Tolkien Gleanings #54.
* Thanks to Sebastiano Tassinari for noting that the Renee Vink book of essays Gleanings from Tolkien’s Garden (2020) does have TOCs online. I had previously been unable to immediately find the book’s contents page, though I had found the correct Web link to order the book from Europe. It turns out that the book was detailed in a 2021 review in the Journal of Inklings Studies Vol. 11, No. 2.
* My new blog post, musing on some possible influences from “Tolkien’s wartime fireworks”.
* The Wisdom of Hobbits: an online conference, 29th April 2023. This $20 event listing brings news of a new book…
“In this three-hour, fully-online event, Lord of the Rings scholars join author Matthew J. Distefano to explore themes in the newly published book The Wisdom of Hobbits.”
The full title is The Wisdom of Hobbits: Unearthing Our Humanity at 3 Bagshot Row (March 2023), available in print or as an ebook. There’s a good in-depth podcast audio review at Tolkien Lore.
I have nothing against AI images, but it’s perhaps regrettable that a book on “our humanity” uses an unretouched AI-generated image for the cover.
* A new John Garth post “Making an ass of yourself, with Geoffrey Bache Smith”, on Geoffrey Bache Smith’s sense of humour. Also a presentation slide from Garth that did not make it onto the YouTube recordings of the March 2023 conference on Smith and Tolkien.
* New in open access, Prosody in Medieval English and Norse (2023). The Oxford University Press book attempts to… “Introduce and explain technical topics and metrical theories for the understanding of readers from a range of backgrounds”. Such things are beyond me, but some may be interested… since Tolkien was. Click “Open Access”, and then the PDF link, to get the book.
* Omentielva Quainea: The International Conference on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Invented Languages will be held in France in August 2024. Further details to be announced.
* And finally, from the buzzing world of computer-code scripting languages, a new Arda Python Library emerges…
“At various times over the last ten months, I’ve been quietly working on a Python library for doing various Tolkien-related calculations. The project is still in its early stages and currently just has two things. Firstly, an initial implementation of Year and YearDelta classes for dealing with Ages and the beginnings of a Shire Calendar class ShireDate. … Much of the initial motivation for this was wrangling data for Tolkien Timelines.”