Tolkien Gleanings #235
* Now available, the topic-list for the latest programme of public Tolkien talks in Oxford. Starting 17th October and running through to Christmas.
1. Holly Ordway: ‘Tolkien as Interpreter and Transformer of Culture’.
2. John Garth: ‘Quisling and Prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard’.
3. [HALF-TERM, NO TALK]
4. Mark Williams: ‘A Harmless Vice: Tolkien’s Invented Languages’.
5. Giuseppe Pezzini: ‘The Authors and Styles of The Lord of the Rings‘.
6. Grace Khuri: ‘Echoes of Anglo-Saxon England in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings – From Page to Screen’.
7. Michael Ward: ‘C.S. Lewis’s Influence on The Lord of the Rings‘.
8. Stuart Lee: ‘The ‘Key-spring’ of The Lord of the Rings?’.
* Kristine Larsen has a new paper which briefly looks at “”A fear of anything large and alive, and not easily tamed or destroyed”: Kaiju in The Lord of the Rings“, kaiju being Japanese for rampaging giant monsters. She has noticed that the appearance of LoTR coincided with the post-war craze for giant destructive monsters — atom-age mutants in America’s B-movies, and the kaiju (Godzilla etc) of Japan’s monster cinema. Freely available online.
* Law & Liberty magazine’s new “Inklings on the Move” article turns out to be a long joint review of the recent books Tolkien’s Faith and C.S. Lewis’s Oxford. Freely available online.
* On YouTube, a July 2024 interview with the author of the acclaimed book Reading Tolkien in Chinese (2024).
* And finally, The Shire Way, a fledgling long-distance… “walking route in the heart of England dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien and his tale The Lord of the Rings“. Currently being walked, tweaked and recorded, it aims to run from the Lickey Hills just south of Birmingham, due south down through rural Worcestershire and down to Evesham. Then to hook north again through the adjacent rural Warwickshire, and thus arrive back in south Birmingham.
“If one is seeking to emulate as nearly as possible the journeys in Tolkien’s books, the outward three stages to Evesham should be walked between the 23rd and 25th September; the homeward three stages to Birmingham between 31st October and 2nd November.”
Six days for experienced hiking walkers, probably more for Tolkien-like pottering and peering-under-leaves. Though all walkers are warned that… “prolonged rain can turn the low-lying parts of Worcestershire into muddy quagmires” and thus slow progress.
One of reasons given for creating the walk is that…
Surprisingly and sadly, Tolkien is underappreciated in his home region and many places associated with his upbringing are overlooked, run-down or already destroyed. Without visitors, this crucial aspect of the English-speaking world’s literary heritage is in jeopardy.
I look forward to a full finished route-book with Wainright-like maps and sketches, and perhaps one day walking it. Though at present the project seems to be ‘early days’, with an ETA for the finished online route-guide of spring 2025. Still, the recent Two Saints Way through Staffordshire and Cheshire shows what can be done in five years by someone determined to create a specialist long-distance path. I understand, having been a small part of the making of the Two Saints Way, that thankfully England doesn’t put too much bureaucracy in the way of such individual enterprise. No tedious committees, time-limited permits, or state rubber-stamped approval is required for such things. Tolkien-the-anarchist would surely have approved of that.