Tolkien Gleanings #179.
* “The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien” is to be published in September 2024 as a three volume boxed-set, edited by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull. A collection to be presented in what sounds like chronological order and presumably with accompanying translations from the Anglo-Saxon, Elvish etc. It will include… “more than 60 [poems] that have never before been seen”, though regrettably not all of the poems found in The Hobbit and LoTR. The Kindle ebook edition will be £45, and the hardback set £90. I’m hoping there will be a substantial topic / name / location index at the back. If not then I’ll probably make a free one in PDF, as I did for Lovecraft’s index-less collected poems (The Ancient Track 2nd Edition).
* More free YouTube recordings, from the series of talks being given at Oxford, John Garth on ““An Entirely Vain and False Approach”: Literary Biography and why Tolkien was wrong about it” and Grace Khuri on “Kipling’s Medievalism and Tolkien’s Book of Lost Tales”. “Medievalism” sounds daunting, but here just means the classic but now neglected books Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and the sequel Rewards and Fairies (1910). One wonders if Tolkien also took something from Kipling’s birthing of the sub-genre of ‘hard science-fiction’ in his seminal “With the Night Mail” (1905, then easily available in a book collection in 1909) (my annotated edition and in excellent audio) at around the same time, before he left for Oxford in 1911? In terms of the innovative use in “Night Mail” of an invented futuristic vocabulary within a framework of largely unexplained allusions to a larger back-story, complete with ‘appendices’ that expand the world-building. This deepens the reader’s engagement and forces one to suspend disbelief, and as such is akin to what Tolkien would later do with LoTR.
* In Italy, a two-day conference on “Tolkien: the relevance of myth”, set for April 2024.
* In America, this year’s University of Vermont Tolkien Conference is set for April 13th 2024, and is themed “The Psychologies of Middle-earth”. Includes the papers “Ponying Up: Examining the Role of Bill and Human-Animal Bonds in The Lord of the Rings” and “Love Sickness in Middle-earth”, among others.
* The first book review, in the latest edition of the gradually-filling Journal of Tolkien Research. A long and detailed review of the edited volume Tolkien and the Relation between Sub-Creation and Reality (2023).
* “The Influence of Medieval Icelandic Literature on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion”. Freely available online, it appears to be a 2023 Masters dissertation written in English for a French university.
* And finally, up for auction is “a touching letter to a child fan in 1961” in Lancashire. In this Tolkien states… “The Hobbit was specially written for reading aloud”. He also talks about the bitter deep-freeze winter conditions of Christmas 1961. His next winter, of Christmas 1962 to March 1963, would be even worse and also longer — a ‘great winter’ with continuous snow for months, and frozen rivers. It became the coldest British winter since records began in 1659, “this dreadful winter” as Tolkien called it in another letter, and it was especially risky for older people such as himself (cold being far more a risk for the old than heat is). This was in the era before North Sea gas and affordable central-heating, and Britain also had an old housing stock almost all without much loft-insulation. One wonders if this imminent risk to the old was partly why “deep in the winter of 1962-3” (Chronology) Tolkien tried for a reconciliation with C.S. Lewis? Lewis was then aged about 64, and thus an old man (by the yardstick of English male longevity in the mid 20th century).