Tolkien Gleanings #26

* At Signum University, starting 1st May 2023, a live online course on “Tolkien Illustrated: Picturing the Legendarium”. Likely to be fully booked in ‘a bang and a flash’, so book early.

It’s also good to see that a live course, currently in development at Signum, is “Tolkien & Science, with Dr. Kristine Larsen”.

* Nominations are now open for the Mythopoeic Awards 2023. This is for recent new non-fiction books in ‘Myth and Fantasy Studies’ and ‘Inklings Studies’ (including Tolkien).

* “Religion along the Tolkienian Fantasy Tradition”, a panel session planned for the big International Congress on Medieval Studies, to be held in the USA in 2023. The word used is definitely “along” rather than “among”, so at a guess it’s perhaps looking at the neo-medieval religious movements and shifts that ran alongside and interacted with the post-1967 growth of the wider “Tolkienian Fantasy Tradition”? Sadly the call-for-papers is now “404”, wasn’t well distributed, and the Wayback Machine didn’t keep a copy of it.

* In the week’s Somerset County Gazette local newspaper “Queen’s College, Taunton, discovers links to J.R.R. Tolkien”…

Tolkien’s grandfather, John Suffield (1833-1930) was a pupil at the original Queen’s College when he started studying at the school September 1845, aged just 12. The school was then situated within the grounds of Taunton Castle. [He] studied at the school until he went to work in the family business. […] They also discovered that Tolkien himself was good friends with Christopher Wiseman, the headmaster of Queen’s between 1926-1953 after the pair met at King Edward’s School in Birmingham in 1905. Tolkien, Wiseman and others formed the semi-secret T.C.B.S social club centred on their mutual intellectual interests. Wiseman and Tolkien were so close at school that they called themselves the Great Twin Brethren. Of Tolkien’s close friends from the club, Wiseman was the only one to survive the First World War.

* And finally, a cosmic event on 23rd January 2023. Clouds permitting, shortly after sunset the crescent moon will rest next to the bright Venus. See Kristine Larsen’s 2021 paper for the Journal of Tolkien Research, for a special focus on this “occultation” (as it is called) of the Moon and Venus.

Above: a gold stater coin of the Iceni tribe, c. 40-50 BC. Icini territory was one of the first tribal territories that the Anglians would move through, before their settler-families moved west along the River Trent and into relatively unpopulated mid and north Staffordshire (as it would later become). Which then became the initial heartland of early Mercia on the upper reaches of the Trent.

Tolkien Gleanings #25

* A 2021 interview in English with Italian scholar Claudio A. Testi, on “Tolkien on War and Intelligence”. ‘Intelligence’ is used here in the wartime sense of ‘information likely to be advantageous in war’. Tolkien was a battlefield signals expert, and later involved in combating the Zeppelin menace. As such he was on the receiving end of intelligence activity, such as it was in the First World War. Testi’s interview observes that the over-reliance on intelligence in war can be un-wise, as shown by The Lord of the Rings. Such as the…

“… Palantir’s use, these mysterious stones that allow seeing almost everywhere. Saruman and Denethor use them, see Sauron’s army, and mistakenly lose hope. Sauron himself uses it, sees the face of a hobbit (Pippin), and mistakenly believes that the Ring is going to Minas Tirith, towards which he concentrates the greatest war effort, and so on.” […] In my opinion, The Lord of the Rings warns of the danger of transforming intelligence from a means to an end in itself. Today, with big data, this risk looks real. […] Tolkien tells us that when [such] power is too great, it becomes too dangerous.” [It] “cannot be governed, but it governs us”. […] The true leader is not the one who has the most information but the one who is most aware of the dangers of power” and especially the danger of mass intelligence gathering in terms of its potential to mislead. There is also the further and wider danger in the Ring, that having “utmost intelligence completely destroys freedom” among people, or it would if used by one who knew how to wield it.

There is a small misinterpretation of a point in LoTR, given early in the interview. It’s claimed that… “Theoden arrests him [Eomer] because he did not strictly apply the law” in the case of meeting Strider when riding out on the wold. But it’s stated in the book that Eomer was arrested and imprisoned because he had openly and actively … “threatened death to Grima” [the king’s counsellor] while in his lord’s hall. He had also gone riding north with his household men… “without the king’s leave, for in my absence his house is left with little guard.”

* The new open-access journal Leeds Medieval Studies now has two issues online, for 2021 and 2022. I’ve added it to my JURN. These opening issues include “The Animality of Work and Craft in Early Medieval English Literature” (animals working alongside humans), and also a review of the book The Natural World in the Exeter Book Riddles. Good preparation for the forthcoming “Tolkien’s Animals” special issue of Journal of Tolkien Research by the sound of it. The Leeds Medieval Studies editors are also interested in “the study of modern medievalisms”, by which they presumably mean 19th and 20th century medievalisms rather than ‘early modern’. Their new journal is…

“the successor to and continuation of Leeds Studies in English (founded 1932)”

Since Tolkien was at Leeds, it would be natural to imagine that they might be open to a possible ‘Tolkien special-issue’ at some point.

* There’s a new Nick Groom repository citation for his forthcoming article ““The Ghostly Language of the Ancient Earth”: Tolkien and Romantic Lithology”. This effectively brings news of a new Walking Tree book for 2023, The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. There was a call for papers for this book a couple of years ago, with a deadline at the end of 2020. Possible topics then included, among others…

– The pre-Raphaelites, Birmingham and the T.C.B.S.
– The fairy-tale tradition (Brothers Grimm and others).
– The Romantic spirit in […] Tolkien’s predecessors and contemporaries.
– Romanticism in other art forms (music, visual art etc.) and its connections to Tolkien.

Sounds good, and I now assume it’s likely to appear in 2023. The “Lithology” in Groom’s title refers to the understanding and classification of rocks and their physical formations.

* And finally, Jack Kirby and Tolkien. What a Kirby-krackle of a combination. The open Creative Commons 2018 article “Darkseid’s Ring: Images of Anti-Life in Kirby and Tolkien” explores the parallels.

Tolkien Gleanings #24

* Forthcoming in 2023, the book Tolkien’s Hidden Pictures: Anthroposophy and the Enchantment in Middle Earth. Here “anthroposophy” sounds like a horrible disease, but it refers to “the spiritual esoteric insights of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy”, which the author finds to be hidden in Tolkien’s works. The book runs to 144 pages and is due in February. The table-of-contents is available and suggests the reader must also tangle with Jung (groan…). Still, it looks serious and interesting. I see the author is also giving a talk about the book at Rudolf Steiner House in London, UK, on 28th March 2023.

Steiner was an Austrian who came of age in the 1880s and died in the mid 1920s, after contributing to the new flux of ideas around matters such as: children and education; soil health, food and mind-body holisism; and the various new fields of ‘spiritual research’ which purported to be scientific in approach. He’s certainly someone whom Tolkien would have heard and read about circa 1902-1929, among many others, and not least because he had ‘re-interpreted’ German fairy tales in esoteric ways and as a theosophist had evinced a public interest in Atlantis. Later Tolkien would also have heard about Steiner’s ideas from a fellow Inkling… “As an anthroposophist influenced by Rudolf Steiner, Barfield was a believer in the evolution of consciousness”. Lewis also walked with “anthroposophist friends, Cecil Harwood and Walter O. Field”. However Tolkien was surely both savvy and religious enough to resist such ideas, while still sympathising with their key cause — a profound spiritual discomfort with a fast-emerging and apparently god-less post-1919 ‘modern world’. Like Lovecraft, one imagines that he would have freely taken a few notions from theosophy, anthroposophy etc, in order to harness them to his own unique creative imagination. On the face of it then, there could have been some tangential influence and possibly prior to The Lord of the Rings. The forthcoming book evidently looks into that in some depth.

* I found another Fornet-Ponse article, one of many which seem to be surfacing in 2022 due to open-access deposit requirements. So far the university repository has no unified page for him that also lists all the new material, though the various aggregators can get at the PDF files. One such is “Tolkien, Newman und das Oxford Movement” which is in German and from the journal Hither Shore in 2010. It’s of interest since it relates to the influence of Cardinal Newman on the younger Tolkien. The author finds a “very meager state of research on this topic”, then examines “Newman’s conception of conscience” with particular reference to “the intuitive character of moral sense” in decision-making. Then he seeks traces of this in Tolkien’s work. He finds that decision-making in LoTR often rests not only in rational considerations, but also on subjective feelings and interpretations — which are nevertheless aligned to a moral sense that arises from a clear view of good and evil.

* Luna Press has a new 35-minute YouTube interview with scholar and collector Oronzo Cilli, hot from his recent home-town book-launch and panel discussion event. Here Cilli talks (in Italian only) about his Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist (second revised and expanded edition), a book due at the end of January 2023. Though it’s in Italian, the YouTube transcript can be translated and the gist extracted…

Cilli: I started because I was curious. I wanted to understand which books Tolkien had to hand, which book he had read. And so I started making some notes, just to collect the information about the books of his library – some of these had gradually appeared via collectors’ auctions. Then I started talking to collector friends, those who had works which were signed by or belonged to Tolkien, and I noted whatever information was in these, such as his own annotations in the margins [or on paper slips]. This collection grew and grew, and became far more than ‘just a list’. Then I started annotating! The biggest challenge was finding certainty that ‘this was the right book’ because you needed to analyze the differences between editions. In the beginning I didn’t think of it as a publishable book. [Then I spoke to Tom Shippey, who saw the potential for this to become a book]. [It has since become something of a group project for Tolkien scholars, as suggestions and revisions have poured in for a second edition]. [For the forthcoming second edition] I revised the text, I double checked. I had kept track of items that needed to be updated. New books had appeared, there were auction information sheets, and two German professors helped me to ‘harmonize’ my writing of titles in German. And then I integrated all the other sets of suggestions and lists that I have from scholars . So in the second edition there are over 500 books that are new additions. And I tried to better explain some of my choices. I also took the advice of some reviewers on the arrangement of the book. I have chosen to divide the book. There is now a Section A and Section B. The Section A has only the books which with certainty we know that were Tolkien’s. Then in Section C I talk about all the works done by Tolkien. Ranging from the articles for debates at King’s College or at Oxford, or in academic journals or books by him. I also did a search on where and if these were published and where they can be found today [up to the year 2022]. There is another section on interviews and reviews of Tolkien, with some additions that escaped me in the first edition. [He then goes on to describe other sections].

* “Tolkien And The History Of Tongues”. A 40-minute lecture by Tom Shippey at the University of Oxford, given in September 2018. Now a handy .MP3 audio-only file, for those with less than the ultrafast broadband required by the chunky official video-only version.

* And finally, “When did Gandalf first meet hobbits?”.

Tolkien Gleanings #23

* Tolkien’s Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode will be (re)published on 30th April 2023. This seems to be a re-publication of the 1983 version, but in a form that’s uniform with current Tolkien editions. The book is not about Middle-earth but is Old English + Tolkien’s lecture notes, all well-edited by a former student of his and presented in some 180 pages. The “Fragment” is 47 heroic lines in Old English. The “Episode” was a more tragic version of the same story, as found inlaid into the text of Beowulf. Those who’ve listened to Tom Shippey’s YouTube series on Beowulf (which is far more interesting than it sounds) will recall the account of ‘the attack on the mead-hall’. Shippey ably explains the regional politics behind it, and also the ramifications of that long-ago tribal strife for the future of England. The book’s cover illustration is by John Howe.

* I see that the independent Signum University is to have their first OzMoot gathering in Australia. Happening 27th-29th January 2023, in Brisbane. The theme is to be ‘Deep Roots’, and judging by the listing it appears to be largely Tolkien studies. I see that one of the OzMoot presentations is to be on “The Lost Children of Middle-earth”.

Yes, thinking about it… not many children. We hear that Aragorn grew up in Rivendell, though no details; elementary schools are part of a Shire upbringing, judging by asides from Sam and Pippin and Gandalf; small hobbit children run after Gandalf’s fireworks cart at the start of LoTR and appear at the end in the form of cherry-eaters and Sam’s new family; there are children in Bree, since they follow Strider and the hobbits out of the village; there’s Beregond’s young errand-running son and his band of friends in the city of Gondor, and later the post-King return of children to the city; there is mention of Westmarch children sheltering in the caves at Helm’s Deep or riding on the wains seen headed away from Gondor before the battle. The Shire, Rohan and Gondor all have the tradition of “children’s tales” told at the fireside. There’s the ubiquitous “son of” which is appended to names.

There are also some ‘absences with implications’. For instance it’s never stated, but evidently Merry’s deep yearning to find a father-figure in Theoden implies a distant or chilly relationship with his own father Master Saradoc Brandybuck of Brandybuck Hall. Merry only uses “Meriadoc, son of Saradoc” once and very formally, when greeting Theoden at the ruined gates of Isengard. Sam appears to have a prickly but more loving relationship with his father, who often cussed and berated Sam with sharply disparaging words — drawn all too-easily from the “large paternal word-hoard”. Gollum might have been raised by his grandmother, perhaps implying he was orphaned, and later he recalls his childhood times and tales of the South. Between Wormtongue and her hard shield-maiden training, it’s implied that Eowyn didn’t have much of a carefree girlhood. The Ents have no young entings. The Wood Elves appear to consider all non-Elves as “you children” (said by Legolas). But some Elves also have childish characteristics — or at least they feel free to express that side of themselves in safe Rivendell, where Sam encounters “some as merry as children”.

Frodo, on arrival at Rivendell, expresses a child-like mis-understanding of “the big people” as being easily divisible into either “wicked” or “kind”. Doubtless more could be said about the general child-like characteristics of hobbits, such as being always eager for large portions of food, and picky about the quality of their “vittles” (sweet pastries) etc.

* There’s now an equivalent to the long-running H.P. Lovecraft podcast Voluminous. As with Voluminous, the new Tolkiens Briefe (podcast) is a two-hander and each episode discusses and explicates one letter sent by the author. One of the presenters is the President of the German Tolkien Society, and I assume they have Estate permission to read from the letters as translated into German. Yes, the podcast is in German. Still, nice to know it exists. I would assume one might be able to run the .MP3 (to be found at the link above) through the desktop Dragon Professional (the best desktop automatic AI-aided transcribing of voice from an .MP3) and then use an online text auto-translator to move the text from German to English. Though these days there’s probably a free upload Cloud service for that. Possibly the podcast will have detailed show-notes and links that can be auto-translated.

* And finally, I sense that some people’s New Year Resolution is “a grand Tolkien re-read” in 2023. Some may want to read through the Chronology, and as they encounter a note about each new item being written, find it and read it. That would approximate Tolkien’s writing chronology, though it might unearth some rather ponderous scholarly material. What if you don’t have the time because you’re juggling babies or have heavy-duty commuting + work? If you simply want a 12-month schedule for sitting down with The Lord of the Rings with tea-and-toast, then Tea with Tolkien has today posted a handy new The Lord of the Rings in a Year: Reading Schedule in wall-chart form.

Tolkien Gleanings #22

* New today, a long article on “Eucatastrophe and Evangelium: Tolkien’s Devotion to St. John the Evangelist”. At the end of this the reader learns that…

“This article is adapted from material in Holly Ordway’s forthcoming book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (Word on Fire Academic, 2023).”

Good to hear of a new book, and from a writer who knows the theology and church history. This forthcoming title is currently listed on Amazon UK, set for a hardback release on “2nd September 2023”.

* I’m not going to be tracking articles or books on Tolkien’s invented languages for Tolkien Gleanings. But they will be noticed if they reflect on the young Tolkien and his influences. Such is a new article in the Italian open-access journal RiCOGNIZIONI, “Tolkien and Comparative Historical Linguistics” (2022, in English, with English abstract). This looks at the influence of the young Tolkien’s academic training on his earliest Elvish languages. Finds some influence on his… “meticulousness [and] symmetry and systematicity”, among other things. But also the age itself was somewhat encouraging him to take a “creative and free approach to his sources”, though in this he was steered by his already highly-developed “phonoaesthetic taste”. But what were his sources? The author suggests, as a glottopoeia source for the young Tolkien…

“a source not listed in Cilli’s catalogue and, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere mentioned” [which could well have been the] “Rev. George Bayldon’s
An Elementary Grammar of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language.”

* In the same issue of the RiCOGNIZIONI journal, “Linguistics and Classical Tradition as Sources for Tolkien’s Glottopoiesis”. The author focusses on picking up what are said to be many similarities to Latin, but his abstract usefully explains what the first author meant by the technical word glottopoeia (glottopoiesis)…

“[to create his constructed languages] Quenya and Sindarin [Tolkien picked] from the templates represented by natural languages, such as Finnish, Germanic languages, Welsh and also Classical languages.”

* I encountered a bit more on the local claims for the ‘Tolkien Trail’ in Lancashire. A 2022 local press report on the walk claims…

“it is clear that Tolkien did get inspiration to call the fictional region of Middle-earth, ‘The Shire’, from Hurst Green. Shire Lane can be found in the village, along with the River Shireburn and the Shireburn Arms”

There is an intertwingling in the above sentence between Hurst Green in Sussex and Hurst Green in Lancashire, which few will notice. The Tolkien Reader’s Guide and Chronology both have this place in Sussex and not in Lancashire…

“At that time the Brookes-Smiths lived at The Lodge, Hurst Green, in Sussex” and “then living in Sussex, in a country house at Hurst Green.”

The confusion among Lancastrians is probably genuine, and it appears to root back to Paul Edwards’ “In the Valley of the Hobbits” article describing much the same walk, which was then picked up and enshrined by the 2008 Tolkien’s Inspirations PDF assemblage. The confusion appears to have arisen locally via the following reasoning: “Tolkien is known to have stayed several times at Stonyhurst and sketched it (true, though many years too late to have influenced the early landscape of LoTR); and the lovely rural stone village of Hurst Green is near Stonyhurst (true); therefore this ‘Hurst Green’ mentioned by Tolkien sources must be the Stonyhurst one (false); and thus… the whole area must therefore have been his inspiration for Hobbiton and the Shire!”.

The landscape does however appear to be very lovely and well worth a stroll, and is about 17 miles north of Manchester and on the southern edge of the Bowland Forest. Some of the pictures of fir-trees and small streams even remind one of Rivendell. But as for “The Shire” claim in the more recent 2022 press article… I suspect that Worcestershire and Warwickshire and Staffordshire may yet have something to say on the matter of Tolkien’s coining of ‘the Shire’.

* And finally, on GitHub I find the very comprehensive javascript-driven “Shire Reckoning: A visualization of the calendars described in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Appendix D”. The GitHub shows it was last updated in September 2022. Impressive work.

Tolkien Gleanings #21

* As posted here yesterday, my new musings on the question “Could Tolkien have seen the pre-Raphaelite collection at Birmingham?” along with my newly colorised picture of the interior in 1911.

* I came across a 2017 paper I’d not heard of before, from Tolkien scholar and astronomy specialist Kristine Larsen. The Harvard aggregator for astronomy papers has it as “Oxford Astronomer John Knight Fotheringham (1874-1936) as Unwitting Godfather of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fictional Luni-solar Holiday “Durin’s Day””, with a substantial abstract but no PDF link. My guess is this paper was later partly folded into her Journal of Tolkien Research article on Durin’s Day. The latter is freely available as a full-text .PDF file. But some researchers may also want the original abstract re: some details on Fotheringham.

* The two Mallorn issues produced in 2020 have now popped their locks, these being issues 60 (Summer 2020) and 61 (Winter 2020). They appear to be the latest. Despite still being labelled on their landing pages as “not open-access as it was published within the previous two years”, on a hunch I found I could download the full PDF downloads. I assume some auto-bot has popped the locks for 2023 without any human intervention. Included and of interest to me are…

# 61:

———— “Tolkien on Holiday” surveys Tolkien’s uses of holidays, and his personal thoughts on the real thing. Doesn’t note that a chunk of the early part of Fellowship was written while on holiday.

———— “In the Moon Gleaming” on Tolkien’s uses of ‘Man in the Moon’. Unaware of the Shropshire and Hereford links, which would have been well known to Tolkien as a West Midlands medievalist.

———— “The Tolkien Art Index”, giving a history of building “an online catalogue raisonne of all published Arda-related artwork created by J.R.R. Tolkien” and a short guide to the structure and usage.

———— “There and Back Again? Tolkien’s Brief Visit to Sussex in 1904”. He went for a long extended stay, and most likely also took day-trips out. The article discovers a likely address in Hove (of ‘Brighton & Hove’). With a rider in the form of “Tolkien in King’s Heath” in the following issue, which picks up a misinterpretation of the 1901 census (though relating to King’s Heath in Birmingham, rather than Hove).

———— A good review of Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist and yet another short review of Tolkien and the Classics (it must have had 20 or more by now).

———— A long letter of reply to the earlier “Checking the Facts” article, which had been critical of certain aspects of Tolkien studies.

# 62:

———— “Tolkien’s Fantasy Landscape”, a fine lead article which examines a Tolkien “1915?” dated painting in detail, and with painstaking topographic and astronomical cross-referencing. Also has much to say about Tolkien’s brother Hilary.

———— A joint review of the recent Oxford, New York City and Paris Tolkien exhibitions. Notes the great popular successes, each in a different way but alike in terms of vast visitors numbers and red-hot catalogue / book sales. Has nothing to say about any serious notice given to the shows, if any, by weighty art-world critics. I had to laugh at the glowing description of the ticket system at Oxford… “a cleverly designed ticket booking system guaranteed that every visitor had the impression of entering a shrine of peace and quiet with enough space and time to take it in”. When I was there the ushering in/out was abandoned and the place was rammed. I managed to stay in for well over two hours.

———— Reviews of the books Something Has Gone Crack, Tolkien’s Cosmology, and a rather pickily critical one for Garth’s The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien.

* Birmingham Museums now have their long-awaited CC0 collections online. It’s been around in various forms since 2018, but now at last it has good-sized downloads freely available without sign-up. My searches suggest there’s not a great deal of Tolkien interest in there, but there is a pleasing old pencil sketch of what appears to be the Library entrance corridor in Tolkien’s school on New Street. Possibly an unfinished drawing, or meant to evoke the original appearance of the interior… as I see lines hinting at a tall bookcase on the right-hand wall.

* And finally, one for the book-sniffers. Dr. Joe Schwarcz on the smell of old and new books at YouTube (2021).

Could the young J.R.R. Tolkien have seen the now well-known pre-Raphaelite collection at the Birmingham Museum, circa 1903-1911? In those years he was at school in Birmingham city centre, and was aged 11-19.

Perhaps. But he appears never to have recalled them in either letter or interview, so far as I can discover. Which in itself is quite remarkable. Nor does he ever appear to have been asked about them, even for the official biography, which is even more remarkable. What were the Birmingham Tourist Board of the 1960s and 70s thinking of, not to pin him down on the topic and get a few quotes for future marketing purposes? Well, they probably weren’t even considering such things. In those days Birmingham wasn’t exactly on the tourist map of England, except as a big void to avoid.

But what of the Edwardian era, before the planners and the car-culture ruined the city centre? Were unaccompanied youngsters not allowed into the Museum at that time, perhaps? Were there no ‘school visits’ back then? Tolkien’s school was at the opposite end of New Street, so they wouldn’t even have needed to hire a charabanc to visit the place. Just troop the lads up the gentle hill.

Yet all that can be found in the scholarship is Garth remarking that “Tolkien once likened the TCBS to the Pre-Raphaelites”, stated in passing and with no reference given. Tolkien’s official biographer mentions the same, in a similarly fleeting and un-referenced manner. But perhaps Garth was remarking on unpublished letters, which he was allowed to see at the Bodleian when writing his Great War book?

We do know that the leading pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones (d. 1898) was a Birmingham lad from Bennett’s Hill, and a romantic artist whose early life and student fellowships (with William Morris and fellow Brummies) Tolkien knew about. He admired and read Morris, and would have seen Burne-Jones works and designs in print. Had he fully read up on Burne-Jones’ biography it would have offered him something of a life-template. Indeed, a little later Tolkien would follow in Burne-Jones’ footsteps and become an undergraduate at Exeter College. Again it’s then very difficult to imagine that the young Tolkien wasn’t popping into the local Museum on rainy afternoons after school, admiring works by Burne-Jones in the company of members of the TCBS or Edith. Or perhaps moving solemnly around St. Phillip’s Cathedral, which was located a stone’s throw from both Barrow’s Stores tea-rooms and Cornish’s bookshop, to admire the building’s fine Burne-Jones stained-glass windows (fully installed there by 1898).

But were pre-Raphaelite works on general public show in the Museum at that time? It’s very difficult to discover what was on show back when, either permanently or in time-limited exhibitions. Surprisingly no-one ever seems to have put together a comprehensive history of the early pre-Raphaelite exhibitions in Birmingham, between the death of Burne-Jones and the First World War. Possibly there were none, simply a gradual growth of the collection. Though I can find hints which suggest Birmingham Museum’s collecting began relatively early. For instance I can discover that in 1891… “an exhibition of examples of the English pre-Raphaelites was held in the Birmingham Museum in October [1891]” (The British Architect trade journal, 1892). “The Star of Bethlehem” was the star attraction. “The Last of England” was also on show. These remained at Birmingham, and both works spoke to themes that would become important to Tolkien. A wealth of drawings had been added to the collection by 1906, and one might assume the best of these were exhibited in a temporary show within a few years. Some of the remarkable Burne-Jones series of giant Holy Grail Tapestries were… “presented to the Museum in 1907” (Journal for Weavers, Spinners & Dyers), and presumably these were suitably hung for the public before a few more years had passed. Visual depictions include Sir Gawain and a magnificent medieval ship in tapestry-stitch. Though it’s possible “The Ship” was not then at Birmingham.

Thus it sounds to me like a core collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings, tapestries and drawings was present in Birmingham by circa 1908-11, and probably were on at least some sort of permanent public display there by 1911 — however limited due to the chances of fading etc. A glass-plate photo appears to confirm for 1911, at least.

A pre-Raphaelite Gallery at Birmingham in 1911, suggesting a permanent public display by that date. “The Star of Bethlehem” in the centre.

But we still don’t know for sure that Tolkien saw them, and we probably never will now — unless perhaps some new youthful letters are eventually released for publication.

Tolkien Gleanings #20

* A long and detailed November 2022 guest-post on John Garth’s website goes “In search of T.W. Earp”, a fellow-student during Tolkien’s undergraduate years at Oxford. Earp was also a guardian of the records, minutes and traditions of the various college societies during the disruptive war years. Includes portraits and pictures that I had not seen before.

* “Community Greening in The Lord of the Rings: Samwise Gamgee and the Power of Local Care”. A revised December 2022 essay version of a presentation given at the Texas Literature and Language Symposium 2021…

In the character of Samwise Gamgee, Tolkien champions a “love of the land” which Patrick Curry describes as “a fierce attachment to highly specific and local places and things”. Sam is a gardener — an excellent gardener with great knowledge and skill. He is also a curator of local ecological knowledge — he knows the landscape of the Shire, and he knows how the flora and fauna of the Shire are distributed.

* British Fairies has another post in a long series. This New Year’s Day post notes some of the uses that writers have made of lore of ‘long-barrow sleepers’ in the British landscape. A tradition which readers will recall informed the events on the Barrow Downs in The Lord of the Rings.

* In South Carolina, USA, a 2023 Regional Convivium (great word) on the theme of “The Inklings and the Great Conversation: Friendship through Literature”. On 24th-25th February 2023…

we explore ways that literature brings old friends together, helps us make new friends and continues the long friendship of minds from ancient times into the present and for the future.

* News of the annual Inklings Symposium 2023 in Germany. Papers can be in either German or English, and the deadline is 31st January 2023, for…

the annual symposium of the Inklings Society for Literature and Aesthetics [from] 29th April to 1st May at Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, [with] the theme ‘Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic’.

* News of a conference panel on the theme of “the functions of relics and ruins in Middle-earth”. Part of a conference to be held at Niagara Falls on the U.S./Canada border, from 23rd-26th March 2023.

* A forthcoming book has been mentioned, to be titled Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien’s Legendarium.