Tolkien Gleanings #299
* The publisher Walking Tree has just published Tolkien among the Theologians (2025) (Cormare volume 53). This collection of essays has a table of contents online and I see it includes two chapters which sound like they might be usefully biographical-theological, “Tolkien and Newman: Towards a Theology of History” (Cardinal Newman), and “Tolkien in His Contemporary Context: Among the Oratorians and the Jesuits”. Amazon UK has the paperback for £17.50.
* Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal reviews The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (2025) ($ partial paywall). The first page of the review is free, and that’s enough to read the reviewer’s succinct outline of the book’s chapters. It’s especially interesting to learn that…
“The final two chapters explore the impacts of the liturgical calendar on Tolkien’s works. [The first of these] focuses on themes of Advent and Christmas [which also necessarily touches on ‘earendel’ and the word’s sources]”
* Walking Tree has a free PDF of a review of the book Celebrating Tolkien’s Legacy (2024). The review is in English from Lembas Katern, which appears to be a supplement to the Dutch Tolkien Society’s main Lembas publication. Apparently this book has… “Several chapters [that] deal with Tolkien’s earliest childhood: a chapter about a tea in Kinver …”. I wasn’t aware there was evidence he was ever there, and the comprehensive Tolkien Chronology of his life has nothing for Kinver. The publisher’s blurb clarifies slightly with… “a likely 1904 excursion” (my emphasis), which would put Tolkien at around age 12 — if it ever happened. Not impossible I suppose, since Kinver was a popular summer day-trip from nearby Birmingham from Easter 1901 onwards. That was when the fast transport connection was first made. But it very soon became rather too popular. By 1904, on a public holiday in good weather, around 15,000 people a day could be making the day-trip from Birmingham.
* The Notion Club Papers blog offers a new short post on “Four approaches to understanding J.R.R. Tolkien: historical, philological, Roman Catholic, unique genius”. Useful, though the phrase a “man of his time and class” seemed to me to draw perhaps unconsciously on a Marxist framework. Of course, class was a vital structuring element of society during Tolkien’s working lifetime. But above class and subsuming it was the British ‘nation and landscape’, in which all classes had their place and played their parts and spoke English with their many tongues. Landscape and tongues and weather were equally important to him, I’d suggest. And in Tolkien’s formative years ‘nation and landscape’ was itself subject to the even higher framing of the British Empire. Not that Tolkien felt much allegiance to the Empire by all accounts, but only to England and especially to the West Midlands. Yet remember that the Empire would have been a constant presence, and was also in steep and obvious decline during the decades before the writing of LoTR. Could then the decline of the British Empire have fed into the ‘fallen remains of past glories’ landscapes seen in Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age? Not consciously, but via a steady ‘filtering in’ to the creative mind during those decades? But I guess such matters may be touched on in the forthcoming Garth book, which apparently relates LoTR to the events of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath.
* Another three 90-minute lectures have been scheduled on YouTube from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Spellsongs of Tinuviel (already online), Morgoth’s Revenge and Gondolin in that order. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted free on YouTube.
* Another Tolkien letter is up for auction, at Sotherby’s in the UK. A very late and short letter to a fan, but it mentions Bag-end. Sotherby’s has small scans.
* On YouTube, the latest Ben Shapiro podcast interviews “LoTR Expert Malcolm Guite” on why Tolkien matters today (two short adverts, and an all-to-short interview). Guite is also the former chaplain and a Life Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, and I see he has his own YouTube channel. Including the popular “A pint and a pipe!” in which he celebrates the long continuity of the English inn and pipe-smoking, both of which were dear to Tolkien’s heart. The wartime book English Inns (1943) is mentioned, and I see it is now online for free at Archive.org.
* Australia has ruled that trading as ‘Lord of the [Something]’ does not infringe the trademark of Middle-earth Enterprises. In this case it was ‘Lord of the Fries’, a chain of nine food shops, and the ruling sensibly deemed that…
“the absence of the ‘rings’ element meant that a total impression of dissimilarity emerges from a comparison of the signs”
* And finally, talking of trading… note that the new temporary U.S. international trade tariffs do not cover printed books or paper. The long-standing 7.5% U.S. tariff on books printed in China does however remain in place, exempting only religious books. But, as of today, it sounds like the U.S. has forced China into serious trade negotiations… thus it’s possible that even that 7.5% may change by the end of the summer.