Tolkien Gleanings #34

* An update on Signum University Press. The Press is barely six months old, but now has a firm slate for 2023 and beyond. In Tolkien studies there’s news of the book Cardinal Vices of Middle-earth (September 2023), a new “comparative analysis of the role of chosen vices and virtues” from a Catholic perspective; and “An interview series with Verlyn Flieger”.

* A casting-call for Fellowship: Tolkien & Lewis… “an upcoming limited [screen] series, based on the friendship, faith, and fantasy of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.” Filming in London in early spring 2023, and the call has a rather tight deadline. Why do such projects/jobs always seem to have a ‘rush-rush’ deadline of days, rather than at least a month or so?

* Wheaton University now has its list of summer school 2023 courses. Includes “The Makings of Middle Earth: Creation, Creativity, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings“, and the “Otherworlds of Imagination in C.S. Lewis”. Seems to be aimed at regional students who want a long taster of what the university can offer. I had to look up “Wheaton, IL”, and it turns out that this well-known university is on the edge of the city of Chicago.

* Issue 2 of my Tolkien Gleanings as a PDF magazine, now available for download.

* And finally, oh dear… more PR piffle for bamboozled tourists from the city of Birmingham. The Birmingham University tower… “is famously believed to have been the inspiration for the tower of Orthanc, the black tower of Isengard”. Will the city ever learn that there’s a really moving true story to tell about Tolkien and Birmingham? They don’t have to make it up.

My Tolkien Gleanings issue 2 (Jan-Feb 2023) is now available for download. A handy PDF magazine format for Tolkien scholars, collecting all my recent ‘Tolkien Gleanings’ news postings since the last issue. I also add some articles, vintage pictures and a book review. Contributions, especially scholarly book reviews, are welcomed for the third issue.

Tolkien Gleanings #33

    “33, an important number”

* A two-day conference on “G.B. Smith and J.R.R. Tolkien: a meaningful friendship” at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 22nd-23rd March 2023. Looks excellent. Booking now.

* Starting in May 2023, a new Signum University course titled “Tolkien Illustrated: Picturing the Legendarium”. “Two 90-minute live lectures and one 1-hour discussion sessions per week as assigned (4 hours total weekly).”

* A new issue of the open-access journal Fafnir. One review is of interest, of the book A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien’s Literary Canvas.

Tolkien Gleanings #32

* In the Canadian undergraduate journal Explorations, the new essay “The Birth of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Love-Child Culture in The Two Towers“. An off-putting title, but it turns out to be a detailed and worthy essay on the insular and self-governing nature of the Rohirrim. It has kindly been placed under full Creative Commons. There’s a mistake to watch out for, though. Helm’s Deep was not the work of Rohan, as LoTR states… “Men [of Rohan] said that in the far-off days of the glory of Gondor the sea-kings had built here this fastness with the hands of giants.”

* At the Fantastic Metropolis blog I found a nice copy of “The Realms of Tolkien”. This being a late interview printed in the British science-fiction magazine New Worlds (Vol. 50, No. 168, November 1966), an issue not yet on Archive.org. In the interview Tolkien elaborates a little on Queen Beruthiel and her cats, among other topics.

* Libraries and Books in Medieval England is a new book due in April 2023. It promises to be a manageable survey of the topic in 192 pages, from an eminent authority with all the latest research at his fingertips.

* Due in a few weeks, the academic book J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics (February 2023), on the still-hot academic topic of utopianising tendencies in literature. Here ‘Classics’ means ‘the ancient world and our inheritance from it’. The blurb sounded quite interesting, until I read the names of the usual suspects… Plato, Homer, Ovid. The contents are…

Introduction: Utopianism and Classicism: Tolkien’s New/Old Continent.

1. Lapsarian Narratives: The Decline and Fall of Utopian Communities in Middle-Earth.
2. Hospitality Narratives: The Ideal of the Home in an Odyssean Hobbit.
3. Sublime Narratives: Classical Transcendence in Nature and Beyond in The Fellowship of the Ring.

Epilogue

The book follows last year’s theologically-informed Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium (February 2022) by a different author, which had a chapter that surveyed… “elements of anarchism, distributionism, and Toryism in Tolkien’s political philosophy”.

* And finally, a newly discovered pithy marginal note from Christopher Tolkien…

“What’s the point of all this pedantry if you can’t get a detail like this right?”

Tolkien Gleanings #31

* Now public, a recording of a new public lecture on YouTube ““I hold the key”: J.R.R. Tolkien through interviews and reminiscences”. Given by Dimitra Fimi at the University of Birmingham, in May 2022.

* My unearthing of the location of C.S. Lewis’s 1936 walk near Buxton, Derbyshire, plus a small correction to an important memoir of Tolkien.

* New on Archive.org to borrow, the book There and back again: in the footsteps of J.R.R. Tolkien (2004). This reflects on a series of walks, presumably made in the late-1990s / early 2000s, in the following places…

So far as I know, Tolkien never visited the Lyndey excavations. But he certainly wrote the “Nodens” paper.

* And finally, “The Magic of Middle-earth” exhibition is travelling to West Sussex in 2023. The show opens at the museum in Chichester in April, and will require paid tickets.

A bit more on walking and fantasy writers, following my last Tolkien Gleanings. I found a list of long walks taken by C.S. Lewis and his brother. One walk had possibly been taken near me, in Derbyshire.

“13th–16th January 1936 in Derbyshire”

So I briefly looked into it. Tolkien was not with them, and according to the Chronology was hard at work preparing for his new academic term and dealing with tedious Early English Text Society business. But I wondered where the walk was anyway, perhaps for the benefit of some future Tourist Board leaflet. Was it on the west or the east of the Peak? The location took a bit of tracking down, but Lewis’s brother kept a diary that records a visit to the church at Taddington, which is rather amusingly described by the American diary annotator as “north of Oxford”. England may be a very small place, compared to America, but we’re not that small. More precisely Taddington is just a little east of the spa-town of Buxton, in the far west of the Peak. No further details of the precise spot are known. But logically the trip would then be on the train from Oxford – Birmingham – Derby – then onto the local milk-run train through the Peak and then off at Miller’s Dale station just before Buxton… and then brisk and chilly walking in and around the fabulous Miller’s Dale (aka Millers Dale) and probably staying in the local pub there.

Walking in the snow, since “lovely snow clad trees” feature in the diary in the entry for their final day there. A 1930s winter, with heavy snow, in the Peak, in January. Not something that even the most ardent Lewis-ite would want to re-create today, I’d imagine. Even if they could. Today even the fall of a few snowflakes could be enough to stop all transport and prevent you from getting there on public transport. Not so back then, when we had more grit and gumption.

Along the way I found a small transcription error re: another walk, the error being caught in George Sayer’s important 1992 speech “Recollections of J.R.R. Tolkien”…

I had the impression that he [Tolkien] had never walked the [Malvern] hills before [August 1947] though he had often admired the distant view of them from [his brother’s at] the Avon valley near Evesham. Some of the names of the places we saw from the [Malvern] hills produced [in his talk] philological or etymological footnotes. Malvern was a corruption of two Welsh words, “moel” meaning bear, and “vern” derived from bryn or fryn meaning hill. This of course told us that the area was in early times heavily wooded, though the ten-mile ridge of the hills was not.

I was puzzled for a moment by this, unable to ‘see the bear for the woods’. But I realised that “bear” (animal) should be “bare” (bald), from the Welsh moel (bare, bald, often applied to a prominent hill). From the Malvern Hills one looks east across Herefordshire and into Wales.

The error is repeated in Tolkien: A Celebration (1999), in which the speech is reprinted. So, no… sadly Malvern does not mean Bear-hills, but simply Bare-hills.

Tolkien Gleanings #30

* In the new issue of the scholarly journal 1611, a new Spanish-language article on the reception of Tolkien’s works in Spanish translation. …

“this study constitutes a contribution to the still-scarce academic bibliography on the reception of a British author, one who has come to occupy an important place in the Spanish-speaking publishing world.”

* The Chairman in Humanities at Houston Christian University has a glowing review of the new book Tolkien Dogmatics by Austin M. Freeman…

Austin Freeman has given a gift to Tolkien scholars and aficionados alike in a work I didn’t think could be written. Tolkien Dogmatics: Theology Through Mythology with the Maker of Middle-Earth painstakingly assembles, collates, and cross-references Tolkien’s legendarium, academic essays, and letters to construct a systematic theology. Though informed by the copious secondary material on Tolkien, Freeman’s work is firmly and faithfully grounded in the depth and breadth of the primary material. Broken into 12 chapters that explicate Tolkien’s views on God, revelation, creation, humanity, angels, the fall, evil and sin, Satan and demons, Christ and salvation, the church, the Christian life, and last things, Tolkien Dogmatics takes a deep dive into the theological convictions that grounded, inspired, and guided the maker of Middle-earth. In his aptly titled “Prolegomena,” Freeman makes clear his goal: “To set out as accurately as possible what Tolkien thought, without letting my or other people’s views intrude upon the matter”. He stays true to his promise.

* The Index of Medieval Art Database will become ‘free to use’ from 1st July 2023 onward. The largest online database of such research, it is well-established and includes a huge “photographic archive” with cross-reference links to the relevant texts which the pictures illustrate or allude to. The service currently requires a university subscription.

* “Hill Is a Hasty Word” is a new blog post from the English West Midlands. It helped me make the link between Treebeard’s approach to things and ‘Tolkien as a walker’. It appears that Tolkien was an ‘artist-rambler’ type of walker — relatively slow in walking and curious about his surroundings, stopping frequently to collect his thoughts and/or to consider the things he encountered big or small. Whereas Lewis appears to have been an ‘exercise-hiker’ of the brisk 1930s type — wanting to walk fast to ‘cover the ground’ and get to the destination. A slow “Cretaceous Perambulator” Lewis was not, though apparently that was how he liked to style himself as a walker. Another earlier blog post from 2019 looked at this topic of walking and has taken the time to find various quotes. Lewis said (1947, Malvern) that Tolkien was…

“not our sort of walker. He doesn’t seem able to talk and walk at the same time. He dawdles and then stops completely when he has something interesting to say”.

In 2022 First Things had another post on the topic, but with a contradictory quote (c. early 1950s, published 1955) from Lewis…

“Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them.”

So, what is one to make of that? Perhaps Tolkien changed Lewis’s mind on the combination of talking and walking, between 1947 and the early 1950s, as he did with other things? Well, I’ll leave that one for the Lewis scholars to puzzle over. Another 2022 article “Walking with Chesterton and Lewis (and Tolkien)” also mused on this topic, and related the walking styles back to the writing styles…

“The Lewis brothers liked to walk vigorously, covering lots of ground; Tolkien preferred to amble, stopping every few hundred yards to look at a flower or a tree. The brothers became increasingly frustrated with their lack of progress and increasingly impatient with Tolkien’s dilatory perambulations. They strode off ahead, leaving Tolkien and Sayer to meet them in the pub when they eventually arrived. […] This difference in approach to a country walk is evident in the difference between the respective writing styles”.

* And finally, take a walk in the rich fields of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1895) in its 1905 printing. This was the standard edition until the major revision of 1952, and thus the one available to Tolkien prior to the creation of The Lord of the Rings. This online version has very poor OCR (see the .ePub file), but is a good scan otherwise.