Tolkien Gleanings #115.
* A large Tolkien Music Festival in Italy… “the Tolkien Music Festival aims to become a cultural center-of-gravity, capable of hosting and sustaining the ongoing artistic production” inspired by Tolkien. The 2023 event also includes a contest for visual artists. 30th September to 1st October 2023, in a town about 25 miles north of the city of Bologna in northern Italy. Booking now.
* New to me, the book Words of Westernesse: Tolkien’s languages of Men and Hobbits (November 2021). A 120-page introduction to “the tongues spoken by the men of Numenor”, and by extension the Westron. Google Books has an extended free preview, which inspires more confidence than the cover. Includes…
(tentative) etymologies of Adunaic and Westron as far as the corpus of vocabulary has been established. This volumes includes updated versions of the essays ‘Lalaith’s Guide to Adunaic grammar” and “Etymologies of the Atani Languages”.
This find led me to discover the author’s Middle-earth Science Pages website / blog. Again, new to me and now indexed by my new Tolkien scholarship search-engine. From the site I found there’s a 500-page omnibus edition (March 2022), combined with several other books…
“… a new hardcover offer. And I am most impressed! The omnibus edition of my four volumes “Middle-earth seen by the barbarians”, “Words of Westernesse”, “Dynasties of Middle-earth” and “The Moon in The Hobbit” looks most professional, the colour images are crisp, the paper feels noble – “like from the bookshop” my daughter said, admiringly!
Middle-earth Seen By The Barbarians considers what can be known about the barbarians and pirates of the far east and south. The Moon in The Hobbit looks at the astronomical / calenderical aspects. Dynasties has various annotated genealogical tables. This March 2022 omnibus can also be had as a budget £5.60 Kindle ebook (about $8).
* 100 Staffordshire churches will be open to visitors in September. These will include Our Lady of the Angels and St. Peter in Chains, on the edge of Hartshill in Stoke-on-Trent. This church is of some tangential Tolkien interest, since the older Tolkien spent many holidays in Stoke-on-Trent in his retirement. His son was the priest there and thus I assume the elder Tolkien attended this next-door church, though I don’t know of any hard evidence for that. I guess it’s just possible that he found a more traditional Catholic church somewhere else in the Potteries, and went there. Possibly the forthcoming Holly Ordway book will clarify such questions of attendance. Anyway the church will be open to the public on the weekend of 16th-17th September 2023, noon to 5pm. Free, with no booking required.
* And finally, new on Archive.org is a run of White Dwarf Magazine from #1 to #100 (1977-1988). Raw and fannish early RPG gaming, before the slick corporate takeovers and makeovers. Such games and scenarios drew heavily on ideas from Middle-earth, though with a strong infusion of pre-Tolkien sword & sorcery.