* Joel Wentz reviews the new book Tolkien Dogmatics (2022). The book is found to be an…
“astoundingly well-researched volume […] I do not think these insights can be found in any other writing on Tolkien, which itself is a remarkable achievement.”
* The Western Front Association asks “Who was ‘Tea-Cake’ Barnsley?”. Their answer is in the form of an excellent long illustrated essay, with footnotes.
* New and freely available on Archive.org is the Sindarin Dictionary, in the form of a special issue of Hisweloke (seems to be from the early 2000s?).
* A new academic book from a Spanish author writing in English, The Atlantic as Mythical Space: An Essay on Medieval Ethea (2023). Nearly 300 pages and described as a scholarly…
“study of medieval culture and its concomitant myths, legends and fantastic narratives as it developed along the European Atlantic seaboard. It is an inclusive study that touches upon early medieval Ireland, the pre-Hispanic Canary Islands, the Iberian Peninsula, courtly-love France and the pagan and early-Christian British Isles.”
* Another Tolkien event has recently popped up on Google Search as a listing…
“Celebrating the 70th anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight lecture at the University of Glasgow (1953-2023).”
Bookings via Eventbrite.
Looking up the dates in the Chronology, I see Tolkien’s lecture was given in Glasgow on 15th April 1953. He left England on the 14th and it’s implied that, at a first-class table on the train to Scotland, he had to work to polish up the unfinished lecture. Unfinished because he had been ill over Christmas and then assailed by a triple-whammy of moving house, academic administration work, and trying to complete The Lord of the Rings. Afterwards he had no time to go haggis-hunting, but jumped on the train back to England…
“I travelled all the way from Motherwell to Wolverhampton with a Scotch mother and a wee lassie [a small girl], whom I rescued from standing in the corridor of a packed train, and they were allowed to go ‘first’ [to sit at a table in the first-class carriages] without payment since I told the inspector I welcomed their company.”