* New on Archive.org to borrow, Roger C. Schlobin’s collection Phantasmagoria: Collected Essays on the Nature of Fantasy. This includes the essay “The Monsters are Talismans and Transgressions: Tolkien and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, which discusses how Tolkien might have subtly woven certain tones and shades from Gawain into The Lord of the Rings. Such as having a mostly “absentee villain”. The author briefly examines Boromir as a flawed character, but curiously overlooks Sir Gawain as the obvious template for Boromir’s lone and questing journey to find the mysterious Rivendell. Though I’ll admit that this quest is easy to overlook, deeply interwoven as it is across a dozen or more points in LoTR.
* Tea with Tolkien has a useful new Concise Outline of the Waldman Letter (Letter 131). This being a very long letter/pitch by Tolkien to an editor, written and sent in 1951. The Tolkien Gateway also has an existing summary online, but that is more verbose and slab-like.
* Douglas A. Anderson’s new scholarly Tom Shippey on Tolkien: A Checklist through 2022. Free as a .PDF file, though regrettably only for those with an Academia.edu account.
* New this week at The European Conservative, the article “When Middle Earth Came to Vienna”… “The renewed obsession with the minutiae of Tolkien’s work gives me an excuse to revisit […] the inspiration for Tolkien’s Battle of the Pelennor Fields.”
* A talk on “The Pagan Tolkien” is set for 16th February 2023, snow-gods permitting… “Professor Ronald Hutton shares insights on the pagan influences evident in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien”. A heavyweight speaker, though at a small Shire-like village-hall on the edge of Gloucester, England. Booking now.