Tolkien Gleanings #181.

* New from Walking Tree, the book The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. An edited collection which includes among others “J.R.R. Tolkien, Walter Scott, and Scott-ish Romanticism”, and “‘The Backs of Trees’: Tolkien, the British Theological Romantics, & the Fantastic Imagination”. Available for pre-order from Amazon UK and possibly other Amazon sites, with a publication date of 31st March 2024.

* Also new from Walking Tree, the single author book Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium. With a foreword by Tom Shippey and an introduction by Thomas Honegger. Available now.

* Free scans of books by R.R. Marett, Tolkien’s personal tutor at Exeter College from 1913. Most are collections of his famously lucid and focused lectures, and many can be downloaded.

  – The Birth of Humility (1910, inaugural lecture) (To ‘read online’ only)

  – The Threshold of Religion (1914, enlarged and revised second edition)

  – Psychology and Folk-lore (1920)

  – The Diffusion of Culture (1927, printed lecture) (To ‘read online’ only)

  – The Raw Material of Religion (1929, printed lecture, not online)

  – Faith, Hope and Charity in Primitive Religion (1930–1932)

  – Sacraments of Simple Folk (1933) (To ‘borrow’ only)

  – Head Heart And Hands In Human Evolution (1935)

* And finally, the latest issue of the open-access journal on fan-works, Transformative Works and Cultures. The topic of the issue is ‘Fandoms and platforms’, meaning online platforms rather than role-playing flets. Includes “The Fading of the Elves: techno-volunteerism and the disappearance of Tolkien fan fiction archives”.

Tolkien Gleanings #180.

* Coming soon from the Catholic University of America Press, The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation (May 2024)…

“This book is the first sustained attempt to show not only the centrality of recovery to Tolkien’s fantasy, but the way in which his fantasy affects that primal recovery in every reader. […] for Tolkien fantasy has within itself a healing power through which intellectual, moral and existential paradoxes are resolved and our intellectual and perceptual faculties are made whole again”.

* Free online under Creative Commons on Calameo, Dragon Verde #15 (September 2023), from the Colombia Orodruin Tolkien Society. With cover art by Thomas Orn Karlsson of Sweden.

Collects the best articles from the “eighth to the thirteenth editions of Dragon Verde.” Article titles in English translation:

  – Echoes of Middle-earth.
  – Dragon Fire and Wild Swords.
  – From Linguistics to Metaphysics: interview with Carl F. Hostetter.
  – The Rings of Power and their Influence in the Fate of Middle-earth.
  – Tolkien and the Celts.
  – Dwarven Chronicles.
  – Meowing and Barking in the Hobbit Hole. (Seems to be about dogs and cats).
  – The Spanish connection of J.R.R. Tolkien.
  – Modernity as seen by Tolkien.

Since Dragon Verde #15 is under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, the articles are free to be translated. You’d screen-capture and then use either Microsoft OneNote or ABBYY Screenshot Reader to get the text out for translation. Both are good for use with smaller 72dpi type.

* Older issues of Dragon Verde used to be found as free flipbooks on Issuu, and are technically still there. But they’re blocked. My guess is the Society has thus moved to Calameo from the Issuu service. Issuu having now made itself toxic to publishers, due to their gangster-like behaviour. A year or two back now Issuu suddenly locked down their wealth of free magazine issues, then made extorting demands for payment to unlock them. Issuu also adds insult to injury, by misleadingly blaming the magazine’s publisher for the blocking…

That’s why it’s always a good idea to mirror your free flipbook PDF magazines at The Internet Archive (Archive.org).

* Newly added to the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, a long and detailed review in English of the substantial catalogue for the 2023 Italian exhibition ‘Tolkien: Uomo, Professore, Autore’. This medium-sized exhibition has now transferred from Rome to Naples, where it runs from 16th March to 2nd July 2024.

* Some notes on Berin’s Hill in Oxfordshire.

* And finally, look again at Amazon UK’s pre-order price for the three-volume dead tree edition of the Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. As I write, this has dropped from £90 to a more affordable £60. The drop is seemingly due to an avalanche of pre-orders, making it a ‘best-seller’ long before publication. (Update: Now back up to £90).

The new John Garth talk ““An Entirely Vain and False Approach”: Literary Biography and why Tolkien was wrong about it” reveals he’s found a Berin’s Hill, at Ipsden in Oxfordshire. Which Garth says is the place where Tolkien’s Birmingham Oratory good friend Fr. Vincent Reade came from, and where Reade’s family was the ‘head family’ of the village. Garth also says it was near to the location of the Birmingham Oratory’s boarding school, and my consultation of a map shows the proximity was some five or six miles.

I find that a 1919 Little Guide’s guide to Oxfordshire (reprinted from the 1906 first edition) has it that the hill name “preserves the name of St. Birinus”. Birinus (d. 649 or 650AD) was a man who would offer Tolkien a saint potentially bridging, in his lifetime, the old Christianity of the Roman Empire and the later British Christianity. As such the name and its apparent place-affiliation would certainly have interested Tolkien, and the connection would certainly have been relayed to him by the learned Fr. Vincent Reade.

The book Saint Berin, the apostle of Wessex (1902) has it all, bar any later tweaks. St. Birinus was sent by Asterius (Archbishop of Milan) to “scatter the seeds” of the faith and convert Mercia. But on crossing the channel and landing he was permanently stalled among the West Saxons, after discovering that they were still utterly pagan (he had been told otherwise).

The author gives an interesting link with Cornwall, while first exhaustively trying to establish and divine the forms of the name. His name and saint’s day were documented as venerated at St. Micheal’s Mount in Cornwall, before the 13th century and probably well before — since an 867 A.D. Canterbury calendar in the Bodleian also has the saint’s day. This would give Reade and Tolkien a good reason to have visited St. Micheal’s Mount on their visit to Cornwall in 1914. I couldn’t place them there in my recent book-chapter on the visit, though the Mount was within sight from the cliffs and was ‘just around the corner’ from where they were staying.

The book linked above also saves Tolkien scholars looking for the name’s meaning, since… “Birinus is meaningless in English”. It was a Latinization of some Frankish or perhaps Lombardic name. The author favours Lombardy for the name, but many other sources have the saint as “probably” Frankish. After some deliberation the author leads us (nearly) to the likely name of Beorn. Hmmm, that sounds rather familiar…

“The name, therefore, is most probably Teutonic [Germanic], and the same that becomes in the Scandinavian form Biorn” and he offers a quote from Baring-Gould… “Probably Bjorn or Baerin or Berin, a compound expressive of Bear in some form, High or Low German”.

Which rather voids the hill, regrettably, since this means that Tolkien could have had his Beren name simply from ‘Bear’, with the implication of ‘warrior’. Though in Tolkien’s Noldorin Beren means “bold”. Similar.

Of Berin’s Hill in Oxfordshire the 1906 book usefully gives a description…

“From the foot of it two remarkable tracks, hollowed out to the depth of some feet in the chalk, diverge on either side of the modern roadway which has superseded them, and meet again upon the summit. The villagers say that before the road was made, half-a-century ago, one of these hollow ways was used for ascent, and the other for descent. Whatever may be the true explanation of their form, there can be no doubt of their extreme antiquity. At the point where they meet again upon the hill-top they enclose a pair of earth-circles, each with a shallow surrounding trench. In the wood below, a few yards from the double track, is an ancient well, to which common belief and the judgment of antiquaries agree in assigning a Roman origin. Numerous coins also, from Claudius to Constantius, have been found here, and various Roman remains exist abundantly all around […] Berin’s Hill is upon the Chilterns, where certainly the Briton lingered long after he had been driven from the neighbouring valley. All along these hills we find a trace of the older language in the hollow “combes”…”

The author draws partly on “Ms. notes by the late Mr. Edward Anderdon Reade of Ipsden House”, on the hill and the history of its name. Presumably an older relative of Fr. Reade.

The well was explored and dug by local archaeologists in 1969, and their report noted “the well had been explored by Mr E. Reade [1807-1886] about 100 years ago” (SOAG Bulletin 62, “The ‘Roman Well’ near Ipsden”). The 1969 digs found a wealth of material including “one 2nd-century Roman sherd decorated with combing”, but the Roman claim is still lacking structural evidence.

Tolkien Gleanings #179.

* “The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien” is to be published in September 2024 as a three volume boxed-set, edited by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull. A collection to be presented in what sounds like chronological order and presumably with accompanying translations from the Anglo-Saxon, Elvish etc. It will include… “more than 60 [poems] that have never before been seen”, though regrettably not all of the poems found in The Hobbit and LoTR. The Kindle ebook edition will be £45, and the hardback set £90. I’m hoping there will be a substantial topic / name / location index at the back. If not then I’ll probably make a free one in PDF, as I did for Lovecraft’s index-less collected poems (The Ancient Track 2nd Edition).

* More free YouTube recordings, from the series of talks being given at Oxford, John Garth on ““An Entirely Vain and False Approach”: Literary Biography and why Tolkien was wrong about it” and Grace Khuri on “Kipling’s Medievalism and Tolkien’s Book of Lost Tales”. “Medievalism” sounds daunting, but here just means the classic but now neglected books Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and the sequel Rewards and Fairies (1910). One wonders if Tolkien also took something from Kipling’s birthing of the sub-genre of ‘hard science-fiction’ in his seminal “With the Night Mail” (1905, then easily available in a book collection in 1909) (my annotated edition and in excellent audio) at around the same time, before he left for Oxford in 1911? In terms of the innovative use in “Night Mail” of an invented futuristic vocabulary within a framework of largely unexplained allusions to a larger back-story, complete with ‘appendices’ that expand the world-building. This deepens the reader’s engagement and forces one to suspend disbelief, and as such is akin to what Tolkien would later do with LoTR.

* In Italy, a two-day conference on “Tolkien: the relevance of myth”, set for April 2024.

* In America, this year’s University of Vermont Tolkien Conference is set for April 13th 2024, and is themed “The Psychologies of Middle-earth”. Includes the papers “Ponying Up: Examining the Role of Bill and Human-Animal Bonds in The Lord of the Rings” and “Love Sickness in Middle-earth”, among others.

* The first book review, in the latest edition of the gradually-filling Journal of Tolkien Research. A long and detailed review of the edited volume Tolkien and the Relation between Sub-Creation and Reality (2023).

* “The Influence of Medieval Icelandic Literature on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion”. Freely available online, it appears to be a 2023 Masters dissertation written in English for a French university.

* And finally, up for auction is “a touching letter to a child fan in 1961” in Lancashire. In this Tolkien states… “The Hobbit was specially written for reading aloud”. He also talks about the bitter deep-freeze winter conditions of Christmas 1961. His next winter, of Christmas 1962 to March 1963, would be even worse and also longer — a ‘great winter’ with continuous snow for months, and frozen rivers. It became the coldest British winter since records began in 1659, “this dreadful winter” as Tolkien called it in another letter, and it was especially risky for older people such as himself (cold being far more a risk for the old than heat is). This was in the era before North Sea gas and affordable central-heating, and Britain also had an old housing stock almost all without much loft-insulation. One wonders if this imminent risk to the old was partly why “deep in the winter of 1962-3” (Chronology) Tolkien tried for a reconciliation with C.S. Lewis? Lewis was then aged about 64, and thus an old man (by the yardstick of English male longevity in the mid 20th century).

Tolkien Gleanings #178.

* Forthcoming at Signum University, “Tolkien & Tradition” is a 12-week online course which starts on 29th April 2024. Booking now.

* More recordings from the Tolkien lecture series at Oxford, now freely available on YouTube, “‘Never Trust a Philologist’: Lewis, Tolkien and the Place of Philology in English Studies” and “Tolkien’s Modern Readings: Past Perspectives, Present Insights, Future Study”.

* A new article itemising and detailing at great length “The Sauronic Empire”…

“The Sauronic Empire was the largest single dominion in recorded history, stretching sixteen hundred leagues from the Sundering Seas in the west to the foothills of the Orocarni Mountains in the east, and more than four thousand and eight hundred leagues from Forodwaith in the north to Far Harad in the south. It was larger than any of the Eleven realms of the First Age, or the Kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor at their height, or the domains of Morgoth during his rule from Angband, representing an unprecedented consolidation of power and territory under a single ruler.”

* A 2023 thesis from Brazil, O Fim da Demanda: a Terra-madia de J.R.R. Tolkien entre a vontade de poder e o escape da morte (‘At the end of the quest: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth between the will to power and the escape from death’). Freely online, and while not in English it has a substantial English abstract. Trying to boil down this rather choppy abstract, I take from it that… Tolkien’s protagonists go on “audacious quests” partly due to their inner “yearning for happiness”, in the sense of Aristotle’s eudaimonia (‘happiness in a life well-lived, in persuit of excellence and virtue’), or the similar Christian beatitude (here understood in the religious sense, but which in the secular sense might mean ‘great happiness, achieved by using one’s own natural powers to strive for the better world that is to come’). The author links these ideas with Tolkien’s wider idea of “the hope of a happy ending beyond the catastrophe of tragedy — and even of death”.

* A 2022 thesis from Finland, Supernatural Knowledge: Literary and Philosophical Approaches to Epistemology in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium. Freely available and in English. Examines how and where… “Tolkien’s complex fantasy universe partakes in philosophical conversation about the questions of knowledge”, with special reference to aspects of “Plato’s philosophical theory”. The abstract leaves the latter unspecified, but the body text reveals it to be the Theory of Forms.

* The lead article in the latest edition of the journal Greece & Rome is “Tolkien’s Unique Reception Of Pythagorean ‘Dissonance’ in the Ainulindale of The Silmarillion” ($ paywall). The author suggests that… “Tolkien has deliberately chosen a somewhat esoteric element of Pythagorean musical theory, albeit highly relevant to his own historical context”.

* And finally, a new Middle Earth Font (late 2023), as freeware for personal use. A paid commercial version is also available on request and appears to have the addition of a set of numbers. Presumably the maker knows it should be Middle-earth not Middle Earth, but he probably fears a trademark.

Tolkien Gleanings #177.

* The obituary of Richard Douglas Plotz (1948-2024), the organiser in 1965 of the Tolkien Society of America, publisher of the early Tolkien Journal.

* Now on YouTube, the recent John Garth lecture at Oxford titled “Inventing on the hoof: How the Riders of Rohan suddenly became Anglo-Saxon”. One of a series of talks from different scholars. The audio for this one is quite listenable.

* The blog of the venerable Tolkien scholars Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull has re-awakened after many years, with a post that ends with a teaser for their new book. More news on the book is due “next week”.

* A new attempt to succinctly summarise the various “Tolkien Middle-earth Rights” as they currently stand and mostly for film and TV. In ten minutes. As with all legal advice, obtain a second-opinion before embarking on making your own Middle-earthy production.

* An exploratory academic project on Tolkien’s Green Knight, at Inverness in the UK. Google Search dates the page’s appearance as February 2024, but… Google.

* Long listed as “currently unavailable” on Amazon UK, I see publisher Cambridge Scholars is listing their hardback of the book The Mirror Crack’d: Fear and Horror in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Major Works (2008) as available to buy.

* “A snippet on Stoke”, adding a new 1962 date to Tolkien’s many visits to the West Midlands city of Stoke-on-Trent.

* Note that December 2024 will be the 20th anniversary of the release of the ‘Extended’ “Director’s Cut” DVDs of the LoTR movies. Even if you don’t care for the visuals or plot-chopping of the screen adaptation, the extended movies can still surely be celebrated for their magnificent soundtrack and superb voice-work. One imagines the 20th anniversary might then be the occasion for a scholarly event perhaps titled “Tolkien’s Tones and Timbres”, to discuss the sounds and delivery of voices in the literature, the three movies, and the audio fan-work (e.g. Phil Dragash). Perhaps also with a nod to that out-of-reach aspect of the historical voice that Tolkien was tantalised by, the silent modulation and inflection of the spoken word by the speaker’s simultaneous non-verbal communication. In some cases there is also the aurality of the texts to consider, and for instance Tolkien once wrote “The Hobbit was specially written for reading aloud”.

* And finally, The Great British Spring Clean is set for 15th-31st March 2024. Pick up at least one bin-bag of litter (U.S.: ‘trash’) in your area. Tolkien died just as the scourge of litter began to be recognised circa 1972-4 (the years of Keep Britain Tidy campaigning and The Wombles). But I can quite see him with a litter-picking stick and a bin-bag today, wombling around his local woodland paths. It’s surely a cause he would have approved of.

A snippet on Stoke, from Holly Ordway’s new biography of Tolkien. In 1962, he was prize-giver at the Catholic boys’ school of St. Joseph’s in Stoke-on-Trent. The summer event was reported in the Catholic Herald on 1st June. He was presumably able to attend because he was staying with his son who lived in Hartshill, Stoke. The school was not far away in Trent Vale, down on the London Road, thus Tolkien would likely have walked or cycled down there from Hartshill in the May weather. If he was staying at Hartshill, then we can add the summer of 1962 to the times Tolkien stayed in Stoke. Unfortunately there’s no further research in the book on Tolkien’s activities in Stoke.

Frontage of St. Joseph’s, Trent Vale.

Tolkien Gleanings #176.

* “Tom Bombadil and the ‘hyper-fantastic’ in J.R.R. Tolkien”, a new essay in English from the Spanish Tolkien Society. Freely available, newly posted as part of the Society’s Aelfwine 2023 set of contest-winning essays.

* Freely available, the Masters dissertation “Fantasy in Translation: an Analysis and Comparison of the English Chapter ‘The Council of Elrond’ from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and its Chinese Translation” (2023). Italian, in English with Chinese quotations. It concludes that…

“Despite several errors – some of which produce a distortion of the original text’s meaning – this [Ding Di] Chinese edition of The Lord of the Rings is important as it marked a new era for the country’s fantasy production.”

This complements the new book Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy and Translation (2024).

* New in Russian, an essay which translates as “The motif of radiance in the poems ‘Christ’ by Cynewulf and ‘The Last Wandering of Earendel’ by J.R.R. Tolkien” (2023). Freely available. The author suggests the ‘Christ’ echoes…

“Dionysius the Areopagite, a church thinker of the 1st century, who in his work “On the Heavenly Hierarchy” directly says that the angels are filled with “sacred radiance” [5, p.21]. It is unclear whether Cynewulf was familiar with the work of the Areopagite, but the idea itself had long been comprehended by the Church and adapted for preaching.”

* “Why Tolkien Hated Dune”. A strong and long article, but “hated” is too strong a word. Even if Tolkien’s comment in a letter that “I dislike Dune with some intensity” comes close. I object to the use because the casual-fanboy clickbait-y use of “Tolkien hated…” seems a worrying new trend. He “hated” Disney. He “hated” Frank Herbert’s Dune. He “hated” modern technology. He “hated” the Roman Empire, and so on. All this seems dangerous in a world where there are some who would like to establish a false consensus, in the minds of the uninformed young, that “everyone knows” Tolkien was a hater. Such headlines may contribute to subtly establishing a climate-of-feeling about the man, which could then be exploited further by those with an anti-Tolkien agenda.

* Depressed by the media’s relentless drum-beat of doom, pessimism and alarmism, this week The Good Catholic finds hope that ““The Eagles Are Coming!”: Tolkien & the Catholic Hope of Eucatastrophe”. Well… yes. But perhaps adding a reading of the secular The Rational Optimist could triple the antidote effect.

* On “Forgetting the Way to Faerie”, with some choice quotes.

* Forthcoming in May 2024 from Manchester University Press, the book Fantastic Histories: Medieval fairy narratives and the limits of wonder. Set to examine…

“the histories of Gerald of Wales and Walter Map, the continental mirabilia of Gervase of Tilbury, and the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French Melusine romances and their early English reception”.

* “Bees in folk belief and practices before and now” (2023), free via searching for the article title “in quotes” on Google Scholar. A well-researched Estonian scholarly essay in English, with a strong medieval focus and useful awareness of Eastern Europe.

* On DeviantArt, Kuliszu of Poland, who paints often-charming naive-style artworks of Middle-earth scenes.

* And finally, Tolkien’s uncle Wilfred (1870-1938). Not much to go on at present, but who knows where slim leads might lead to?

Tolkien Gleanings #175.

* Signum University and the Mythgard Institute return to the UK, for the UK Moot on ‘Death and Immortality: The Great Escapes’ in relation to Tolkien. To be held in the city of York, 27th April 2024. Booking now, and it appears that speaker proposals are still being accepted.

* “Frank N. Magill in 1969, on The Lord of the Rings”. Being his lengthy critical evaluation, newly discovered by myself. Judging by Google Books, the 1969 appearance was probably actually a reprint from one or more earlier publications from the prolific Magill. Sadly the probable 1954-56 Masterplots Annual sources are not online at Archive.org or Hathi. Also, I’ve since tested some more lines from it online, to see if someone had recognised it in some form before I did. But no, I’ve only found it partly plagiarised in a 2008 dissertation from the Middle East.

* There are now details of the speakers and topics for the Tolkien sessions at the International Medieval Congress at The University of Leeds (July 2024). Various topics, including Anna Smol on “Eärendil’s Mythopoeic Journeys”.

* More details on the forthcoming 2024 German event to discuss ‘Tolkien and His Editors’…

“In addition to the central figure of Christopher Tolkien […] the roles of the editors Stanley and Rayner Unwin, the biographer Humphrey Carpenter (Biography; Letters), the student and later colleague Alan Bliss (Hengest and Finn), the daughter-in-law Baillie Tolkien (The Father Christmas Letters) or the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship should also be examined.”

* New on Archive.org, scans of Parma Eldalamberon #21 (Quenya noun structure) and Parma Eldalamberon #22 (Quenya verb structure, Feanorian alphabet). Both issues are said to be otherwise out-of-print and unavailable.

* This week the Cultural Debris podcast interviews Holly Ordway on Tolkien’s Faith. A book which I’m currently about two-thirds of the way through reading. I was slightly disappointed not to get more than a mention of the strong early influence of Francis Thompson, in her new book. But I guess that’s really a task for the very rare scholar who combines deep expertise in Francis Thompson, early Tolkien and Catholicism.

Incidentally I see the Cultural Debris podcaster also publishes a print journal, Local Culture which issues substantial themed volumes on localist topics from a conservative viewpoint. Including one issue on The Arts of Region and Place, and another on the localist thought of Roger Scruton. There are also annual conferences.

* In Italy, PhTea Talks: “The Conception of time in Tolkien’s legendarium”.

* “Tolkien Illustration in the Soviet Bloc”, post-censorship. A University of Plymouth (UK) talk set for 17th April 2024. Booking now, and the event appears to be in-person only.

* And finally, a new Tolkien Map Project video on YouTube. Said and shown to be a “procedural and fully customisable map system” for making Tolkien-like maps, and now in its final finished form.

Here is a possibly overlooked critical and positive appreciation of The Lord of the Rings, found buried in Frank N. Magill’s Masterpieces Of World Literature In Digest Form; Vol. 4 (1969). At that time the weighty volume(s) would likely only have been available in larger or university libraries. Though it is said to be a reprint under a new title, and snippets from Google Books suggest that the LoTR items originally appeared in Magill’s Masterplots: The four series in eight volumes (1958), and probably earlier than that in his Annual. Which if correct would make it a very early piece of criticism, and perhaps more widely distributed than in 1969 (among the many authors who would have subscribed to the Masterplots series in the 1950s, and associated Annuals). It may have been overlooked because Tolkien researchers assumed the Magill books contained only bald plot summaries?

The item does not occur in A Chronological Bibliography of Books about Tolkien under “1969”, a list in which Magill only enters in 1983 with his Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature. The same is true of the items referred to in Tom Shippey’s “Tolkien as a Post-War Writer”.

The three books are treated in different parts of the volume, and are here run together.

Samuel Johnson is credited with saying that “A book should teach us to enjoy life or to endure it.” J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings teaches both. It also fits the dictum of another writer, Robert Louis Stevenson: “And this is the particular triumph of the artist —not to be true merely, but to be lovable; not simply to convince, but to enchant.” Tolkien has been compared with Lodovico Ariosto and with Edmund Spenser. Indeed, he is in the mainstream of the writers of epic and romance from the days of Homer. His work is deeply rooted in the great literature of the past and seems likely itself to be a hardy survivor resistant to time. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, Celeborn the Elf King (no doubt speaking for his author) warns against despising the lore that has survived from distant years; for old wives’ tales may be the repositories of needful wisdom. Although The Lord of the Rings is advertised as a trilogy, with each volume bearing a different title, it is really a single, continuous romance. The author is in complete control of his copious material. He has created a consistent world with a sharply realized geography, even furnishing maps; he has worked out a many-centuried time scheme, summarizing the chronology in an appendix to the third volume, The Return of the King. With fertile inventiveness Tolkien has poured out an amazing number of well-drawn characters and adventures; and his memory of the persons, places, and events of his creation is almost incredible. If there are any loose ends in the three volumes, they are so minor as to be negligible. The book has been pronounced an allegory; with equal positiveness it has been pronounced not an allegory. At any rate, it is a gigantic myth of the struggle between good and evil.

The author also presented his invented creatures, the hobbits or halflings, in an early book, The Hobbit, to which The Lord of the Rings is a sequel, but a sequel with significant differences. Hobbits are small, furry-footed humanoids with a delight in simple pleasures and a dislike of the uncomfortable responsibilities of heroism. They share the world with men, wizards, elves, dwarfs, trolls, orcs, and other creatures. Although many of these creatures are not the usual figures of the contemporary novel, the thoughtful reader can find applications to inhabitants and events of the current world, which has its share of traitors, time-servers, and malice-driven demi-devils, and is not completely destitute of men of good will and heroes. Of the three volumes, The Fellowship of the Ring has the widest variation in tone: it begins with comedy and domestic comfort, then moves into high adventure, peril, and sorrow. Occasional verses appear in the pages, but the quality of Tolkien’s poetry is in both his prose and his verse.

The Two Towers is the second volume of The Lord of the Rings. Like its predecessor, The Fellowship of the Ring, and its successor, The Return of the King, the volume has its roots in faérie, which is not quite the same thing as our conventional fairyland. The setting is a country inhabited by creatures of miraculous goodness or horrifying evil just beyond the borders of our so-called “real” world, and its time is not our time. In his essay “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien defines a fairy story as an account of the adventures or experiences of men in faérie or on its shadowy borders. He defends the idea that fairy-stories should be written for adults and read by them, and not, as an American scholar said of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, unjustly “banished to the nursery.” In The Two Towers, Tolkien’s fertile imagination continues to pour out fascinating beings and exciting adventures; and his poetic spirit continues to cast a light of heartrending beauty and a shadow of sadness on his story. In the men of Rohan he recaptures the heroic spirit of Beowulf; in his creation of Ents, gigantic herdsmen of trees who resemble their own flocks, he goes far beyond his predecessors who have furnished their pages with animated tree-beings; and in the spidery Shelob, he creates a malevolent, blood-chilling monster worthy to join his favorites, the great dragons of Germanic story. Aragorn, who grows in stature as the book moves on, speaks for the author and helps to furnish a critique of the book and its philosophy. He points out that the earth itself is a principal matter of legend and that the events of the present provide the legends of the future. He also declares that good and evil are the same in all generations. It is Aragorn also who pronounces most clearly “the doom of choice.” For The Lord of the Rings is a story about choice, or free will. Character after character is brought to a choice, and the sum of the choices makes the fate of the character. In this volume as in the others there are lyrical passages which are small prose poems. Such a passage is the description of Gandalf, returned from the depths and transfigured. The author paints a picture of the wonderful old man holding sunlight in his hands as if they were a cup. The power of the image is increased when the old man looks straight into the sun.

The concluding volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, brings to fruition the choices and labors of the opposing forces of good and evil, whose struggle is narrated in The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and the present work. Like a symphony the book reaches its climax and subsides into a quiet coda, mingling profound joy and sadness. After depicting many adventures, it returns to the Shire, where the first volume began; but the Shire and its inhabitants are much changed from what they were at the beginning. As in the other volumes, the author shows his mastery of narrative and his poetic power. No brief summary can cover all the incidents or name all the memorable characters in the book; nor can a mere retelling of the story do more than hint at its depths. When Tolkien speaks of the song of the minstrel after the overthrow of Sauron, he, perhaps unwittingly, characterizes his own work, for the singer led his hearers into the regions where joy and sorrow coalesce. The book looms like a survivor from some ancient age but speaks wisely and pertinently to the present.

The appendices to The Return of the King include chronologies of the First, Second, and Third Ages, family trees, legendary histories of the peoples appearing in The Lord of the Rings, and keys to pronunciation of names and to the languages, including the elven tongue. Although not necessary to the understanding of the book, the appendices are a playground for the linguist and teller of tales, and they furnish delight to readers with similar tastes.

Tolkien Gleanings #174.

* New and free on YouTube, “Newman, Tolkien, and the Perils of Beauty”, being the 2024 Annual Newman Lecture with Dr. David O’Connor. 40 minutes, with excellent clear delivery and audio.

* The book Tolkien and the Gothic: XXIV (Peter Roe Series) is set for publication on 26th March 2024, at least according to the wayward Amazon UK. The book has the proceedings of a 2022 Tolkien Society seminar, as seven papers in 134 pages. Also to be available as an affordable £5 Kindle ebook.

* In the new book The Spirit and the Screen: Pneumatological Reflections on Contemporary Cinema (2023), the chapter “Exegeting Samwise the Brave Advocate”. I see the whole chapter free, via Google Books.

* In this month’s edition of the UK’s The Critic magazine, the article “Campus Confidential” ($ paywall) recounts the joining of a secret student society at Cambridge University (UK). Necessarily secret because they discuss C.S. Lewis. And presumably, though left unsaid, their discussion sometimes also turns to Tolkien. The secrecy is said to be needed during term-time, due to the likelihood of baying mobs of ‘cancel cultists’ turning up outside the venue.

“Conservative-leaning university students now have to meet in secret to avoid the ‘cancel’ mob and risk derailing their careers for the crime of having unfashionable views. [In order to join, the student writer went through a 90 minute interview …] The lecturer wanted to know how an English student, theatre kid and barefoot pagan came to be excluded from liberal and tolerant society and to seek the company of Christians. After 90 minutes the professor sat back with a satisfied nod. “I wanted to be sure of you.”

* The Tolkien Society AGM and Springmoot 2024, will be held in mid April at Cambridge University. The dates are out of term-time, so presumably the university’s baying mobs will be absent.

* A new book on The Arts and the Bible (2024), being the proceedings of a 2017 U.S. conference. Tolkien is only briefly nodded to, if the table-of-contents is anything to go by.

* And finally, the worthy project Bookstore Chronicles is calling for recorded contributions for an oral history of bookselling in America, as told by the nation’s own booksellers. The call is open.