Tolkien Gleanings #267
* Lingwe has a review of The Mythmakers, a new biographical book/comic about Tolkien and Lewis. The review has a short list of the most obvious errors and typos.
* Another batch of four long video-lectures from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown. These were formerly in her huge paid-for course ‘The Forge of Tolkien’, but are now slowly being posted for free on YouTube. Aule and the Nephelim is already available; while What did Tolkien read? (unusually halting-and-stumbling delivery makes it a difficult listen); The Two Trees; and The Mischief of Elves are all scheduled for January 2025.
* In the first issue of the new Taylor & Francis journal English Studies, “Eldarin Cosmotechnics: Posthumanism, Ecology and Techne in Tolkien’s Portrayal of Elven Paradises” ($ paywall)…
“Contrary to prevailing ecocritical beliefs that Elves depict a simplistic relationship with nature, this research posits that their profound bond stems from advanced technology, understood as either craftmanship or magic”
Yes, I’d agree (or probably would, if I could read the article rather than the abstract). Though I suggest it’s perhaps both at once, plus a sort of ‘infusion’ of the maker’s potent emotional visualisation (akin to an ‘Elves-to-object telepathy’). Recall… “we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make” — says ‘the leader of the Elves’ speaking to Pippin, in Fellowship. I’ve sometimes also wondered if some magic-infused things in Middle-earth are ‘charged’ or ‘activated’ by the emotions of the bearer. For instance would Merry’s spell-woven barrow-dagger have had such potency in the end, if it had not been first christened with orc-blood, then offered humbly with love and fealty to Theoden, then later wielded with a greater love?
* Italy gets Tolkien’s The Fall of Numenor for the first time in translation. First as a preview in the La Repubblica Sunday-supplement magazine Robinson, and then as a book on 15th January 2025.
* John Garth blogs at length about “2024: My year of Tolkien and tribulation”…
“Tolkien’s Mirror, my book-length study […] Here’s my underlying principle [for the book]: to fully understand why Tolkien invented something, you need to establish when he did so.”
Quite so. And exactly where, I’d add. There’s nothing like tracing the footsteps to start you on the right track. I did it with H.G Wells, ill and coughing blood and struggling up a very steep hill to Basford in Stoke-on-Trent… and this led me to his likely model for The Time Traveller (his then world-famous Physics examiner, who was living a few roads over); I did it with Sir Gawain and he led me along the Earlsway to Alton Castle, a site formerly completely overlooked by scholars, and… then a hundred or so facts and dates all fell into place; then I sort of did it again with Tolkien and the historical Earendel, by starting with the market-garden farm from which Tolkien made his fateful observation of a bright Venus being ‘hunted’ by the Moon. Many academics instead start with the texts and think that’s all there is and all there needs to be. Nope. If you have a mystery to solve, you go to exactly where and when the text stands in the biography and start from there. Of course, if one can afford it, also dig in the archives. Garth’s new blog post reports he’s done that, and he appears to have “the 1939 lecture text itself” (thought lost) for the later-revised “On Fairy Stories”.
* On Swedish TV channel AxessTV, the mini-series Fantastic Worlds – From Carroll to Tolkien, with the final 48-minute broadcast due on 18th January 2025…
“Part 4 of 4 – Tolkien and Childers. A four-part documentary series combining biography, quotes and film clips from a range of unforgettable British children’s book worlds.”
“Childers” must presumably be the author of The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service?
* And finally, a new YouTube video flip-through of the catalogue for the exhibition J.R.R. Tolkien – The Art of the Manuscript.