Tolkien Gleanings #12
* Open-access in the Italian journal Mantichora, ““Like Flowers Beneath The Ancient Song”: Language And Myth In Owen Barfield and J.R.R. Tolkien” (2021). The journal wrongly states the article is in Italian. It’s actually in English.
“at the basis of language there is first and foremost an ancient pleasure — purely expressive and performative — of articulating sounds [that are] pleasantly conformed to the objects they designate (“phonetic fitness”) [… with these being often originally] strongly linked to the natural environment.”
* Open-access in LURe: Literary Undergraduate Research, “Christopher: The Editors and the Critics” (2022). A deft appreciation of Christopher Tolkien, by a talented undergraduate.
* A new library blog-post from Special Collections at Washington University, “The Medieval Mind of Tolkien”, which offers a peep at a few of their treasured books.
* The Dominican publication Dominicana offers a new meditation on “Christmas in Middle-Earth”…
“His stories about Middle-earth […] also reveal the marvel of the Incarnation in ways that are explicit, surprising, overlooked, and ‘peculiar’ — to use the author’s own word.”
* An extract from an old conference paper, now newly posted online as a blog post by Dimitra Fimi, as “Goblins in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and Tolkien’s The Hobbit“.
* Open access, “Palimpsestos Liricos em Tolkien” (2022). The full title translates as: ‘Lyrical Palimpsests in Tolkien: on the poetic interpolations and vestiges of Nordic and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien’. A Masters dissertation for the University of Sao Paulo, in Portuguese. In the English abstract, the author sees a…
“derivative relationship with Beowulf in Old English and the Elder Edda in Old Norse [and detects] traces left by such a process and its connection with the Germanic poetic tradition [and] compositional procedures from that tradition. [Something which, for Tolkien, may have] begun in an effort of translation”.
Someone in a podcast — possibly Tom Shippey — recently recalled how translation of several pages of text was given as an exercise by the better British schools, in Tolkien’s day. It was a swift dash-it-off individual daily exercise. Tolkien, of course, went a step further. At least for Greek. To help him learn to translate Greek, he invented his own purified ‘Pure Greek’.
* And finally, news of a new richly illustrated translation of “The Wanderer”….
“Cole decided to write her own translation of ‘The Wanderer’, one that would pay homage to Tolkien by using his language and themes […] she also illustrated her text with beautiful watercolor paintings.”.