Tolkien Gleanings #54.

* Thanks to Sebastiano Tassinari for noting that the Renee Vink book of essays Gleanings from Tolkien’s Garden (2020) does have TOCs online. I had previously been unable to immediately find the book’s contents page, though I had found the correct Web link to order the book from Europe. It turns out that the book was detailed in a 2021 review in the Journal of Inklings Studies Vol. 11, No. 2.

* My new blog post, musing on some possible influences from “Tolkien’s wartime fireworks”.

* The Wisdom of Hobbits: an online conference, 29th April 2023. This $20 event listing brings news of a new book…

“In this three-hour, fully-online event, Lord of the Rings scholars join author Matthew J. Distefano to explore themes in the newly published book The Wisdom of Hobbits.”

The full title is The Wisdom of Hobbits: Unearthing Our Humanity at 3 Bagshot Row (March 2023), available in print or as an ebook. There’s a good in-depth podcast audio review at Tolkien Lore.

I have nothing against AI images, but it’s perhaps regrettable that a book on “our humanity” uses an unretouched AI-generated image for the cover.

* A new John Garth post “Making an ass of yourself, with Geoffrey Bache Smith”, on Geoffrey Bache Smith’s sense of humour. Also a presentation slide from Garth that did not make it onto the YouTube recordings of the March 2023 conference on Smith and Tolkien.

* New in open access, Prosody in Medieval English and Norse (2023). The Oxford University Press book attempts to… “Introduce and explain technical topics and metrical theories for the understanding of readers from a range of backgrounds”. Such things are beyond me, but some may be interested… since Tolkien was. Click “Open Access”, and then the PDF link, to get the book.

* Omentielva Quainea: The International Conference on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Invented Languages will be held in France in August 2024. Further details to be announced.

* And finally, from the buzzing world of computer-code scripting languages, a new Arda Python Library emerges…

“At various times over the last ten months, I’ve been quietly working on a Python library for doing various Tolkien-related calculations. The project is still in its early stages and currently just has two things. Firstly, an initial implementation of Year and YearDelta classes for dealing with Ages and the beginnings of a Shire Calendar class ShireDate. … Much of the initial motivation for this was wrangling data for Tolkien Timelines.”

“Gandalf had made a special study of bewitchments with fire and lights” — The Hobbit.

A new free audiobook on LibriVox, Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making (1922). Includes “Military Pyrotechny in the Great War”, written only a few years after the war ended. The final third of this discusses signalling and illumination star-shells fired from Very ‘flare’ pistols, and larger rifle-fired star-shells.

The enemy capabilities were also noted by Cyril Fall (The First World War, 1960)…

“A German attack meeting stout resistance was often a remarkable cooperation between infantry and artillery by [signalling] fireworks far more detailed than the British or French could achieve. The sky was at times so full of yellow, red, and green rockets that the observer wondered how anyone could make head or tail of the signals. Yet time after time the artillery would lengthen or shorten its fire or carry out a re-bombardment of varying duration. This may be Greek [i.e. incomprehensible] to the infantryman of the Second World War because, having other means of communicating with the artillery, he finds it hard to realise how vital rocket signals might be.”.

As an experienced wartime signals officer, J.R.R. Tolkien would have had a basic familiarity with ground-candles, coloured smokes, aerial flares and the ubiquitous star-shells (the British used 10 million of these every month).

British star-shell pistol, 1917.

Presumably he also had some understanding of larger signalling fireworks, and possibly even experience of maroons. The latter being British firework rockets, usually used as maritime distress rockets at sea and designed to go off with a very loud ‘bang’ noise. These were in use in London and at least one industrial town, during the latter part of the First World War. They served as advance night-time air-raid warnings / calls for scattered fire-crews. The sound presumably being akin to the “deafening … signal for supper” dragon-rocket, encountered early in The Lord of the Rings. One imagines there would also be a dazzling flash if one happened to be looking at the night sky when one went off, akin to the flash that dazzles all the hobbits on the vanishing of Bilbo.

Which makes one wonder if Tolkien’s evident interest in fire and fireworks might have some origins among such experiences, although today we might tend to think of ‘signals’ in terms of wireless and codes. I’m however uncertain if maroons were also used for the frequent air-raids that crossed the east coast of England, where Tolkien was helping to counter airship raids later in the war. Possibly not on the sleepy coast, where a policeman or postmaster with a bicycle and a loud voice (then the more usual British method) would have sufficed for the few civilians. Perhaps further inland, in the industrial towns? But the only hard evidence I can find for the municipal civilian use of air-raid maroons outside London is from the textile town of Macclesfield in Cheshire (Reporting the Great War, p. 29).

The first use in London of maroons was not until a large airship bombing raid of July 1917, the authorities being previously worried that their abrupt use in a vast city would trigger panics and stampedes (especially dangerous at night in the blackout) for the bomb shelters. But the public fear had lessened by then, since new incendiary bullets and darts were destroying what had once seemed to be untouchable ‘monster’ airships. One is reminded here of the special bow of Lorien in The Lord of the Rings, which is used by Legolas to bring down the flying Nazgul on the Great River.

My searches suggest that the history of signalling fireworks and star-shells and maroons in the First World War remains to be written. But there is now at least a biography of the ‘wizard’ behind the many weird and yet very workable British military fireworks, Gunpowder and Glory: The Explosive Life of Frank Brock OBE (2020). It looks like this book would make an accessible starting point. I also encountered (but couldn’t get) a 1924 article of unknown title in the Journal of the Royal Engineers, and rocket-scientist Willy Ley’s book Shooters and Shooting (1942) which appears to have a section on star-shells.

Tolkien Gleanings #53.

* Available now, a new edition of the open scholarly journal Mythlore, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2023). A half-dozen or so articles are of Tolkien interest, including “Delving Too Greedily: Analyzing Prejudice Against Tolkien’s Dwarves as Historical Bias” (asks if his dwarves were really antagonistic to and destructive of nature, as is often casually assumed). Also a short article by Verlyn Flieger in pursuit of a possible trace of wartime code-breaking in Tolkien, and another book-review for The Gallant Edith Bratt.

* Book publisher Walking Tree has a large round-up of recent reviews of their books, although the Web links are spread across multiple posts. Start at the publisher’s 31st March post and then move forward (i.e. click on each “Newer items” link), downloading the most interesting PDFs as you go.

* Various multi-paper Tolkien sessions are scheduled for the giant International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, 11th-13th May 2023. Including: “Religion along the Tolkienian Fantasy Tradition: New Medievalist Narrative”; “Tolkien and the Middle Ages: Tolkien and the Scholastics”; and “Christopher Tolkien: Medievalist Editor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium I: The Works” followed by “II: The Interactions”. The papers are not (yet) online, but the titles are…

* A new one-hour YouTube recording of a lecture on “Hope Beyond the Walls of the World: J.R.R. Tolkien and Christian Virtue”, given this Easter at Bethlehem College and Seminary, Minneapolis, USA. High-quality audio, of a good clear speaker.

* Thanks to Sebastiano Tassinari, who drew my attention to the fact that the “70 years since J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sir Gawain lecture in Glasgow” event now has tickets available on Eventbrite. The date is 27th April 2023.

* And finally, the blog Tolkien: Medieval and Modern has a new post on the current thinking on the history of ancient Welsh and English…

“the archaeological community until fairly recently [thought] that the Anglo-Saxon invasions were overblown and that the English had a large amount of Briton in them. But a very recent genetic study of Anglo-Saxon graves (Gretzinger, Sayer, Justeau et al, 2022) proved that they indeed had overwhelmingly Germanic heritage.”

This seems to me to be over-claiming for this new study of ancient DNA. What the research actually found was that…

“the individuals who we analysed from eastern England [i.e. mostly what were then the fenlands and coastlands] derived up to 76% of their ancestry from the [adjacent] continental North Sea zone, albeit with substantial regional variation and heterogeneity within sites”.

Many were women. Thus it’s open to question if some of these were descendants of women brought from overseas as ‘old country’ brides for the new settlers of eastern England.

Tolkien Gleanings #52.

* An online partial Film Preview at Archive.org, 15th April 2023. The forthcoming film is The Forge of Friendship: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. This would appear to be the same as the online Web series filmed and VFX’d in London in early 2023, then called Fellowship: Tolkien & Lewis.

“Hosted by: The Internet Archive and co-sponsored by Northwind Institute and C.S. Lewis Society of California as part of their weekend conference on ‘Tolkien & Lewis in a Digital Age’.”

* “Tolkien’s Easter Joy in The Lord of the Rings…

“Tolkien’s use of the date is not some artificial mechanism by which he links his tale to the Christian myth to come, but a deliberate placement of his tale in history, and not just history, but salvation history”.

* A new Journal of Inklings Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 ($ partial paywall). The lead article is relevant to Tolkien, “The Conversions of C.S. Lewis: Notes on Rethinking Their Chronology and Character”. There are also free public reviews of: The Fall of Numenor; The Road to Fair Elfland: Tolkien on Fairy Stories: An Extended Commentary; An Anthology of Iberian Scholarship on Tolkien; Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss: Steps on the Developmental Journey; In the House of Tom Bombadil; and Performing against Annihilation: Identity and Consciousness in J.R.R. Tolkien. Other book reviews, such as for Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism and Critics of Enlightenment, are found to also consider Tolkien.

* And finally, a public lecture on “Holidaying in the Middle Ages”. Being the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, 6th June 2023.

Now available for download, Tolkien Gleanings issue 3. My free 48-page ‘zine for Tolkien scholars, collectors, and others. Also available via Gumroad.

Among other things, this issue collects my recent ‘Tolkien Gleanings’ blog posts into one handy PDF. The clickable Web links are retained in the PDF.

Tolkien Gleanings #51.

* “The bees of Beorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional Middle-earth” (August 2022), a Bee Histories article by a bee specialist. Warning: the site pops up a page-blocking overlay. If you want more on Tolkien, bees and honey-cakes, then the Tea with Tolkien podcast had a guest episode “On Beorn & Beekeeping” (2019) with beekeeper Daniel Stewart.

* The Archdiocese of Madrid has launched a crowd-funder… “to create the world’s largest geo-location map along a walking trail based on The Lord of the Rings“. This being their… “79 mile ‘El Camino del Anillo’ in the Sierra Norte hills”, about 20 miles north of the Spanish capital city of Madrid.

Launched in 2020, this is an apparently “Tolkien-esque” and openly Catholic eight-day hill-walking trail. The idea seems to be to take a depopulating landscape and — over time, building on what’s already there — to make it a circular journey through varied landscapes evoking those of The Lord of the Rings.

* The Poetic Edda: A Dual-Language Edition (2023). In this new free Creative Commons PDF book of nearly 900 pages… “there are thirty-six texts, giving us one of the fullest translations of the work” into English. Not to be confused with the Prose Edda.

* And finally, The Hollywood Reporter has seen Amazon’s viewing figures for That Recent TV Series, and reports this week that “only 37 percent” of buyers actually finished watching the eight-episode series.

Tolkien Gleanings #50.

* Forthcoming is a new scholarly book from Kent State University Press, titled Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many. Due toward the end of 2023, with Amazon UK currently offering a shipping-date perilously close to Christmas, “12th December”. The publisher’s blurb has the book as a…

remarkable work of close reading and analysis, Thomas P. Hillman gets to the heart of the tension between pity and the desire for power in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. As the book traces the entangled story of the One Ring and its effects, we come to understand Tolkien’s central paradox: while pity is necessary for destroying the Ring, it cannot save the Ring-bearer from the Ring’s lies and corruption. […] Instead of turning his interpretation to allegory or apologetics, Hillman demonstrates how the story works metaphorically, allowing Tolkien to embrace both Catholic views and pagan mythology.

* Also forthcoming later in 2023, a new graphic novel about the young Tolkien, provisionally titled Tolkien: Lighting Up The Darkness. That title may change before publication, since the Estate would appear to have a clear case of trademark infringement regarding the front-cover’s sizing, styling and colour of ‘Tolkien’…

The book lists as “112 pages”, so it’s not the sort of chunky 240-page graphic novel that an English reader might expect. Indeed, those 112 pages are probably padded, since I see the French site Tolkiendil mentions “82 pages” of actual story. Which suggests it’s a French BD. Yes, turns out that it’s an English translation of a BD already available in French, Tolkien: Eclairer les Tenebres (2019), and in Italian as Tolkien: Rischiarare le Tenebre (2021). A Tolkiendil review picked up some small factual errors, but was generally positive. The interior art looks excellent.

* The new French fannish magazine Generation Cites d’Or #10 (2023) is a “Tolkien Special”, with articles.

* And finally, in May 2023 Canada’s Maple Moot will happen in Toronto, taking the theme of ‘Northern Spirit’…

“an ancient virtue […] we will explore the meaning of Northern Spirit, its thematic influence in Tolkien’s legendarium, and its origins in fantasy and literature.”

Tolkien Gleanings #49.

* Newly published in the UK, the hardcover edition of the Tolkien book The Battle of Maldon: together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth. The previously unpublished material here is reported to be Tolkien’s own prose translation of the Anglo-Saxon “The Battle of Maldon”, and his unpublished lecture “The Tradition of Versification in Old English” (late 1920s?).

* A one-hour YouTube lecture on “J.R.R. Tolkien on Homes and Havens” (2021). The audio is excellent. This has now become a paywalled scholarly article of the same title, published in the new edition of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture (Spring 2023).

* A recent Texas Tolkien Talk Podcast discussed the recent biography The Gallant Edith Bratt with the book’s author Nancy Bunting.

* A Signum University announcement this week, Introducing “Tolkien Illustrated: Picturing the Legendarium”. This being a trailer for a Summer 2023 online course at Signum, booking now and starting…

“Monday 1st May 2023, with a one week break from 19th-23rd June for Mythmoot. […] ‘Tolkien Illustrated’ will include two 90-minute live lectures Mondays and Thursdays 10:00-11:30 AM ET (3:00-4:30 PM GMT) and one one-hour discussion session per week as assigned (four hours total weekly).”

* And finally, a demo of a fragment of The Silmarillion as read by an ElevenLabs AI-generated TTS voice. Rather pleasing and clear, considering it’s just a quick demo generated from YouTube clips of the older ‘grandpa’ Tolkien speaking to the media in the 1960s. So far as I’m aware, there’s no legal infringement. You can’t copyright the sound and accent of a voice, due to the ‘prior art’ spread among millions of previous voices.