Tolkien Gleanings #371
* As the winter temperature plummets below freezing here in England, a timely article from the University of Leicester journal Physics Special Topics, “Thermal Insulation of Hobbit Holes: Comfort in the Shire”. Freely available online.
“[Bag End’s] long hallway contributes significantly to heat-loss, but burial depth and material selection enable sustainable heating with ∼18kg [40lbs] of wood daily.”
Bag End therefore must have had a winter log-pile some 4 feet high and 8 feet long, called a ‘cord’ in the trade, perhaps averaging 4,000 pounds of wood. At Bilbo’s consumption rate this pile would need to be fully renewed three times each year, with each new ‘cord’ lasting him around 100 days and with a two-month gap for the high summer. Deliveries likely in late August, mid December, and early March, probably with an extra cost for carting it all up the hill. Assuming easy-burning pine logs, Bilbo is therefore consuming about two mature pine trees a year, in order to comfortably heat a large hole with a great many rooms. If on his country walks he occasionally plants a pine-cone in a likely spot, he is more than heating his home in a sustainable manner.
* New in The Explicator, a note-article on “The Origins of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mirkwood Revisited” (first page and footnotes are free, the rest is $ paywalled).
* The Geeks of Doom blog reviews the new pocket-book Pocket Portraits: J.R.R. Tolkien (2025)…
Organized into 100 brief vignettes, this mini-hardcover spans 240 pages filled with biographical insight into the British writer and illustrator’s life […] But where this beautifully designed biography really excels, however, is in its exploration of Tolkien’s writings that were never published during his lifetime, particularly those set in Middle-earth”.
* A 2026 reprint of the £75 ‘making of’ book Middle-earth: From Script to Screen: Building the World of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (Weta/HarperCollins). A table-trembling hardcover of over 500 pages, with the reprint due on 26th March 2026. It doesn’t appear to have been updated or expanded for this new printing.
* Italy’s Paulo Nardi on Homer and Tolkien: What It Means to Come Home.
* In Polish in the latest edition of journal Rozprawy Spoleczne, “(Po)wolnosc” (‘Slow and free’), on slowness and slow-living in Tolkien. The Ents are considered as a metaphor for the value of slow and considered living in freedom. Being so deeply rooted in the land, this slowness can yet at times turn to a fast and efficient defense of the homeland — as in the scouring and transformation of Isengard.
* And finally, talking of slow and rooted… Tolkneity this week blogs on “Tolkien Pines in Poland”…
“Before the Tolkien Pine [aka the ‘Black Pine’] in Oxford declined […] Polish Tolkien fans brought its cones back from England in 2008. [Intending to plant its] true descendants, grown from seed — a new generation of the very tree Tolkien himself knew. A decisive moment came when the Skierniewice Forest District became involved in the project. It was there that the seeds were professionally sown, the young trees were raised under expert care, and proper forestry conditions were provided for their survival.”