Tolkien Gleanings #147.

* A student’s lengthy November 2023 summary-report of an “Oxford professor’s USC visit” and the lectures given there…

“USC’s Nova Forum for Catholic Thought invited Pezzini for a weeklong speaking series on Tolkien’s literary contributions from a Catholic perspective.”

* Advance notice of an Easter Tolkien talk in the UK, “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Hope of Easter”.

* Now on Archive.org, Colin Wilson’s Tree by Tolkien chapbook (1973), seen here in its 1974 U.S. edition…

Not to be confused with the notoriously-wrong critic Edmund Wilson. The only commentary on it that I can immediately dig up is in the Tolkien Encyclopedia…

“It could be said, fundamentally, that no ‘mainstream critic’ appreciated The Lord of the Rings or indeed was in a position to write criticism on it. […] The best possible exception would be Colin Wilson in his 1974 Capra Press pamphlet Tree by Tolkien, in which he compares Tolkien somewhat oddly (but in the end perhaps perceptively) with Jeffrey Farnol.”

Actually I find the comparison is short, and then a later passing comment suggests Wilson intended it to apply to the initial walking journey from the Shire to Rivendell. But the observation made me look into Farnol. He was one of the many accomplished Edwardian writers of popular adventure-romance novels. He was from Aston in the north of Birmingham, so not far from Tolkien. But at age 30 he married his 18 year-old love and they set off for America. There he became a successful writer, robust but with a strong dash of romance added so as to appeal to women readers. Also a strong taste for the old English rural highways and byways, Regency highwaymen and ‘country characters’ being then very much in demand. Four of his novels are on Archive.org…

As I sat of an early summer morning in the shade of a tree, eating fried bacon with a tinker, the thought came to me that I might some day write a book of my own: a book that should treat of the roads and by-roads, of trees, and wind in lonely places, of rapid brooks and lazy streams, of the glory of dawn, the glow of evening, and the purple solitude of night; a book of wayside inns and sequestered taverns; a book of country things and ways and people. And the thought pleased me much.” (Opening of The Broad Highway, 1911).

Update: I heard the first fifteen or so chapters via the LibriVox reading. No great resemblance to Tolkien, so far, other than the love of English landscape.

As for Colin Wilson, there are some perceptive moments. But he reveals that the first read of LoTR was a three-day gallop, and we later learn that he skipped large sections. The second was a read-aloud to his children which meant many “long speeches” skipped and the book’s reading also re-ordered so as to focus on Frodo and Sam. Partly, Wilson’s reading doesn’t appear to have been deep or complete enough. Nor does he have anything much of the biography to grasp, seemingly having to intuit the Catholicism rather than to know about it. Still, as possibly the first worthy criticism after Auden, it’s fairly creditable. Unlike many critics of the time, he had actually (mostly) read the book.

* A short new book from the University of Wales, Introducing the Medieval Fox (2023).

* And finally, advance news of a short summer 2024 exhibition at the Getty in the USA. “The Book of Marvels: Wonder and Fear in the Middle Ages” will run from 11th June – 25th August 2024.