Tolkien Gleanings #155.
* Leeds Library Service’s The Secret Library blog has a new article, “Tolkien in Leeds: Back again”…
“on locating our copy of Gordon’s book, we were delighted to find, on page 28, the very illustration Atherton described, and which so very clearly inspired Tolkien’s own drawing [of Beorn’s hall]”
And a pleasing drawing it is. Part of the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition in the northern English city of Leeds… “taking place at the Central Library until January 2024”.
* The latest Law & Liberty magazine on “Tolkien Among the Greeks”, this being a lengthy review of the book J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics (March 2023).
* Amazon UK now suggests that the book Tolkien et l’antiquita: passe et antiquites en terre du milieu is due in mid February 2024. Probably the proceedings of a conference at the Sorbonne, of the same name. The title translates as ‘Tolkien and Antiquity: the past and antiquities in Middle-earth’.
* I find that the forthcoming Morrow graphic novel of The Hobbit, mentioned in a recent Gleanings, is merely a reprint. It already exists, though the news had passed me by. Possibly because it was first published way back in 1989 by Eclipse Comics, as a mini-series of three spinner-rack floppies. Then in 1990 as a collected trade paperback with an unappealing cover. Contains Moderate Peril found it a quite pleasing and faithful adaptation, which is encouraging.
* Publisher Morrow also looks forward in late 2024 to… “a new standard hardcover edition of Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien (previously only available in a slipcased edition)”.
* I somehow missed “A Typeface for Tolkien” which appeared in February 2023, though it was in the 2022 Vol. 2 issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research. Inserted late, perhaps? Takes an in-depth illustrated look at the uses of “Victor Hammer’s typefaces” for texts by Tolkien. I find that The Hammer Society has a long Hammer biography online.
* And finally, want to generate your own 2024 Tolkien calendar? November 2023 saw the release of a new free AI ‘plug-in’ that’s able to generate a close emulation of the style of the Brothers Hildebrandt, the well-known 1970s Tolkien illustrators and arguably still the best. The maker recommends using it as a ‘style plug-in’ with the Stable Diffusion 1.5 checkpoint model Illustro v1. Note that SD 1.5 struggles with generating coherent images of quadruped animals, especially ones that don’t exist in the primary world. So dragons, wargs and oliphaunts may be a bit mangled.
