Tolkien Gleanings #344
* This week The Imaginative Conservative has a new text interview with scholar Thomas Honegger on Tolkien. In English, and freely available online.
[Honegger:] Interestingly, Tolkien’s influence is even perceptible in the world of Hogwarts [the setting of the Harry Potter novels]. Rowling’s Horcruxes, the Elder Wand, and the Cloak of Invisibility can be seen as an intelligent Tolkien reader’s response to or commentary on issues that Tolkien left unanswered in his own texts, such as ‘How did Sauron forge his One Ring horcrux?’ and ‘How does an object that provides absolute power [as do both the One Ring and the Elder Wand] affect its possessor and those who come into contact with them?’
* This week Edmund Prestwich’s blog has a long article on the musicality of “Tolkien’s Lament for Boromir”, which includes a musical expert’s appreciation of the subtleties of the singing of the lament by the Clamavi De Profundis musical group.
* Talking of song, the McFarland book Tolkien’s Glee: A Reading of the Songs in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is set for a paperback (only) release in a few days on 12th October 2025.
* A new Masters degree dissertation in Illustration, “Imaginary Friends: Engaging the Unconscious Mind through Picture Books” (2025). This focuses on… “the ‘imaginary friend’ as a narrative device in picture book storytelling”, and along the way looks in part at… “the benefits of imaginative play and fantasy in readers [as found in works] by Gianni Rodari and J.R.R. Tolkien”. Freely available online. From the same University of Washington degree, the dissertation “On Drawings of Dragons” (2025) also touches on Tolkien — but there the download is under embargo until 2028.
* Oxford Council’s planning dept. has at last fully approved plans to restore Tolkien’s Eagle and Child pub. The Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) will refurbish the disused pub where the Inklings met, via the heritage specialist Donald Insall Associates and their workers. There will be a new rear landscaped garden, and a cafe will be added alongside the pub in 50 and 51 St. Giles. The upper floors will be made into new workspaces for EIT, and I recall there was also initial talk of a public meeting-room. Billionare Larry Ellison’s EIT is currently spinning up a new £300m cancer research facility in Oxford, based elsewhere in the city.
* And finally, another and earlier tea-rooms. I found a third view of the road frontage near the Post Office and Woodside Cottage (later ‘Fern Cottage’) at Rednal (Lickey Hills), where the young Tolkien brothers stayed with their mother. It shows, close-up, the house seen in the distance on yesterday’s postcard of Rednal Post Office. This house was a little beyond the start of the track that led to Birmingham Oratory’s Retreat House and the nearby Woodside Cottage. Turns out it was a pub, or would be.
At a guess the new picture seen above was made five or six years after the Tolkien brothers were there, so perhaps 1910 or thereabouts? The wide curving frontage of the Hare & Hounds pub has here become the “Motor Terminus, Rednal”, meaning the terminus for motor-buses from the city of Birmingham. A sign seen on the far left (the lower-lettering was covered by damage on the original, and has been slightly and inevitably gribbled by my restoration process) is clearly headed “_ern Cottage” (Fern Cottage), and was presumably directing people up the track towards the cottage. The apparent advertising(?) sign suggests the Cottage was then making money for the Oratory by serving as a summer tea-room?
The ‘supplies delivery’ wagon seen above somewhat evokes the Hobbiton ‘party fireworks delivery’ wagon, described at the start of The Lord of the Rings…
An odd-looking waggon laden with odd-looking packages rolled into Hobbiton one evening and toiled up the Hill to Bag End. The startled hobbits peered out of lamplit doors to gape at it. It was driven by outlandish folk, singing strange songs: dwarves with long beards and deep hoods.