Author Archives: futurilla

The Burslem Bulletin

by futurilla

In his latest Sentinel column, historian Fred Hughes reveals the existence of a long-running illustrated publication titled the Burslem Bulletin…

Doulton’s contribution to Burslem’s prosperity was palpable. And the relationship between town and factory was richly featured in its house magazine, Burslem Bulletin. First published in 1947 as an irregular publicity journal, it quickly grew into an illustrated monthly newsletter promoting the activities and social life Doulton employees, most of whom were Burslem residents arriving here straight from school and remaining until old age retirement eased them out. […] I have a full set of these monthly publications telling the story of Burslem more comprehensively than any established social history book I have in my library. The whole is an archive of information that shows how well the workplace and social life blended together to make an organic community.

Sounds like a job for a crowd-funder on IndieGoGo or suchlike, to get this scanned and onto Archive.org. Otherwise there may be a risk that things like this will go into the Keele local archives and never be catalogued for decades let alone scanned and made public. For instance, look at the fate of the Proceedings of the North Staffordshire Field Club and similar local journals.

Another mega-Tolk

by futurilla

Another ‘mega-Tolk’, being my regular big ‘combo PDF’ made by combining various interesting-looking recent papers on Tolkien…

* A review of a book I was completely unaware of, which slipped out just before Christmas 2021, A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien’s Literary Canvas. There’s a leftist review in Journal of Tolkien Research. The extended tub-thumping about academic working conditions is, as usual with leftists, ‘preaching to the converted’. This aspect of the review might better have been stripped out and made into a more public article with quotes, for somewhere like the THES. There’s another review in Mythlore which is more straightforward.

As for the book itself it’s a Kent State University book and is thus too expensive for me though at least is not one of those £120 tomes. It’s 150 pages and judging by the reviews it treads Silmarillion territory and hardly touches LOTR. There’s no preview of it on Google Books, and even Amazon refuses to load the ‘Look Inside’ for it, so I can’t see if my The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth (2018) is mentioned. Judging by the two reviews, it isn’t.

* Another review of Tolkien and the Classical World in Mythlore, and another in Lembas which usefully names the German scholars identified by Burton as having influenced Tolkien: Victor Hehn and Otto Schrade. Also a review of Tolkien and the Classics in Finfar.

* “Possible Analogues of Invented Plant Species of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth in Earth’s Current Flora”.

* “Commentary on “Musings on Limlight”” (Elvish etymology of the name of the river Limlight) (See also the section ‘light’, in the new Commentary on The Nature of Middle-earth from the same authors).

* Birds of Creation in the Old English Exeter Book (paywall, abstract only).

* Review of Tolkien and the Sea: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar 1996. (Now re-published as an affordable edition).

* “A Lost Tale, A Found Influence: Earendel and Tinuviel”. (The lost tale of Wade as a model for Tolkien’s ‘lost’ Tale of Earendel)

* “Seeing Double: Tolkien and the Indo-European Divine Twins”.

* Historykon review of the 2020 Polish book Mitologia Polnocy a Chrzescijanstwo… “An equally interesting figure is Earendel, who is compared by researchers and the author with the morning star and also with Mary, John the Baptist or even Jesus. The mysterious mythological figure becomes even more mysterious, and this mystery also inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to The Lord of the Rings. In my opinion, the sub-section is the best part of the book. Renata Lesniakiewicz-Drzymala makes here a great analysis of the mythological figure and then gives the answer what it could have been and what it could symbolize in the Christian world.” (On the topic see also the recent French La Terre du Milieu: Tolkien et la mythologie germano-scandinave).

The publisher’s TOCs show this as covering pages 134 – 167:—
2.0. Earendel – the brightest of the angels.
2.1. Variants of the name Earendel and their mythical connotations.
2.2. Earendel and the O Oriens.
2.3. Earendel – Christ, Mary or John the Baptist?
2.4. Earendel and Christianity.

Sounds good, but I’m not sure how one would squeeze even the briefest survey of all that into just 32 pages. I can’t really afford it, but I suppose I shall have to get a copy of the book to scan and translate. Amazon UK knows nothing about it, but thankfully it is relatively cheap at £10 via the ‘Polish books to the UK’ service ksiegarniainternetowa.co.uk. Despite not appearing to offer PayPal, they do… with a 50 pence surcharge. Ah well, there goes a third of the income made so far from my emergency Tolkien in Cornwall ebook production. Thankfully I’m now slightly better placed on cash, than I was just before Christmas.

Update: I now have the book. The earendel section actually covers pages 97-116, 20 pages.

The blocking wave

by futurilla

It seems I’m not the only one to be abruptly blocked on Facebook. Birmingham Live (The Birmingham Post & Mail) reports Facebook deletes ELO rock legend Bev Bevan’s account…

He is the fourth person to have contacted BirminghamLive after accounts have been blocked, including Tamworth show-home furniture businesswoman, Gemma Pountney, grieving Birmingham mum, Alison Cope, and cafe owner Sarah Exall.

Coverage in America also complains of abrupt blocking of accounts of those deemed ‘too popular’. It’s very probably just some stupid mis-management decision cascading down the system, although Putin must be happy that management dunderheads and their drones are effectively doing his work for him.

Well sod ’em, I’m gone now. There were only four Groups of interest there, other than mine, and three of them were only sporadic and weren’t all that useful. Indeed one Group, run as a front for the local Socialist Workers Party (or whatever they call themselves now) was only visited for a chuckle.

Now that Elon Musk is set on buying Twitter and restoring free-speech, I might even get an account over there at last… when he takes over there. For re-posting blog-posts only.