Tolkien Gleanings #238
* Mythcon 53 (August 2024), with abstracts and now also videos and PDFs. A wealth of items, but a few I noted included…
– The Niggling Bandersnatch: Tolkien’s Revisionist Tendencies and the Canon of Middle-earth (video and panel transcript).
– Seeking, hesitating and doubting in Tolkien’s ‘Smith of Wootton Major’ (PDF ‘coming soon’)
– The Eschatology of Tolkien’s Middle-earth (video and transcript).
* A new German Tolkien documentary, due for TV broadcast on 5th December 2024, Tolkien: Die wahre Geschichte Ringe (‘The True Story of the Rings’). 90 minutes, by Jean-Christoph Caron (ZDF/ARTE, head of documentaries) and Matthias Schmidt. There was an in-cinema preview presentation for those involved, on 13th September.
* Due for publication in a few days, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Very Short Introduction, a pocket-book in the Very Short Introductions series.
* The new rolling issue of Journal of Tolkien Research has its first article, on “The Wayland-legend and the First Age of Middle-earth”.
* More previously-paywalled lectures on Tolkien by Rachel Fulton-Brown, now free on YouTube. Further to the earlier video releases I mentioned in Gleanings #229, the ongoing release of her series now continues with “A Notion of Time” (live). Then: “A Deeper Delve”; “Falling Wide Asleep”; “Norman Castles”; and “A Taste for Tongues” (all scheduled for airing soon).
* A new podcast, Tolkien’s Philosophy of Fairy Stories with Dr. Philip Chase, Chase being a medieval literature specialist and now also a fantasy author.
* Wormwoodania unearths “A Secret Sussex Fantasy”…
“The Man Who Was Sussex, A Hand-Book for Hikers (1933). This begins when two hikers get lost in a mist near Chanctonbury Ring, the great earthwork and landmark [and are then] rescued by a local who seems to be both fully human and yet with an ancestral and elemental quality, and he then guides them around other historic and scenic sites in the county. As the title suggests, he is in fact the personification of Sussex and its storied landscape.”
The likeness is not mentioned but it sounds somewhat LoTR-like to me, in terms of the scene with the hobbits on the Barrow-downs and Bombadil. Published by the major publisher Duckworth I see, so I assume it had some publicity at the time — and might have come to the attention of Tolkien. There are also four copies currently on eBay, suggesting it had a reasonable sale at the time of publication. The book is not yet scanned and online. Tolkien’s Bombadil in poetry was of course earlier than the book’s date of 1933, but the more expansive Bombadil of the LoTR chapters was written in autumn 1938.
* Now online, titles of the papers to be presented at the Tolkien and His Editors seminar.
* And finally, Princeton University’s online Index of Medieval Art should by now be free for all to use. It looks like it is, on a flying visit. The plan was that it would be perpetually ‘free to use’ from 1st July 2023 onward, for “researchers at all levels”.