Tolkien Gleanings #195.
* The book The Medieval North and Its Afterlife: Essays in Honor of Heather O’Donoghue (2023) ($ paywall) has, among others, a chapter on “Tolkien and Mirkwood”.
* The latest Journal of Tolkien Research is filling up. Now the first peer-reviewed article has appeared, “Middle-earth’s Middleman: Exploring the Contradictory Positionalities of Faramir in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”. Freely available online.
* “Professor Receives Fulbright Award to Teach and Research in Slovakia” in Eastern Europe…
“Among the topics Murphy will investigate is ‘samizdat’ […] “There was a whole underground of people who had typewriters and were making copies of books and manuscripts,” says Murphy. “The government saw books such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as being a threat to a communist ideology and people could go to jail for reproducing these books. I’m very interested in finding out more about how people accessed literature.””
* Useful for scholars, the free ePub translator plugin for the free Calibre ebook management and conversion software. Supports the free and fast Microsoft Edge translation service, and several others that offer large banks of languages and AI assistance. You install the plugin .zip file from inside Calibre.
* A current course module at the University of York, ‘From Tennyson to Tolkien: The Middle Ages & Modern Literature, 1840-1940’.
* On the Malvern Hills, a new spring and Well Dressing Festival, following the similar tradition found in the Derbyshire Peak District and parts of the Staffordshire Moorlands. 4th-12th May 2024. Might be a nice event for Tolkien tourists to coincide with, in future?
* And finally, the South Essex Echo News has “Essex’s links to Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien”. This local newspaper story claims “it is believed” locally that Barad Dur = Colchester Castle. Though I can’t find that startling claim in any source I have access to. Unmentioned by the article is that mid Essex at least has the site of the Battle of Maldon, and thus Tolkien’s work on it and its topography, together with its symbolic later resonance. As Garth points out, in April 1915… “Zeppelins struck the Essex coast just where the Anglo-Saxon earl Beorhtnoth and his household troop had been defeated by Viking raiders almost ten centuries before.” Tolkien would play his part in the defence against the Zeppelin menace, albeit on the Yorkshire coast. South-west Essex also has a slight tangential connection, when one learns that Tolkien’s hero-writer William Morris had ridden and walked the depths of the Essex greenwood as a boy… “as a young boy, he would dress up in his child-size armour and ride his pony through Epping Forest” (The Prose Romances of William Morris). One recalls here Theoden’s gift to Gimli of his own child-armour, in LoTR. But that, so far as I can tell, is it for Essex and Tolkien connections.