Tolkien Gleanings #7

* The new book From Imagination to Faerie: Tolkien’s Thomist Fantasy now has a partial Google Books preview and TOCs…

* “The Vyne Ring in context: powerful people and powerful rings during the end of Roman Britain”, an open-access English chapter from the sumptuous and scholarly Rings of Power print book (2019, 2 volumes) on the cultural archaeology and thinking on ancient finger-rings. Readers will recall Tolkien’s connections with this and Nodens.

This open-access chapter also gives the TOCs, and there one finds the essay paired in the book with Thomas Honegger’s German-language “Tolkien und die Tradition der Ringe der Macht”. I find an English version of Honegger’s article is freely available. The book’s TOCs also show that most of the other chapters are in German. There appears to be no open-access version, other than these chapters.

* The new book Beowulf as Children’s Literature (December 2021, $ paywalled on JSTOR) considers the 100 or so children’s adaptations of Beowulf which appeared during the 19th and 20th century, and at the end has a chapter on “Children’s Beowulf for the New Tolkien Generation”.

* The open-access “To Bring Back some Eagleness to Eagles: On Bird Worldings in the Bronze Age” (2020). Relevant to Tolkien’s understanding of eagles in ancient Northern history and tales. The…

“research community has paid very little attention to avian creatures [and] birds seem to vanish from the air [in recent cultural studies of farming and landscape, since] Marxism still seem to rule contemporaneous Bronze Age research”.

Goes on to provide an interesting non-communist cultural/archaeological study (“According to north European birdlore, eagles were thought to be immortal”), and then the last third rapidly leaves the Bronze Age and comes up to date.