Tolkien Gleanings #265
* Mallorn #65 (Winter 2024) is now available for download by Tolkien Society members. Among other items there are long articles on “The Horror of the Unnarrated” in LoTR, and another try at “Cracking the Bombadil Enigma”. Plus a shorter essay on the ur-spider Ungoliant, followed by several book reviews (in one, the pithy complaint that “Christopher Tolkien gets as many mentions as Karl Marx”). Also has excellent colour illustrations.
* The Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination (2025) is a bumper collection of chapters which includes the long and dense chapter “Into The Storm”, on the band Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-earth and the reception of Tolkien in German metal music. This is followed by the chapter “Time Travel Through Tolkien”, which surveys Tolkien in classical (Swann etc), folk rock and psychedelia circa 1962-69.
* The exemplary and long-running localist publication The Hockley Flyer (for Hockley and the Jewellery Quarter, just to the north of the centre of Birmingham UK) lists an event on 12th January 2025, a walking tour of Key Hill Cemetery in Birmingham. Apparently “Tolkien used to visit” when living in Birmingham, when it may still have been marked on maps as the ‘General Cemetery’. The weather for the afternoon of Sunday 12th is currently looking crisply cold and dazzlingly sunny… take sunglasses.
* Canadian magazine Catholic Insight has the new article “Apostles of Joy: J.R.R. Tolkien and St. Philip Neri”. Freely available online.
* Contemplations on the Tree of Woe has a new long article on “Goethe and Faust for a New Age”, which considers the possibility that, like Goethe, Tolkien is to now be considered as… “a world-historical figure whose work is emblematic of an entire civilization”. Doomer Vox Populi responds, with the shorter blog post “We are the Elendilans”, which broadly agrees, but doomily suggests rather that we are a civilisation in inevitable decline.
* Note that Archive.org have just put a mass of 1930 books online “to borrow”. Technically, they will not be public domain in the U.S. until 1st January 2026. Not a very exciting bunch, judging by a ten-minute scroll through the titles. But I did spot the book Fairy tales from Baltic shores: folk-lore stories from Estonia.
* And finally, as ‘global boiling’ reaches new extremes of… erm… deep cold and ice… here’s a timely reminder that there is also a British summertime. Newly posted on YouTube, a simple video recording of the View from J.R.R. Tolkien Memorial Bench in Oxford Parks – June 2024.