Tolkien Gleanings #211.

* Fine Books Magazine reports “Tolkien’s Page Proofs in Folger’s New Special Exhibitions Gallery”. These are his hand-corrected proof-copies of The Lord of the Rings. On show until 5th January 2025, in Washington, DC, USA.

* The new Tolkien memorial in Oxford, in the artist’s local Stourbridge News newspaper (which covers the southern parts of the Black Country near Birmingham). With excellent pictures.

* Due in October 2024, a new book from the Catholic University of America Press titled Tolkien, Philosopher of War. Exploring Tolkien’s “philosophical and theological understanding of war”, the book appears to focus around the dangers of vanity in relation to militarism and war. Vanity is here seen as a key factor in the first emergence (Italian Futurism) of what would become the paramilitary political platforms of the inter-war years. Tolkien’s LoTR can thus be seen to… “dramatize[s] an aesthetic resistance to Futurism” and its “apocalyptic politics”.

* Talking of war, new on YouTube is a new 50-minute podcast aiming to present “The Real ‘War of the Rohirrim’, According to Tolkien”. This will be useful for many, as the mass marketing for the new animé movie starts to reveal a radically different and non-Tolkien plot. Skip to 18.15 minutes in the podcast/video to save yourself some time, and to arrive at the promised focus.

* Also new on YouTube, the podcast “Tolkien & Lewis & Wesley” in which… “Nick Polk of Tolkien [discusses] his involvement with Mallorn, the Tolkien Society journal”.

* In the second issue of the new journal Nexus, a short student essay on “J.R.R. Tolkien and Escapism”.

* Seemingly released under Creative Commons as part of Archive.org’s recent ingestion of newly Open Access books, Tom Shippey’s Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings….

“What follows is a challenge to a well-established consensus, which as I argue below was created in large part by Professor Tolkien. It is also in some respects a dialogue with Tolkien, and moreover points to a kind of dialogue between Tolkien young and Tolkien old — a dialogue which has hardly been noticed within the scholarly world.”

* And finally, a nerdy computerised comparison of the writings of Tolkien and Lewis. These are crunched…

mathematically by using an original multi–dimensional analysis of linguistic parameters, based on surface deep–language variables and linguistic channels. [This reveals] strong connections between The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy (Lewis) and novels by [George] MacDonald.”