* The National Archives reports that… “Two handwritten letters penned by J.R.R. Tolkien have been discovered for the first time”…
“Written in 1945, shortly after Tolkien’s appointment as Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College, Oxford, the letters are part of an exchange with the British Council about funding for his research into early English languages.”
* The editors of the forthcoming academic journal The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale…
“will host an online conference via Zoom on 31st March – 1st April 2023. The theme is “Beginnings” and we will be exploring how, in many ways, the nineteenth century saw the birth of science fiction and fantasy as we know them as well as the scholarly study of folk and fairy tales.”
Sadly the deadline for registration for attendance has now passed, but hopefully recordings will become available on YouTube.
* A handy YouTube playlist for “G.B. Smith and J.R.R. Tolkien: a meaningful friendship”. This being a scholarly conference at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 21st-22nd March 2023.
* Listed as due in mid September 2023, a new edition of Letters from J.R.R. Tolkien. “Featuring a radically expanded index”, and set to be a volume of 704 pages from “William Morrow & Company (15th September 2023)”, according to Amazon UK. No further details.
* And finally, a sale listing alerted me to the fact that that there was once a place called “The Ring” at Tolkien’s Great Haywood in mid Staffordshire…
“Samuel Wyatt’s other group at Great Haywood was regrettably demolished in about 1965. Known as the Ring, it comprised a hollow hexagon formed of 16 cottages with a communal bake-oven in the centre of the inner yard.” (Country Life, 1977). One of the cottages served as a schoolroom. Erected sometime after the Great Flood of 1795, to house many of the former villagers of Shugborough. Probably built c. 1800-1806. Therefore the ‘Ring’ was there in Tolkien’s time.