Tolkien Gleanings #160.

* Phil Dragash’s full-cast unabridged audio of The Fellowship of the Ring, one of the great audio-works of our time, has been updated with a 2023 version. Released today. Importantly there is a…

“new version of [the 1.04 hours chapter, now 1.09] ‘A Journey in the Dark’, provided by Phil Dragash, that restores the sections missing from the original”

The sections missing (due to an oversight) total five minutes and involved the latter part of the wading of the Watcher’s pool-edge, the first encounter with the likely site of the door-trees and Doors of Moria, and the short but poignant section involving Bill the pony. I identified the absence a year or two ago, and I’m very glad it has now been restored. Those impressed by his free work may like to know that I had a long interview with Phil in the first issue of my Tolkien Gleanings PDF.

To legally download Dragash’s recording of Fellowship you need to own the books in print, the official audiobook, and also the Howard Shore score recording.

* A look at the pleasing 1977 Folio Society header-art for Fellowship.

* From Japan in English, the new “Frodo the Wanderer from the Shire: Self, Elf-Friends, and Community in The Lord of the Rings”. Free in open-access. The academic repository labels this as January 2024, and as coming from the Bulletin of The Society of English Literature and Linguistics, Nagoya University, Japan.

* At the Marion E. Wade Center on 1st February 2024, “‘Dreaming in the Margins’: Tolkien’s Engagements with The Battle of Maldon” with Benjamin Weber. It appears there will be an online livestream. Weber…

“will discuss J.R.R. Tolkien’s recently-released translation of the Old English poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’ with reference to both Tolkien’s fiction and scholarship on Old English literature.”

* Also at Wheaton in May 2024, George MacDonald and the Prophetic Imagination: A Bicentenary Conference.

* Set for April 2024 in the UK, a conference session on The Past, Present and Future of Medieval Art in the British Isles…

“Recent discoveries such as the Staffordshire Hoard, the Macclesfield Psalter, and the wall paintings of St Cadoc’s, Llancarfan, and the publication of significant studies of Anglo-Saxon through Gothic art in Britain have profoundly changed the scholarly landscape and demand that we reassess some of our key ideas and approaches.”

Perhaps room here for a paper on Tolkien’s influences, in terms of enticing fresh talent? I’d imaging there are stories to tell about how a youthful interest in Tolkien and Middle-earth led ultimately into a career in the field? And lessons to be drawn from this.

* Italy continues its work with advanced school pupils with the 2024 “Tolkienian Itineraries” series of workshops. “Aimed at classical high school students”, the students undertake a 30-hour project under the guidance of five expert teachers… “coming from different disciplinary areas but sharing an interest in Tolkien studies”.

* Three articles from Volume 2 of the Italian I Quaderni di Arda: Rivista di studi Tolkieniani e mondi fantastici (2020) are now available free on Academia.edu, and can also be had without joining Academia.edu by searching “for their titles” in quote marks on Google Scholar.

* And finally, the UK’s Barnsley Chronicle local newspaper reports “Museum seeks out best Tolkien memorabilia”…

“The [town’s] museum will host an online event on Thursday 21st February 2024, between 6.30pm and 7.30pm to find the best Lord of the Rings memorabilia in the country.”

Tolkien Gleanings #159.

* The New York Tolkien Conference will return in summer 2024, after a hiatus (the last event was before the lockdowns, in 2019). The conference will be held as a one-day event on 15th June 2024 at Baruch College, which is in the centre of Manhattan, New York City. Booking now, and I see that the call-for-papers is still open.

* Due toward the end of April 2024, a single-author study of War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, by Janet Brennan Croft. Amazon UK currently ‘knows nurthink’, but this book appears to be an affordable Bloomsbury reprint of her Preager 2004 hardcover of the same name. A comparison of the page-counts doesn’t suggest a new expanded edition.

* New to me, a useful website from a collector, dedicated to The Lord of the Rings Translations. The site seems to have appeared in late summer 2023, and has updated since.

* “Catholic Culture with Tolkien”, a public lecture at the University of Washington, with a speaker from the University of Nebraska. Set for 18th January 2024.

* The University of Leiden has an afternoon event for advanced students titled “Heroes of Old and New: A Symposium on Tolkien and Old English Philology”. Set for 19th January 2024. I know there are still a few outposts of rigorous philology in Europe, and I’m guessing that Leiden is a place where a philology course is still taught?

* A call for material for an edited book with a working title of Flights of the Imagination: Dragons in Mythology and Folklore. Deadline: 17th February 2024, with chapters to be delivered by 15th May 2024. “Please send abstracts and a brief bio to Rachel Carazo at rachel.carazo@snhu.edu”

* Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education is set to offer “The Making of Middle-earth: Tolkien and the First Age” and “Written in my life-blood”: J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings as 2024 summer school courses. Currently both Web pages state… “we are expecting to announce [booking] in the coming weeks.”

* And finally, the novelist John Buchan’s pamphlet The Novel and the Fairy Tale (1931) is now online for free as a scan at Archive.org, via the University of Kashmir. It seems the essay was read by Tolkien in the 1930s.

Tolkien Gleanings #158.

* The dedicated Tolkien and Alliterative Verse website has a new “‘Secondary Sources’ page now online”. In the near future the editors also hope to be… “adding works on Tolkien’s engagement with Middle English alliterative poetry”.

* The USA’s National Nordic Museum is set for a Tolkien round-table discussion on Tolkien and Norse mythology, to accompany a big-screen screening of the first part of the LoTR movie trilogy. At a guess, then, it might be the first of a three-part event? Anyway it’s set for 18th January 2024 in Seattle.

* “Shadow Shrouds and Moonlight Veils: The Forest as an Existential Scene in Tolkien’s Legendarium”, a brisk survey chapter from the Indiana University Press book Beasts of The Forest: denizens of the dark woods (2019). This chapter is now newly free via Academia.edu. Scholar has a special arrangement with Academia.edu, and those not signed up to .edu can get a downloadable PDF simply by searching Google Scholar for “Shadow Shrouds and Moonlight Veils”. In the book, the chapter is paired with “Fiendish Forests of Middle-earth: Tolkien’s Trees as Ominous Adversaries” (not yet online).

* A Signum University online course “J.R.R. Tolkien: A Life in Letters 1”, running as two parts in February, and then “A Life in Letters 2” as another two-parter in March 2024. Also in March at Signum, I see the courses “Tolkien, the Anglo-Saxon Minstrel” on Tolkien’s Anglo-Saxon poetic inspirations, and “Grief, Mourning, and Death in Tolkien’s Legendarium”. Booking now.

* In Finnish in the new issue of the open-access journal Fafnir, “Hautaamistavat J.R.R. Tolkienin fantasiafiktiossa” (‘Burial customs in Tolkien’).

* Also in Finnish, The Lord of the Rings as a four-hour stage epic, set to have its premiere in Finland’s capital in August 2024. With… “original music by the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra”.

* And finally, Progressive Rock Central begins a new series for 2024, “Tolkien and Progressive Rock. Part I. The 1960s and 70s”. Not a critical article, but rather a blog post with a very long set of YouTube embeds.

Tolkien Gleanings #157.

* New to me, details of the Mythcon 53: the Mythopoeic Society conference 2024, which is set for Minnesota in early August 2024. Appropriately enough for the middle America location, the theme is to be ‘Fantasies of the Middle Lands’, with suggested topics including middle America (Bradbury, the rural Simak, and Ardath Mayhar spring to mind) and also literary fantasies of… “the English Midlands, beloved by Tolkien”. Though I should note that Tolkien’s interest tended specifically toward the western parts of the Midlands. He would have understood the taken-for-granted division between the east and west Midlands, also the division between the Staffordshire and Derbyshire Peak, and would further have been well aware of ‘the Welsh Marches’ — the long liminal borderland that straddles the western Midlands and Wales. Note the conference’s careful use of “of the” in the title. This suggest that a writer simply being from the place will not be enough. A better chance of selection might be had if one’s chosen writer were not only from the chosen Midlands but also wrote about it. Sadly, there are a great many examples of great writers leaving their childhood place in the English Midlands just a soon as they were able, and never once looking back.

* Yet another review of the book Tolkien and the Classical World (2021), this time in the latest edition of the open-access Spanish journal Minerva. In Spanish.

* Shalom Tidings has a new article on “Tolkien’s Secrets to a Happy Marriage”.

* The Digital Tolkien Project has a new “2023 in Review and What’s Ahead in 2024” video, on YouTube.

* Newly added to Archive.org, the Amsterdam Wind Orchestra interpreting The Lord of Rings (1990). Five ‘free samples’ only. Created in 1984-87, the full version apparently takes the form of a suite in five parts and a total of 44 minutes. Each part interprets a key character in LoTR.

* Tolkien with a telescope? Mere Inkling Press amusingly muses on “Elven Inspiration from Space?”.

* And finally, another free LORA plugin for AI image generation. This one aims to generate images of Viking architecture. More or less, since LORA creation and AI image generation are both imprecise arts. Still, it looks good enough to then be the basis of a hand-painted paint-over, with the AI having ‘done the heavy lifting’ to establish the accurate lighting. That’s a key tell-tale of AI imagery — the lighting is always perfect.

Tolkien Gleanings #156.

* The Brazilian journal TeoLiteraria: Revista de Literaturas e Teologias has a new issue themed as Anti-nihilistic literature and its use of variations on the divine in music, romance, poetry, and fiction. One article on Tolkien, with the title translating as “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fairyland: faerie as the ‘Middle-earth’ between the world of senses and the world of ideas”.

* Over Christmas the Amon Sul podcast had podcasts about or related to Earendel: 1. These Are the Voyages [of Tolkien’s Earendel]; 2. The Star-Ship Vingilot [the ship of Tolkien’s Earendel]; followed by Brightest of Angels, with the latter being on the Old English poem in which Tolkien discovered the mysterious and beautiful word earendel. This starts at six minutes in, then gets bogged down in fifteen minutes of tiptoeing around some modern scholarly and Christian sensitivities, re: Eastern and Western Christianity. But persevere, as it is otherwise a good and learned explication of the larger text in which earendel was discovered, even if some of the public-domain translations used are iffy. They get to the earendel section at about 43:00 minutes.

* The latest Unreliable Narrators podcast discusses the book Meditations on Middle-earth (2001), in which a number of fantasy writers wrote about Tolkien and his influence.

* Freely available online and possibly useful for those interested in the wider context of the initial reception of The Lord of the Rings, a new academic article in Romanian Journal of English Studies, on “Pacifist Literature During WWII: T.H. White’s Once and Future King”, a major fantasy work which appeared in 1958. The author sees the work as another reaction by a fantasy writer to the experiences of modern warfare, with White further using his fiction to explore solutions which would forestall strife and war.

* Tables are not unknown in the worlds of Tolkien scholarship, especially among the linguistic material. Thus readers may be interested to know of two table-extracting utilities. One works in your Web browser to extract any HTML table on a Web page to a .CSV file. The other can OCR any purely visual table, i.e. one presented as a fixed graphic, retaining the table form as it saves to a .CSV file.

* Freely available in the new edition of the journal Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies, “In Faery Lands Forlorn: The Fantastic Narrative Poetry Of Queen’s Early Lyrics”. Queen here being the famous British 1970s rock band, and with the article focusing on…

“early narrative songs by the band Queen, which all feature fantastic characters and seem to share the same setting. They can be interpreted as parts of the same story that takes place in Freddie Mercury’s imaginary land of Rhye. This paper argues that the songs in question can be understood and analysed as narrative poetry”.

The bibliography doesn’t reference a book-length survey-study of the poetic ‘faery rock’ of the period and its bards (Marc Bolan et al). I don’t know of one. Perhaps it still needs to be written?

* And finally, another kind of mist-enchanted rock. An ‘as-if by Tolkien’ map of The Isle of Man, a real place in the sea between Northern Ireland and northern England.

Tolkien Gleanings #155.

* Leeds Library Service’s The Secret Library blog has a new article, “Tolkien in Leeds: Back again”…

“on locating our copy of Gordon’s book, we were delighted to find, on page 28, the very illustration Atherton described, and which so very clearly inspired Tolkien’s own drawing [of Beorn’s hall]”

And a pleasing drawing it is. Part of the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition in the northern English city of Leeds… “taking place at the Central Library until January 2024”.

* The latest Law & Liberty magazine on “Tolkien Among the Greeks”, this being a lengthy review of the book J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics (March 2023).

* Amazon UK now suggests that the book Tolkien et l’antiquita: passe et antiquites en terre du milieu is due in mid February 2024. Probably the proceedings of a conference at the Sorbonne, of the same name. The title translates as ‘Tolkien and Antiquity: the past and antiquities in Middle-earth’.

* I find that the forthcoming Morrow graphic novel of The Hobbit, mentioned in a recent Gleanings, is merely a reprint. It already exists, though the news had passed me by. Possibly because it was first published way back in 1989 by Eclipse Comics, as a mini-series of three spinner-rack floppies. Then in 1990 as a collected trade paperback with an unappealing cover. Contains Moderate Peril found it a quite pleasing and faithful adaptation, which is encouraging.

* Publisher Morrow also looks forward in late 2024 to… “a new standard hardcover edition of Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien (previously only available in a slipcased edition)”.

* I somehow missed “A Typeface for Tolkien” which appeared in February 2023, though it was in the 2022 Vol. 2 issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research. Inserted late, perhaps? Takes an in-depth illustrated look at the uses of “Victor Hammer’s typefaces” for texts by Tolkien. I find that The Hammer Society has a long Hammer biography online.

* And finally, want to generate your own 2024 Tolkien calendar? November 2023 saw the release of a new free AI ‘plug-in’ that’s able to generate a close emulation of the style of the Brothers Hildebrandt, the well-known 1970s Tolkien illustrators and arguably still the best. The maker recommends using it as a ‘style plug-in’ with the Stable Diffusion 1.5 checkpoint model Illustro v1. Note that SD 1.5 struggles with generating coherent images of quadruped animals, especially ones that don’t exist in the primary world. So dragons, wargs and oliphaunts may be a bit mangled.

Tolkien Gleanings #154.

* The Brazilian open-access journal Revista Primeira Escrita has a new issue themed as Fantastico tradicional x fantastico moderno (‘The traditional fantastic vs. the modern fantastic’). This has one Tolkien essay, in Portuguese, whose title translates as ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Theory Against the Classic Fairy Tale’.

* The Brazilian open-access journal Histiria em Curso also has a new issue on fantasy, themed as Nada mais inverossimil do que a realidade: dialogos entre Historia e Literatura Fantastica no alvorecer do seculo XX (‘Nothing more unlikely than reality: dialogues between history and fantasy literature at the dawn of the 20th century’). There are three articles on Tolkien, whose titles translate as: ‘A Possible World: Tolkien’s dialogues with historiography in fantasy’; “Between the Ashes of Isengard and the Green of Fangorn: an eco-critical analysis of The Lord of the Rings”; and “Death in Middle-earth: Tolkienian views on evil”.

* Freely available, a short summary-review in a French educational journal of the 520-page multi-author book Tolkien et les sciences (‘Tolkien and the Sciences’). After summarising the book in broad outline, the reviewer concludes by briefly chafing at its popular tone and an apparently unwelcome use of humour…

“Reading the volume does not remain pleasant, because the work presents a popular bias (both when it comes to Tolkien’s work and scientific content) and a certain humor.”

* A new Masters dissertation, “The Shadow King of Fantasy: Robert E. Howard” (Texas A&M, 2023), with a PDF preview freely available. The author argues that “Howard brought barbarism back to fantasy” and thus was able to appeal to young pulp magazine audiences and working class readers. “Howard’s inclusion into fantasy scholarship” is overdue, and would expand the possibilities of discussing “themes of the working class” in fantasy and fantasy readerships. Part of one chapter surveys “Tolkien on Low Fantasy”, though this is not part of the free PDF.

* A new simple list of the ‘Father to Son’ letters sent by Tolkien.

* In Italian on YouTube, the video proceedings of a recent Italian conference on “Cosmology and Tolkien”. Six lectures appear to be freely available.

* And finally, The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy has been shown for what is said to be the first time in cinemas in Cambodia, during November-December 2023. I assume it’s a dubbed version (since Cambodia’s school teaching of English is still poor), and the press release doesn’t say if the screenings are of the original or the extended “director’s cut” version. But it does state…

“All three films will be available in selected cinemas nationwide in 2D and IMAX. This special release event will span the course of four weeks, culminating in a marathon showing of the entire trilogy at select locations.”