Tolkien Gleanings #65.
* A new open-access article by the technologies librarian at Marquette University, “Anduin: Transforming manuscripts from The Lord of the Rings into a digital experience” (2023). Incidentally I see the word is claimed as a trademark of Middle-earth Enterprises. But surely there is ‘prior art’ on this? It was long the name used to refer to one of the key Lombard kings, as Anduin (526-572 A.D.). It can be found thus in English as early as Procopius, The History of the Warres of the Emperor Justinian (1653)…
… through 1811, the 1857 in the Jahrbuch fur Deutsche Sprache, Litteratur (‘Yearbook for German Language and Literature’), and the 1928 Harvard ‘Loeb’ Classics edition of Procopius in his History of the Wars (Gothic War). Today known to modern historians as King Alboin.
* Leading Tolkien scholar Michael Drout has revealed that… “W.W. Norton will be publishing The Tower and the Ruin, my book on J.R.R. Tolkien, in spring 2024″. The title presumably relates to Tolkien’s parable of the tower, given in his The Monsters and the Critics.
* Publisher Taylor & Francis has released a date and table of contents for the forthcoming book J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe: Context, Directions, and the Legacy. The planned publication date is set for 29th September 2023, and the chapters cover receptions of Tolkien translations in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and perhaps more — though other nations and peoples are not stated in the blurb or TOCs.
* Details of what sounds like an event on Tolkien and translation, in Italy on 27th May 2023… “The event, organised to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien, is part of a series of events to celebrate the author of The Lord of the Rings”. I also see in a press release that the forthcoming Turin Book Fair has a talk about “a national campaign” happening in Italian schools, to do with the same 50th anniversary.
* The German fan magazine Flammifer von Westernis #68 (April 2023) has been published. My translation of the TOCs suggests that among other items it has an interview with Brian Sibley, an article on Tolkien and Switzerland, and a review of the book The Science of Middle-earth.
* And finally, in the latest Journal of Scottish Thought, “The Angel Creatures of George MacDonald’s Phantastes”. This issue is a special on MacDonald and also has an article on “The Literary and Theological Otherworlds in MacDonald’s Fairy Tales”.