* Forthcoming in 2023, the book Tolkien’s Hidden Pictures: Anthroposophy and the Enchantment in Middle Earth. Here “anthroposophy” sounds like a horrible disease, but it refers to “the spiritual esoteric insights of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy”, which the author finds to be hidden in Tolkien’s works. The book runs to 144 pages and is due in February. The table-of-contents is available and suggests the reader must also tangle with Jung (groan…). Still, it looks serious and interesting. I see the author is also giving a talk about the book at Rudolf Steiner House in London, UK, on 28th March 2023.
Steiner was an Austrian who came of age in the 1880s and died in the mid 1920s, after contributing to the new flux of ideas around matters such as: children and education; soil health, food and mind-body holisism; and the various new fields of ‘spiritual research’ which purported to be scientific in approach. He’s certainly someone whom Tolkien would have heard and read about circa 1902-1929, among many others, and not least because he had ‘re-interpreted’ German fairy tales in esoteric ways and as a theosophist had evinced a public interest in Atlantis. Later Tolkien would also have heard about Steiner’s ideas from a fellow Inkling… “As an anthroposophist influenced by Rudolf Steiner, Barfield was a believer in the evolution of consciousness”. Lewis also walked with “anthroposophist friends, Cecil Harwood and Walter O. Field”. However Tolkien was surely both savvy and religious enough to resist such ideas, while still sympathising with their key cause — a profound spiritual discomfort with a fast-emerging and apparently god-less post-1919 ‘modern world’. Like Lovecraft, one imagines that he would have freely taken a few notions from theosophy, anthroposophy etc, in order to harness them to his own unique creative imagination. On the face of it then, there could have been some tangential influence and possibly prior to The Lord of the Rings. The forthcoming book evidently looks into that in some depth.
* I found another Fornet-Ponse article, one of many which seem to be surfacing in 2022 due to open-access deposit requirements. So far the university repository has no unified page for him that also lists all the new material, though the various aggregators can get at the PDF files. One such is “Tolkien, Newman und das Oxford Movement” which is in German and from the journal Hither Shore in 2010. It’s of interest since it relates to the influence of Cardinal Newman on the younger Tolkien. The author finds a “very meager state of research on this topic”, then examines “Newman’s conception of conscience” with particular reference to “the intuitive character of moral sense” in decision-making. Then he seeks traces of this in Tolkien’s work. He finds that decision-making in LoTR often rests not only in rational considerations, but also on subjective feelings and interpretations — which are nevertheless aligned to a moral sense that arises from a clear view of good and evil.
* Luna Press has a new 35-minute YouTube interview with scholar and collector Oronzo Cilli, hot from his recent home-town book-launch and panel discussion event. Here Cilli talks (in Italian only) about his Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist (second revised and expanded edition), a book due at the end of January 2023. Though it’s in Italian, the YouTube transcript can be translated and the gist extracted…
Cilli: I started because I was curious. I wanted to understand which books Tolkien had to hand, which book he had read. And so I started making some notes, just to collect the information about the books of his library – some of these had gradually appeared via collectors’ auctions. Then I started talking to collector friends, those who had works which were signed by or belonged to Tolkien, and I noted whatever information was in these, such as his own annotations in the margins [or on paper slips]. This collection grew and grew, and became far more than ‘just a list’. Then I started annotating! The biggest challenge was finding certainty that ‘this was the right book’ because you needed to analyze the differences between editions. In the beginning I didn’t think of it as a publishable book. [Then I spoke to Tom Shippey, who saw the potential for this to become a book]. [It has since become something of a group project for Tolkien scholars, as suggestions and revisions have poured in for a second edition]. [For the forthcoming second edition] I revised the text, I double checked. I had kept track of items that needed to be updated. New books had appeared, there were auction information sheets, and two German professors helped me to ‘harmonize’ my writing of titles in German. And then I integrated all the other sets of suggestions and lists that I have from scholars . So in the second edition there are over 500 books that are new additions. And I tried to better explain some of my choices. I also took the advice of some reviewers on the arrangement of the book. I have chosen to divide the book. There is now a Section A and Section B. The Section A has only the books which with certainty we know that were Tolkien’s. Then in Section C I talk about all the works done by Tolkien. Ranging from the articles for debates at King’s College or at Oxford, or in academic journals or books by him. I also did a search on where and if these were published and where they can be found today [up to the year 2022]. There is another section on interviews and reviews of Tolkien, with some additions that escaped me in the first edition. [He then goes on to describe other sections].
* “Tolkien And The History Of Tongues”. A 40-minute lecture by Tom Shippey at the University of Oxford, given in September 2018. Now a handy .MP3 audio-only file, for those with less than the ultrafast broadband required by the chunky official video-only version.
* And finally, “When did Gandalf first meet hobbits?”.