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.

Tolkien Gleanings #234

* Now released, a preview of the front cover for the Kindle ebook version of the forthcoming Collected Poems.

* The Jewish Journal has a new article on “Tolkien’s Timely Testimony”, and its importance in the current climate. Freely available online.

* A new long post at The Blog of Marzabul, “”And That Means Comfort” — On the Shire as anti-Faerie”, asks… “is the Shire rather less safe and idealised than one might imagine?” In fact, a sort of “anti-Faerie”? Well, yes, I’d say so… if one reads closely and gleans the wider context from the text. Such as something the blog article omits, that the Shire has four seasons. As anyone who lives in the British Isles knows, that means discomfort for much of the year. The Shire is also known to have had some very hard winters within living memory. For instance the winter in which the Shire was invaded by the white wolves, a winter which a young Bilbo must have experienced.

* A new special issue of the open-access journal LinguaCulture, on “C.S. Lewis: The Re-enchanted Academic” (June 2024). Includes, among others, “The Dauntless Don: How C.S. Lewis Became a Public Intellectual, 1938-1944” and a review of the book Many Times and Many Places: C.S. Lewis and the Value of History (2023). Freely available online.

* Releasing at the end of September 2024, the book The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien. Not the graphic novel I vaguely thought it was, since it turns out to be… “prose interspersed with images and narrative comics”. Also, seemingly not aimed at sophisticated teens and adults, since it’s to be published by Abrams Fanfare… “a new imprint from Abrams Children’s Books dedicated to comics for young readers”.

* A new young children’s picture-book, in hardcover for spring 2025, Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the Worlds of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Pre-ordering now.

* The Spectator magazine has a new article on “The expensive business of quoting poetry” ($ possible paywall, though I had the whole article)…

“the idea that there’s a distinction of legal status between [prose and poetry] is bizarre. It seems perverse and unwarranted that you could quote great paragraphs of Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy, in a critical work about Seth, without a by-his-leave. But that you’d need to avoid quoting more than a line or two from his verse novel The Golden Gate.”

* In The Birmingham Mail (29th August 2024) ($ paywall)… “More than 10,000 Classic FM listeners selected their favourite scores. Howard Shore’s music from the [LoTR] fantasy films, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, took the top spot.” For the benefit of those outside the UK, I should add that Classic FM is the UK’s main free-to-air classical music radio station.

* Apparently in France translations of Tolkien’s books are published by a relatively small publisher, Christian Bourgois. The French press report that it has this week been bought out by Groupe Madrigall, the third-largest publishing group in France.

Tolkien Gleanings #233

* A new Beyond Bree book review, hosted as an archived PDF at the publisher Walking Tree, reviewing The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024). Freely available online.

* The latest Journal of Tolkien Research has added a long and thorough review of Reading Tolkien in Chinese (2024).

* At the VoegelinView, a review of the book Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination (2023).

* The Catholic Theology Show podcast’s latest episode is “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Catechesis on Creation”. Free on YouTube.

* At The European Conservative, the new article “Tolkien’s Paradise”… “If we consider the characteristics of Paradise present in various religious traditions, we can easily compare and identify them with the features of the wondrous lands in Middle-earth.”

* Earth and Heaven blog has a new 2024 review of The Messiah Comes to Middle-earth (2017). Now a book of three printed lectures, but originally part of… “Wheaton College’s Hanson Lectureship Series, [in which] Wheaton College President Philip Ryken examines the thesis that various characters in [LoTR] represent different aspects of the nature of the Messiah”

* The Spanish open-access journal Helice: Critical Thinking on Speculative Fiction publishes in Spanish and some English. Of special note is the 2023 English article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe (1838-1938), and Beyond: A Historical Overview”. Freely available online.

* A scan at Archive.org of a late-1970s ‘blank pages notebook’, with sketchy illustrations as framing marginalia, titled A Hobbit’s Travels: being the hitherto unpublished travel sketches of Sam Gamgee (1978). Its companion A Hobbit’s Journal was also published in the same format and by the same artist, though Archive.org only has the cover freely available online. There appear to have been four such notebooks by the artist, the others being A Tolkien Journal (faces of the Fellowship and others), and A Walk Through the Shire (various scenes of hobbit life in the Shire).

* And finally, NewsThump hilariously reports “New power station to be powered by J.R.R. Tolkien spinning in his grave”.

Tolkien Gleanings #232

* OzMoot 2025 is set for 24th-26th January 2025, in Australia and online ($35 ticket for online). The organisers now have a theme, ‘The Music of Words: Language, Poetry, and Music in Tolkien’s Works’. The deadline for proposals is 24th December 2024.

* The Welsh nationalist online publication Nation.Cymru has a book review of the new Yr Hobyd, the new Welsh translation of The Hobbit. The review is freely available online (in English), and the reviewer notes that various Welsh dialects are used to aid the characterisation.

* CNews has an interview in French with Vincent Ferre, about the huge new table-trembling edition of the Dictionnaire Tolkien. Freely available online.

* A new official free-sample for Drout’s Tolkien and the West five-hour audiobook (2012) which in the UK is currently £14 or free to Amazon’s Audible subscribers.

* A PDF with the full programme for ‘The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference’ in September 2024. The first day will offer some Tolkien-related papers and talks. The conference will also see a stage performance of The Baptized Imagination: Lewis & Tolkien, produced by George Fox University theatre lecturer Ben Tissell.

* Now recorded and online at YouTube, the latest FACTS podcast with guest Holly Ordway, discussing Tolkien’s Faith.

* The latest issue of Leicester University’s Luminary open-access undergraduate journal is Issue 6: ‘Locating Fantastika’. Among others, the article “Palimpsestic and Abject Faerie Spaces and Species” explores two pre-Tolkien British depictions of mortals who trespass into faerie places. Freely available online.

* The UK’s ImagineFX magazine (November 2024 issue) has a four-page ‘making of’ feature, showing the cover art for the new LoTR-based tabletop role-playing game. The game gives the popular Dungeons & Dragons 5e RPG playing system a thorough LoTR makeover. Clueless newbs such as myself would also need the key D&D Player’s Handbook, as there’s said to be a lot of basic D&D combat knowledge being assumed.

* The UK’s annual Heritage Open Days this year includes Exeter College, Oxford, with their date being Sunday 15th September 2024. No pre-booking required, but I imagine that getting in the queue early might be advisable. Note also that, around the corner, “The Bodleian’s letterpress printing workshop will be open for drop-in printing”. There may be even more open and free in Oxford on that day, if you look.

* And finally, the new free open-source AI image-generator Flux can generate images that use distinctive handwriting styles. Of course, someone quickly created a free ‘Flux Tolkien Handwriting’ style-guidance plug-in (a ‘LORA’) for it. This now appears to have been taken down, but some of the sample images are still available to prove that it can be done.

Tolkien Gleanings #231

* Later in 2024 The Tolkien Society plans a two-day conference (online) to celebrate the centenary of Christopher Tolkien’s birth.

* In the Hungarian journal The Anachronist (Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest), “Tolkien Behind the Iron Curtain and Beyond” reviews the recent book J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe. Context, Directions, and the Legacy (2023). In English and freely available online.

* Jessica Yates asks “Who was ‘Mr. Rang’?”. Tolkien wrote a long and important late letter to him, of which the draft survived to be published. A plausible candidate for ‘Rang’ is suggested. The only other (and somewhat unlikely) possibility I can dig up is the acclaimed London surgeon Mercer Rang (1933-2003). He was a leading specialist in healing children’s bone fractures, and from 1967 was in Toronto in Canada. He was also an accomplished non-fiction medical historian and anthologist, and might conceivably have had an interest in the best children’s literature (as an aid to the recovery of his long-term patients). Although I guess Tolkien would have known to address him as “Dr. Rang”.

* In the new book The Bible and Western Christian Literature: Twentieth Century to the Present Day (2024), the chapter “Remythologizing Faith: Biblical Fantasy and the Inklings’ Romantic Theology”.

* Coming soon via the FACTS podcast, another interview with Holly Ordway on her book Tolkien’s Faith.

* In a market town in mid Wales, a local newspaper has a new feature in which “Machynlleth Tolkien collector shares tips” on collecting Tolkien editions. With a picture of his local market stall, which looks worth seeking out should you be passing through on your way to the coast.

* On YouTube, the August 2024 Update for the Digital Tolkien Project.

* And finally, the World Fantasy Convention (who knew?) is to be held in Brighton, 30th October – 2nd November 2025.

Tolkien Gleanings #230

* “Fatty Bolger, a Local Hero”…

“It is tempting to try to save the world, [and local] grassroots terrors are perhaps mere deputies of the boss villains. But their sting is devastating, nonetheless. […] Pippin is the first to recognize the lengths that Fredegar went to fight the Enemy on the home front: “You would have done better to come with us after all, poor old Fredegar!” Perhaps Pippin is right, but none of the friends call Fredegar Fatty anymore, and those chaps know something about heroics.”

Readers will recall that ‘Fatty’ goes (in the background of the story) from being a timid credulous young fellow overly fond of plum-puddings, to leading… “a band of rebels […] up in the Brockenbores by the hills of Scary”.

* New in Spanish in the journal Historia Universal, “From Virgil to Tolkien”. The two men are here pictured as… “two lighthouses that in the midst of [civilisational] darkness became guides to a new approach to national identity”. Freely available online.

* West Point’s Modern War Institute has a new article on “From Middle-earth to Ukraine, the Enduring Value of Wylie’s General Theory of Power Control”. Freely available online. When war in unwinnable or has reached a stalemate on the battlefield, surprising tactics are needed (hobbits, in the case of LoTR, doing the reverse of what the enemy expects). Ideally these new tactics shift the centre-of-gravity of war away from the battlefield, while also holding out the prospect of ensuring a final settlement of lasting political value.

* In France, Vincent Ferre’s Dictionnaire Tolkien has appeared in a third edition (2024). This is “revised and expanded” according to the blurb, and apparently has a number of French summaries of English scholarly works.

* November 2024 at the online Signum University brings the prospect of a short-course on “The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Early Poems 1 (1910-1919)”.

* Some notes on two books of essays recently read, Mark T. Hooker’s Tolkienian Mathomium and Hobbitonian Anthology:

   M. p.26. “OE word bruna was commonly used to name bodies of clear running water, emanating from springs, that flowed over gravelly beds […] related to the German brunnen and Dutch bron, both meaning spring, as in ‘water welling up out of the ground’.”

   M. p.51. “Tolkien says [in an interview] that he sometimes used the Gothic translation of his surname — Dwalakoneis”. In full, Ruginwaldus Dwalakoneis.

   M. pp.220-221. “a number of authors consider that certain aspects of the [Babylonian astro-theological] myth of Astarte/Ishtar [aka Inanna] were co-opted by the Christian church […] for attribution to Mary”. The Encyclopedia Biblica “equates her title ‘Queen of Heaven’ with “a cult of Venus” (IV, 3993)”. See also p.223 for a comparison of women weeping for Tammuz [lover of the Babylonian Venus] and the weeping of women heard by Earendel. I would add that this feature is also present in Egypt in the nightly voyage of Ra-Horus through the Hours of the Night, though it may have been borrowed from Tammuz.

   HA. pp.34-35. A 1932 reprinting of a 17th century list of the predecessors of King Arthur placed a “King Magoth” five generations earlier. Geoffrey of Monmouth had Goemagot as the leader of the giants who inhabited Albion [Britain] before the arrival of the Trojans. Both thought similar to Maggot, re: Farmer Maggot.

   HA. p.96. Brother Hilary’s farm at Evesham grew mostly plums, not apples. Plums then being a far more commonly-eaten fruit than today. I would add that this colours the description… “later they sat on the lawns under the plum-trees and ate, until they had made piles of stones like small pyramids” (Return of the King).

* Renga is hunting down the Cracks of Doom (late 1981), which is thought to have been the first commercial Tolkien computer game. He has also been able to discount the game Middle Earth (1979) as the first such. This game has recently been found and, on playing it on old hardware, it appears to be a Jules Verne-ish ‘journey to the centre of the earth’ type RPG game set in the 1970s/80s. It has no Tolkien connection, other than the misleading title.

* And finally, the British ticket-seller Trainline has a new Web page titled “Tour Tolkien’s England: UK locations that inspired The Lord of the Rings & Middle-earth”. Hasty, but not as cringe inducing as you might expect. Though we do get “University of Birmingham’s Great Hall = The Hall of Elrond”, without any reference to it serving as the hospital to which Tolkien was brought from the battlefields of France. Gondor’s ‘Houses of Healing’ might therefore be a more apt comparison, since Tolkien was never a student there.

However… I see there’s now a Great Hall 360 Virtual Tour, and today one could indeed imagine it as Elrond’s hall.

Tolkien Gleanings #229

* A partially-online review of The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (2024). The reviewer notes…

“the skilled craftsmanship of the book’s visuals. The illustrations, drawn by hand and digitally colored, are masterful balances of details and sweeping, epic scenes, with warm shades of yellow cozying up next to a range of cool, blue hues. Any dialogue is rendered in typefaces based on the handwriting of the author, and this instantly creates a welcoming, insider vibe. Full page spreads, orderly panels, and sections that are primarily text-only all share harmonious space without disrupting the narrative flow, effortlessly blending fantasy and reality.”

* New in the undergraduate journal Eloquentia Perfecta (Fordham University), a lengthy essay exploring Tolkien’s work in relation to “Bilbo and the Consequences of War”.

* From blog notes on the projects of the Oxford Libraries Graduate Trainees…

“Leah’s trainee project was a fascinating deep dive into the offprints of Professor Turville-Petre, a prominent Oxford scholar in Old Norse-Icelandic Studies who, as a student at Christ Church, was tutored by none other than J.R.R. Tolkien himself. When Turville-Petre died in 1978, he donated his entire library to the English Faculty Library. [One aim was to look through his huge collection of offprints and to] create a handlist [and there is now] a spreadsheet detailing each offprint. These details included, but were not limited to, author details, publication information, as well as language. Leah also paid close attention to the contents and notes that he made in the margins of the off-prints [which has] proved to be effective in bringing Turville-Petre to life, letting us catch a glimpse of his personality and work style.”

* Previously paywalled, “The Forge of Tolkien” series from Rachel Fulton-Brown. There were 43 episodes in total, for subscribers, issued in 2020-2021. The first six are now freely available on YouTube, or are scheduled to be so very soon…

   1. “What Sort of Tale Have We Fallen Into?”
   2. A Mythology for England
   3. Mythopoeia
   4. Who is Tom Bombadil?
   5. Stories for Children
   6. A Taxonomy of Dragons

* Project Muse now has a Web page for the contents of Tolkien Studies, Volume 20, 2023 ($ paywall, released summer 2024). ($60 + registration required).

* Borromeo at the Birmingham Oratory, in Tolkien’s time there? Hmmm, now that sounds like a familiar name. Found on an old postcard I spotted on eBay…

The possible connection was not addressed in the recent book Tolkien’s Faith.

* And finally, The Gates of Argonath as ‘filmed’ in an advanced game-engine, the latest real-time Unreal Engine 5. No horrid 2000s-style polygonal videogame river-rocks, but the YouTube demo video does have fashionable wobbly camerawork… so beware of sea-sickness.