Tolkien Gleanings #341
* The recently auctioned “signed by Tolkien in Elvish” LoTR set has sold for £24,000. The news also reveals some additional Tolkien biography…
“The book was originally gifted to one of three Oxford University students who befriended Tolkien in the 1950s. Alan Egerton Parker, then an undergraduate at University College Oxford in 1957, read The Lord of the Rings trilogy and decided – along with two pals – to track down the retired author, who was living nearby. Tolkien welcomed the students into his home, invited them for tea, and the group went on to enjoy a series of friendly meetings. Before the students graduated, Tolkien presented each of them with a personally signed set of The Lord of the Rings as a farewell gift.”
* TolkienGuide reviews The Bovadium Fragments, and gives the complete table-of-contents including the illustrations list. We also have a poem unpublished until now…
“One might think that we had been treated to so much poetry recently, with The Collected Poems […] that no more substantial poems would remain to be published. […] The poem [newly published here], with its mention of “Iffley” makes one look back to the poem bearing that same name, ‘From Iffley’, written from 1911 to c. ?1915″ [to be found in Poems, pages 54-6].
* Oronzo Cilli reports his findings on “Printing Tolkien: Investigating the 1925 Oxford Professorship Application”. Freely available online.
* The Soundscape of Ea by Jordan Rannells is apparently about to release, this week. Though the Web page is still offering a pre-order. For $70, an entire musical score for the Silmarillion mixed with suitable field records of the natural world. The recording is said to be precisely… “timed to match the Andy Serkis audiobook”.
* A new paper on “Cold Words, Heartless and Miserable: Tolkien’s Approach to Supernatural Horror” (2025). Freely available online. Tolkien’s LoTR chapter…
“”Fog on the Barrow-downs” is basically a tale of supernatural horror [and] demonstrates that Tolkien, as a horror writer, could innovate and improve on his materials”
* The tireless British Fairies blog has a new post on “Forever fading: the ever-present, ever-leaving faery”, arising from a recent conference talk…
“our perennial conviction [is] that the faeries have ‘just [now]’ disappeared — that they were something our grandparents believed in, but which can only be regarded as naive nonsense by ‘modern’ society. The irony is that people have been saying things like this at least since the time of Geoffrey Chaucer in the late fourteenth century.”
* And finally, talking of disappearances, a new scientific discovery in The Science of the Will-o’-the-Wisp. But the scientists must not only explain why the “tricksy lights” appear(ed), but also why they seem to have disappeared.