Tolkien Gleanings #169.
* Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien, now firmly dated in hardcover for 9th May 2024 and pre-ordering. This is Christopher Tolkien’s pick of his father’s pictures, with notes, in 128 pages. “Now reissued after almost 30 years” according to the publisher.
* There is now a free ‘Errata’ PDF for the recent Tolkien book The Nature of Middle-earth (2021).
* There’s now an official page for the forthcoming German conference Tolkien and his Editors. I’m told this October 2024 conference will be in both German and English. There are currently scholarships available for young scholars of Tolkien. Walking Tree is associated with the conference, which means we will likely have a book in due course.
* Set for early September 2024 in the USA, The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference. Set to have a talk on “Lewis, Tolkien, and the Oxford English School”, and to ask “What Did Tolkien Really Think about Narnia?”.
* Italy’s modest-sized Tolkien exhibition, “Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author”, has now closed. The local press reports that it saw 80,226 visitors in total. Which is not bad for a somewhat hastily-planned exhibition during the winter months. I recall there was also a hefty entrance-fee, and some hostile comment in the leftist press. All of which could have dissuaded people from visiting. Thus 80k attendance is all the more impressive. The show will now tour to other venues in Italy. It opens in Naples on 15th March and will run through to 30th June 2024. After that, the cities of Turin and Catania are booked.
* Published tomorrow in French, Pearl / Perle: suivi de “Tolkien et Perle” by Leo Carruthers. Being a translation of the Gawain-poet’s Pearl into French, followed by an essay on “Tolkien and Pearl” also in French. There’s also what sounds like a rather ambitious introduction…
“the introduction to this book examines [the Gawain-poet’s] probable origin, while proposing a new theory about the poem’s patron, previously unidentified. He would have been one of the most famous English princes of his time, son and father of kings”.
Oh dear, hopefully it’s not Edward the Black Prince. Who died in 1376 and is thus clearly too early. (Update: No, the claim turns out to have been for John of Gaunt as patron, commissioning for the babe Blanche of Portugal, 1388-1389).
* New on YouTube, a hands-on tutorial on emulating Tolkien-style maps in GIS software: part 1, forests.
* And finally, do you fancy buying Tolkien’s fave childhood mill? Birmingham City Council is reported to be planning to sell off Sarehole Water Mill and various other heritage buildings in the city. The Mill is not quite up for sale yet, but it could be shortly according to the Daily Mail. Now’s your chance, it seems. For a nicely renovated listed watermill set in ten acres in the Midlands, you’d probably be paying at least £2 million. I’ve seen the Mill’s pizza restaurant reviewed and I assume there’s also a gifte shoppe these days (I was last there in the early 1990s), so you might need perhaps £3 million. Maybe knock off a bit for the flooding risk, but also make sure you have enough for the hefty annual insurance and ongoing maintenance.
Sarehole Mill from the lane, the pool on the other side of the hedge.