Tolkien Gleanings #170.
* There’s now a table-of-contents for the new book Tolkien et l’Antiquité: Passe et Antiquites en Terre du Milieu (2024). Here are all the titles, translated though some are in English…
Introduction.
Antiquity and Middle-earth: two other worlds.
The Third Age as Medium Aevum: From the Ages of Middle-earth to ‘our days’.
The Virgilian golden age in Tolkien’s Legendarium.
“All that walk the world in these after-days”: antiquity and ‘haunted’ gothicism in J.R.R. Tolkien.
The Language of Knowledge: the influence of Latin on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Quenya.
Vestiges of Antiquity among the Hobbits.
From Babylon to Numenor: The reception of Near Eastern Antiquity and the use of Akkadian sources in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Rome in Middle-earth: echoes of a past to come.
Velleda and Galadriel, the Antiquities of Chateaubriand and Tolkien.
The Babylon one interests, but regrettably it’s in French.
* The Church Times this week reviews Tolkien’s Faith: a spiritual biography (2023).
“… his presentation of the Hobbits as not only “merry and full of laughter”, but also “curiously tough” — the balance reflecting the Oratorian ideal of personality.”
* In the latest edition of Law & Liberty “A Life Well Lived”, being a long review of the new expanded edition of the Tolkien letters. No footnotes in the book, regrettably, but we usefully learn that…
“In the digital edition, all endnotes are internally hyperlinked so that it is easy to go from text to note and back again, more efficiently than in the print edition.”
* Bookings for the UK Tolkien Society’s Oxonmoot 2024 are now open. The annual event will run from 29th August to 1st September 2024. Set to be held at “St Anne’s College, Woodstock Road, Oxford, and online.” A College that has a “1936” feel about it, by the look of it…
* John Garth is giving a public lecture at Merton College, Oxford, on Friday 23rd February 2024, titled “Inventing on the hoof: How the Riders of Rohan suddenly became Anglo-Saxon”.
* The National Library of Scotland blogs about its copy of Tolkien’s “Songs for the Philologists”. This rare publication can also be had free on Archive.org.
* More Tolkien-style mapping tutorials, using professional ‘GIS’ mapping software. The new series is now, having covered creating the map components, at “Tolkien Style Maps in a GIS: part 4, Assembly”.
* And finally, in mid Staffordshire, six new walking routes on Cannock Chase and around, for 2024, including “Tixall and Shugborough”.