A “face jug” produced by English potters in the 14th century. Apparently once widespread in England, and presumably a direct precursor of the ‘Toby’ jugs.

Free on Archive.org, In northern mists: Arctic exploration in early times (1911) Vol. 1, and Vol 2. It’s a deep history of the discovery of the high northern lands, with plenty of well-scanned hand-drawn maps. “Early” here means from the Greeks to the discovery of North America.

A new one-sheet map will help readers of such books orient themselves, although it doesn’t cover the integral area that lies a little further east — where Finnish culture leaps the dividing channel of water and shades down into the lake-country of what is now Lithuania.

A nice idea for an exhibition, albeit down in at the other end of the West Midlands in Warwickshire. I wonder if something similar could be done for Stoke’s ceramics, showing the journey of the clay up from Cornwall and the same for all the other elements, glazes and components that go to make a humble pot in 2020?

Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath. No, not a reference to an especially rough Sunday in Stoke-on-Trent. It’s a Kickstarter for a horror-story anthology revolving around the Birmingham heavy rock band Black Sabbath. I hesitate to inflict a Kickstarter on readers, but it seems a worthy and novel idea, and it appears to be struggling a bit with just six days to go.

It also segways neatly into news that Home of Metal: Black Sabbath – 50 Years is a major retrospective exhibition set to open in Birmingham, on 26th June and it will then run through to 29th September 2019.

Likely to be of interest to those reading this blog for the Tolkien posts…

Symposium: THE SURROUNDING FOREST: TREES IN THE MEDIEVAL IMAGINARY
When: 22 June 2019, 09:30 — 18:30
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square, The Keynes Library
Booking details: Free entry; booking required.

The Arnold Bennett calendar (1911).

Unfortunately not keyed to the weather, seasonal events and other seasonally flavoured textures of life in North Staffordshire. A bit of a wasted opportunity in that regard.

A small bonus for those buying the new ebook of my Sir Gawain book. I’ve just snagged a distinctly better scan of the Redhurst Gorge picture, which I had earlier posted here at the end of December 2018. Here’s the larger and clearer version…

Redhurst Gorge is in the distance, and what appears to be a new-paved road runs alongside the Manifold. Most likely the card was made to celebrate the new road, but inadvertently also recorded the Gorge, and its upper sides. Most probably in the 1920s.

“What’s happened to the ‘Staffordshire’ news?”, I thought. On searching Google News, there’s almost nothing worth having for the last week. But I realised that the problem was not Google News, but the lack of coverage from its sources, as evidenced for a search such as…

Staffordshire -terrier -cancer -police -ambulance -tennis -magistrates -motorway -racecourse

… and with this I had basically knocked out nearly all the news that was being reported, with my ‘knockout’ keywords. There was almost nothing left that wasn’t crime, sport, car-crashes or Staffordshire Bull terriers!

The dregs that did appear showed thrilling headlines such as… “Gavin Williamson opens refurbished gazebo in Wombourne” and… “Suffolk ewe wins at Staffordshire County show”. Nearly all that was left in the results came from the sturdy expressandstar.com in Wolverhampton, a long-standing newspaper that still has the very worthy remit of trying to cover everything on its patch, even if only very briefly. Other results were mostly press releases and farming trade journal articles.

I should add that I was searching the proper searchable Google News, not the nasty ersatz version found at news.google.com.

There’s an opening here for an aggregator page that collects and curates links to Stoke and Staffordshire news, while filtering out all the sports, crime, fluff and robo-reporting, for those who have no interest in the news that Deirdre of Burslem got into some argy-bargy in Cobridge, or that Bogthorne Rovers won a match against Piddlemire by two goals. I won’t be the one to do that, so feel free to give it a go.

An expanded ebook of my book Strange Country: Sir Gawain in the moorlands of North Staffordshire, an investigation is now available on Amazon, at an affordable price. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, you’ll recall, is one of the most famous supernatural tales in English literature.

This book offers a concise overview of the existing Gawain research relating to North Staffordshire, and then adds a wealth of new detail and facts drawn largely from previously overlooked sources. The case is clearly made that one of the most famous works of English literature belongs to North Staffordshire. Obvious new candidates for both the Gawain-poet’s patron and the Gawain castle are suggested, and these are found to fit naturally and almost exactly when compared with the expected dates, castle features, dialect location, social status and life-story. A wealth of surrounding detail is also explored, such as: the history and role of the King’s Champion; English contacts with full-blooded paganism during the Prussian crusades; the two lavish courts at Tutbury; and the history of the Manifold Valley. This ebook is well illustrated and copiously referenced with linked round-trip footnotes.

Available to buy now!

A note on the Hobby Horse performers at Stafford, with dates, from the Staffordshire Advertiser.

I thought the ‘Tolkien in Staffordshire’ touring exhibition had finished touring. But the Express & Star today brings news, URL-dated as 27th May 2019, that it’s just opened at Cannock Chase Visitor Centre. They’re not very clear on specifics though, and offer no finish-date.

Initially I wondered if this report was actually a press-release re-writer bot, erroneously re-writing a press-release from 2018? The website at staffordshiregreatwar.com has died and the Staffordshire Council events pages are giving me 404s, so no luck there in terms of discovering more.

But a recent press report on the biopic movie, in the neighbouring Shropshire Star, mentions the exhibitions and gives an inkling as to the current situation for the show…

“Part of that new exhibition has now found a new home at the Great War Hut at the Marquis Drive Visitor Centre [on Cannock Chase] where people will be able to visit every weekend, and Bank Holidays”

I suspect that that’s it, and that it’s now opened as a cut-down permanent exhibit, perhaps with the information boards in leaflet form.

Another review of the new Tolkien biopic has landed, and this time it’s a long one that’s not behind a paywall. Tolkien — A Review is pithy and very well-written take, whose summary line might well be…

the film’s connect-the-dots literalism obscures and diminishes the daunting richness of creativity behind Tolkien’s construction of his Middle Earth fantasies

The reviewer sees not just a minimization of his Catholic faith, as some other reviews have suggested without specifics, but an outright blanking of it. I guess this might have seemed to the scriptwriter to be somewhat justified by the historical record, since the practice of his faith (if not his actual faith) does seem to have been rather lost in the initial boisterous phase of his encounter with Oxford. Specifically he was somewhat cursory or hasty in observance, from October 1911 until very early in 1913. Carpenter’s biography states that Tolkien said his first years at Oxford saw… “practically none or very little practice of religion”. This does not mean that faith had died in him, but rather that his observance and church attendance was probably minimal at that time. Nevertheless, when he did attend it may have meant a good deal to him. The key evidence for this is that Tolkien required that Edith become a Catholic for him.

It is also true that Tolkien’s very late letter to his son Michael (Letters, No. 250, 1963) recalled that throughout the busy 1920s he “almost ceased to practice” Catholicism. But letting one’s formal practice lapse is of course not quite the same as letting one’s belief lapse. Nor does it indicate that he ceased to cherish the various church rituals in his memory and on special occasions such as Easter. But here is another indication that during the early and formative period of the legendarium he was not always as suffused with a burning nimbus of Catholicism, as some modern adherents of the faith might now wish him to have been. Interestingly, this implies that Tolkien, at periods during the 1910s and 1920s, may thus have been more open to playfully holding in his mind certain textual pagan concepts and alluring ‘tricksy lights’ emanating from rare pagan perhaps-survivals, the better to try to get at the nub of the language and the meanings involved.

But back to the review, which bluntly notes that the portrayal of his wife-to-be Edith… “skirts perilously close to hectoring Virginia Woolf-style feminism”. A portrayal which, so far as I’m aware, goes against her real character.

The reviewer stresses the Worcestershire angle a couple of times, in a rather boosterish way — but appears unaware of the tight conjunction of several county lines as they enter Birmingham, and the local patriotism that set Birmingham above county origin. My guess is this is perhaps a function of the movie having apparently set up a sharp and dramatic dichotomy between a Mordor-like urban Birmingham and its Shire-like rural fringes, and as such may be an example of the way that a film can skew one’s perceptions of the topography of a place. Perhaps it’s also a function of trying to map the elder Tolkien’s understanding of his family and place-histories in 1941 (“any corner of that county…”) back onto what the teenage Tolkien would have understood of the same. Again one senses a subtle distortion perhaps induced by Tolkien-promoters, this time the ‘it was all inspired by Moseley’ brigade in Birmingham.

The reviewer also rather lumpenly suggests an intended conflation of Gandalf’s “Stand, men of the West!” with the folk of the West Midlands. Ouch. What was that you were saying about “connect-the-dots literalism”? Still, it’s another useful and thoughtful review and in a high-quality journal.

As for Birmingham, one can observe that South Birmingham (there is a clear divide between ‘north’ and ‘south’ of the city) is and was surprisingly leafy, and yet we know that the young Tolkien walked to the centre and back, to school each day. The family could not afford the tram fare for a long while, and only later did he move up to be near the Oratory. Thus as a youngster he did have the formative experience of walking through the industrial sections (Sparkbrook, Deritend) from a more semi-rural outskirt area, which he would have had to do to reach New St. in the city centre. He would also have walked up to New St., on the final approach, through the morning-markets area (Bull Ring, rag market and meat markets) on the southern edge of the city centre. Later, he and his brother cycled (“getting on our bikes to go to school in New Street”, Letters).