Tolkien Gleanings #148.
* Dimitra Fimi on “Tolkien and the Fairies: Faith and Folklore”. Seemingly newly published, the blog-post article is the text of her 2010 Oxonmoot presentation.
* Arriving in late February 2024 according to Amazon, a 144-page graphic-novel version of The Hobbit, published by Morrow. Which probably means about 120 pages of story, plus padding.
* Amazon currently has “10th January 2024” as the date for the ebook version of the English edition of the biographical graphic-novel Tolkien: Lighting Up The Darkness.
* New to me, the book Easter: A Pagan Goddess, A Christian Holiday, and their Contested History. Not on Amazon UK under that title, nor discover-able via Google. The publisher is Uppsala Books, Tom Shippey’s new imprint, which lists the title and dates its page as “2023”. Possibly still ‘forthcoming’, at a guess?
“The purpose of this book is to explore the principal claims and counter-claims that now surround the goddess Eostre (recorded once by the Venerable Bede in 725 AD) and the origins of the Christian paschal festival. It critically examines the substance and history of these ideas from their earliest sources to the present day.”
* And finally, new on Archive.org is the Journal of Conchology (i.e. shells and their makers). Not a journal in which one might expect to find Tolkien considered. But its two-part 1991/92 “Mollusca in fiction” survey delighted in finding a snail as a key plot-point in The Hobbit…
“The works of J.R.R. Tolkien are much read and admired, but most readers have probably failed to notice the passive, fleeting, but crucial role played by a snail in The Hobbit. [Plot recap, then…] at the last moment as the sun sinks a thrush flies down and cracks a snail upon a large stone. The last rays shine upon the key-hole as they stand by the stone and they are thus able to [plot spoilers]. T.E. Crowley observed that it was impossible to anthropomorphise a snail. It has, however, now been done.”
Actually H.P. Lovecraft did it first, as with so much else. See the Lovecraft / Rimel collaboration on the Dreamlands tale “The Sorcery of Aphlar” (published in The Fantasy Fan, 1934).