Tolkien Gleanings #426
* Crickhowell in Breconshire does, after all, have at least a place-name link with Crickhollow in The Lord of the Rings. The Abergavenny Chronicle local newspaper this week notes the contents of… “A letter written by Tolkien in 1966, that is due to be auctioned next month at Christie’s”. In it Tolkien wrote…
“I have been in most parts of Wales, but the place names I used are made up from English models or borrowed from books, though Crickhollow was actually meant to resemble Crickhowell.”
Clear enough, though it’s the placename rather than the place. Thus local claims for being the inspiration for Buckland, Bucklebury, the Brandywine Bridge or even Erebor are all still unsupported. The letter appears to be unpublished.
* More interesting for the wider world in this new letter is that the “walking elms”, one of which you’ll recall was seen on the edge of the North Moors by Sam’s cousin, were indeed ents. Tolkien writes that they were… “keeping watch on the Shire” at Gandalf’s bidding.
Which suggests that some ents had a foothold in the north somewhere. Most likely in the high Hills of Evendim, where they would be within reach of both the Rangers at Fornost and the elves of the Grey Havens, and from which they could fairly easily patrol the northern border of the North Moors (the ent was seen “away beyond the North Moors” — Sam, my emphasis). Either the Rangers or the elves could then have conveyed a message from Gandalf to guard the hobbit hunting-tracks on the northern approaches to the Shire. Also, we can assume the northern ents were especially gigantic ‘Elm ents’, since Sam says… “as big as an elm tree, and walking – walking seven yards to a stride”, while the smaller Fangorn ents only made much less to each stride. If elms, then we might also infer that the high Hills of Evendim (high enough that the elves who once lived there travelled exclusively by river) were not just forbidding slopes of northern pines and firs, at least on the western side.
* A new book, The Language of Early English Dialect Literature (2026). Reveals…
“the rich and varied forms that linguistic creativity takes in the work of dialect writers from across England between 1547 and 1877, ranging from Cumbria in the north-west and Newcastle in the north-east, to Cornwall in the south-west and Kent in the south-east. Challenging the traditional view of dialect literature as backwards-looking and conventional, this book makes a case for its stylistic ambitiousness and complexity.”
* Matej Cadil on “Roast Mutton: Trolls at Dawn and Treasures Underground”, this being the second long illustrated post for his… “illustrated journey through The Hobbit”. (Substack, but nearly all free).
* Pre-orders are now live for the CD-sets and scores for the demo recordings for Musical Chapters from The Hobbit, performed by Volante Opera and authorised by the Tolkien Estate.
* And finally, Futuropolis appear set to release a new Tolkien biography in August 2026, by Henrik Rehr and Chantal Van Den Heuvel. Their previous books were BD-style illustrated albums, running 130-160 pages, on the lives of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I’d assume the same format for their Tolkien book?
