Author Archives: futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #33

by futurilla

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

by futurilla

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

by futurilla

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.

Three Generations of The Family of Author Sydney Fowler Wright

by futurilla

I’m pleased to present Three Generations of The Family of Author Sydney Fowler Wright (1874-1965), by leading H.P. Lovecraft scholar Ken Faig Jr.

Ken had shown me the private PDF of his genealogical text before Christmas, and I suggested that a few historians and some fiction readers in the West Midlands would be interested in this local writer, if I could add a biographical introduction and more images. He agreed to the expansion and that it could be made public. This 26-page PDF is the result, now freely available for download.

Download: fowler_wright_genealogy_life.pdf

S. Fowler Wright was a key writer in the history of early science-fiction. To earn money for his family he was also a popular crime-mystery writer of the 1930s and 40s. He was raised in Smethwick and then lived in north Birmingham. As a seminal imaginative writer and as a Birmingham man interested in Mercian history he was thus very much a contemporary of Tolkien, and he even went to the same school in New Street. I suspect a connection with Arnold Bennett, and note that Wright apparently advised Churchill on certain matters during wartime (see PDF for details). S. Fowler Wright’s biography remains to be written. I won’t be the one to write it, so feel free.

C.S. Lewis’s 1936 walk near Buxton, Derbyshire

by futurilla

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

by futurilla

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.

Pickling and tinkering

by futurilla

An excellent short post about “The Britishness of British Faeries”. Despite its click-baity title that article doesn’t sum up the characteristics of Britishness and then tally them with fairy-lore and fairy-traits. Though that might make for an interesting future post at the venerable British Fairies blog.

The article is actually about how the idea of ‘fairy’ can be brought before the more rational mind. In this case by situating the fairies as the ineffable genii loci of a place, especially in the British context of our ‘deep time’ landscape and places. No diminutive Tinkerbell or neo-pagan confabulation is then required to get the basic idea across to the musing young walker.

The concise article sums this up very well. But I’d like to add a few points, around the idea that its not all about an ‘immediate emotional response’ to a place.

At worst that sort of response can simply stop short, easily slipping into a purely nostalgic and preservationist view of a place. The preservationist ends up ‘pickling the fairies’ of a place, as if in a jar of pickling vinegar.

The ‘immediate emotional response’ assumption can also overlook the contributions made by the rational thinking mind, in terms of ‘landscape place-making’ (from path-makers to tree tenders to grand folly-makers to wall-builders), and also ‘landscape place-discovering’ (folklorists and antiquarians through to modern metal-detectorists, from child den-makers to footpath naturalists). It’s not just about cultivating a hazy awareness that some distant ancestors may have once ‘dwelt’ here long ago, but rather that an active chain of creators helped to subtly shape and ‘make’ this place while respecting all the past contributions. In which case today’s beholder of the place could become a part of that chain, one of the many local stewards and makers whose work of centuries eventually enables one to say…

“Whether they’ve made the land, or the land’s made them, it’s hard to say” (Samwise Gamgee)

Although cultivating such an awareness would then risk opening the place up to unwanted ‘tinkering and improvements’, of the sort which may do more harm than good. Rather than ‘pickling the fairies’, in this case it would be ‘suffocating the fairies’ in a cloud of cringe-inducing naffness. I’m thinking here of hasty bits of ‘improvement’ of a place. Such as:

* a massive shiny new DIY shed which instantly destroys the lovely ambience on the corner of an allotments;

* some old rain-bedraggled ‘yarn-bombing’ or ‘inspirational’ message left to rot in a depressing manner;

* various quick-fix local council ‘improvements’, at best new ‘interpretation boards’ and/or a mundane municipal sculpture, at worst things like the replacement of a park’s proper wooden-slat benches with one tiny and freezing anti-dosser metal-mesh seat;

* the numerous examples of over-interpretation and political ‘interventions’ at National Trust sites, and increasingly also at nature reserves;

* ersatz ‘fairy-fication’ via sculptures — ranging from some quite acceptable bits of outdoors art sympathetically made by local people, through a host of bland wickerwork dragonflies made by fly-by-night ‘creative practitioners’, right down to the occasional naff garden-gnome gardening (sometimes not without an eccentric charm, admittedly).

Doubtless readers can think of some tinkering or ‘improvements’ done at their own favourite places, which has caused the genuine fairy-feeling to vanish while (curiously) the litter remains un-picked.

So, yes… perhaps after all it’s best to leave most people with their brief ‘immediate emotional response’, before ushering them back to their latest forgettable TV series. Rather than pushing the mood on further, into a response that risks being either about ‘pickling’ or ‘tinkering’.