Tolkien Gleanings #170.

* There’s now a table-of-contents for the new book Tolkien et l’Antiquité: Passe et Antiquites en Terre du Milieu (2024). Here are all the titles, translated though some are in English…

Introduction.

Antiquity and Middle-earth: two other worlds.

The Third Age as Medium Aevum: From the Ages of Middle-earth to ‘our days’.

The Virgilian golden age in Tolkien’s Legendarium.

“All that walk the world in these after-days”: antiquity and ‘haunted’ gothicism in J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Language of Knowledge: the influence of Latin on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Quenya.

Vestiges of Antiquity among the Hobbits.

From Babylon to Numenor: The reception of Near Eastern Antiquity and the use of Akkadian sources in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Rome in Middle-earth: echoes of a past to come.

Velleda and Galadriel, the Antiquities of Chateaubriand and Tolkien.

The Babylon one interests, but regrettably it’s in French.

* The Church Times this week reviews Tolkien’s Faith: a spiritual biography (2023).

“… his presentation of the Hobbits as not only “merry and full of laughter”, but also “curiously tough” — the balance reflecting the Oratorian ideal of personality.”

* In the latest edition of Law & Liberty “A Life Well Lived”, being a long review of the new expanded edition of the Tolkien letters. No footnotes in the book, regrettably, but we usefully learn that…

“In the digital edition, all endnotes are internally hyperlinked so that it is easy to go from text to note and back again, more efficiently than in the print edition.”

* Bookings for the UK Tolkien Society’s Oxonmoot 2024 are now open. The annual event will run from 29th August to 1st September 2024. Set to be held at “St Anne’s College, Woodstock Road, Oxford, and online.” A College that has a “1936” feel about it, by the look of it…

* John Garth is giving a public lecture at Merton College, Oxford, on Friday 23rd February 2024, titled “Inventing on the hoof: How the Riders of Rohan suddenly became Anglo-Saxon”.

* The National Library of Scotland blogs about its copy of Tolkien’s “Songs for the Philologists”. This rare publication can also be had free on Archive.org.

* More Tolkien-style mapping tutorials, using professional ‘GIS’ mapping software. The new series is now, having covered creating the map components, at “Tolkien Style Maps in a GIS: part 4, Assembly”.

* And finally, in mid Staffordshire, six new walking routes on Cannock Chase and around, for 2024, including “Tixall and Shugborough”.

Tolkien Gleanings #169.

* Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien, now firmly dated in hardcover for 9th May 2024 and pre-ordering. This is Christopher Tolkien’s pick of his father’s pictures, with notes, in 128 pages. “Now reissued after almost 30 years” according to the publisher.

* There is now a free ‘Errata’ PDF for the recent Tolkien book The Nature of Middle-earth (2021).

* There’s now an official page for the forthcoming German conference Tolkien and his Editors. I’m told this October 2024 conference will be in both German and English. There are currently scholarships available for young scholars of Tolkien. Walking Tree is associated with the conference, which means we will likely have a book in due course.

* Set for early September 2024 in the USA, The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference. Set to have a talk on “Lewis, Tolkien, and the Oxford English School”, and to ask “What Did Tolkien Really Think about Narnia?”.

* Italy’s modest-sized Tolkien exhibition, “Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author”, has now closed. The local press reports that it saw 80,226 visitors in total. Which is not bad for a somewhat hastily-planned exhibition during the winter months. I recall there was also a hefty entrance-fee, and some hostile comment in the leftist press. All of which could have dissuaded people from visiting. Thus 80k attendance is all the more impressive. The show will now tour to other venues in Italy. It opens in Naples on 15th March and will run through to 30th June 2024. After that, the cities of Turin and Catania are booked.

* Published tomorrow in French, Pearl / Perle: suivi de “Tolkien et Perle” by Leo Carruthers. Being a translation of the Gawain-poet’s Pearl into French, followed by an essay on “Tolkien and Pearl” also in French. There’s also what sounds like a rather ambitious introduction…

“the introduction to this book examines [the Gawain-poet’s] probable origin, while proposing a new theory about the poem’s patron, previously unidentified. He would have been one of the most famous English princes of his time, son and father of kings”.

Oh dear, hopefully it’s not Edward the Black Prince. Who died in 1376 and is thus clearly too early. (Update: No, the claim turns out to have been for John of Gaunt as patron, commissioning for the babe Blanche of Portugal, 1388-1389).

* New on YouTube, a hands-on tutorial on emulating Tolkien-style maps in GIS software: part 1, forests.

* And finally, do you fancy buying Tolkien’s fave childhood mill? Birmingham City Council is reported to be planning to sell off Sarehole Water Mill and various other heritage buildings in the city. The Mill is not quite up for sale yet, but it could be shortly according to the Daily Mail. Now’s your chance, it seems. For a nicely renovated listed watermill set in ten acres in the Midlands, you’d probably be paying at least £2 million. I’ve seen the Mill’s pizza restaurant reviewed and I assume there’s also a gifte shoppe these days (I was last there in the early 1990s), so you might need perhaps £3 million. Maybe knock off a bit for the flooding risk, but also make sure you have enough for the hefty annual insurance and ongoing maintenance.

Sarehole Mill from the lane, the pool on the other side of the hedge.

Tolkien Gleanings #168.

* Catholic World Report has a new article offering “Tolkien’s lessons for Hollywood’s failures”. Specifically, the lessons to be learned from Tolkien’s rewrites of his LoTR drafts. Freely available online.

* MultiLingual, the trade magazine for the languages industry, profiles Tolkien’s invented languages in “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Life in Languages: inventing and adapting the lexicons of Middle-earth”. Freely available online.

* Newly added to the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, a review of Thomas Honegger’s new book Tweaking Things a Little. I now see that Kristine Larsen also reviewed the book in Mallorn #64 (Winter 2023). Though neither review picks up Honegger on his earendel section.

* Newly free on Academia.edu, ““Leaf by Niggle” – The Artist and the Art” a chapter from Revisiting and Reimagining the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (2022). If you’re not signed up to Academia.edu you can still get the PDF by searching for it on Google Scholar.

* A nice surprise, on my at last joining the Tolkien Society. I find I also have access to PDFs of a new publication called Vingilot, which sits somewhere between the Society’s Mallorn and Amon Hen. So far there are two issues, and it seems to be for longer linguistic or similarly technically-complex essays, while at the same time also soaking up some of the poetry being submitted.

* In the latest Amon Hen I see what appears to be a ‘wider Midlands and Wales’ informal meet-up event, the ‘Three Farthing Stone Smial’. The last meeting was way down in Moreton-in-Marsh (below Stratford-upon-Avon, in the Cotswolds), but for Spring 2024 they have the Midland Hotel in the centre of Birmingham pencilled in.

* Also, it’s good to see an October 2023 ad for a graphic designer for Amon Hen. One might hope for a new two-column layout, at least, which would offer a huge improvement in readability. In the meatime, it’s down to technology. There are a half-dozen ‘two-column to one-column’ solutions for scientific journal PDFs. But none the other way around. Thus the temporary ‘one-column to two-column’ DIY readability solution, at least for those with a 10″ tablet such as a Kindle Fire, is this:

1. Convert the fixed-text .PDF to a reflowable-text .ePUB with Calibre (free) or ePubor ($30).
2. Send the .ePub to the Kindle.
3. Open and read with the Librera Pro reader app.
4. Librera Pro settings: font size at 32-point, text alignment left, no hyphenation, line-spacing at 13, paragraph spacing at 3. This emulates a column.
5. Finally, select your font. The Times New Roman font is fine for me, but Librera also bundles some dedicated ebook fonts.

Of course in converting to .ePUB you jettison the page layout, though not the graphics. The solution to that is to also load the .PDF to the Kindle, browse pleasurably through it and admire the layout and design, read the short bits, and choose your longer articles. Then switch over to the .ePUB for actual close ‘columnised’ reading of selected articles.

* And finally, some Polish Tolkien book covers. And there I was thinking that the 1980s German ‘green’ covers were the most bizarre…

Tolkien Gleanings #167.

* The Tolkien Society has a new set of free video recordings on YouTube. The short talks from a recent event include, among others, “Pagan Magic and the Marvelous: Songs of Enchantment in The Silmarillion” and “Tolkien’s Depiction of Cremation in the Context of Catholic Canon Law”.

* A new illustrated article on “Tolkien and The Swan Press”, a venture for which Tolkien wrote contributions during his tenure at Leeds University.

* A new article muses on “Introducing Tolkien Fans to the Western Canon”, with the author suggesting that Tolkien readers may like to initially sample Beowulf, Ivanhoe, and Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse.

* A fine cover illustration by Matt Stewart for the latest Amon Hen #305, the bulletin/magazine of the Tolkien Society. Now that I’ve found a regular job at last (if only cleaning toilets in Stoke-on-Trent) I’ve been able to justify the £30/$40 cost of joining the Society to access their publication back-issues and presumably the coming issues for 2024. Thankfully PayPal didn’t freak out at the unusual payment, and the Society’s membership bot didn’t confuse me with the apparently-banned David Day (phew). In due course I hope to post a listing of the most interesting-to-me articles, which are (only) obtainable via membership.

* The YouTube video series My Life In Objects flips through and discusses Journeys of Frodo: An Atlas of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. A fine book which is in need of a reprint, as used prices continue to soar. If you’re quick there’s currently a paperback copy on Amazon UK for £28, with shipping from Amazon itself — which means it can be conveniently sent to a locker for pick-up.

* Been and gone in January 2024, a talk in Liverpool on “To the boy most cunning in Thucydides: the classical world of J.R.R. Tolkien”. I don’t yet see a recording on YouTube.

* Recommended for scholars, the Windows genuine freeware AnyTxt Searcher. This speedily indexes inside your PC’s documents and then lets you search across them. It was a bit iffy five years ago when the old DocFetcher was still the best free option, but the developer has kept at it and 2023 saw a big spurt of development. It’s now very useful for scholars, has a dark mode, and appears to lack only proximity search Update: for proximity-search, turn on Regex by selecting ‘Regular Match’ in the search type drop-down, and use…

\b(?:hobbits\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,6}?supper|supper\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,9}?hobbits)\b

This example will find all instances of ‘hobbits’ within 9 words of ‘supper’.

* And finally, talking of the tech world… the craze continues for naming new technologies after Tolkien characters. The lastest is Smaug-72B, the apparently hottest open-source AI chatbot that… “surpasses other advanced open-source models [and] excels in reasoning and math tasks”. Though with the current blistering pace of AI development, ‘Smaug’ likely won’t stay top-dragon for more than a few weeks.

Tolkien Gleanings #166.

Contains LoTR spoilers.

* A new illustrated page on the Tolkien Guide, listing what might be overlooked items of Tolkien criticism 1954 – 1973. Mostly culled from obscure titles, from the ‘little magazines’ of the period, and some science-fiction magazines.

* Which way, Western man? — George R.R. Martin’s depressing nihilism or J.R.R. Tolkien’s hope in the face of despair?

* New in The European Conservative, the long essay “J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Cosmic Music of the Beginnings”…

“Despite reading Tolkien’s letters multiple times, I could not find any clarification about this literary motif of creation through music.”

The author thus veers off into an unconvincing look at Plato. But I seem to recall something I heard in a podcast, about a clear source for this in one of those proto-‘books of the Bible’ that never made it into the official Bible?

* In Italian, the Italian Tolkien Association surveys 2023’s Tolkien exhibitions, and has many interior pictures. Several of the exhibitions are ongoing in early 2024.

* The Pastor Theologians Podcast has a new episode “On Tolkien and Theology”, with a guest who recently edited an academic collection of essays on the topic.

* The latest edition of the open-access Spanish journal Babel–AFIAL has a long and detailed review of A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien (2022), the second expanded edition. The review is in English.

* And finally, the German open-access journal for fantasy research, ZfF, asks “Is it time to end Tolkien research?”, in favour of studying… “the incredibly diverse landscape of films, books and games in [its] aesthetic, political and social terms”. One might have thought that there are already a significant number of people doing just that in special-issues of journals, edited academic collections, and the various open-access academic journals of the fantastic and/or videogames. Tolkien, in a quantitative comparison with all that output, might appear to be something of a niche speciality. Of course if one measured such things by avid and engaged readers, rather than the simple fact of publication, then perhaps the balance would shift a little.

Also, the ZfF article says that The People’s Committee for the Suppression of Tolkien Research should make especially sure that ‘useless eater’ articles about Lobelia’s umbrella are ‘disappeared’. However I’ve always been interested in the special historical symbolism of Lobelia’s ‘release from the lockholes’, in the context of the section’s general undeniable echo of the primary-world releases from the death-camps…

Lobelia. Poor thing, she looked very old and thin when they rescued her from a dark and narrow cell. She insisted on hobbling out on her own feet; and she had such a welcome, and there was such clapping and cheering when she appeared, leaning on Frodo’s arm but still clutching her umbrella, that she was quite touched, and drove away in tears. She had never in her life been popular before. But she was crushed by the news of Lotho’s murder, and she would not return to Bag End.

…and how this could then be read as an oblique attempt to comment on (and perhaps purge) an unsavoury but seminal incident at the other end of the road to the death-camps. In which Hitler had emerged from a long talk with Nietzsche’s elderly sister, having been symbolically gifted Nietzsche’s walking stick by her…

“Taking Nietzsche’s walking stick in hand, Mr. Hitler strode through the crowd to great huzzahs.” — Times of London, 4th November 1933.

Thus, even an umbrella may have the political interpretation so yearned for by the ZfF author.

Tolkien Gleanings #165.

* In the latest edition of the UK’s The Critic magazine, a long article on “Grimdull”. Freely online. The author is of the opinion that…

“The fantasy genre is afflicted by a dull and tedious obsession with adolescent cynicism, prurient scenes and one dimensional anti-heroes. [And even given the vast output of such fare] it’s striking how little headway [has been made in trying to seize fantasy, by leftist ‘realists’ / ironic modernists / strident atheists]. Whilst Tolkien feels timeless, not least because of its echoing of the language and sensibility of myth and fairy tale, much of the ‘realist’ fantasy that sought to supplant it now feels terribly dated. [And] even the most procedural and uninventive of past fictional fare starts to look good, next to the chaotic and senseless storytelling that is increasingly the norm.”

* In July 2024, the second International Conference on Constructed Languages. The two-day event is set to happen in Orleans, France, and the organisers write that…

“We are expecting two keynote speakers, including Edouard Kloczko, translator and expert on the languages of J.R.R. Tolkien.”

* OutSFL interviews the writer of the forthcoming biographical graphic-novel of the young Tolkien…

“A good story inspired by real events should not move away from reality as we know it for the sake of making it more exciting. Writing about a life should be a pact signed with the reader or viewer: ‘I’m telling you a true story’. Otherwise, you might as well invent the whole thing entirely. […] I read everything I could find about Tolkien’s life, on the course of the First World War and the Battle of the Somme in particular, but also on the war efforts in Oxford and Cambridge, the relationships between people at that time, their way of behaving, the clothes and uniforms, weapons, etc. I tried not to leave anything to chance and wanted to recreate as faithfully as possible a reconstruction of this period and this part of Tolkien’s life.”

Amazon currently lists the hardcover of this English translation as shipping on 27th February 2024, and the Kindle ebook version is already available.

* Anna Smol ventures into Shelob’s Lair, with the aid of Tolkien’s plans of the place…

“Once Tolkien gets his hobbits inside the Lair, he can imagine which ways they can go by drawing the Plan of Shelob’s Lair”.

* And finally, one I missed from back in 2022. The Wade Centre had a one-hour podcast on Tolkien and the Green Knight. One of the participants notes C.S. Lewis writing on the Green Knight as a man…

“… as vivid and concrete as any image in literature” […] a living coincidentia oppositorum; half giant, yet wholly a ‘lovely’ knight’; as full of demoniac energy as old Karamazov, yet in his own house, as jolly as a Dickensian Christmas host; now exhibiting a ferocity so gleeful that it is almost genial, and now a geniality so outrageous that it borders on the ferocious; half boy or buffoon in his shouts and laughter and jumpings; yet at the end judging Gawain with the tranquil superiority of an angelic being.”

This was published in 1962 (the podcast participant, who seems to be a Lewis expert, claims it dates from 1947). If 1962, which various bibliographies suggest is more likely, then this seems in part to also be Lewis’s oblique comment on the likely origin of Tolkien’s Bombadil?

Tolkien Gleanings #164.

* A free recording of “‘Dreaming in the Margins’: Tolkien’s Engagements with The Battle of Maldon”, a recent event at Wade College in the USA.

* The new scholarly book Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-1959 now seems firmly set for release by Oxford University Press on 25th April 2024.

* A free recording of the lecture by Holly Ordway, “Tolkien’s Faith and the Foundations of Middle-earth”, recently given at Christendom College in the USA.

* The book The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopeia and the Recovery of Creation is set for a 1st April 2024 release, from the Catholic University of America Press. In the context of the balm and healing experienced by certain types of readers, the authors discuss how Tolkien explored…

“the relation of language to reality, the nature of evil, the distinction between time and eternity and its relation to death and immortality, the paradox of necessity and free will in human action, and the grounds for providential hope”.

* The new article “Ramer contra Lowdham: comparing Tolkien’s alter ego characters in The Notion Club Papers”.

* Coming soon is a new graphic novel adaptation of The Kalevala, an early Tolkien favourite, told in a suitably chunky 300-page book. Due at the end of February 2024 according to the publisher, or May 2024 according to Amazon. It’s not a reprint of the 2005 attempt at a graphic novel version. Regrettably the publisher is misleadingly touting it as… “the basis for Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”.

* A blog review of Greg and Tim Hildebrandt: The Tolkien Years, picked up in a second-hand bookshop.

* On YouTube, a January 2024 update for the Digital Tolkien Project.

* A free 12th Century Gothic Art LORA. A LORA being a ‘style-guidance’ plugin, for use with AI models deriving from the Stable Diffusion 1.5 image generator. Note that this one usefully outputs at 768px, rather than the usual 512px.

* And finally, a free audio reading of The Art of Pipe-Smoking Pleasure (1946), the “Introduction” of which puts Tolkien’s pipe-smoking into brief historical context re: the prevailing attitudes to pipe smokers before and after the First World War. Tolkien may not have read this American title, and in a British context was perhaps more likely to have encountered Alfred Dunhill’s classic The Pipe Book (1924, revised 1969), of which note its chapter on “Pipes of the Far North”. He certainly had the 60-page booklet Art of Pipe Smoking (1958), which at a guess would probably have referred him to the earlier works of 1924 and 1946.

Tolkien Gleanings #163.

* Publisher Walking Tree posts a free PDF offprint of a long review in Lembas Katern, which appears to be an extra to the Dutch Tolkien Society’s Lembas publication. The review is of Thomas Honegger’s new book Tweaking Things a Little: Essays on the Epic Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and G.R.R. Martin (2023), and the reviewer is mostly concerned with Martin and his Game of Thrones. Though the book’s terse table-of-contents…

1. Worldbuilding, Icebergs, Depth, and Enchantment
2. Names, Onomastics, and Onomaturgy
3. Languages
4. Riders, Chivalry, and Knighthood
5. Ethics

… is usefully detailed for the first time. The “Names” section of the book, the reviewer reveals, has a lot to say about Tolkien’s earendel in the context of naming and names. And I assume, from the comments on its length, that the section is either new or expanded / updated. I’ll thus have to obtain the book at some point. Rather amusingly the reviewer chafes at Honegger’s use of 15 pages to explicate earendel. When my book on the subject required 200,000 words. [Update: I now have the Honegger book, and can see why the reviewer felt a bit exasperated. It’s 15 pages of ‘floundering about’, to no great effect. And a good chunk of it is simply re-telling Earendel’s role in Tolkien’s back-story.]

* The new-ish book Charms, Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England (2018) is this weekend highlighted on medievalists.net, and the free sample there throws light on the name Galdor. Via the book’s first chapter on “Anglo-Saxon Understandings of Galdor”. You’ll of course recall the sceptical elf-lord at The Council of Elrond, named as ‘Galdor of the Havens’.

* There’s a new book on the intellectual and religious reception of C.S. Lewis in America in the 20th century, and the author is currently doing a number of podcasts and webinars.

* A three-part series of blog articles for The Davenant Institute at the end of 2023, “Like the Days of the Tree: The Other Voice of Allegory in Tolkien’s Artistic Reflections”; “Behold Your Music: Harmonic Sorrow in Tolkien’s Ainulindale“ and “Eagles, Ents, and Dwarves: Tolkien’s Taming of the Romantic Imagination”.

* A new PDF paper in Portuguese, whose title translates for sense as “Place And Cartography In The Hobbit: Reflections On Teaching Geography”. There would certainly seem to be potential for eight year olds to move from an initial local ‘classroom mapping’ (e.g. “create a frieze-map in the classroom, discovering and naming what we can see along the far-horizon from our classroom window”), to the creation of a similar fantasy map-scroll for the journey in The Hobbit.

* And finally, a pleasingly crafted envisioning of Bilbo’s wall-map with his favourite Shire walks marked on it in red ink.

Although note that Bilbo’s may actually have been smaller in range, depending on what the “Country Round” encompassed for Bilbo…

“He loved maps, and in his hall there hung a large one of the Country Round with all his favourite walks marked on it in red ink.”

Tolkien Gleanings #162.

* New on Archive.org, a long outline of the Critical Response to Tolkien’s Fiction over the decades. Such as it was, since many pre-2000s critics seem to have either not read LoTR at all, to have hardly read it, or to have misunderstood what little they did read.

* The Tea With Tolkien blog has a Live Q&A with Dr. Holly Ordway, author of the new book Tolkien’s Faith.

* In the USA, Ball State University announces…

“a new exhibit [to] showcase material from the Deborah and Fritz Dolak J.R.R. Tolkien Collection, which was donated to University Libraries Archives and Special Collections in 2013. [This will include the display of a] fantasy map project [undertaken by students] in the spring of 2023”

* The J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscripts: Public Showings 2024 at Marquette University in the USA. Two dates, booking now.

* The Imaginative Conservative examines “C.S. Lewis on the Existence of Fairies”…

“Lewis concludes his outline of the medieval theories about fairies: “Such were the efforts to find a socket into which the Fairies would fit. No agreement was achieved. As long as the Fairies remained at all they remained elusive.””

* Tolkien and Fantasy looks for Fairy-tale Versions of Beowulf and discovers two partial re-tellings of Beowulf in an unlikely place, Andrew Lang’s anthology The Red Book of Animal Stories (1899).

* A call-for-papers for a 2024 Canadian university conference on The Christian Legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien, which is set for 27th-28th September 2024.

* And finally, Hobbit vinyl unearthed in Malvern, which then sold at auction for an unearthly price.

Tolkien Gleanings #161.

* Amazon is listing the new book Tolkien et l’Antiquite: Passe et Antiquites en Terre du Milieu as set to ship in mid February 2024. The book has the proceedings of the conference of the same name at the Sorbonne in Paris, which examined how Tolkien’s imagination drew partly on classical antiquity. The book lists as an English edition, but also as “English, French”. My guess would be in French but with long English abstracts?

* A new open-access Kristine Larsen article “Rayed Arcs and the ‘Rory Bory Aylis'” and offers a further examination of the Father Christmas Letters, seen through the lens of science. It’s a follow-on to her earlier article, but here focusing… “on Tolkien’s use of astronomy, especially aurorae” [‘the northern lights’].

* New on YouTube, the talk “Rings of Smoke: Pipe-weed, Pipes, and Smoking Imaginary in J.R.R. Tolkiens’s Narrative”. Being, as I recall, the only English talk in the Tolkiendil society’s event of 6th-8th October 2023. Very poor sound-quality and a very heavy accent, but it’s just about comprehensible with the aid of YouTube’s AI-aided subtitles and the presenter’s slides.

* Marcel R. Bulles fisks the Tolkien-for-kids biography book called Little People, Big Dreams: J.R.R. Tolkien (2022), one of a large series. Many biographical errors are found.

* There’s a new UK Court of Appeal ruling, relevant to British scholars and publishers alike…

it confirms that museums do not have valid copyright in photographs of (two-dimensional) works which are themselves out of copyright. It means these photographs are in the public domain, and free to use.

* New to me, though it appeared last summer, there’s an apparently book-correct new Lord of the Rings Roleplaying tabletop RPG, which gives the popular Dungeons & Dragons 5e RPG system a thorough LoTR makeover. The time period is between The Hobbit and LoTR… “It is the year 2965 of the Third Age and the Shadow is returning.” etc, but it could presumably be adapted for other periods. The game’s core rule book and Rivendell expansion book will set you back around £75. Clueless beginners will 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. This lack regrettably means you have to soil your shiny new game with a Wizards of the Coast product, a company which has tried its best to desecrate Tolkien’s LoTR. Gamemasters looking for the ‘cracks’ into which to insert a new RPG adventure might also add my own book The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth to their order.

Owl? Well, I guess they have to appeal to the Harry Potter crowd. And is Gandalf doing Captain Spock’s Vulcan hand-gesture for the Star Trek crowd?

There are said by the review to be other expansion books, Ruins of Eriador, Tales of Eriador and Shire Adventures (hobbits at home), but either they ship as insert-booklets with the core rule book or they have yet to be published in the UK. Amazon UK knows nothing of them.

Curiously Amazon has found a way to slip past my ad-blocker and wants to also sell me baby stuff, in ads among the listings page for the above. Is the pent-up post-lockdown baby-boom finally happening? Or is Amazon’s dumb taste-matching bot just even dumber than usual?