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?

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.