I’m pleased to hear that the Wolverhampton photographer Oscar Rejlander has a major exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, of all places. It appears to have travelled from its 2018 debut in Canada, so let’s hope it eventually crosses the Atlantic and reaches Birmingham. His work is far more human and warm than the cold and aloof psychotica made by Julia Margaret Cameron, with whom he’s commonly compared, and it should be a popular show.

“Oscar Rejlander: Artist Photographer, on view 12th March – 9th June 2019 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles. … The exhibition features 150 photographs”

“Mary Constable and Her Brother”, 1866.

“The Scholar’s Mate”, c. 1855 exhibited 1856. The governess-tutor appears pleased and amused that her clever girl scholar is about two moves from checkmating her brother at a game of chess, and she seems to be quietly warning the girl to remain ladylike about it and not to gloat and snook when she wins. (Boys were commonly dressed as girls until they were abruptly “breeched” into trousers, in those days, thus one assumes she’s playing her brother even though he wears skirts).

One wonders if his pictures titled “Wolverhampton Fair” and “The Fortune Teller”, of the same 1855 date, survived. Also how many other Wolverhampton pictures have survived. He spent about 15 years in Wolverhampton before fame hit. He’s said to have employed the fairground sideshow girls of Wolverhampton as models (“Madame Wharton’s Pose Plastique Troupe”), which probably added to the scandal around his famous breakthrough pictures known as Two Ways of Life.

The new show is billed as “the first major retrospective on Rejlander”, and there’s a sumptuous Yale University Press book to accompany it. Which might make the West Midlands curators pause for thought, about why we couldn’t have got there first and are instead being beaten to a major show on ‘the father of art photography’ by distant Canada and Los Angeles.

Now we know something about the locations for one of the Tolkien bio-pics. Not quite my own Staffordshire, but somewhat near-ish in what’s technically Cheshire. A south Manchester suburb stood in for the battlefield scenes….

“Tatton Studios was one of their key locations, with war scenes being filmed on one of its 24-acre backlots … played host to a cast of 150 First World War soldiers, 30 cavalry horses and a 300-strong crew, which included a dedicated SFX team to manage activity such as night shooting and also construction experts, who spent three months building the battlefield.”

This is a useful behind-the-scenes movie-making article, though there also seems to be a great deal of mindless legacy media blather in advance of this first movie. Such as dismal headlines like: “The Untold Truth of JRR Tolkien” and “Will ‘Tolkien’ bring the Lord of the Rings trilogy back to life?”.

Er, when did it die…?

But there are also currently some good thoughtful articles arising from the New York exhibition, such as the new “You’ve Read Tolkien’s Books — But Have You Seen His Paintings?” and “Tolkien’s drawings reveal a wizard at work”.

Cultural Heritage Spring Lecture Series, “brought to you by the South West Peak Landscape Partnership”…

12th March – There’s More to Walls by Master Craftsman Trevor Wragg;
19th March – Fire, Foxholes, Bullets and Barrows by SWP cultural heritage officer Dr Catherine Parker Heath;
26th March – Anglo Saxons in The Staffordshire Moorlands and the South West Peak by Harry Ball;
2nd April – Highways and Waymarkers by Jan Scrine of The Milestone Society;
9th April – Historic Mining in the South West Peak by Dr John Barnatt.

“Birmingham Then and Now” at Never Yet Melted.

And, sadly, the vandals usually slip away un-named and un-remembered.

New in The Sentinel, ‘The coal man and the bread man have gone for good’ – how things have changed in Stoke-on-Trent since the 1960s. Memories of Goldenhill, an isolated hilltop part of Stoke-on-Trent.

Mind you, such things lasted a long time in parts of Stoke-on-Trent. In the early 2000s when I lived in Middleport, you could still see coal-deliveries being made to pensioners, with coal-sacks trucked by hand up back-alleys and into coal-sheds. The distinctive ‘annnyyy-oll-irroon!’ call of the rag-and-bone man could still be heard, maybe once every six weeks, although his horse had long gone. And the milk-float man still made milk-bottle deliveries, and you could get a pre-ordered loaf of bread delivered with the milk. Of course, it’s all gone now — flattened into brick-dust by Commissar Nevin and henchmen.

There’s a fascinating new paper on ancient sea-travel routes in northern Europe, and a resulting coherent diffusion of stone-circle building… “Radiocarbon dates and Bayesian modeling support maritime diffusion model for megaliths in Europe”.

Now we have to be a little sceptical here, because… i) it seems increasingly easy to get questionable headline-grabber papers past peer-review and into the PNAS journal, judging by other recent examples; ii) the study is partly based on computer-modelling and statistical re-shaping, a method which has its own inherent problems; and iii) stone circles in remote coastal areas are far more likely to have survived into the historical record.

That said, the new paper does present an intriguing prehistoric proposition and has good evidence to support it…

“We argue for the transfer of the megalithic concept [of stone circles] over sea routes emanating from northwest France, and for advanced maritime technology and seafaring in the megalithic Age.”

I’m pleased to see that Arthur Berry’s autobiography, A Three & Sevenpence Halfpenny Man, is now available as an ebook for the Kindle, at a reasonable £2.71.

Ah, at last we have a release date for one of the forthcoming big Tolkien biopic movies. One of them has to be good, we can hope, and respectful to the material.

“Fox Searchlight is releasing Tolkien in cinemas in the UK on 3rd May 2019. Tolkien explores the formative years of the orphaned author as he finds friendship, love and artistic inspiration among a group of fellow outcasts at school. This takes him into the outbreak of the First World War…”

The cast looks good, though the writers have a somewhat worrying leftist slant in their track-record.

Della Hooke on “Water and the Environment in the Anglo-Saxon World”. A talk to the Staffordshire Archaeological & Historical Society in Lichfield, 10th May 2019.

The Word of Teregor (1914) by Guy Ridley (1885-1947) is an early British fantasy novel of sentient trees. The trees converse in moots and are unfriendly to men. One of the trees is called Enteth.

“No one but a real lover of trees could write of them as Mr. Ridley has done.” — review in the Westminster Gazette. “A suggestive and original voice among the babel of modern literature” — review in The Daily Telegraph.

An obvious inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ents, circa 1938, you might think. Though I doubt that would be provable now — and anyway there are more obvious and earlier possibilities. Such as an aside in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (“Who can impress the forest, bid the tree | Unfix his earthbound root?” ‘impress’ = to strongarm a man into armed service in an Army). This might perhaps be Shakespeare’s nod to Taliesin’s magnificent poem “The Battle of the Trees” (Cad Goddeu), in which many types of trees are enchanted into a marching army of trees. Tolkien and his circle had surely found time to notice Taliesin by 1938 — though I imagine that Tolkien would have been professionally wary of seeming to endorse the authenticity of the late Welsh ‘bardic’ songs.

There’s also a prime example from Tolkien’s childhood, the “Attack of the trees” from the famous The Wizard of Oz, here depicted in 1900 by Denslow…

Anyway, the full novel is at the link above.