Tolkien Gleanings #101.

* The Art of Jay Johnstone, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. These substantial free Substack posts offer extensive commentary on the art, which many will recall seeing an example of on the cover for the recent second edition of Tolkien’s Library.

Jay Johnstone’s website.

* In France, the nation’s Museum of the Great War is set to host a one-day conference on ‘Tolkien and the war: experience and representation’. The venue is a large museum of some 70,000 items, about ten miles east of Paris. I can’t find the speakers and topics, but tickets for Saturday 22nd July are here if you can delve deep enough into the page.

* A free sample article from the latest paid-for Saint Austin Review (July/August 2023, Vol. 23, No. 4) is the two-page “Who is Tom Bombadil?”. The issue also leads with “Chesterton, Tolkien, and Lewis in Elfland”, and later in the same issue there are ‘new voices’ items titled “Galadriel’s Mirror” and “Anduril, Flame of the West”.

* Il Pensiero Storico: Rivista internazionale di storia delle idee reviews Tolkien, l’Europa e la Tradizione (2022) in its Italian translation. The short book is found to offer…

“an essay on the flavoursome soup of studies, readings, passions and professions that fed Tolkien’s existence; the taste of which Berger evokes in every step of his examination. [Though] we are not dealing here with a specialized study, but a taster. Yet it is a seasoned introduction to Tolkien’s world, garnished with mythological materials, archetypal symbols of the European tradition, the vision of heroism and the relationship between technique and nature, and links with the cultural heritage of the West. [The book] recalls that “carrying the weight of tradition” forward is basically a moral duty for all of us.”

* Popping up on Amazon UK, Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology is a forthcoming single-author book of essays. Due in mid September 2023 and pre-ordering now with a £28 ebook. Has an endorsement from Thomas Honegger. Some of the essays also discuss the movie adaptation of LoTR. One advance reviewer usefully writes…

“the essays in Estes’s collection use Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings to explore everyday themes such as friendship, home, and food, as well as more obviously theological concepts, like apostleship, salvation, and theodicy”.

* In English in the latest edition of the Turkish open-access journal Milel ve Nihal, a paper by a University of Exeter PhD student, “The Understanding of Evil in British Romanticism: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Ring as “a running ambivalence”…

“there is a depth in Tolkien’s works, lost between the praise of his supporters and the criticism of his opponents, which exceeds what either group claims to have found.”

* And finally… “The Sound of Tolkien Metal”, a curated 22-hour playlist of what one has to assume is the best Tolkien-inspired heavy metal music. Google suggests it may date from the end of June 2023, and the dates on some of the 250+ tracks it includes seems to confirm this.

“the blasts of it smote the hills and echoed in the hollows, rising in a mighty shout above the roaring” (LoTR)

Tolkien Gleanings #100.

* The latest Providence magazine uses Tolkien to offer thoughts on “Ambiguity and Violence: A Christian Perspective”. Freely available online.

* What looks like a new PhD for the University of Montreal, “Une interpretation semiotique de On Fairy-Stories: la formulation d’un modele Tolkienien du plurimonde et de l’experience fictionnelle” (2023). (‘A Semiotic Interpretation of “On Fairy-Stories”: Formulating a Tolkienian Model of Secondary Worlds and Fictional Experiences’). This appears to ask which of the academic semiotic models might best fit Tolkien, and then derives and refines a new ‘Tolkienian model’. Freely available online, in French.

* Freely available online, the Portuguese essay “Boromir, Um heroi imperfeito” (‘Boromir, the imperfect hero’). A chapter from the new Portuguese book J.R.R. Tolkien: Construtor de Mundos. Personagens, Lugares e Adaptacoes (2023). Which also includes essays in Portuguese on “Sauron and his many names”; “On Beorn”; “Aragorn and Anduril: the representation of the hero and the medieval sword”; “On Norse Mythological Geography” and others. Seems to be the first in a planned series of books. What may be the book’s website at almedina.net is currently not responding to a request from the UK.

* This weekend sees the Tolkien Magellan Society annual Council event, with talks and exhibitions and at least one life-sized troll…

They also do a very nice line in event posters…

The Sociedad Tolkien Magallanes appears to be in Patagonia, South America.

* Nearby in Chile, South America, a two-day ‘Tolkien Opera’ event in July 2023…

“Amigos de la Opera present a two-day cycle of song dedicated to the famous British author J.R.R. Tolkien. The voices of Violeta Juanez Rojas and Lili Cortes will breath life into the writer’s verses, accompanied on piano by Maria Rey Carmona and Toni Pons. They will also perform a series of songs published in 1967. The final day will also feature talks by different experts on the many aspects of Tolkien’s life and work”.

Tolkien Gleanings #99.

* In The Catholic Herald this week, “The untold tale of Tolkien’s faith”. The author has carefully read an advance access copy of the forthcoming Holly Ordway book…

“Holly Ordway, my colleague and friend, has written a fantastic new book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography […] it is a sober and factual treatment of his entire life from a religious point of view. It gave me a totally fresh impression of the man. And I am not alone. Tolkien expert John Garth has said of Ordway’s work that he “learned far more reading it than I even realised I needed to learn” [… this forthcoming book] is not hagiographical or triumphalist, but it is a triumph, a long overdue account of one of the last century’s most prominent and influential Catholics.”

The book is due in September 2023.

* Walking Tree yesterday posted eight new links to new Tolkien book reviews and another one today. Most have already been linked here at Tolkien Gleanings.

* New on Archive.org to borrow, a poor scan of Cor Blok’s A Tolkien tapestry: pictures to accompany The Lord of the Rings (2011). Imagine Tove Jansson’s Moomin book illustrations, crossed with the sort of stylised animals and people of the sort sometimes to found at the edges of early medieval illuminated manuscripts. Seems to be part of the 1960s/70s assumption that The Lord of the Rings was a children’s book like The Hobbit.

* And finally, a new survey article “Traditional Second-Hand Bookshops in Britain”… finds that “the idea that ‘traditional’ bookshops are disappearing is a tradition in itself.”

Tolkien Gleanings #98.

* The new Jerusalem 365 podcast looks at the history of “The Hebrew Translation of Tolkien”… “After their plane was downed over Egypt, Israeli soldiers translated J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit while they were in captivity.”

* Last week Hither Shore: Power and Authority in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien – Band 16 (2019) popped up on Google Books, and on Amazon UK and Amazon DE. No delivery is yet possible from the UK, but the German Amazon has it as “27th June 2023” and shipping. I seem to recall it was delayed by the lockdowns, and so it may be indeed be new despite the 2019 date. Anyway, the German Amazon has a ‘Look Inside’ and so the contents can be known…

* Walking Tree Press has a new page for the forthcoming Thomas Honegger book of essays, to be titled Tweaking Things a Little. Though it doesn’t give much away about the contents, just the sections under which the essays are collected…

 – Worldbuilding, Icebergs, Depth, and Enchantment.
 – Names, Onomastics, and Onomaturgy.
 – Languages.
 – Riders, Chivalry, and Knighthood.
 – Ethics.

* On Archive.org to borrow, the book The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the romance of history (2007). This appears to place Tolkien in the wider cultural context of an attempt at “a robust revival of Christian humanism”, at a time when relativist modernism was rapidly growing in power and mainstream acceptance. I’m no historian of such things, and as such I wonder how much of a coherent programme that pushback was at the time. Though I guess one might see it that way in post-1968 hindsight, and perhaps this arc of cultural-religious history bolstered Tolkien’s sense that he had fought in ‘the long defeat’ in the 1930s-1950s?

* Spain’s Universidade de Santiago de Compostela has a four-day Tolkien summer school, the title of which translates rather awkwardly as ‘Tolkien: a classic of our time’. Though a ‘classic vintage’ might work nicely and poetically in English. Anyway, the application deadline has gone and it starts tomorrow. But some may be interested in the list of introductory talks and names.

* And finally, the Oxford Mail has a glowing Theatre Review: The Hobbit at the Oxford Playhouse.

Tolkien Gleanings #97.

* New on Amazon, a pre-order page for Thomas Honegger’s book Tweaking Things a Little: Essays on the Epic Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and G.R.R. Martin. The book is to be a Walking Tree title of 466 pages, and according to Amazon is due on 19th July 2023. Though some other sources say September, while Honegger’s own site says August. No sign of a table-of-contents as yet.

* Newly and freely online, the Presentation Abstracts book PDF for the forthcoming conference Mythmoot X: ‘Homeward Bound’. The talk on “The Hobbit and Middle Age” looks intriguing, considering as it does Tolkien’s appreciation of “the nature and value” of late middle age and old age. That’s an overlooked aspect, and may even have had an especially useful impact on the world at a critical time — in the form of LoTR influencing the heavily youth-oriented student counterculture circa 1966-68.

* ‘J.R.R. Tolkien – the forgotten text interviews’ offers Tolkien’s side of the magazine and newspaper interviews he gave, and has these read by one of the better old TTS generated robo-voices. TTS voices have improved greatly since ye olde days of Microsoft Sam, but are not as good as the new AI voice clones. The older TTS ones are however still useful, in that they make it easy to distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘fake’. ‘Part One’ (40 minutes, March 2023) is on YouTube. It seems that ‘Part Two’ has not yet been posted.

* Nancy Bunting is seeking information about the coastal command structure relating to the First World War Acoustic Mirror at Kilnsea. Tolkien was posted to the coast as an officer, but… “The sticking point is who was in command of the acoustic mirror at Kilnsea? We believe it has to be the Royal Garrison Artillery at Spurn Point, but we don’t have documentation”. Her enquiry, on the Great War Forum, is almost an essay in itself. However, this also notes that…

“I need to make if very clear that even though Tolkien was an experienced and trained Signals officer (we know he had training for and used a Fullerphone in the fall of 1916), he was NOT in the loop for the acoustic mirror [a large sonic monolith, used to track incoming Zeppelin airship bombers]. That was in a different jurisdiction.”

* And finally, Stone Ramblers will be undertaking a 10 mile walk over Tolkien Trail & Great Haywood on 19th October 2023. They’re local, Stone being the pleasant railway/river town between the city of Stoke-on-Trent and the county-town of Stafford.

Tolkien Gleanings #96.

* A new article at the Archives and Manuscripts Dept. of the Bodleian Library…

“As some of you may know, since 2011 the Bodleian has been archiving websites, which are collected in the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive (BLWA) and made publicly accessible through the platform Archive-it […] you can find websites of societies dedicated to the study of famous authors whose papers are kept at the Bodleian [Tolkien, Larkin, etc]. We are happy to consider suggestions from our users about websites that could be suitable additions to the collection.”

* The journal Fantasy Art and Studies has produced five new issues since I last looked (back then they had just released the “Arthurian Fantasy” issue, Autumn 2019). The journal is mostly in French, but usually has a few English items. I see there was a Spring 2021 “Enchanted Music” issue, which had the essay “Singing into Being: Defamiliarisation as Creation in J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis” in English. Free-to-read online, in flipbook form.

* A two-page article in the latest edition of the British paid-for magazine The Oldie introduces unsuspecting oldies to Tolkien. The article seems quite a reasonable two-page introduction, for those who previously had no idea at all about Tolkien the man.

The article’s author lived in Oxford in the 1950s, and recalls that Tolkien… “lived for a while in what looked like a blackened witch’s house opposite my lodgings in Holywell Street.” This “witch house” would be 99 Holywell Street (1950-53), which today appears to have had its thick black grime partly sand-blasted back to the pale ashlar stone. Historic Oxford has it that his son Christopher Tolkien then had the house from 1954-1967. In which case… was this the primary site at which Christoper and his assistant Guy Gavriel Kay worked on The Silmarillion? Or was that work done elsewhere? Update: No, the work was done elsewhere, in a large barn at the farm where Christopher then lived.

* And finally, composer Paul Corfield Godfrey and the Welsh Volante Opera / Prima Facie have this week released the fifth and final part of his ‘The Silmarillion as opera’ series of recordings.

Tolkien Gleanings #95.

* “Clambering Hobbits and Marching Soldiers: Finnish and English Translations of Manner of Motion in Tolkien’s The Hobbit or There and Back Again and
Linna’s Tuntematon Sotilas“ (2023). A Masters dissertation in English for the University of Eastern Finland. Some may may not be too interested in the tumbling and back-flips involved in translation work, but the extraction of all the motion-words from The Hobbit could be a useful time-saver for those writing about motion/ walking / distances. Has extensive colour-coded tables at the back.

* New to me, and uploaded to Archive.org last April, Tolkien and Gordon’s Songs for the Philologists in a 2007 OCR edition with Tolkien’s contributions starred. Has a different version of Sam’s “A Bump o’ the Boot” troll song, than that given in The Lord of the Rings. Tom Shippey has expert translations of four of the more personal poems by Tolkien, to be found in the back of his book The Road to Middle Earth.

* New in Spiked!, “Collecting old books is now a radical act”, an article on recent book censorship. So far as I’m aware, there have only been two such instances affecting Tolkien’s text. Tolkien’s own early removal from The Hobbit of a reference to Bilbo seeing “a tinker” (i.e. itinerant, nomadic hobbit, of a type elsewhere mentioned) ambling by when the dwarves were making their way out of the Shire. And Elrond’s use of “lesser men” at the Council of Elrond in LoTR never made it to Christopher Tolkien’s Silmarillion: while LoTR had “the blood of the Numenoreans became mingled with that of lesser men.”, the Silmarillion had “For the blood of the Numenoreans became much mingled with that of other men”. Those are the only instances I know of.

* Now freely available online “Middle America Meets Middle-earth: American Publication and Discussion of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, 1954-1969” (2003). Described as a Masters degree “paper”, for the School of Information at the University of North Carolina.

* The Urbana Theological Seminary’s Tolkien Conference. I see there have been six conferences so far, the last in 2022. There are some videos online for 2021 and there’s a new 50-minute podcast interview (June 2023) with the main conference organiser.

* And finally, the unfinished teenage novel “The Quest of Bleheris” by C.S. Lewis… “In 2021, Inklings scholar Don W. King was able to provide a full transcription of “The Quest of Bleheris” in Sehnsucht journal. Recently, Sehnsucht has become an open-access journal.” It’s thus freely available. His youthful attempt at a novel was an Arthurian romance in the William Morris style.

Tolkien Gleanings #94.

* New on Archive.org to borrow, The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien (2011) from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

* Posted on a Spanish forum, as a spur to a general discussion of Tolkien, a map I’d not seen before. The text at the bottom was too small to read. But the style suggested the 1960s U.S. paperback cover-artist Barbara Remington. This thought led me to a fine 3,000px scan of the map still freely online at Boston Rare Maps. Turns out that Ballantine Books sold her rather pleasing map by mail for $1.50, back in the 1960s. The maps don’t show up on eBay today, if a PicClick search is anything to go by.

Although one has to wonder how many fans can actually properly ‘read’ the Middle-earth maps. A 2021 OS survey of 2,000 people found that 77% (nearly four people in every five) can’t read a standard British Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 map in even the most basic way.

OS 1:25,000 map example, near Stoke-on-Trent. Red dashed lines are public footpaths.

60% of people also admit they get lost because they can’t even follow a simple way-marked map shown on a mobile phone. There’s perhaps an opportunity here to run short courses for teens in ‘Tolkien and the joy of maps’ that also teaches regular map-making / map-reading skills, based not only on the Middle-earth maps but also off the fact that Tolkien was a Signals Officer — a job for which swift map-reading was a vital skill. Could also be combined with Strider-like ‘natural wayfinding’ methods for North-South orientation, as many people also seem unable to maintain their orientation to north when walking.

* My latest 80-page PDF ‘zine Tolkien Gleanings issue 5 (May-June 2023) is now freely available. All the recent Gleanings collected in one searchable bundle, plus some quick essays, notes, a film review and artwork.

* And finally, Tolkien’s ‘trench fever’ could soon be cured with relative ease. Researchers on the disease at the University of Basel in Switzerland… “have discovered neutralizing antibodies, which prevent bacterial infections or bring them to a halt” in cases of what is commonly known as ‘trench fever’.