Tolkien Gleanings #112.

* New on Archive.org, Tolkien’s “English and Welsh” seen in its original context, along with other lectures. As the volume Angles and Britons: O’Donnell Lectures.

* A new second edition of The Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (June 2023), though sadly aimed at university libraries and thus a whopping £150 for some 590 pages. Surely there would be more profit in making it a mass-market £30 title, given the thousands of fans who would buy it VS. a few hundred university libraries? Now the fans will just pirate it instead, whereas they might have ordered a paper edition. Anyway, it has…

“a chronology, an introduction, an extensive bibliography, and cross-referenced entries on more than 800 authors, ranging across the entire historical spectrum. More than 200 other entries describe the fantasy sub-genres, key images in fantasy literature, technical terms used in fantasy criticism”

No reference is made in the blurb to the venerable Brian Stableford’s Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (2005), but it seems possible the new book is a second expanded edition of his work under a new editor. Since I can find no first edition credited to the second edition’s author.

* The Oxford Tolkien 50 event’s website has some details of the forthcoming small exhibitions at the University of Oxford Tolkien at Exeter College and Tolkien at Merton: Fellowship and Friendship.

* In France, the Tolkiendil society has a scholarly event to… “celebrate the 50 years of the first French translation of the Lord of the Rings”. In French, but one talk appears to be in English as “Rings of Smoke: Pipe-weed, Pipes, and Smoking Imaginary in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Narrative”. I’d hope to see this on YouTube later in the year. The event is set for 6th-8th October 2023. I see there’s also a re-issue of the French edition of the Carpenter biography, Tolkien: une biographie, due in September 2023.

* The proceedings of the Tolkien Society Autumn Seminar are on YouTube as video, uploaded in July 2023. Due in book form in October 2023, with the title Translating and Illustrating Tolkien (Peter Roe Series XXIII). Not yet on Amazon UK.

* Signum University’s Australian OzMoot, set for 26th-28th January 2024. ‘Above All Shadows: Tolkien and Uncertain Futures’ will be on the theme of Tolkien’s depictions of hope in the face of future uncertainty.

* Coming soon to the former mill-town of Barnsley in northern England, the touring Middle-earth exhibition. This time it will be free. Barnsley is about ten miles south of Leeds, and thus a visit to the show might be combined with a Tolkien-oriented visit to Leeds. Local walker Chris Tye has a Tolkien’s ‘walk to work’ route at Leeds.

* And finally, the Catholic Irish writer Rosa Mulholland’s vivid children’s fantasy The Walking Trees, now freely available in PDF. This is not the later handsome illustrated edition, which is utterly available except physically in a few Irish libraries. This version has been assembled from the original magazine serial. It has some Tolkien-like moments. Walking, talking trees. Flying on the back of an eagle. It ends rather abruptly, but perhaps the book editions gave it a better ending? Anyway, enjoy.

Tolkien Gleanings #111.

Gleanings returns from a hiatus during part of August, with a bumper “eleventy-one” post! I had planned to leave it until the end of August. But of course then barrel-fulls of the stuff began rolling in, despite my thinking that it might be quiet in August. So here’s a more manageable Gleanings post than might have appeared at the end of August.

* There’s to be a ‘Tolkien weekend’ at the Birmingham Oratory, 1st – 2nd September 2023. This also appears to form the official launch event for the new Holly Ordway book on Tolkien’s faith, a book (which according to its stated dates) should start shipping on 30th August. Pre-ordering now.

There’s also a long pre-release Word on Fire YouTube interview with Ordway about the new book.

* New on Archive.org to borrow, the major book Tolkien: a cultural phenomenon (2003). Beautifully written, at least to me, although one reviewer observed that the tone might be too didactic and British for American academics. The Archive.org scan is the expanded second edition with a heavyweight and politically astute chapter on “Tolkien in the History of Ideas”…

“In the first edition of this book in 1992 I treated what I called Tolkien’s ‘theological anarchism’ somewhat apologetically and marginally, as if it would be better cut away. But I now believe that it is essentially related to Tolkien’s overall ethical vision, and that that vision is a compelling one.”

* New on YouTube at the end of July, a recording of the talk “Pity & Tolkien” given at the ‘Interchanging Melodies’ online event in summer 2023.

* Early issues of Orcrist (1968-1977, 2017) from the University of Wisconsin J.R.R. Tolkien Society. These are being freely placed online, and a scan of the bumper 100-page issue #1 has just arrived. Issues now online contain, among other early scholarly articles…

    – “Tolkien in the Letters of C.S. Lewis” (#1)
    – “Saruman’s Vision of a New Order” (#1)
    – “Color Symbolism in The Lord of the Rings” (#8)
    – “The Conservatism of J.R.R. Tolkien” (#8)
    – “What Are Ents Made Of?” (#8)

* The Quettar: Bulletin of the Linguistic Fellowship of the Tolkien Society Vol. 5 (1991 to 1995) has recently been recreated from scans, and is now available in paper via the Lulu.com print-on-demand site. The first four volumes (1980 to 1990) are also available in the same way. A free Index is available.

* Little Delvings in the Marsh (beta), my new custom search-tool for Tolkien scholars. Currently ‘in beta’ with a bare search-box and indexing 140+ websites, journals and pages. It doesn’t index wikis, forums, fan-fiction etc. You may see Google’s text-advert at the top of results (I don’t benefit from these). But the advert-bar is easily blocked via uBlock Origin or a similar good ad-blocker.

* New on Archive.org to borrow, From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: the war of ideas between Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis (2003). I’d never heard of the book before, despite my mild interest in Clarke (mostly in his ocean work and books, which could use some audiobooks if anyone’s interested). Clarke of course being the famous British futurist and best-selling science-fiction writer. He must have approved this book, since he wrote the opening and closing sections.

* The full Programme PDF for the International Congress on the Study of the Middle Ages (July 2023). This year the several Tolkien strands, as finalised, included some talks I’d not previously noted in Gleanings…

    – “Dark are the Pathless Ways” (unknown content, but an intriguing title)
    – “Travel and the Quest Motif in Tolkien’s Work” (paired with the above talk)
    – “Tolkien Studies and the ‘Theological Turn'”
    – “Oath-Making and Oath-Keeping in Tolkien – Literary Devices or Spiritual Statements?”

* Tolkien’s original of “The Root of the Boot” song (1923). The scan is freely available online via Leeds University. It’s different from Sam’s troll song in LoTR.

* Many thanks to ‘Elise’ for making me aware that there’s a 2019 Dimitra Fimi talk on YouTube. This is a good 50-minute overview survey of the uses of the fox in Tolkien (with audience singing, even), and I hadn’t encountered it before. I was interested to learn that there’s a 1826 Scots version of ‘The fox went out’ short folk-song — but curiously neither Fimi nor the audience mention that its line “The wind’s in the west” is also the same line in LoTR. The line is said by Sam, and is found very close to the appearance of the talking fox. I’ve just now found that this line was also known to Beatrix Potter, as found in a 1911 letter to her publisher explaining the use of the name Tod for her book The Tale of Mr. Tod (1912). It came via the same Scots folk-song, by the look of it…

“‘Tod’ is surely a very common name for a fox? It is probably Saxon, it was the word in ordinary use in Scotland a few years ago, probably is still amongst the country people. […] “Hey quoth the Tod / it’s a braw bright night! / The wind’s in the west / and the moon shines bright” — Mean to say you never heard that?”

I also wasn’t aware of the 1920s Tolkien poem “Regingardus the fox”, which Fimi mentions in passing, apparently one of a set of four poems inspired by medieval bestiaries. Nor did I know about Tolkien’s early 1909 boyhood “Book of the Foxrook” linguistic / animalic notebook.

* On Archive.org for free, What the children sing: a book of the most popular rhymes & games (1915). Apparently Tolkien’s wife Edith owned this, and this was where he took the notation for the old folk tunes (“The fox went out…” etc) as the basis for some of the Middle-earth songs. Thanks to someone in the audience of the Fimi talk (see above) for mentioning this.

* The art show for the forthcoming Oxonmoot 2023 should soon be available online via the kunstmatrix.com, a slick site which tries to emulates a white-walled gallery in a Web browser. One to bookmark, if you can’t afford to get there in person.

* It looks like Thomas Honegger’s book Tweaking Things a Little: Essays on the Epic Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and G.R.R. Martin (July 2023) may have been published, though only in paper. No ebook, from which one might learn more about that’s in it, and how much of the book has been seen before as essays and papers. The publisher Walking Tree only gives the book’s vague higher-level section headings (e.g. “Languages”), each of which I guess may hold essays or essay-blends.

* A forthcoming book, or at least a title… Creating Creatures: The Science and Imagination Behind Tolkien’s Iconic Species. I see the author produced an “evolutionary history of the cat” book in 2023 summing up the many new discoveries on mysterious moggie movements in pre-history, and a 2017 book on the predictability (or not) of evolution. He’s a proper science writer, with a focus on creatures and evolution. Thus the new book on Middle-earth creatures looks promising, especially if it can be pleasingly illustrated without the copyright lawyers swooping down on it. No more details, as yet.

* Tolkien scholar Austin Freeman (Tolkien Dogmatics) on “Why Should Theologians Read H.P. Lovecraft?” (March 2023).

* And finally, Smaug in Georgia, USA…

“A dragon has fired up the residents of a small mountain town in north Georgia. […] The proposed [mountain-top] dragon, which would have been visible to passers-by, was slated to be more than 30 feet tall with a 160-foot wingspan and would resemble Smaug from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.”

Little Delvings in the Marsh, my new search tool for Tolkien scholars. With the aid of Google it indexes over 100 sites and pages, all those I can think of, via a Google custom search-engine. No wikis or fan-fiction, no Reddit, and no merchandising piffle such as ‘Lego Frodo’ etc. Very much in beta, but it will expand as I find or remember further sites.

Note that a Google custom search tends to work best with more sophisticated searches. Trying it with just one or two simple keywords may give lacklustre results. A custom search is also not a great tool for discovering “What’s new?” (though you can ‘sort by date’). More like “What’s old?”.

The hit-counts refer to the full Google Search. A custom engine can’t be bothered to re-calculate the hits for the sub-set of sites.

If the dumb drop-down auto-suggest annoys (as it will), block it in your uBlock Origin custom filters list, thus…

cse.google.com##.gsc-completion-container

And block the ads thus…

cse.google.com##.gsc-wrapper > .gsc-adBlock

Tolkien Gleanings #110.

* A new book collection of work by David Bratman, Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays: On Tolkien, the Inklings, and Fantasy Literature (2023). Available now as a $10 Kindle ebook from Mythopoeic Press. Among others, essays on…

   – The Artistry of Omissions and Revisions in The Lord of the Rings.
   – Smith of Wootton Major and Genre Fantasy.
   – Yes, There Is Religion in Middle-earth.
   – The Making of a Tolkien Fan: A Personal Reminiscence.

* Freely available online, “Tolkien and Comparative Historical Linguistics: Some insights from the earliest works on Elvish languages” (2022). “This paper aims to identify the influence of Tolkien’s academic background in the field of linguistic studies on the creation of his Elvish languages.”

* A 130+ minute podcast on Tolkien’s Letters On Anarcho-Monarchy (May 2023) with Professor Rachel Brown (medieval history at the University of Chicago).

* At the University of Oxford, “How to write The Lord of the Rings”. Being… “a series of free seminars [starting in early October 2023] aimed at those who have read Tolkien’s work but are interested in gaining a bit more insight into his life, career, and writings.” Includes Simon Horobin on “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Philologist” on 22nd November 2023. Face-to-face with limited auditorium capacity, booking now. Those in Oxford may be also interested in the Oxford Seminars in Cartography Conference, which is to include what sounds like the introductory talk “Artful maps: exploring the visual culture of cartography” on 26th September 2023.

* Slowly being scanned and freely placed online, Green Dragon (1966-1972), the ‘zine of the early Tolkien Society of America. Another new issue was added last week. If you own any of the still-missing issues or similar rare early ‘zines, I’m sure they’d be glad to have a set of scans.

Tolkien Gleanings #109.

* There’s now an official Web page for Tolkien’s Words and Worlds at the University of Oxford. “The aim of the conference is to exhibit and reflect on the range of different approaches, methodologies, and backgrounds with which Tolkien has been studied in the past 50 years”. 2nd-3rd September 2023, with a 31st July registration deadline. The page also reveals details of topics, which among others include…

   – Tolkien’s Biographical Studies: a Long History.
   – Tolkien’s Anglo-Saxon Scholarship and Fiction.
   – Kipling’s Medievalism and Tolkien’s Book of Lost Tales.
   – C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Place of Philology in English Studies.

* The Italian Tolkien Association has an article on Charles Noad and his work. In Italian but easily auto-translated.

* Added to Archive.org to borrow, a year ago, the book Evocation of Virgil in Tolkien’s Art (1986). See also the blog post “Echoes of Vergil” in Tolkien and this week’s follow-on post which offers a note on “C.S. Lewis and William Shakespeare on Vergil”.

* In the German scholarly journal for Christian culture, Stimmen der Zeit 148 (August 2023), an article whose title translates as “Green Sun: J.R.R. Tolkien, Creation and Technology”… “The article first appeared in Etudes and was translated from French by Stefan Kiechle”. Not open-access in either case, by the look of it. But obviously felt to be important enough to translate, which makes the article notable.

* MIT ponders some of the political-philosophical implications of “Talking Trees”. Free online, adapted from the new book Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art (July 2023).

A somewhat Ent-like figure on a seal, Tepe Gawra, Upper Mesopotamia (c. 3,500 – 2,900 B.C.)

* And finally, A Tolkien Reading Chart v.2023-07b, giving an overview of Tolkien works published to 2023. It’s under CC Attribution so there’s an opportunity here for an artist and designer to give this a makeover, I’d suggest. I can also imagine a “by reading age” wall-chart with a similar approach.

Tolkien Gleanings #108.

* A new Tolkien Society one-day seminar event, Secondary Believers, Secondary Worlds: Tolkien and Religion in the Twenty-First Century. Set for 26th November 2023. The call-for-papers is now live, with a 8th September 2023 deadline. The organisers of the….

“seminar welcome fresh and innovative treatments of the generative interactivity between Tolkien’s fiction, Tolkien’s faith, and the faith (or lack thereof) of the readers [who draw on Middle-earth].”

* New in Fields: journal of Huddersfield student research, “How Architecture Expresses Character Traits in Middle-earth: analysing the great dwarven cities of Moria & Erebor”.

* The Guild of St George offers “A Tolkien reading walk” in early September 2023. It’s said that this is just one event, as… “the Bewdley Museum and Ruskin Land are holding a Tolkien weekend in Bewdley, in collaboration with the University of Birmingham”. But there are no further details at present, other than the walk. Bewdley is a town in the Worcestershire countryside, about six miles the other side of The Black Country, in the West Midlands of England. The event is not listed on the Museum’s “What’s On” page, and I don’t see any associated exhibition (yet). Though I guess there may well be scope for a small regional show which celebrates Tolkien’s connections with Worcestershire, and then tours the county’s libraries and museums.

* I see that a recent series of online lectures has been and gone. “Tolkien, Christianity, and Art” was offered by the Lumen Christi Institute, 18th – 22nd July 2023.

* A call for papers for a pre-Halloween meeting on Medieval Monstrosities (Illinois Medieval Association). Submissions are due by 15th September 2023.

* And finally… new on Archive.org to borrow, the book Fantasy and Science-Fiction Medievalisms (2015). This includes an opening survey of “Low-culture Receptions of Tolkien’s High Fantasy”. And, by sheer co-incidence, the new Tolkien Pop! on Substack. The author discusses Tolkien’s influence on “various pop cultural artefacts”.

Tolkien Gleanings #107.

* Newly released by the Tolkien Society, “Obituary: Charles Noad”.

* News of a forthcoming book, The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien. Due 2nd January 2024, and pre-ordering now at a whopping £130 ($170). Erm, it’s a three-volume set, then? Nope, just a standard academic book with a standard robo-cover. It’s from the usually-leftist publisher Routledge, which is also a bit off-putting — but the contents do sound interesting…

While most criticism has concentrated on Tolkien’s use of historical traditions of northern Europe, this book argues that Tolkien also valued Southern and Mediterranean pasts and registered the Germanic and the Scandinavian pasts as they related to other histories as much as his vision of them included a primeval mythic aura.

The TOCs suggest that the author will have chapters on Ancient Rome, the Goths, and Byzantium, and I see he has previously published Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature (2013). Which again sounds encouraging. I’d hope for a complex explication of exactly how Tolkien’s Northern sources could have sometimes reflected or been influenced by sources from the Near East, beyond the obvious influences from the Bible and perhaps from Virgil? Definitely one for the Wish List, by the look of it.

* Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Platonism is to host a conference on Participation and Subcreation in September 2023.

* A three-day “online summit”, Interchanging Melodies: Tolkien, Religion & Beyond. Has a good roster of speakers but not much notice is given, since it will run 28th – 30th July 2023. But it seems that tickets can still be had…

The cost? A course like this is typically offered for $99 or more, but contribute whatever you can to help make this possible for everyone. No human is turned down for lack of funds. If you would like to sponsor someone or host a group let us know. […] The complete summit content collection will be available on the password protected resource page. The downloadable audio and video of each session will be uploaded there and available for at least a year.

* New in French, but easily auto-translated, the open-access article “Tolkien et l’art des differentes echelles cosmiques” (‘Tolkien and the art of different cosmic scales’).

* And finally… “Dorothy L. Sayers’ Copy of Tolkien’s First Appearance in Book Form” came up for auction a few days ago. Which at least provides the rest of us with a look at the cover…

Surprisingly, the volume is not on Archive.org as a scan.