Tolkien Gleanings #270
* A new short post from The Catholic University of America, on “Robert T. Meyer: ‘Bespectacled Linguist’ and Friend of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Includes a link to the 22-box Robert T. Meyer Collection, which has the text of a past lecture reminiscing about Tolkien…
* The Tolkien Society has posted the contents-list for the forthcoming book Proceedings of the Tolkien 2019 Conference in Birmingham. Due to be published as an affordable £9 ebook on 28th February 2025. I spotted, among many others…
— Tolkien’s Birmingham.
— J.R.R. Tolkien and R.S.S. Baden-Powell.
— On the Trail of the young Tolkien in Sussex.
— The Dim Echo of the Catcher [presumably about Nuada?].
— Knife, Sting, and Tooth: The Lasting Effects of Frodo’s Wounds.
— Clothing in Tolkien’s World and What Can Be Seen through its Analysis.
* The Tolkien Society has released another batch of videos, free on YouTube. Among others, these include “Collecting, Reading and Studying Tolkien’s Letters” and “Where Tolkien is Remembered: Sites of Memory in the UK”.
* In Spanish, the YouTube recording of a 2023 Madrid conference on Geologia en la literatura fantastica y de terror (‘Geology in fantasy and horror literature’).
* The Silver Key finishes “Blogging the Silmarillion” and now has all the essays hyperlinked from one page.
* Lynn Forest-Hill blogs that… “my revised translation of the 14th century version of Sir Bevis of Hampton is approaching the galley-proof stage.” She sees the back-of-the-book indexing, which it seems the publisher is foisting on authors, as a sticking point. I might tell her that indexing can now be automated with the desktop PC software PDF Index Generator 3.4. Very useful, even if one only indexes places and names and adds less obvious items later. Use: search “capitalized phrases only”, then weed the results, then run the filter for a “surnames, forenames” switch-over. I see this worthy software is still $70 in early 2025, with a free perpetual ‘trial version’ available (limited to the first 10 pages of a PDF). Runs on Windows, Mac or Linux.
* “Ballantine Adult Fantasy: A Reading Series”, another part of an emerging… “essay series [that] will take years to complete”. This will involve reading and discussing all the works in the huge series.
* And finally, do you offer your students fantasy literature in the classroom? Then the “Teaching With Magic” online survey would like to hear from you.