Tolkien Gleanings #6
* A download of a lecture by Prof. Giuseppe Pezzini (University of Oxford), Tolkien on the Nature and Purpose of Christian Art. “This lecture was given on 21st April 2022 at The Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst as part of the ‘Catholicism and the Arts: An Intellectual Retreat’.” (Online August 2022). Be warned that the Centre’s disastrous podium microphone often goes haywire and this, combined with the very heavy Italian accent, makes for a difficult listen. See also his open-access journal article “The Lords of the West: Cloaking, Freedom and the Divine Narrative in Tolkien’s Poetics” (2019).
* A theological podcast from October 2022 interviews the French author of the new book From Imagination to Faerie: Tolkien’s Thomist Fantasy (July 2022). The interview and discussion are excellent. I can’t locate any reviews of this book, as yet, even on Amazon.
* Amazon is now listing Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist: Second Edition Revised and Expanded, due 31st January 2023. The book is currently listing as a Kindle ebook only, and the listing previews an appealing new cover…
* Further out in time, a major new Tolkien book has been announced for the end of March 2023 and this is pre-ordering now. To be titled The Battle of Maldon: together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, it will have Tolkien’s scholarly notes and “unpublished and never-before-seen texts and draft”. Plus related essays by Tolkien, and the text of his lecture “The Tradition of Versification in Old English”.
* Tolkien Studies, Volume 19, 2022 Supplement (July 2022, $ paywall). Has a single book-length article, “The Chronology of The Lord of the Rings”. This appears to be the first full publication of Tolkien’s own day-by-day working ‘grid chart’ for The Lord of the Rings, used by him to keep track of which characters were where on which day. I seem to recall that I saw a large section of this at the Bodleian exhibition in Oxford, a few years ago. This special Tolkien Studies supplement has extensive scholarly notes and an introduction. Amazon UK appears to know nothing about it.
* New in the questionable Brazilian Journal of Development (not in DOAJ or the Brazilian aggregators, and I won’t index it in JURN), a November 2022 article in English. “J.R.R. Tolkien: an analysis of the English conservative political culture” is said to be drawn from a Masters dissertation.
* In The Spectator magazine ($ paywall) this week, “In defence of fairy tales”…
“A recent opinion poll has revealed that they terrify people under the age of 30, who consider them horribly inappropriate for children [and] ‘sexist’ and old-fashioned and outdated.” [Yet] “Some of these fairy tales date back 6,000 years […] That they have lasted, often scarcely changed, over the intervening millennia seems to me evidence that they contain certain immutable truths, applicable to all, regardless of whether we were chasing the last handful of mammoths or attempting to split the atom. [But today they are too often seen as] simply conduits for grievance and resentment” [And when such] “stories are read with blinkers on … The real point of the story is entirely lost.”
* And finally, the new research study “The Influence of the Mother Tongue on the Perception of Constructed Fantasy Languages”. Researchers found that Tolkien’s Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin sounded the most mellifluous to German and Japanese speakers. While Orkish which the second most favoured language among Chinese speakers.