Tolkien Gleanings #116.

* New this week on the Mythmakers podcast, an interview with Holly Ordway about her important new book Tolkien’s Faith (due for release on 2nd September 2023). For the .mp3 download, click on ‘… More’, then right-click ‘Download Audio’ and then ‘Save Linked Content…’. I hadn’t realised that the Birmingham Oratory that Tolkien knew as a boy is not not the one we have now. The new building was begun when Tolkien was about age 15 and completed three years later in 1910. He left Birmingham for Oxford in 1911, so as a schoolboy he would only have known the new and current building in daily use for perhaps 18 months.

* Newly and freely online, a short scholarly introduction to “Trees in J.R.R. Tolkien’s World”. Originally in “Birks, A. (2010), Etudes Tolkiennes, Universite Catholique de l’Ouest.” This journal Etudes Tolkiennes appears to have produced two issues and was a departmental collection of “the best articles written by Masters research students studying ‘Interculturality: Languages ​​and Cultures’ at UCO”. The journal appears to have otherwise utterly vanished into the mists of time. Note that this “Trees” article can also be had as a PDF download, by those not signed up to Researchgate, by searching for the title on Google Scholar.

* The Tolkien et al. Gawain is to get an Italian edition next week. Sir Gawain e il cavaliere verde: Con Perla e Sir Orfeo is due to ship on 30th August 2023 from Bompiani. “Beautifully rendered in a new translation” together with Pearl, and with a translation of Christopher Tolkien’s introduction. Also coming at the end of October 2023 is an Italian hardback edition of Hammond & Scull’s J.R.R. Tolkien: artista e illustratore, which may interest non-Italian readers simply for the pictures. Italian artbooks having a certain reputation for quality printing.

* A new edition of SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (Vol. 28 No. 1, July 2023). Note that many of the DOI links are broken (no surprise there, as around 50% of all DOIs are broken), but the PDF links are fine. This issue of SELIM has an addendum to “The Missing Letters J.R.R. Tolkien Received from Derek J. Price and R.M. Wilson”, together with a review of Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year (2022) and of Tolkien in the 21st Century (2022). From the sound of it the latter is surprisingly historical, given the book’s title and sub-title “Reading, Reception, and Reinterpretation”. The book having within it “Fairy Women in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and their Arthurian Counterparts” and “Tolkien’s Runes and their Legacy” in which the reviewer notes…

“Birkett establishes that the runes devised by Tolkien, contrary to his claims, did derive from older sources, at least appearance-wise”

* “Plans to revive pub where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis met”. It’s said that the firm applying for local council planning permission remains “committed to the Eagle and Child as a public house”. If the building of a restaurant extension can be approved, the firm will also “lightly” restore and refurbish. Though it sounds like the place has been left to go to rack-and-ruin, and probably needs a lot more work. Yet there’s obviously a market in Oxford, since the newly community-owned Lamb & Flag pub was reported in mid June to be thriving more than six months after re-opening.

* And finally, 20,000 words are newly included in a new dictionary of Shakespeare’s English. These are found in the new Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language (August 2023). The first two volumes (of five) should be available quite soon, and together these two hold the complete new A-Z. The new words are also drawn from a huge corpus written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, as well as from the works. They have a £400 retail list-price, but currently no price on Amazon UK. The press-release was issued before Amazon could price the books for pre-order.