Tolkien Gleanings #145.
* A Rome Reports two-minute TV-news style video takes cameras inside the Italian National Gallery for a peep at the successful new Tolkien exhibition there, and interviews Oronzo Cilli. Be sure to turn on YouTube’s auto-subtitles.
* The Athrabeth podcast interviews Thomas P. Hillman. His new book is due just before Christmas from Kent State University Press, titled Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many. The publisher’s blurb has…
“Instead of turning his interpretation [of LoTR] to allegory or [Christian] apologetics, Hillman demonstrates how the story works metaphorically, allowing Tolkien to embrace both Catholic views and pagan mythology.”
* Seemly newly up for auction, Tolkien’s hand-written 25th September 1954 letter to someone who had given The Lord of the Rings an attentive and positive review on publication of Fellowship. In the New Statesman magazine, of all places. Presumably British armchair leftists had no idea what was coming, given that only the first volume of LoTR had by then appeared, or they might have had a more hostile reviewer lined up. My guess would be that the editor simply nodded it through.
The item up for auction appears to be Letter 154 in the Letters.
* I found the site of L’Arco e la Corte, an Italian publisher offering Tolkien scholarship including a journal. This gave me the Italian journal’s Minas Tirith #23 (May 2023) contents in Italian, which includes among others…
– Tolkien the philologist and Armand Berger’s Res germanica.
– At the Origin of the Elvish Languages: Early Quendian and Proto-Indo-European.
– Elvish language trees according to various later conceptions of J.R.R. Tolkien.
– The French ‘Library’ of J.R.R. Tolkien.
A Tolkien page in their catalogue also revealed interesting items (though again, published in Italian). Among which are, here given in English title-translation…
Glimmers of things higher, deeper, or darker than its surface (conference proceedings); Travelling to Isengard: Tolkien and European traditions (multi-author, scholars from widely differing disciplines); J.R.R. Tolkien, philologist and poet between antiquity and the 20th century (a short primer for Italians on Tolkien’s Philology and his wider academic interests); and a two-volume The Languages of the Elves of Middle-earth – History and development of the Elvish languages of Arda.
* And finally, An Unexpected Journal has the new essay “Melchizedek, Bombadil, and the Numinous in The Lord of the Rings”. A new long and Bible-aware essay, which suggests a possible Biblical source / influence for Bombadil. One that’s new to me.