News of a new Tom Shippey book, Beowulf and the North before the Vikings, from Amsterdam University Press. Here’s the blurb…

Ever since Tolkien’s famous lecture in 1936, it has been generally accepted that the poem Beowulf is a fantasy, and of no use as a witness to real history. This book challenges that view, and argues that the poem provides a plausible, detailed, and consistent vision of pre-Viking history which is most unlikely to have been the poet’s invention, and which has moreover received strong corroboration from archaeology in recent years. Using the poem as a starting point, historical, archaeological, and legendary sources are combined to form a picture of events in the North in the fifth and sixth centuries: at once a Dark and a Heroic Age, and the time of the formation of nations. Among other things, this helps answer two long-unasked questions: why did the Vikings come as such a shock? And what caused the previous 250 years of security from raiders from the sea?

It was slipped out in August 2022, when many were at the beach. The podcast History of Vikings has a late September podcast interview on the book, and appears to be the only interview. This has an .MP3 download and the excellent long interview starts at 3:10 minutes. Shippey states that he had large amounts of friendly help from Scandinavian archaeologists, eager to bring their little-read recent discoveries to a wider public. Judging from what’s said it seems to have been a very productive engagement, as discovery after discovery slotted into place in the broader framework that Shippey was able to provide.

Amazon notes of the book “New edition”. But I can find no earlier edition, and the podcast interview suggests this is a wholly new book. Shippey does mention that there was a big difficulty in getting copies into warehouses, so perhaps that’s what’s meant — perhaps the first run had to be pulped due to printing problems, and then a new one produced?

Also of note, elsewhere, the new “A Babel of Shadows: The Meaning and Function of Shadows in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings“. A fine Masters dissertation, dated 2022, from a Dutch student. Written in English.

I found what appears to be an offshoot of the January 2022 YouTube Tolkien Day lectures, which I discovered and noted here back in the summer. The offshoot video is an excellent short YouTube lecture on “The Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien”.

Many good clear points are made in just 11 minutes, but the young speaker makes the especially pithy point that Tolkien — who must surely be the most read poet of the 20th century due to all the poetry and lyrics in his books — is…

“not even mentioned in any general account of 20th century English poetry, so far as I’m aware”

I recently found what appears to be a similar state of affairs in art history bibliography, judging by the massive new unified art history bibliography for 1910-2007. Just six hits for a simple search on “Tolkien”, and one of those spurious…

* Drawings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1976)

* Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien (1979)

* The invented worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien : drawings and original manuscripts from the Marquette University Collection (44 page exhibition catalogue)

* J.R.R. Tolkien : artiste et illustrateur (1996, French)

* “Elements of myth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and selected paintings of Paul Klee” (1980 microfilm dissertation, probably tangential)

* A collector’s guide to costume jewelry (spurious result, author is also named Tolkien)

… which seems odd. Because some of the many contributing mega-libraries must surely have at least one or two key pre-2007 Tolkien art books in their collections. Although, being charitable, I suppose such books may have proven so popular that they were either stolen, had the best pictures razored out, or simply fell to bits and were discarded.

Perhaps some kind soul could send the relevant publication data to the new openbibart.fr art history bibliography, in the hope that they might add the missing books and articles on Tolkien’s art? Alternatively, perhaps someone might make a comprehensive annotated bibliography on the art, fully up to date?

More mega-Tolkishness. New Tolkien scholarship items are…

Kristine Larsen’s new “Moons, Maths, and Middle-earth”, which looks at Tolkien’s mathematical abilities. See also her earlier “We hatesses those tricksy numbers” (2011).

A new Journal of Inklings Studies (October 2022) brings a review of A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien’s Literary Canvas, and also of the monograph Following the Formula in Beowulf, Orvar-Odds saga, and Tolkien.

Also in the same new issue of Journal of Inklings Studies, a sufficient abstract of the pay-walled An Inspired Alias? J.R.R. Tolkien’s Frodo Baggins ‘Underhill’ and Fr Gerard Albert Plunket ‘Underhill’, O.P. (1744–1814). Argues that a Leeds priest may have been the inspiration for the name. I’d note that the Earendel cognate Urvandill also has a certain similarity in terms of its ‘look on the page’, although the meaning is of course different.

“The Beeches Were their Favourite Trees”: An analysis of peoples’ relationships with trees in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Takes 50 pages to get to the point, but then there’s quite a bit that’s interesting after that.

“Galloping through the Middle Ages: The Horse in Medieval Life and Middle English Literature”. Horses and ponies are a ubiquitous but somewhat neglected aspect of Middle-earth, so this sort of historical background survey is useful.

“The Symbolic Function of the Cityscape in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings“.

“”Fairies and Fusiliers”: Warfare and Faerie on the Western Front”. Abstract only, described as a completed “doctoral project”.

“Celtic Things” In Tolkien’s Mythology. Has some musing on Goldberry and Bombadil at the end.

A rather needling review, seemingly the first, of the $105 collection Critical Insights: The Lord of the Rings (2022). The review usefully notes…

John R. Holmes’ article “‘A Dream of Music’: The Eärendil Poem in The Lord of the Rings”. Holmes’ contribution is one of the best pieces

Sounds good. Another essay on Bombadil apparently notes “the character’s Finnish sources”. The reviewer also offers a snippet relating to the chapter “Speak Memory: Some Biographical Sources of The Lord of the Rings“…

While [the chapter’s section] “Inventing Buckland” is its most persuasive portion, Bunting’s comparison between Eärendel and Brandywine proves rather uncompelling.

Interesting. I’ve not seen the book. But it sounds like the author tries to make connections between place-names in Buckland and Old English names? Tolkien certainly put a lot of effort and thought into his place-names. But how would that work, in this case?

Internally to Middle-earth, Brandywine is from Baranduin, i.e. “golden brown”, and the simpler “brown river” is stated early on in Fellowship. “The Etymologies” (Lost Road and other Writings) has the name Baranduin as from baran (brown) and seemingly inspired via the real-world Old Norse barane, the latter meaning a sandy-brown river-sandbank made of sands and shining river-muds. Probably related is Old Norse brunn, which meant either ‘brown’ or ‘shining, polished’ depending on context and modifiers. ‘Amber’ then immediately suggests itself to me as a middle-ground, allowing easy slippage between the two meanings. Something of the latter Old Norse ‘shining’ meaning survives today in English as ‘burnish’.

So the name Brandywine may not relate to the colour of the river-water, but rather to the rich colour of the sandbanks and shifting sandy eyots so beloved of Tolkien (river eyots appear regularly in LoTR). That said, the Baranduin river was once long ago made navigable, and thus one would assume a central deep channel. The river’s source was near the city of Annuminas in the Hills of Evendim, founded by Elendil. This once-great city’s people travelled only by this river, being otherwise hemmed in by high hills. Tolkien once called its waters “Elvish” in explaining why the Black Riders were later reluctant to cross this water in LoTR. This perhaps implies that the Elves had once frequented the river, visiting Elendil in Annuminas. That the Elves named the same city Torfirion suggests they knew it and thus the river-route that was the only approach to it. And, recall here that Legolas says, “Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the Elves, if once they dwelt there”. If they had once used this river, they did not exactly “dwell” there, but it would have been a route well-known to them. Perhaps leaving enough of a legacy to be off-putting to the Black Riders.

[Update: Nature of Middle-earth reveals that the elves “still controlled” Lake Evendim, the source of the river, at the time of Frodo’s departure from the Shire. This is why the Riders will not touch the “elvish” river.]

But that Elvish usage, if such it was, was long past by the time of the founding of Brandy Hall. Either way, if the Brandywine had golden sandbanks or golden-brown water or both, hobbits would have made a natural comparison with the colour of whatever distilled golden-brown hobbit-wine was the equivalent to ‘brandy’. Indeed in early Hobbit-language it was Branda-nîn (possibly ‘border-water’, perhaps also a pun on the brandy colour). Thus we may have a triple semantic weighting, two Hobbit-y and a deeper one that may percolate through and yet live in the memories of the long-lived Elves. Indeed we have evidence of this living-on, since the river is named by Glorfindel in an early manuscript as Branduin — he tells Frodo on the hills above Woodhall of “the Branduin which you turned into Brandywine” — with the line later being cut from the published text. The Elvish name for it is also translatable to ‘golden-brown’.

But “golden brown” is also the colour of a partly charred brand of wood. Recall here Tolkien’s early/sometime use of ‘Burning Briar’ for the well-known star-constellation The Plough and its Middle-earth symbolism as its form of an enduring war-threat to the evil Melkor. Briar = branch = brand (of wood). Perhaps this was partly inspired via the extensive Biblical literature debating the translation of the Hebrew ‘branch’ as ‘dayspring’ (rising light before dawn). Which, if an early inspiration for the name Branduin, would then give one a roundabout earendel connection.

However, if in “The Etymologies” one were to confuse BARAN- with the immediately adjacent BARAD- or BARATH- then either way one could get a quick (but wrong) connection with Varda / Elbereth, and hence with the Middle-earth star-equivalent for the Old English earendel (if the star Venus). Which is not to say that this wasn’t an early conflation once made by Tolkien in his several BARA- words, before later separation. But that would have to be shown by the Middle-earth language specialists and the historians of the evolution of LoTR. By the sound of it, “Bunting’s comparison between Eärendel and Brandywine” — whatever that was — may lack such considerations.

In the real-world the name Brandywine (a river, a real-world folk-etymology) is well known in American history. There it goes back to brandwijn and the earlier brantwijn (Middle Dutch) -> meaning “burnt wine” -> i.e. a ‘fiery spirit distilled from wine’. Then in Old English I suppose one might surmise a hypothetical parallel in biernan (burning) + win (wine, implied dark). Fiery spirit burning, dark, implied wetness, probably good for cheering one through the cold midwinter darkness… yes, I guess you could just about wrangle it into a connection with the Old English earendel in terms of the meaning. But the connection would be more than a bit creaky. Unless… you were to assume another hypothetical original, way back in Old English, as biernan (burning) + windle (turning, winding), with the windle claimed to root back to -wendil. Again, by a roundabout route, there you’d then have an earendel connection via -wendil.

So, those would be my guesses about what might be going on in “Bunting’s comparison between Eärendel and Brandywine”.