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.