Tolkien Gleanings #241

It’s the two-year anniversary edition of Tolkien Gleanings. New Patreon supporters are always welcome.

* New on YouTube, “1967 footage of Donald Swann performing Tolkien’s songs”. Apparently the only such footage.

* MIT’s Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium presents Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull on editing Tolkien. 12th November 2024 at MIT. Looks like it’s MIT students-only, though I guess we may see a recording posted in due course?

* The Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference page now has a speaker-list, though no titles of their papers or talks.

* A new edition of Amon Hen (#309, October 2024) ($ paywall), now available for download by Tolkien Society members.

    – Editorial [the magazine is “no longer accepting any fan-fiction”].
    – Tolkien’s Greater Project [is there an arc that crosses all the Middle-earth works?].
    – The Role of Inns in The Lord of the Rings.
    – Tolkien and Old Norse.
    – Art in Tolkien Books [brief considerations of some ‘illustrated Tolkien’ books]
    – Review: Reading Tolkien in Chinese.
    – They Also Serve [on the figure of Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs].

* Signum University’s list of online short-courses for December 2024 include ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas‘ and ‘The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Early Poems 2 (Volume 1: The Years 1910-1919)’.

* New at the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Wizard, Demon, Cat; Reformer, Satanist, Bureaucrat: a diachronic analysis of three modes of Sauron in the Legendarium in light of The Book of Lost Tales“.

* Anna Smol has posted her First Impressions of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.

* A ComicCon Interview With John Hendrix, maker of the new illustrated children’s book and part graphic-novel The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (2024).

* From the Ukraine, a long abstract in Ukranian for a 2024 article that… “analyses the colours in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which play an important role as key elements of creating images and atmosphere” in Middle-earth.

* New at Archive.org, Rambles in Cornwall (1928). Though not an entire scan of this chunky book. Just the two chapters on The Lizard and the Mount. These are relevant to what Tolkien might have seen on his extended walking holiday on the Lizard in 1914, a decade or so before the book’s author made several walks in the district from a base at Helston (Tolkien, by contrast, was based in Lizard Town). The author observes the landscape and coast with a critical eye, and dutifully notes any interesting features of the older local churches. He occasionally notes standing stones, prehistoric rock chambers and ancient wells.

* And finally, ‘Little Sword’: Denmark’s oldest runes found on knife blade.

Tolkien Gleanings #240

* Holly Ordway takes “A First Look at The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien”, in Word on Fire. Freely available online.

* Lingwe blogs the question “Can generative AI help us analyze The Lord of the Rings?”. The answer is currently ‘no’, at least judging by the conclusion of his test with Google’s general AI. Which is a poor AI to choose, for several reasons that have been well publicised. But that aside, problems were found by the test. For instance the AI offered up the false notion that there is the word… “Windlestraw: a type of grass mentioned in the Shire”. There is, but not in the Shire. The word was old Scots, used by Robert Louis Stevenson in his short fable “The Song of the Morrow”. Stevenson has a mysterious hooded piper appear on a dismal Scottish beach, and the sound of his mournful and depressive playing of the wailing pipes is described as… “like the wind that sings in windlestraw”. My guess would be that someone once mentioned this word in a scholarly Tolkien paper on ‘Withywindle’, and thus the AI’s confusion arose?

* Another paper newly added to the latest rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Fallen Kingdoms and Ancient Monoliths: The Influence of Atlantis and Egypt in Tolkien’s Numenor”.

* A new book-chapter, “From Old English orcneas to George MacDonald’s Goblins with Soft Feet: Sources of Inspiration and Models for Tolkien’s Orcs from English Literature” ($ paywall, free footnotes). In English, to be found in a new predominantly German-language book on various ‘orcs’ in history and popular culture.

* New to me, Insolita: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares do Insolito, da Fantasia e do Imaginario (‘Insolita: Brazilian Journal of Studies of the Unusual, Fantastic and Imaginary’). Freely available in open-access, currently with seven issues all in Portuguese. Appears to have a strong tilt toward screen culture, but it may interest some.

* A new small book, titled Recovering Consolation: Sam’s Enchanted Path in The Lord of the Rings, discussing what makes Sam the most beloved character for many readers. Just over 150 pages in paperback, and also available as a Kindle ebook.

* And finally, new on DeviantArt, a handy print-and-fold Silmarillion Guide made by a fan. At-a-glance help, for when your head is spinning due to all the names, peoples and places. Free as a 14Mb .PNG file.

Tolkien Gleanings #239

* New in open-access from Italy, “The Tengwar and the Angerthas: an analysis of Tolkien’s Runes” (2023). PDF freely available, but the website is currently unresponsive when trying to download.

* A new Parma Eldalamberon 23: The Feanorian Alphabet, Part 2 & Eldarin Pronouns. “Released: 19th September 2024”, as a print-on-demand book.

* Available on 30th September 2024, the new book Celebrating Tolkien’s Legacy from Walking Tree, and now listed on Amazon UK. A misleading title, but the contents took rather interesting…

    1. “Tea in Hay” [speculation on a possible day-trip from Birmingham to Kinver, as a boy].

    2. The 1897 Diamond Jubilee and the Long Awaited Party.

    3. May Incledon, the Other Suffield Aunt.

    4. J.R.R. Tolkien: Ambidexter. [Tolkien was ambidextrous].

    5. For Want of a Biography, the Story Was Lost [on the roadblocks which prevented a full biography].

    6. 1904: Mabel Tolkien, Living and Dying.

    7. The Interlace of Autobiography and Faerian Imagery in “Smith of Wootton Major”.

    8. Tolkien as Forgotten Utopian.

    9. Christopher Tolkien as Editor: The Perils of Kinship.

* In the latest The Quietus an article in which… “Skye Butchtard remembers their dad’s collection of cassettes on which he recorded the 1981 radio adaptation” of The Lord of The Rings. ($ paywall) (And they also throw ad-blocker users off the site — thus the link is to Archive.is).

* “Exploring Tolkien” with Dr. Patrick Curry, a £95 four-week course in October 2024. With a slant toward myth and faerie. Booking now.

* And finally, two illustration exhibitions on the western outskirts of London. At the Heath Robinson Museum near London, the large exhibition “The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy” from 28th September to 5th January 2025. Might be combined with the relatively nearby exhibition “Flower Fairies: The Magical World of Cicely Mary Barker”, which runs 22nd October 2024 to 27th April 2025.

Tolkien Gleanings #238

* Mythcon 53 (August 2024), with abstracts and now also videos and PDFs. A wealth of items, but a few I noted included…

    – The Niggling Bandersnatch: Tolkien’s Revisionist Tendencies and the Canon of Middle-earth (video and panel transcript).

    – Seeking, hesitating and doubting in Tolkien’s ‘Smith of Wootton Major’ (PDF ‘coming soon’)

    – The Eschatology of Tolkien’s Middle-earth (video and transcript).

* A new German Tolkien documentary, due for TV broadcast on 5th December 2024, Tolkien: Die wahre Geschichte Ringe (‘The True Story of the Rings’). 90 minutes, by Jean-Christoph Caron (ZDF/ARTE, head of documentaries) and Matthias Schmidt. There was an in-cinema preview presentation for those involved, on 13th September.

* Due for publication in a few days, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Very Short Introduction, a pocket-book in the Very Short Introductions series.

* The new rolling issue of Journal of Tolkien Research has its first article, on “The Wayland-legend and the First Age of Middle-earth”.

* More previously-paywalled lectures on Tolkien by Rachel Fulton-Brown, now free on YouTube. Further to the earlier video releases I mentioned in Gleanings #229, the ongoing release of her series now continues with “A Notion of Time” (live). Then: “A Deeper Delve”; “Falling Wide Asleep”; “Norman Castles”; and “A Taste for Tongues” (all scheduled for airing soon).

* A new podcast, Tolkien’s Philosophy of Fairy Stories with Dr. Philip Chase, Chase being a medieval literature specialist and now also a fantasy author.

* Wormwoodania unearths “A Secret Sussex Fantasy”…

“The Man Who Was Sussex, A Hand-Book for Hikers (1933). This begins when two hikers get lost in a mist near Chanctonbury Ring, the great earthwork and landmark [and are then] rescued by a local who seems to be both fully human and yet with an ancestral and elemental quality, and he then guides them around other historic and scenic sites in the county. As the title suggests, he is in fact the personification of Sussex and its storied landscape.”

The likeness is not mentioned but it sounds somewhat LoTR-like to me, in terms of the scene with the hobbits on the Barrow-downs and Bombadil. Published by the major publisher Duckworth I see, so I assume it had some publicity at the time — and might have come to the attention of Tolkien. There are also four copies currently on eBay, suggesting it had a reasonable sale at the time of publication. The book is not yet scanned and online. Tolkien’s Bombadil in poetry was of course earlier than the book’s date of 1933, but the more expansive Bombadil of the LoTR chapters was written in autumn 1938.

* Now online, titles of the papers to be presented at the Tolkien and His Editors seminar.

* And finally, Princeton University’s online Index of Medieval Art should by now be free for all to use. It looks like it is, on a flying visit. The plan was that it would be perpetually ‘free to use’ from 1st July 2023 onward, for “researchers at all levels”.

Tolkien Gleanings #237

* Yesterday saw the happy event of the publication of Tolkien’s Collected Poems as a three-book slipcase edition and ebook. But note also the substantial new free Addenda and Corrigenda page for the book… “noting a few errors we failed to see before our book went to press, as well as inevitable additions”.

* A joint review of the new Collected Poems, at the Tolkien Collector’s Guide website. Freely available online. The unpublished poems discovered here are said to be “many more than were reported” by the advance publicity. Also noted is that this is partly a biographical work, since “the informative commentaries also contain much new biographical and bibliographical information”, especially in terms of pinpointing various dates in his life. Physically this first printing is reported to be fine in hardback, as judged by the high standards of book collectors, being printed in “Italy by Rotolito” and nicely bound and shipped.

* John Garth reviews The Collected Poems in this week’s TLS ($ paywall).

* Nothing on YouTube and only one lone Amazon UK review of the book, at present. The Amazon reviewer thinks well of their purchase, but states that on browsing the contents-list he finds it… “leaves out many of his shorter poems, especially most of his unpublished compositions written in languages other than modern English”.

* In other newly-published books, The Critic magazine has a glowing review of The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (2024), said to be the first such general history “since Humphrey Carpenter’s Secret Gardens in 1985″. Haunted Wood gives Tolkien a joint chapter with T.H. White. The review is freely available online. The book is now available as a Kindle ebook and in hardback. Judging by the review and the contents-list, this book offers a distinctly British view. Which of course is quite justified by history. But… not even Anne of Green Gables (British Canada)? Nope. According to the Haunted Wood author, the Anne-girl is “not a central part of the canon” of children’s literature. Which will be news to many. At least the Molesworth books are mentioned a few times, in passing.

* On a more mundane but equally timely note, Bondwine Books looks into the matter of Aragorn’s likely tax policy…

“I can tell you Aragorn’s tax policy in seven words that used to be famous in England, and that Tolkien certainly knew well: ‘The King shall live of his own’. Meaning, the daily expenses of government are met by the income of the royal estates, without direct taxation. In wartime, the King depends upon his people to fulfil their feudal obligations and report for unpaid (short-term) military service.”

We also know that when the King grants lands in a huge place such as Middle-earth, he can ask no more than that the new colonists keep up the key bridges and roads, and speed the King’s messengers. As in the Shire, which only has to maintain the key bridge leading to the greenways and Bree.

* New to me, the substantial Ghosts in Middle-earth: Germanic, Norse and Anglo-Saxon Remnants in Tolkien’s Fictional World (2009). Freely available from Academia.edu. Or (for non-members) by searching for “Ghosts in Middle-earth” in quotes on Google Scholar. Scholar has an arrangement with Academia.edu for seamless free downloads of PDF files.

* And finally, the new scholarly article “Ofer Hronrade — Defining the Long-Enigmatic Hron of Old English” ($ paywall), offering… “an exhaustive contextual study of the Old English word hron — and its relationship with the common word hwael — as well as statistical analysis of British marine biology, this paper seeks to demonstrate that the meaning of hron should indeed be separated from the Modern English word ‘whale'” [which is as Tolkien had suggested, though his suggestion was widely disregarded].

Tolkien Gleanings #236

* PRINTmag has a new and long interview with the creator of the new partly-a-comic-book book The Mythmakers, telling the story of Tolkien and Lewis for young readers. Many of the comic-strip interior pages are shown. Freely available online.

* A new issue of the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research has begun its rolling progress. Only one paper added so far, “Teaching Song and Holiness: An Exploration of the Mystic and Syncretic Elements of Tolkien’s Earliest Elvish Language Invention”.

* Digital Tolkien has a new Poems — Tolkien Poetry page, which appears to effectively serve as a useful interactive A-Z of what’s to come in the Collected Poems.

* In northern England, Leeds Central Library (the city’s public library) is to host a Tolkien Centenary Lecture on 23rd October 2024. Only 29 tickets left to hear Claire Rae Randall on what were apparently Tolkien’s local sources, and how these can still be…

found hidden in plain sight here in Leeds and more widely abroad in Yorkshire, from Treebeard the Ent in Headingley to Helm’s Deep in the glacial landscapes of the Dales.

Also related to Leeds, a reminder that one of the calls for 2025 Tolkien at IMC Leeds (7th-10th July 2025) was “J.R.R. Tolkien as Teacher and Mentor at Leeds and Beyond”. The deadline has just passed for IMC Leeds Tolkien proposals, but presumably this means a set of videos on the topic in the second half of 2025. I’d suggest we might also have a complementary set of papers on Tolkien’s own mentors and tutors, at some point in the future.

* Advance themes for the Annual UVM Tolkien Conference at the University of Vermont. 2025 will be “Tolkien and War”, and 2026 “Tolkien and the Medieval”.

* A stamp-collecting Tolkien Philatelic Society has been formed and hopes to grow… “So far we have just a handful of members and are looking for more.”

* More broadly related to the popular side of pre-LoTR fantasy culture, a call for scholars and collectors to contribute to The Pulpster #34, the annual of pulp history. In 2025 this will take the theme of ‘Masters of Blood and Thunder’. These being the writers Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter of Mars, Tarzan etc), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood), and Edgar Wallace (Sanders of the River, crime novels, King Kong script), who will also be the focus of the 2025 PulpFest. However the editors are open to other ‘blood and thunder’ writers who published in the pulps. The editors also seek articles which appreciate your favourite villain from the 1910s-1950s pulp magazines (or their later book reprints).

* And finally, a remarkable ‘Eye of Sauron’ ring has been newly unearthed by archaeologists here in the UK. No reports, as yet, that it makes the wearer invisible.

Tolkien Gleanings #235

* Now available, the topic-list for the latest programme of public Tolkien talks in Oxford. Starting 17th October and running through to Christmas.

    1. Holly Ordway: ‘Tolkien as Interpreter and Transformer of Culture’.
    2. John Garth: ‘Quisling and Prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard’.
    3. [HALF-TERM, NO TALK]
    4. Mark Williams: ‘A Harmless Vice: Tolkien’s Invented Languages’.
    5. Giuseppe Pezzini: ‘The Authors and Styles of The Lord of the Rings‘.
    6. Grace Khuri: ‘Echoes of Anglo-Saxon England in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings – From Page to Screen’.
    7. Michael Ward: ‘C.S. Lewis’s Influence on The Lord of the Rings‘.
    8. Stuart Lee: ‘The ‘Key-spring’ of The Lord of the Rings?’.

* Kristine Larsen has a new paper which briefly looks at “”A fear of anything large and alive, and not easily tamed or destroyed”: Kaiju in The Lord of the Rings“, kaiju being Japanese for rampaging giant monsters. She has noticed that the appearance of LoTR coincided with the post-war craze for giant destructive monsters — atom-age mutants in America’s B-movies, and the kaiju (Godzilla etc) of Japan’s monster cinema. Freely available online.

* Law & Liberty magazine’s new “Inklings on the Move” article turns out to be a long joint review of the recent books Tolkien’s Faith and C.S. Lewis’s Oxford. Freely available online.

* On YouTube, a July 2024 interview with the author of the acclaimed book Reading Tolkien in Chinese (2024).

* And finally, The Shire Way, a fledgling long-distance… “walking route in the heart of England dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien and his tale The Lord of the Rings“. Currently being walked, tweaked and recorded, it aims to run from the Lickey Hills just south of Birmingham, due south down through rural Worcestershire and down to Evesham. Then to hook north again through the adjacent rural Warwickshire, and thus arrive back in south Birmingham.

“If one is seeking to emulate as nearly as possible the journeys in Tolkien’s books, the outward three stages to Evesham should be walked between the 23rd and 25th September; the homeward three stages to Birmingham between 31st October and 2nd November.”

Six days for experienced hiking walkers, probably more for Tolkien-like pottering and peering-under-leaves. Though all walkers are warned that… “prolonged rain can turn the low-lying parts of Worcestershire into muddy quagmires” and thus slow progress.

One of reasons given for creating the walk is that…

Surprisingly and sadly, Tolkien is underappreciated in his home region and many places associated with his upbringing are overlooked, run-down or already destroyed. Without visitors, this crucial aspect of the English-speaking world’s literary heritage is in jeopardy.

I look forward to a full finished route-book with Wainright-like maps and sketches, and perhaps one day walking it. Though at present the project seems to be ‘early days’, with an ETA for the finished online route-guide of spring 2025. Still, the recent Two Saints Way through Staffordshire and Cheshire shows what can be done in five years by someone determined to create a specialist long-distance path. I understand, having been a small part of the making of the Two Saints Way, that thankfully England doesn’t put too much bureaucracy in the way of such individual enterprise. No tedious committees, time-limited permits, or state rubber-stamped approval is required for such things. Tolkien-the-anarchist would surely have approved of that.

Tolkien Gleanings #234

* Now released, a preview of the front cover for the Kindle ebook version of the forthcoming Collected Poems.

* The Jewish Journal has a new article on “Tolkien’s Timely Testimony”, and its importance in the current climate. Freely available online.

* A new long post at The Blog of Marzabul, “”And That Means Comfort” — On the Shire as anti-Faerie”, asks… “is the Shire rather less safe and idealised than one might imagine?” In fact, a sort of “anti-Faerie”? Well, yes, I’d say so… if one reads closely and gleans the wider context from the text. Such as something the blog article omits, that the Shire has four seasons. As anyone who lives in the British Isles knows, that means discomfort for much of the year. The Shire is also known to have had some very hard winters within living memory. For instance the winter in which the Shire was invaded by the white wolves, a winter which a young Bilbo must have experienced.

* A new special issue of the open-access journal LinguaCulture, on “C.S. Lewis: The Re-enchanted Academic” (June 2024). Includes, among others, “The Dauntless Don: How C.S. Lewis Became a Public Intellectual, 1938-1944” and a review of the book Many Times and Many Places: C.S. Lewis and the Value of History (2023). Freely available online.

* Releasing at the end of September 2024, the book The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien. Not the graphic novel I vaguely thought it was, since it turns out to be… “prose interspersed with images and narrative comics”. Also, seemingly not aimed at sophisticated teens and adults, since it’s to be published by Abrams Fanfare… “a new imprint from Abrams Children’s Books dedicated to comics for young readers”.

* A new young children’s picture-book, in hardcover for spring 2025, Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the Worlds of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Pre-ordering now.

* The Spectator magazine has a new article on “The expensive business of quoting poetry” ($ possible paywall, though I had the whole article)…

“the idea that there’s a distinction of legal status between [prose and poetry] is bizarre. It seems perverse and unwarranted that you could quote great paragraphs of Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy, in a critical work about Seth, without a by-his-leave. But that you’d need to avoid quoting more than a line or two from his verse novel The Golden Gate.”

* In The Birmingham Mail (29th August 2024) ($ paywall)… “More than 10,000 Classic FM listeners selected their favourite scores. Howard Shore’s music from the [LoTR] fantasy films, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, took the top spot.” For the benefit of those outside the UK, I should add that Classic FM is the UK’s main free-to-air classical music radio station.

* Apparently in France translations of Tolkien’s books are published by a relatively small publisher, Christian Bourgois. The French press report that it has this week been bought out by Groupe Madrigall, the third-largest publishing group in France.

Tolkien Gleanings #233

* A new Beyond Bree book review, hosted as an archived PDF at the publisher Walking Tree, reviewing The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024). Freely available online.

* The latest Journal of Tolkien Research has added a long and thorough review of Reading Tolkien in Chinese (2024).

* At the VoegelinView, a review of the book Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination (2023).

* The Catholic Theology Show podcast’s latest episode is “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Catechesis on Creation”. Free on YouTube.

* At The European Conservative, the new article “Tolkien’s Paradise”… “If we consider the characteristics of Paradise present in various religious traditions, we can easily compare and identify them with the features of the wondrous lands in Middle-earth.”

* Earth and Heaven blog has a new 2024 review of The Messiah Comes to Middle-earth (2017). Now a book of three printed lectures, but originally part of… “Wheaton College’s Hanson Lectureship Series, [in which] Wheaton College President Philip Ryken examines the thesis that various characters in [LoTR] represent different aspects of the nature of the Messiah”

* The Spanish open-access journal Helice: Critical Thinking on Speculative Fiction publishes in Spanish and some English. Of special note is the 2023 English article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe (1838-1938), and Beyond: A Historical Overview”. Freely available online.

* A scan at Archive.org of a late-1970s ‘blank pages notebook’, with sketchy illustrations as framing marginalia, titled A Hobbit’s Travels: being the hitherto unpublished travel sketches of Sam Gamgee (1978). Its companion A Hobbit’s Journal was also published in the same format and by the same artist, though Archive.org only has the cover freely available online. There appear to have been four such notebooks by the artist, the others being A Tolkien Journal (faces of the Fellowship and others), and A Walk Through the Shire (various scenes of hobbit life in the Shire).

* And finally, NewsThump hilariously reports “New power station to be powered by J.R.R. Tolkien spinning in his grave”.

Tolkien Gleanings #232

* OzMoot 2025 is set for 24th-26th January 2025, in Australia and online ($35 ticket for online). The organisers now have a theme, ‘The Music of Words: Language, Poetry, and Music in Tolkien’s Works’. The deadline for proposals is 24th December 2024.

* The Welsh nationalist online publication Nation.Cymru has a book review of the new Yr Hobyd, the new Welsh translation of The Hobbit. The review is freely available online (in English), and the reviewer notes that various Welsh dialects are used to aid the characterisation.

* CNews has an interview in French with Vincent Ferre, about the huge new table-trembling edition of the Dictionnaire Tolkien. Freely available online.

* A new official free-sample for Drout’s Tolkien and the West five-hour audiobook (2012) which in the UK is currently £14 or free to Amazon’s Audible subscribers.

* A PDF with the full programme for ‘The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference’ in September 2024. The first day will offer some Tolkien-related papers and talks. The conference will also see a stage performance of The Baptized Imagination: Lewis & Tolkien, produced by George Fox University theatre lecturer Ben Tissell.

* Now recorded and online at YouTube, the latest FACTS podcast with guest Holly Ordway, discussing Tolkien’s Faith.

* The latest issue of Leicester University’s Luminary open-access undergraduate journal is Issue 6: ‘Locating Fantastika’. Among others, the article “Palimpsestic and Abject Faerie Spaces and Species” explores two pre-Tolkien British depictions of mortals who trespass into faerie places. Freely available online.

* The UK’s ImagineFX magazine (November 2024 issue) has a four-page ‘making of’ feature, showing the cover art for the new LoTR-based tabletop role-playing game. The game gives the popular Dungeons & Dragons 5e RPG playing system a thorough LoTR makeover. Clueless newbs such as myself would also need the key D&D Player’s Handbook, as there’s said to be a lot of basic D&D combat knowledge being assumed.

* The UK’s annual Heritage Open Days this year includes Exeter College, Oxford, with their date being Sunday 15th September 2024. No pre-booking required, but I imagine that getting in the queue early might be advisable. Note also that, around the corner, “The Bodleian’s letterpress printing workshop will be open for drop-in printing”. There may be even more open and free in Oxford on that day, if you look.

* And finally, the new free open-source AI image-generator Flux can generate images that use distinctive handwriting styles. Of course, someone quickly created a free ‘Flux Tolkien Handwriting’ style-guidance plug-in (a ‘LORA’) for it. This now appears to have been taken down, but some of the sample images are still available to prove that it can be done.

Tolkien Gleanings #231

* Later in 2024 The Tolkien Society plans a two-day conference (online) to celebrate the centenary of Christopher Tolkien’s birth.

* In the Hungarian journal The Anachronist (Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest), “Tolkien Behind the Iron Curtain and Beyond” reviews the recent book J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe. Context, Directions, and the Legacy (2023). In English and freely available online.

* Jessica Yates asks “Who was ‘Mr. Rang’?”. Tolkien wrote a long and important late letter to him, of which the draft survived to be published. A plausible candidate for ‘Rang’ is suggested. The only other (and somewhat unlikely) possibility I can dig up is the acclaimed London surgeon Mercer Rang (1933-2003). He was a leading specialist in healing children’s bone fractures, and from 1967 was in Toronto in Canada. He was also an accomplished non-fiction medical historian and anthologist, and might conceivably have had an interest in the best children’s literature (as an aid to the recovery of his long-term patients). Although I guess Tolkien would have known to address him as “Dr. Rang”.

* In the new book The Bible and Western Christian Literature: Twentieth Century to the Present Day (2024), the chapter “Remythologizing Faith: Biblical Fantasy and the Inklings’ Romantic Theology”.

* Coming soon via the FACTS podcast, another interview with Holly Ordway on her book Tolkien’s Faith.

* In a market town in mid Wales, a local newspaper has a new feature in which “Machynlleth Tolkien collector shares tips” on collecting Tolkien editions. With a picture of his local market stall, which looks worth seeking out should you be passing through on your way to the coast.

* On YouTube, the August 2024 Update for the Digital Tolkien Project.

* And finally, the World Fantasy Convention (who knew?) is to be held in Brighton, 30th October – 2nd November 2025.

Tolkien Gleanings #230

* “Fatty Bolger, a Local Hero”…

“It is tempting to try to save the world, [and local] grassroots terrors are perhaps mere deputies of the boss villains. But their sting is devastating, nonetheless. […] Pippin is the first to recognize the lengths that Fredegar went to fight the Enemy on the home front: “You would have done better to come with us after all, poor old Fredegar!” Perhaps Pippin is right, but none of the friends call Fredegar Fatty anymore, and those chaps know something about heroics.”

Readers will recall that ‘Fatty’ goes (in the background of the story) from being a timid credulous young fellow overly fond of plum-puddings, to leading… “a band of rebels […] up in the Brockenbores by the hills of Scary”.

* New in Spanish in the journal Historia Universal, “From Virgil to Tolkien”. The two men are here pictured as… “two lighthouses that in the midst of [civilisational] darkness became guides to a new approach to national identity”. Freely available online.

* West Point’s Modern War Institute has a new article on “From Middle-earth to Ukraine, the Enduring Value of Wylie’s General Theory of Power Control”. Freely available online. When war in unwinnable or has reached a stalemate on the battlefield, surprising tactics are needed (hobbits, in the case of LoTR, doing the reverse of what the enemy expects). Ideally these new tactics shift the centre-of-gravity of war away from the battlefield, while also holding out the prospect of ensuring a final settlement of lasting political value.

* In France, Vincent Ferre’s Dictionnaire Tolkien has appeared in a third edition (2024). This is “revised and expanded” according to the blurb, and apparently has a number of French summaries of English scholarly works.

* November 2024 at the online Signum University brings the prospect of a short-course on “The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Early Poems 1 (1910-1919)”.

* Some notes on two books of essays recently read, Mark T. Hooker’s Tolkienian Mathomium and Hobbitonian Anthology:

   M. p.26. “OE word bruna was commonly used to name bodies of clear running water, emanating from springs, that flowed over gravelly beds […] related to the German brunnen and Dutch bron, both meaning spring, as in ‘water welling up out of the ground’.”

   M. p.51. “Tolkien says [in an interview] that he sometimes used the Gothic translation of his surname — Dwalakoneis”. In full, Ruginwaldus Dwalakoneis.

   M. pp.220-221. “a number of authors consider that certain aspects of the [Babylonian astro-theological] myth of Astarte/Ishtar [aka Inanna] were co-opted by the Christian church […] for attribution to Mary”. The Encyclopedia Biblica “equates her title ‘Queen of Heaven’ with “a cult of Venus” (IV, 3993)”. See also p.223 for a comparison of women weeping for Tammuz [lover of the Babylonian Venus] and the weeping of women heard by Earendel. I would add that this feature is also present in Egypt in the nightly voyage of Ra-Horus through the Hours of the Night, though it may have been borrowed from Tammuz.

   HA. pp.34-35. A 1932 reprinting of a 17th century list of the predecessors of King Arthur placed a “King Magoth” five generations earlier. Geoffrey of Monmouth had Goemagot as the leader of the giants who inhabited Albion [Britain] before the arrival of the Trojans. Both thought similar to Maggot, re: Farmer Maggot.

   HA. p.96. Brother Hilary’s farm at Evesham grew mostly plums, not apples. Plums then being a far more commonly-eaten fruit than today. I would add that this colours the description… “later they sat on the lawns under the plum-trees and ate, until they had made piles of stones like small pyramids” (Return of the King).

* Renga is hunting down the Cracks of Doom (late 1981), which is thought to have been the first commercial Tolkien computer game. He has also been able to discount the game Middle Earth (1979) as the first such. This game has recently been found and, on playing it on old hardware, it appears to be a Jules Verne-ish ‘journey to the centre of the earth’ type RPG game set in the 1970s/80s. It has no Tolkien connection, other than the misleading title.

* And finally, the British ticket-seller Trainline has a new Web page titled “Tour Tolkien’s England: UK locations that inspired The Lord of the Rings & Middle-earth”. Hasty, but not as cringe inducing as you might expect. Though we do get “University of Birmingham’s Great Hall = The Hall of Elrond”, without any reference to it serving as the hospital to which Tolkien was brought from the battlefields of France. Gondor’s ‘Houses of Healing’ might therefore be a more apt comparison, since Tolkien was never a student there.

However… I see there’s now a Great Hall 360 Virtual Tour, and today one could indeed imagine it as Elrond’s hall.