* In the Canadian undergraduate journal Explorations, the new essay “The Birth of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Love-Child Culture in The Two Towers“. An off-putting title, but it turns out to be a detailed and worthy essay on the insular and self-governing nature of the Rohirrim. It has kindly been placed under full Creative Commons. There’s a mistake to watch out for, though. Helm’s Deep was not the work of Rohan, as LoTR states… “Men [of Rohan] said that in the far-off days of the glory of Gondor the sea-kings had built here this fastness with the hands of giants.”
* At the Fantastic Metropolis blog I found a nice copy of “The Realms of Tolkien”. This being a late interview printed in the British science-fiction magazine New Worlds (Vol. 50, No. 168, November 1966), an issue not yet on Archive.org. In the interview Tolkien elaborates a little on Queen Beruthiel and her cats, among other topics.
* Libraries and Books in Medieval England is a new book due in April 2023. It promises to be a manageable survey of the topic in 192 pages, from an eminent authority with all the latest research at his fingertips.
* Due in a few weeks, the academic book J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics (February 2023), on the still-hot academic topic of utopianising tendencies in literature. Here ‘Classics’ means ‘the ancient world and our inheritance from it’. The blurb sounded quite interesting, until I read the names of the usual suspects… Plato, Homer, Ovid. The contents are…
Introduction: Utopianism and Classicism: Tolkien’s New/Old Continent.
1. Lapsarian Narratives: The Decline and Fall of Utopian Communities in Middle-Earth.
2. Hospitality Narratives: The Ideal of the Home in an Odyssean Hobbit.
3. Sublime Narratives: Classical Transcendence in Nature and Beyond in The Fellowship of the Ring.Epilogue
The book follows last year’s theologically-informed Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium (February 2022) by a different author, which had a chapter that surveyed… “elements of anarchism, distributionism, and Toryism in Tolkien’s political philosophy”.
* And finally, a newly discovered pithy marginal note from Christopher Tolkien…
“What’s the point of all this pedantry if you can’t get a detail like this right?”