on the “Architectural Dynamics in Tolkien’s Novel, The Hobbit: A Literary and Cinematic Perspective”.

* From Indonesia, J.K. Rahma’s new Silmarillion illustrations.

* The Italian Tolkien Society notes that the crowd-funded fan-film Visions of Storm (February 2024) has just won the Best Film Award at the Magic Awards 2025 in St. Petersburg. A prequel to the three Hobbit movies, it sees an elf and man travel to Erebor carrying a warning… but on the way they are attacked by orcs near the Lonely Mountain. Only 14 minutes long but with huge group effort put into it, including intense 3D storyboarding, superb makeup, location shoots and over 90 VFX shots. There’s a trailer on YouTube.

* Likely to be of interest to some Gleanings readers, the documentary feature A Stranger Quest (2023). Being a film about David Rumsey, the outstanding and generous collector of historical maps and also of a few fantasy/imaginary maps of superb quality. Now freely available on Vimeo.

* Artist Miriam Ellis has a new illustrated blog post, musing on life at the Undertowers. This being the new Shire-expanding westward colony, established by Pippin and his family after the events of The Lord of the Rings.

* And finally, here in the UK we have a new set of Royal Mail picture postage stamps depicting some of our popular folk-lore. The Grindylow more commonly known as ‘Jenny Greenteeth’.

Tolkien Gleanings #291

* New in the Cormare series from Walking Tree, the £20 paperback book Tolkien Among the Theologians (March 2025). Being the proceedings of a Houston conference, held online in October 2022. There appears to be no table-of-contents available as yet, but one can easily find various titles from papers given at the conference. These undoubtedly give a flavour of the new book…

   – Tolkien among the Oratorians. (Holly Ordway, keynote)
   – Tolkien and Calvin (lead paper)
   – Tolkien and Chesterton: The Orthodoxy of Middle-earth.
   – The Self, Rationality and the Exterior World in the Work of J.R.R. Tolkien and Fr. Victor White.
   – ‘Tolkien and Balthasar’.
   – ‘Franciscan themes related to the character of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry’

* “It’s odd how the Langobards [Lombards] keep cropping up” (Tolkien in the semi-autobiographical “The Lost Road”, speaking through the character Markison). This week the Axis Mundi blog considers “Tolkien and the Lombards, between myth and legend”.

* Engelsberg Ideas has a new blog article on “England’s mystical inheritance: Tolkien and Powell”. Compares Tolkien to his fellow poet/scholar and Birmingham contemporary Enoch Powell (ten years younger than Tolkien), focusing on parallels between Tolkien’s Shire and Powell’s conception of England. A relatively brief article, and there is probably a lot more to be said on the topic.

* Due for release in hardcover in a week or so, the children’s picture-book Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the Worlds of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

* A notice of a free public lecture in Brisbane, Australia in May 2025, “Shakespeare & Tolkien: Literary Giants & The Great Books”.

* And finally, for a hefty $99, ‘A Long-Expected Soundscape’. New to me, but described as chapter-specific audio apparently providing, via musical “score, ambience, and sound FX”, an enhancement of the…

“journey through J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. You can also use it as an accompaniment for reading the books or sync it with the official audiobook to get an incredible immersive audio experience”.

Here “official audiobook” means the new Andy Serkis reading, not the Rob Inglis audiobook. (Update: there’s also said to now be a version for the Inglis audiobook).

Tolkien Gleanings #290

* Officially announced by the Faculty of English at Oxford, the death of Professor Vincent Gillespie, FBA who was… “the emeritus J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language”.

* Now online, the official announcement for the 2025 J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture in Fantasy Literature in Oxford. Booking details, plus the statement that… “For anyone who cannot make the event, it will be recorded and uploaded to our website and YouTube channel after the event.”

* New on YouTube, a Zoom recording of an online Tolkien colloquium: ‘Good and Evil in Middle-earth’ (March 2025). Part of the ‘Moral Values in Fantasy Literature’ project, University of Notra, Slovakia.

* Also new on YouTube, Holly Ordway for ‘The Great Thinkers’ introductory podcast series, on “Who was Tolkien? His Life and Ideas”.

* The Two Towers in Mongolian, a translation due to be published at the end of March 2025. The Hobbit and Fellowship have already been published in Mongolia, in the same series. I’d imagine that the horse-lords of the Rohirrim will resonate with many Mongolian readers.

* Tolkien in Dorset. Newly launched for summer 2025, a… “Writers’ Trail map: Follow in the footsteps of some of the UK’s best-loved writers and discover the landscapes that influenced them, including […] J.R.R. Tolkien …”. One would have thought Lyme Regis, the coastal resort where Tolkien spent three holidays as a boy, and where he later returned with his own family. But no, it’s “Bournemouth East Cliff”.

* At the Evesham Festival of Words this weekend… “a 20-mile bike ride learning about the area’s connections to writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and William Morris”.

* New online and free, at the Ordnance Survey Maps Six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952 website, ‘OS Maps 1900s Text Search’ of text on maps, and a set of ‘Town Plans, 1920-34’. The latter including Oxford and Leeds. Possibly useful for researchers.

Tolkien Gleanings #289

* New in the first-issue of the new journal Studia Neophilologica, the article “J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Gawain’s leave-taking’: A composite translation of ‘Against my will I take my leave’ (Vernon MS 407v) and a door to further criticism”. The article can also be had free here.

“This article analyzes the manner in which the publication of the deluxe slipcased edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (2020) has helped to uncover some new evidence concerning Tolkien’s poem/translation ‘Gawain’s leave-taking’ (1925), and the possible early influence of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th c.) on the initial stages of Tolkien’s Legendarium, in particular on The lay of Leithian (1925–1931). The article reveals, for the first time, the source for Tolkien’s poem/translation, namely ‘Against my will I take my leave’ (Vernon MS 407 v) as edited in Carleton Brown’s Religious lyrics of the XIVth century (1924), and the importance of ascribing the work by Tolkien to the year 1925 or earlier. It is my hope that this contribution nudges other scholars to examine the evidence with care and to propose enlightening analyses, especially considering that the influence of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Tolkien’s early writing remains unexplored.”

* In the new £92 academic book, Theology, Religion, and Dungeons & Dragons: Explorations of the Sacred through Fantasy Worlds (February 2025), the chapter “Tolkien’s Shadow: The Sub-Creating Influence of Middle Earth on Dungeons & Dragons“.

* The new listing of May 2025 online short-courses from Signum University includes “The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Mature Years”, covering 1919-1931.

* A long review of the stage-play Tolkien by Ron Reed. This has just premiered in the USA and will run until 30th March 2025….

“At nearly three hours with an intermission […] it requires a thoughtful audience curious about interpersonal relationships more than about orcs and elves. A good comparison might be the film Shadowlands […] MaryBeth Schmid captures the period of the play with her excellent costume designs. Hendren creates subtle little flashes throughout that bring to mind imagery or characters from either the Narnia books or Tolkien’s Middle-earth.”

* A new Inklings Scholar Interview: Charles Franklyn Beach.

* A new article in The Imaginative Conservative, “The Exorcism of Bilbo Baggins”, examining Gandalf’s role as a kind of ‘exorcist’ in helping with the burden of the Ring. Written by a genuine exorcist, by the sound of it, but one doesn’t have to believe in such things to value some of the article’s points.

* And finally, new on YouTube, a recent “Tolkien Tour of Oxford”. Filmed on a hand-held camera, but with a reasonable amount of steady-cam — though viewers may still experience some sea-sickness.

Tolkien Gleanings #288

* My choice of interesting-sounding papers due to be given at the forthcoming Medieval Congress 2025 at the University of Leeds…

   – ‘One of my chief encouragements’: Tolkien as Tutor, Mentor, and Friend to W.H. Auden and Mary Renault.

   – Tolkien’s Interpretation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: From His Time in Leeds to His Late Years.

   – The Light of Learning: Medieval Scholar-Kings and Loremasters in the Line of Earendil. (K. Larsen)

   – The Thomist Legacy behind J.R.R. Tolkien’s Concept of Angelic Cognition.

   – Creating a ‘Red Book’: Hobbits, Tolkien, and Irish Monks.

   – Tolkien’s Early Work: Examining ‘Enȝlaȝesíþ’.

* In France, what is billed as a ‘conference-lecture’ on “Tolkien le mysterieux” (‘Tolkien and the Mysterious’), which seeks to peer into… “his most enigmatic texts”. Set for 8th April 2025 in Paris. Looks like there’s also a book launch at the same venue, and the book has an introduction by Leo Carruthers of the Sorbonne.

* A new conference paper in the growing current issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Modes of Sauron: Wizard-Demon-Cat”, argues that Sauron is a “shape-shifter”.

* Set for June 2025, the new Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters.

* New in Portuguese and open-access, the Masters dissertation “J.R.R. Tolkien e a criacao de uma fantasia politica” (2025) (‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the creation of a political fantasy’). Has a long and cogent abstract in English. Examines Tolkien in relation to the then-emerging modernity of the inter-war period, and the various political strands of the time, suggesting that parallel views can be found in The Two Towers. See also the recent Portuguese Elementos antimodernos na obra de J.R.R. Tolkien: uma analise da obra Sobre Contos de Fadas (2024) (‘Anti-modern elements in J.R.R. Tolkien’s work: an analysis of his work on fairy tales’).

* Another interview on YouTube with the creator of the The Mythmakers book, which depicted the friendship of Tolkien & Lewis.

* Amazon UK is currently newly listing a hardcover edition of The Hobbit: A Graphic Novel (Revised and Expanded), with the release timed to wow the ‘back-to-university, got my loan payment’ crowd on 16th September 2025. Official and apparently to be… “revised and expanded with new art by illustrator David Wenzel, together with previously unpublished sketches and notes.” Possibly just some extra picture-galleries at the end, rather than additional pages of story? But the current paperback is 132 pages, while the forthcoming hardback is 192 pages. So there does seem to be room for a few additional pages of the story.

* “Tolkien’s Tengwar writing system has been mapped to Unicode”. Tecendil lets you see it digitally scribed. I see there’s also a guide for webmasters on how to embed Tengwar in your website.

* In English in the current Brazilian Unicamp Journal (magazine of the State University of Campinas), “Tolkien and magic outside the timeline”. Freely available online. A short and dense article, resulting from an interview with the writer of a recently completed PhD thesis in political science. He worries about Tolkien’s integration of older…

“literary genres into his work in an attempt to make it pass itself off as a work belonging to these genres”, and suggests that in this Tolkien “failed to maintain [the] authenticity [of the older traditions] created over generations and [which often had no firm] authorship. There is the issue of [these earlier works] being linked to that culture and that society. Tolkien, no. He recreates this whole apparatus artificially. This is not something authentic”.

But Tolkien states his very valid reasons for doing so, and anyway… what was the alternative in a society so denuded of its tales and lore? One of the great English traditions is the invention of tradition, and a master bard and wordsmith is perfectly entitled to weave fading fragments into a bright new tapestry of words. One might also consider that Tolkien was not only expertly drawing on ancient texts, tales and words. This is the fallacy of those academics who see only words and books. He also drew on the many then authentically-lived traditions of Englishness and Christianity, on the realities and traditions of battle, on local physiognomy and dialects, and on our very ancient landscape along with its distinctively rapid weather-changes amid steady seasonality.

Tolkien Gleanings #287

* A 2025 Tolkien Colloquium, focusing on the poetry. 3rd to 5th April 2025 at Baylor University, Texas. Booking now.

* The long review of the book The Science of Middle-earth, which appears in the latest issue of the paywalled membership-journal Amon Hen #311, is now also freely available in open-access and under full Creative Commons Attribution. See also my correction of an erroneous statement given in the review, in Tolkien Gleanings #282.

* Paywalled in the first issue of the new journal Scrutiny2, “The Borders of War in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”, which examines how Tolkien uses the hobbits to gradually introduce the reader to the wider war-scape of Middle-earth past and present. Also suggests that “the homecoming of Tolkien’s own sons in the Second World War” influenced the tone of the return to Bree and the Scouring of the Shire.

* The catalogue for the Tolkien & Donald Swann Archive, now freely available as an online flip-book. In one of the unpublished letters, Tolkien advises Swann on singing elves… “let him trill his Rs. All elves did that”.

* Programming details and booking alerts for the huge Medieval Congress 2025 at the University of Leeds in the UK. The 15mb .PDF programme reveals treasure-hoards of Tolkien papers and roundtables, which I’ll examine for a later Tolkien Gleanings.

* Press coverage in Italian of the opening of the Tolkien exhibition in Catania, Sicily. The article also reveals the name of the forthcoming final stop for the national tour…

The exhibition has now opened at the Palazzo della Cultura [Catania, Sicily], and will run there until until 31st July 2025. The show premiered in Rome and then toured to Naples and Turin. It will end its tour with a visit to Trieste in the autumn of 2025.

* And finally, newly released software of interest to writers. The desktop creative-writing assistance software NovelForge 3.x, now with full AI assistance. Formerly called CQuill, a one-man software creation. Still standalone and affordable, at $60 for a perpetual licence and with no wallet-gouging extra charges. In the new 3.x version you can plug in either the native AI-like ‘style assistants’, and/or local / remote LLM (‘chatbot’) AIs. Fonts can be enlarged, and dark mode is not native but can be enabled via Windowtop Pro.

Tolkien Gleanings #286

* A collection of largely unpublished Tolkien correspondence is up for auction soon, and could be yours for half-a-dozen bitcoins. Judging by the short article, the letters appear to arise from Tolkien’s late collaboration and friendship with musician Donald Swann. I believe just such an archive came up for auction at Sotheby’s last July, and they still have a page suggesting that it sold. So… perhaps this new sale might be letters from that auction, being re-sold? Or are these other letters, at auction for the first time? Unfortunately, the journalist didn’t inquire that deeply.

* Birmingham’s historical-fantasy / romance novelist Zen Cho has been chosen to give the 2025 J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture, set for May 2025.

* The Catholic University of America Press has a Christmas 2024 essay by Graham McAleer which makes an unexpected point about utilitarian ‘war topography’ in a Middle-earth dependent on horses. In which the beautiful and slowly-nurtured (gardens, hedges, managed woods and forests) can become inherently strongly defensive in time of war. Freely available online…

“Tolkien’s pastoralism is not escapism but strategic. Tolkien’s contemporary, the British geopolitical thinker, Sir Halford Mackinder argued that the great forests of Europe blocked the westward expansion of the Mongol cavalry. The cavalry could [only] flow unimpeded across the steppe. A comparable point is made by Clausewitz who argues that the highly cultivated farmlands of the west of Europe makes military manoeuvres especially tricky. It is notable that the lands of Mordor are barren, purposely, so they can offer no resistance to the ever probing and domineering Eye of Sauron. By contrast, the heroes of the West include Treebeard, Shepherd of the Trees, and Sam, Bilbo’s gardener.”

This observation might have interesting implications for various statements of regret made about the loss of forests and garden/hedge-lands in Middle-earth. The warriors and leaders who make these statements are not regretting only their loss, but also what their loss entails militarily. Not only hedges. One can also observe the irony that it is partly the feet of the hobbits that defeats the main force of ruffians in the Shire. Since they are ambushed in a cutting on the Bywater Road “sloping up between high banks”, presumably a sort of ‘sunken green lane’ worn down through the earth by many generations of hobbit-feet. Again, we see an unconscious defensive double-use for a rural market-trading landscape.

* A Pilgrim in Narnia reveals more spreadsheet sprinklings, generated by feeding Tolkien’s letters to a leading text-analysis software.

* Italian Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, the Vatican’s under-secretary for culture, has compiled a new book of the current Pope’s writings, letters and speeches on the subject of poetry and literature. The collection has now been edited and published in Italian by Milan’s ARES. The book reportedly has many texts relating to Argentinian writers, but also a few on Tolkien. How extensive or deep the Tolkien commentary is, I don’t know.

* Tolkien Gateway now has the contents-list for Parma Eldalamberon #23: The Feanorian Alphabet, Part 2 & Eldarin Pronouns (2024). Also note the review in Journal of Tolkien Research Vol. 20, Issue 2 (2024).

* New on Archive.org, a free scan of the Folklore Society’s Unlucky Plants: A Folklore Survey (1985). From a survey of living informants, something which it was still possible to undertake in the Britain of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

* Next in the current Oxford Tolkien Seminars series, “‘Alight Here for Middle-earth!’: Tolkien, Place, and the Past” on 7th March 2025. Possibly about Tolkien and railways and sense-of-place, given the title? Note the university’s page for the event says “members of the university only”. I thought these talks were also open to interested members of the public, since the Tolkien Seminar HT 2025 | Oxford Tolkien Network Web page has no such ‘uni only’ stipulation. But it seems I’m wrong. Though, recordings of these talks are eventually placed on YouTube for all to see.

* And finally, an article which overlaps with fantasy/SF fandom’s deep attachment to ‘zines and small journals. On the enduring phenomenon of British hobbyists and their print magazines…

“the continued success of the hobby magazine [even in print, in these difficult days for sustainable print] can be attributed to a particularly British — and more broadly Northern European — genius for voluntary association. Whether centred around giant vegetables or antique fountain pens, little communities bubble up everywhere with no outside encouragement. I can’t help but wonder whether the British genius for immiseration also has a role to play. Lively minds will always find alternatives to decaying cities and nagging politicians.”