Tolkien Gleanings #242

* The long-awaited Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-1959 book should have been released today, in hardcover and Kindle ebook.

* Now recorded and freely available on YouTube, Tolkien’s Collected Poems – Livestream chat with editors Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond.

* The European Conservative on “Worlds of Delight: The Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Being an appreciation of the wealth of Tolkien’s poetry, now newly available in the Collected Poems.

* The £25 paperback of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics is due at the end of October 2024.

* The new German collection Marchen und Gesellschaft (‘Folk and fairy tale and society’) has an essay on “J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories”: what is a fairy tale good for anyway?”. A 16 page summary and commentary, in German.

* A new Journal of Inklings Studies: Vol. 14, No. 2 (October 2024) ($ paywall, free reviews). Reviews, among others, of Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives of Tolkien’s Legendarium; and Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many.

* New in English in the Serbian journal Interlitteraria “Fictionality in ‘Fog on the Barrow-downs’: Myth and Reference”. Despite the enticing title it turns out to be almost all academic-literary theory, rather than steeped in a deep understanding of British folklore, tales, landscape and weather. Freely available online.

* New and free on Fanac.org, scans of three 1970s issues of Mythprint.

* The Malvern Gazette local newspaper reports that “Tolkien expert’s talk cancelled after hurricanes destroys his home”…

“John Garth, who was due to speak at the Coach House Theatre on Sunday (13th October), is unable to attend after his family home in the southern USA was damaged by hurricanes Helene and Milton.”

I had no idea he had moved to the USA. Very sorry to hear of the calamity, and I hope that everyone is safe along with the copies of his scholarly work. I imagine this event may also affect his forthcoming Oxford University talk (24th October), “Quisling and Prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard”?

* Joseph Loconte’s book The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 is now set for a June 2025 release.

* The Sentient Tree in Speculative Fiction is due to be published by Palgrave Macmillan just before Christmas 2024, as a £100 academic book. It’s a relatively short single-author book, and I’d guess it will have at least half a chapter on Tolkien.

* Difficult to find anything to link these days, among all the quickie cash-for-clicks clickbait that floods YouTube every day. But I guess I should mention this admittedly very-popular form occasionally (15,000-50,000 hits, compared to 5 or 6 hits for a Gleanings issue), and this week these two items look promising. The Lotus Eaters podcast discusses Tolkien the traditionalist in “Tolkien Hated Motorbikes and Loved Housewives”. While the Jess of the Shire podcast asks “Did Tolkien Hate…Everything?”…

“The Internet really loves to push the idea that J.R.R. Tolkien hated… well, everything. So, did he?”.

* And finally, Archive.org is still offline, after a serious hack. Once back, it will probably be a good idea to get the magnet links for your uploads, and host them on a blog page somewhere. If you’re still seeding the torrent, the file(s) should then remain available even if the Archive goes down again. Someone may also wish to do the same with all the vital free-access Tolkien research books and materials. It won’t be me.

Tolkien Gleanings #241

It’s the two-year anniversary edition of Tolkien Gleanings. New Patreon supporters are always welcome.

* New on YouTube, “1967 footage of Donald Swann performing Tolkien’s songs”. Apparently the only such footage.

* MIT’s Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium presents Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull on editing Tolkien. 12th November 2024 at MIT. Looks like it’s MIT students-only, though I guess we may see a recording posted in due course?

* The Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference page now has a speaker-list, though no titles of their papers or talks.

* A new edition of Amon Hen (#309, October 2024) ($ paywall), now available for download by Tolkien Society members.

    – Editorial [the magazine is “no longer accepting any fan-fiction”].
    – Tolkien’s Greater Project [is there an arc that crosses all the Middle-earth works?].
    – The Role of Inns in The Lord of the Rings.
    – Tolkien and Old Norse.
    – Art in Tolkien Books [brief considerations of some ‘illustrated Tolkien’ books]
    – Review: Reading Tolkien in Chinese.
    – They Also Serve [on the figure of Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs].

* Signum University’s list of online short-courses for December 2024 include ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas‘ and ‘The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Early Poems 2 (Volume 1: The Years 1910-1919)’.

* New at the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Wizard, Demon, Cat; Reformer, Satanist, Bureaucrat: a diachronic analysis of three modes of Sauron in the Legendarium in light of The Book of Lost Tales“.

* Anna Smol has posted her First Impressions of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.

* A ComicCon Interview With John Hendrix, maker of the new illustrated children’s book and part graphic-novel The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (2024).

* From the Ukraine, a long abstract in Ukranian for a 2024 article that… “analyses the colours in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which play an important role as key elements of creating images and atmosphere” in Middle-earth.

* New at Archive.org, Rambles in Cornwall (1928). Though not an entire scan of this chunky book. Just the two chapters on The Lizard and the Mount. These are relevant to what Tolkien might have seen on his extended walking holiday on the Lizard in 1914, a decade or so before the book’s author made several walks in the district from a base at Helston (Tolkien, by contrast, was based in Lizard Town). The author observes the landscape and coast with a critical eye, and dutifully notes any interesting features of the older local churches. He occasionally notes standing stones, prehistoric rock chambers and ancient wells.

* And finally, ‘Little Sword’: Denmark’s oldest runes found on knife blade.

Tolkien Gleanings #240

* Holly Ordway takes “A First Look at The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien”, in Word on Fire. Freely available online.

* Lingwe blogs the question “Can generative AI help us analyze The Lord of the Rings?”. The answer is currently ‘no’, at least judging by the conclusion of his test with Google’s general AI. Which is a poor AI to choose, for several reasons that have been well publicised. But that aside, problems were found by the test. For instance the AI offered up the false notion that there is the word… “Windlestraw: a type of grass mentioned in the Shire”. There is, but not in the Shire. The word was old Scots, used by Robert Louis Stevenson in his short fable “The Song of the Morrow”. Stevenson has a mysterious hooded piper appear on a dismal Scottish beach, and the sound of his mournful and depressive playing of the wailing pipes is described as… “like the wind that sings in windlestraw”. My guess would be that someone once mentioned this word in a scholarly Tolkien paper on ‘Withywindle’, and thus the AI’s confusion arose?

* Another paper newly added to the latest rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Fallen Kingdoms and Ancient Monoliths: The Influence of Atlantis and Egypt in Tolkien’s Numenor”.

* A new book-chapter, “From Old English orcneas to George MacDonald’s Goblins with Soft Feet: Sources of Inspiration and Models for Tolkien’s Orcs from English Literature” ($ paywall, free footnotes). In English, to be found in a new predominantly German-language book on various ‘orcs’ in history and popular culture.

* New to me, Insolita: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares do Insolito, da Fantasia e do Imaginario (‘Insolita: Brazilian Journal of Studies of the Unusual, Fantastic and Imaginary’). Freely available in open-access, currently with seven issues all in Portuguese. Appears to have a strong tilt toward screen culture, but it may interest some.

* A new small book, titled Recovering Consolation: Sam’s Enchanted Path in The Lord of the Rings, discussing what makes Sam the most beloved character for many readers. Just over 150 pages in paperback, and also available as a Kindle ebook.

* And finally, new on DeviantArt, a handy print-and-fold Silmarillion Guide made by a fan. At-a-glance help, for when your head is spinning due to all the names, peoples and places. Free as a 14Mb .PNG file.

Tolkien Gleanings #239

* New in open-access from Italy, “The Tengwar and the Angerthas: an analysis of Tolkien’s Runes” (2023). PDF freely available, but the website is currently unresponsive when trying to download.

* A new Parma Eldalamberon 23: The Feanorian Alphabet, Part 2 & Eldarin Pronouns. “Released: 19th September 2024”, as a print-on-demand book.

* Available on 30th September 2024, the new book Celebrating Tolkien’s Legacy from Walking Tree, and now listed on Amazon UK. A misleading title, but the contents took rather interesting…

    1. “Tea in Hay” [speculation on a possible day-trip from Birmingham to Kinver, as a boy].

    2. The 1897 Diamond Jubilee and the Long Awaited Party.

    3. May Incledon, the Other Suffield Aunt.

    4. J.R.R. Tolkien: Ambidexter. [Tolkien was ambidextrous].

    5. For Want of a Biography, the Story Was Lost [on the roadblocks which prevented a full biography].

    6. 1904: Mabel Tolkien, Living and Dying.

    7. The Interlace of Autobiography and Faerian Imagery in “Smith of Wootton Major”.

    8. Tolkien as Forgotten Utopian.

    9. Christopher Tolkien as Editor: The Perils of Kinship.

* In the latest The Quietus an article in which… “Skye Butchtard remembers their dad’s collection of cassettes on which he recorded the 1981 radio adaptation” of The Lord of The Rings. ($ paywall) (And they also throw ad-blocker users off the site — thus the link is to Archive.is).

* “Exploring Tolkien” with Dr. Patrick Curry, a £95 four-week course in October 2024. With a slant toward myth and faerie. Booking now.

* And finally, two illustration exhibitions on the western outskirts of London. At the Heath Robinson Museum near London, the large exhibition “The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy” from 28th September to 5th January 2025. Might be combined with the relatively nearby exhibition “Flower Fairies: The Magical World of Cicely Mary Barker”, which runs 22nd October 2024 to 27th April 2025.

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”.

Tolkien Gleanings #237

* Yesterday saw the happy event of the publication of Tolkien’s Collected Poems as a three-book slipcase edition and ebook. But note also the substantial new free Addenda and Corrigenda page for the book… “noting a few errors we failed to see before our book went to press, as well as inevitable additions”.

* A joint review of the new Collected Poems, at the Tolkien Collector’s Guide website. Freely available online. The unpublished poems discovered here are said to be “many more than were reported” by the advance publicity. Also noted is that this is partly a biographical work, since “the informative commentaries also contain much new biographical and bibliographical information”, especially in terms of pinpointing various dates in his life. Physically this first printing is reported to be fine in hardback, as judged by the high standards of book collectors, being printed in “Italy by Rotolito” and nicely bound and shipped.

* John Garth reviews The Collected Poems in this week’s TLS ($ paywall).

* Nothing on YouTube and only one lone Amazon UK review of the book, at present. The Amazon reviewer thinks well of their purchase, but states that on browsing the contents-list he finds it… “leaves out many of his shorter poems, especially most of his unpublished compositions written in languages other than modern English”.

* In other newly-published books, The Critic magazine has a glowing review of The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (2024), said to be the first such general history “since Humphrey Carpenter’s Secret Gardens in 1985″. Haunted Wood gives Tolkien a joint chapter with T.H. White. The review is freely available online. The book is now available as a Kindle ebook and in hardback. Judging by the review and the contents-list, this book offers a distinctly British view. Which of course is quite justified by history. But… not even Anne of Green Gables (British Canada)? Nope. According to the Haunted Wood author, the Anne-girl is “not a central part of the canon” of children’s literature. Which will be news to many. At least the Molesworth books are mentioned a few times, in passing.

* On a more mundane but equally timely note, Bondwine Books looks into the matter of Aragorn’s likely tax policy…

“I can tell you Aragorn’s tax policy in seven words that used to be famous in England, and that Tolkien certainly knew well: ‘The King shall live of his own’. Meaning, the daily expenses of government are met by the income of the royal estates, without direct taxation. In wartime, the King depends upon his people to fulfil their feudal obligations and report for unpaid (short-term) military service.”

We also know that when the King grants lands in a huge place such as Middle-earth, he can ask no more than that the new colonists keep up the key bridges and roads, and speed the King’s messengers. As in the Shire, which only has to maintain the key bridge leading to the greenways and Bree.

* New to me, the substantial Ghosts in Middle-earth: Germanic, Norse and Anglo-Saxon Remnants in Tolkien’s Fictional World (2009). Freely available from Academia.edu. Or (for non-members) by searching for “Ghosts in Middle-earth” in quotes on Google Scholar. Scholar has an arrangement with Academia.edu for seamless free downloads of PDF files.

* And finally, the new scholarly article “Ofer Hronrade — Defining the Long-Enigmatic Hron of Old English” ($ paywall), offering… “an exhaustive contextual study of the Old English word hron — and its relationship with the common word hwael — as well as statistical analysis of British marine biology, this paper seeks to demonstrate that the meaning of hron should indeed be separated from the Modern English word ‘whale'” [which is as Tolkien had suggested, though his suggestion was widely disregarded].

Tolkien Gleanings #236

* PRINTmag has a new and long interview with the creator of the new partly-a-comic-book book The Mythmakers, telling the story of Tolkien and Lewis for young readers. Many of the comic-strip interior pages are shown. Freely available online.

* A new issue of the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research has begun its rolling progress. Only one paper added so far, “Teaching Song and Holiness: An Exploration of the Mystic and Syncretic Elements of Tolkien’s Earliest Elvish Language Invention”.

* Digital Tolkien has a new Poems — Tolkien Poetry page, which appears to effectively serve as a useful interactive A-Z of what’s to come in the Collected Poems.

* In northern England, Leeds Central Library (the city’s public library) is to host a Tolkien Centenary Lecture on 23rd October 2024. Only 29 tickets left to hear Claire Rae Randall on what were apparently Tolkien’s local sources, and how these can still be…

found hidden in plain sight here in Leeds and more widely abroad in Yorkshire, from Treebeard the Ent in Headingley to Helm’s Deep in the glacial landscapes of the Dales.

Also related to Leeds, a reminder that one of the calls for 2025 Tolkien at IMC Leeds (7th-10th July 2025) was “J.R.R. Tolkien as Teacher and Mentor at Leeds and Beyond”. The deadline has just passed for IMC Leeds Tolkien proposals, but presumably this means a set of videos on the topic in the second half of 2025. I’d suggest we might also have a complementary set of papers on Tolkien’s own mentors and tutors, at some point in the future.

* Advance themes for the Annual UVM Tolkien Conference at the University of Vermont. 2025 will be “Tolkien and War”, and 2026 “Tolkien and the Medieval”.

* A stamp-collecting Tolkien Philatelic Society has been formed and hopes to grow… “So far we have just a handful of members and are looking for more.”

* More broadly related to the popular side of pre-LoTR fantasy culture, a call for scholars and collectors to contribute to The Pulpster #34, the annual of pulp history. In 2025 this will take the theme of ‘Masters of Blood and Thunder’. These being the writers Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter of Mars, Tarzan etc), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood), and Edgar Wallace (Sanders of the River, crime novels, King Kong script), who will also be the focus of the 2025 PulpFest. However the editors are open to other ‘blood and thunder’ writers who published in the pulps. The editors also seek articles which appreciate your favourite villain from the 1910s-1950s pulp magazines (or their later book reprints).

* And finally, a remarkable ‘Eye of Sauron’ ring has been newly unearthed by archaeologists here in the UK. No reports, as yet, that it makes the wearer invisible.

Tolkien Gleanings #235

* Now available, the topic-list for the latest programme of public Tolkien talks in Oxford. Starting 17th October and running through to Christmas.

    1. Holly Ordway: ‘Tolkien as Interpreter and Transformer of Culture’.
    2. John Garth: ‘Quisling and Prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard’.
    3. [HALF-TERM, NO TALK]
    4. Mark Williams: ‘A Harmless Vice: Tolkien’s Invented Languages’.
    5. Giuseppe Pezzini: ‘The Authors and Styles of The Lord of the Rings‘.
    6. Grace Khuri: ‘Echoes of Anglo-Saxon England in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings – From Page to Screen’.
    7. Michael Ward: ‘C.S. Lewis’s Influence on The Lord of the Rings‘.
    8. Stuart Lee: ‘The ‘Key-spring’ of The Lord of the Rings?’.

* Kristine Larsen has a new paper which briefly looks at “”A fear of anything large and alive, and not easily tamed or destroyed”: Kaiju in The Lord of the Rings“, kaiju being Japanese for rampaging giant monsters. She has noticed that the appearance of LoTR coincided with the post-war craze for giant destructive monsters — atom-age mutants in America’s B-movies, and the kaiju (Godzilla etc) of Japan’s monster cinema. Freely available online.

* Law & Liberty magazine’s new “Inklings on the Move” article turns out to be a long joint review of the recent books Tolkien’s Faith and C.S. Lewis’s Oxford. Freely available online.

* On YouTube, a July 2024 interview with the author of the acclaimed book Reading Tolkien in Chinese (2024).

* And finally, The Shire Way, a fledgling long-distance… “walking route in the heart of England dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien and his tale The Lord of the Rings“. Currently being walked, tweaked and recorded, it aims to run from the Lickey Hills just south of Birmingham, due south down through rural Worcestershire and down to Evesham. Then to hook north again through the adjacent rural Warwickshire, and thus arrive back in south Birmingham.

“If one is seeking to emulate as nearly as possible the journeys in Tolkien’s books, the outward three stages to Evesham should be walked between the 23rd and 25th September; the homeward three stages to Birmingham between 31st October and 2nd November.”

Six days for experienced hiking walkers, probably more for Tolkien-like pottering and peering-under-leaves. Though all walkers are warned that… “prolonged rain can turn the low-lying parts of Worcestershire into muddy quagmires” and thus slow progress.

One of reasons given for creating the walk is that…

Surprisingly and sadly, Tolkien is underappreciated in his home region and many places associated with his upbringing are overlooked, run-down or already destroyed. Without visitors, this crucial aspect of the English-speaking world’s literary heritage is in jeopardy.

I look forward to a full finished route-book with Wainright-like maps and sketches, and perhaps one day walking it. Though at present the project seems to be ‘early days’, with an ETA for the finished online route-guide of spring 2025. Still, the recent Two Saints Way through Staffordshire and Cheshire shows what can be done in five years by someone determined to create a specialist long-distance path. I understand, having been a small part of the making of the Two Saints Way, that thankfully England doesn’t put too much bureaucracy in the way of such individual enterprise. No tedious committees, time-limited permits, or state rubber-stamped approval is required for such things. Tolkien-the-anarchist would surely have approved of that.