Tolkien Gleanings #190.

* Another round of Oxford’s Tolkien 50th Anniversary Seminar Series talks on Tolkien. The first is on 22nd April 2024 and will examine his reaction to his late fame. Also set to include “Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon Calendar” and “The characterisation and narrative value of landscape over the fields of Rohan”, among others.

* Four earlier Tolkien 50th talks newly online at YouTube.

* A new issue of Mythlore, with a lead article on “Tolkien Augustinian Theodicy, and ‘Lovecraftian’ Evil”. Freely available online.

* In the latest Journal of Inklings Studies “C.S. Lewis on Female Scholars: A Reply to John D. Rateliff” ($ paywall)… “What Lewis rebukes is academic complacency and vanity, not female researchers, many of whom Lewis respected and even befriended.” The new issue also has a number of free reviews of recent books on Tolkien.

* Now online, Tolkien Society 2024 Seminar Paper Abstracts. This is the forthcoming one on Romanticism in July 2024, with papers including ““Fiery the Angels rose”: The Romantic Prometheanism of Tolkien’s Enemies”.

* ‘Arcastar Lerinosse: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Arda’, a one-day Tolkien Workshop at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Seemingly a student-focused event, and set for 28th June 2024.

* Newly listed on Amazon UK, Tolkien Spirituality: Constructing Belief and Tradition in Fiction-based Religion. Set for publication in July 2024, a 350-page book as part of academic publisher De Gruyter’s ‘Religion and Society’ series.

* And finally, Tolkien’s ““Broad Relic” in the Notion Club Papers is the island of Flat Holm” in the Bristol Channel, England.

Tolkien Gleanings #189.

* Another overlooked early review of Tolkien, found. Douglas A. Anderson writes in his Tolkien and Fantasy blog that…

“The fact that Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, was one of the first reviewers of The Silmarillion on its publication in 1977, seems to have long escaped Tolkienists, and Tolkien bibliographers.”

* Finland will host John Howe’s first Finnish art exhibition in the summer… “Especially known for his artwork portraying J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy worlds, Howe’s art exhibition will be open at Tampere Hall from 6th July to 18th August 2024.”

* Birmingham’s annual Tolkien lecture seems to be on hiatus or moved (the last was May 2023, with no sign of a 2024 event so far). But the University of Oxford fills the gap, as they announce “Neil Gaiman to Deliver the 2024 Tolkien Lecture”… “The lecture will take place on Wednesday, 12th June 6pm BST at Oxford Town Hall. Tickets will be released on Wednesday, 1st May at 12pm.” The Town Hall only has 500 capacity, according to the local Council which appears to run it. So you’ll have to be quick, though it’ll also be posted on YouTube. Hopefully they’ll state very clearly: “audience questions about the books only, please, no TV / games / movies”.

* A podcast interview I think I missed back in January 2024, an Anselm Society Interview with Austin M. Freeman on Tolkien and theology.

* At Oxford, one of those very expensive short summer-school courses. This one on “The Making of Middle-earth: Tolkien and the First Age”. Application deadline 1st May 2024.

* And finally, more Oxford. In the 2024 Update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) one Christopher Tolkien has been added… “Tolkien, Christopher Reuel (1924–2020), literary scholar and editor [see under Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel]”.

Tolkien Gleanings #188.

* Tolkien researcher Oronzo Cilli now has a new blog at tolkienarchive.blogspot.com. New there is a freely-available post headed “Tolkien’s Undisclosed 1946 Lecture on The Notion Club Papers at Stonyhurst”. The blog’s RSS feed is here.

* Now available for download for Tolkien Society members, Amon Hen #306 (April 2024). This has interesting articles on religious pilgrimage and LoTR, on the signalling handbooks in Tolkien’s library in relation to signalling in LoTR, and a detailed look at Carcharoth the Wolf, among much else. The October 2023 advert for a graphic designer is likely still ‘in play’, judging by some of this issue’s rough edges. Two new copy-editors are reported, but no-one to streamline the layout and sequencing. Hopefully that someone, when found, will re-design without destroying Amon Hen’s current comfy and homely feel. A sympathetic makeover wouldn’t need much. Coherent font choices and sizes, columns of text for easier reading, an indicative colour for each regular section, jettison some DTP-isms such as the ill-fitting header-frames, do much better copy-fitting, and don’t squish the photos. I’d probably also have all the full-page art as a coherent ‘Gallery’ section at the back, with an extra four gallery pages as a small incentive to get the digital edition.

* The Naples stop for Italy’s medium-sized touring exhibition, titled ‘Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author’, has reportedly been a big hit… “in just three weeks, from 16th March to 7th April 2024, the exhibition had 34,795 entries”.

* Seemingly newly posted(?), a “An Interview with Howard Shore”, recorded in 2003. Shore being the composer of the superb soundtrack for the original LoTR movie trilogy.

* On YouTube, Prof. Tom Shippey on Beowulf, Sci-Fi, and Tolkien. Being a 90 minute Patreon Q&A from last October, which I appear to have missed at that time.

* Interesting to see that the novelist John Cowper Powys (A Glastonbury Romance etc) was also a lucid thinker on culture. Archive.org has his book The Meaning of Culture (1929) as a new ‘to borrow’ item. This led me to the Digital Library of India’s open PDF version for the book’s 1932 reprint in Jonathan Cape’s ‘Life and Letters’ series. Note however that the 1932 book has a new and far less forthright author’s introduction, which voids his pithy 1929 summary of the Englishman’s view of other major strands of culture. This older introduction still seems useful today as a snapshot of the national-literary worldview in which Tolkien was also immersed…

* I’ve now heard the new 2023 version of Phil Dragash’s full-cast unabridged fan-project of Fellowship. I find that Farmer Maggot and Merry and even the early Strider have been re-voiced, and that I rather prefer the voices in the older 2013-14 version. If asked I’d thus still recommend the older 2013-2014 version, with the 2023 version only for the Moria sections. 2023 containing as it does the previously inadvertently-omitted section at the Doors of Moria (the latter part of the wading of the pool-edge, the first encounter with the likely site of the Doors of Moria and the holly trees, and then the short but poignant section involving Bill the pony).

Just one instance of the voice changes:

2013/14 version: “Strider” at 2:28, in the Inn at Bree. “But one thing interested me. Please remember, said one of them that the name BAGGINS (emphasised) must not be mentioned”.

2023 version: “Strider” at 2:30, in the Inn at Bree. “But one thing interested ME (emphasis). Please REMEMBER (semi-emphasis) said one of them, that the name of Baggins must not be mentioned”. (No emphasis on “Baggins” here, in fact the opposite).

It appears the changes appeared in a “2014” version, unknown to me, from which the 2023 version was apparently created (simply by splicing in the missing section).

Tolkien Gleanings #187.

* Newly listed on eBay, an interior postcard of St. John the Baptist at Great Haywood, in mid Staffordshire. The buyer would, theoretically and with a hi-res scan, be able to identify the pictures on the walls.

* Now freely available in open-access, “A milestone in BBC history? The 1955-56 radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings”. Being a chapter from the multi-author book The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien (2022). Fellowship was done in six episodes in 1955, but then in 1956 BBC executives decided to cram both Two Towers and Return of the King into another six episodes. The shows were measured as reaching only 0.1% of the adult population. No tape-recordings of these national broadcasts are known to survive, though the scripts and some of the music does. More of a missed opportunity than a “milestone”, the chapter concludes.

* Now online, the speaker programme for the 20th Annual Tolkien at UVM Conference in the USA in April 2024.

* A new article in Quadrant scrutinises recent claims of Tolkien’s roundabout influence on the form of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). Freely available online.

* In the latest Brno Studies in English, the article “Elven chora: feminine space and power in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”. Discusses the feminine aspects of the Elves. Freely available in open-access.

* An Estate-approved Tolkien opera, due for full release as a 15-CD recording and printed score in 2025… “The text is (of course) abridged, but uses as closely as possible Tolkien’s own words”. It’s reported that the Bombadil section (and presumably also Goldberry) has not been cut.

* On YouTube, a new Wyrd Wessex panel discussion with guest speaker and live audience. The topic is “Tolkien and Barrows”. Being the British landscape’s ancient burial-barrows which date as early as the Bronze Age, not the garden barrows used for hauling home your ‘taters and apples.

* And finally, in Finland… “32,000 tickets have already been sold for a new stage-play adaptation of The Lord of the Rings”, a show set for August 2024. Presumably it’s in a Finnish translation?

Tolkien Gleanings #186.

* New on Archive.org, Transactions Of The Yorkshire Dialect Society 1922. An “extraordinarily interesting” talk by Tolkien is noted in the “1921 Report”…

The Chronology dates this as “20th January 1922”.

* The latest issue of VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center has open-access book reviews of The Wonders of Creation: Learning Stewardship from Narnia and Middle-earth; The Nature of Middle-earth; and Tolkien Dogmatics.

* “Tolkien and Lovecraft”, tracking down Honegger’s articles on the topic, and adding to his 2017 ideas on the points of comparison between the two masters.

* Announced in hardback, the book Aubusson tisse Tolkien, l’aventure tissee, set for publication in French on 27th June 2024…

“The Aubusson Tapestry project celebrates the completion of the ‘Aubusson weaves Tolkien’ hanging, begun in 2017 in partnership with the Tolkien Estate. Sixteen weavings – fourteen tapestries and two rugs – were made from original illustrations by J.R.R. Tolkien, intended to accompany his written works. For more than seven years, their implementation mobilized six workshops and factories and more than thirty professionals in the tapestry sector. It is this extraordinary adventure that this publication intends to relate…”

* The Hungarian National Library of Foreign Literature is hosting “a full day of family Tolkien events on 6th April 2024”, which is to include the Hungarian Tolkien Society… “making a formal presentation to the National Library of a core Tolkien collection of nearly 100 volumes”.

* For illustrators using a local install of Stable Diffusion, the new free ParchArt v1.0 LORA style plugin. Have your image-generating AI put any image on a nicely age-shaded parchment.

* An important new update for the excellent Anytxt desktop search freeware. Regex is now supported in the latest version, enabling sophisticated search across and inside your PC’s local files. Of obvious use to scholars with large local collections in .PDF and .ePub etc, provided you know a little search regex.

* New on Librivox as a public-domain audiobook, Early English Hero Tales (1915), as given for a modern audience by an American academic.

* And finally, the German Tolkien Society had an amusing April Fools Day article. The University of Oxford was apparently advertising a Professorship in Elvish Languages.

Tolkien Gleanings #185.

* The publisher Walking Tree announces the book The Songs of the Spheres: Lewis, Tolkien and the Overlapping Realms of their Imagination. An edited volume of essays, due in “mid April” 2024. The table-of-contents is here.

* Spotted during my ongoing read-through of Amon Hen back-issues (#261, page 27), a mention of Henry Wansbrough writing in The Tablet. He is quoted as noting that Tolkien had worked on… “the four chapters of Jonah and a literary revision of Habbakuk”. I knew about Jonah, but not the other. According to a reliable source the short Old Testament book of Habakkuk is about a circa 600 B.C. prophet “who stands at the watchtower awaiting God’s answer”, after the man’s frank and pointed questioning about why God permits the great distress then being inflicted on his chosen people.

* The University Bookman reviews the new Tolkien letters, in “The Mind Of Middle-earth”.

* New in open-access and in English, “The Fellowship of the Ring: A comparison of three Italian translations with the original text” (2024).

* Lovecraft and Tolkien, considered in relation to new scientific findings about ivy on the walls of buildings. In the blog article “… ivy so dense that one cannot but imagine it accursed or corpse-fed”.

* The Catholic Herald had an Easter article on “The Harrowing of Hell, according to J.R.R. Tolkien”.

* A new revised and expanded edition of Tom Shippey’s book Beowulf Translation and Commentary, shipping now.

* And finally, a public wall-plaque for Tolkien illustrator Pauline Baynes, in her home town of Farnham. Set to be unveiled on 20th October 2024.

Tolkien Gleanings #184.

* A call for articles on ‘Fantasy flora / Flore imaginaire’, for a forthcoming special issue of the journal Fantasy Art and Studies. Deadline: 10th June 2024.

* Another sort of call. “We’d like to create the first graphic-novel biography on his life that features his Catholic faith.” Crowdfunding now, with a $23,000 goal.

* The latest issue of St. Austin Review (March/April 2024) is a themed issue on ‘The Victorian Age in Literature’. Note the one-page article “Frodo Baggins: A Dickensian Hero”. Not freely online.

* The Federalist magazine has a new podcast discussing “Tolkien’s Warning”… his “writings and warnings about power apply today”.

* New on YouTube, a recording of Tolkien Colloquium 2024: Emotions in Middle-earth. In English, with five presentations.

* New on YouTube, a recording of Conferenza: Tolkien e il gioco (‘Tolkien and the game’). In Italian. I can’t find more about the event, but skimming YouTube’s auto-translation subtitles suggests it’s about tabletop role-playing games.

* The March 2024 Update for the Digital Tolkien Project.

* And finally, in last week’s Country Life magazine, “The very nature of Middle-earth”, an article loosely woven around the Malvern Hills and Tolkien. The article is now online in full, at least in the UK.

Tolkien Gleanings #183.

* Now freely available in PDF, “Never trust a Philologist’: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Place of Philology in English Studies”. Several C.S. Lewis poems are published in the article for the first time.

* New at the BARS blog, “Will Sherwood on the Romantic Echoes in the Manuscripts of J.R.R Tolkien”… “My research trip to Oxford has chiefly been concerned with locating Tolkien’s references, (mis)quotations, and criticism of the Romantics throughout his life.” Romantics here meaning the British Romantics.

* Tolkien colloquium 2024: ‘Emotions in Middle-earth’, which took place on 22nd March and is due to air on YouTube on 27th March 2024. Five talks in English.

* A seemingly new book titled Las Fronteras de lo Humano: La antropologia de C.S. Lewis y J.R.R. Tolkien (‘On the Borders of the Human: the anthropology of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’). The summary seems to imply a philosophical tour through the creatures and the monsters, worryingly mentions the movies, and sounds like it may be drawing on contemporary understandings of anthropology. It doesn’t suggest any research on the historical context in relation to the anthropology of the time. A book on the influence of the pre-war British anthropologists (who ignored the Americans and only nodded to the French, it seems) would certainly be interesting, but this doesn’t seem to be that book.

* In the USA, “Wolters Centre to Host Tolkien Conference”. The focus appears to be how Tolkien was “able to bear witness to the Christian faith”. In an era that had become deeply hostile to fantasy, and was increasingly dismissive of those with deep Christian faith.

* New to me, and newly on Archive.org, a preview of the tracks on the album A Night in Rivendell: Selected Songs from The Lord of the Rings by The Tolkien Ensemble (2000).

* And finally, Folklife magazine has an article on the Swedish Eldandili Fantasy Choir. Part cos-play group, part choir, and all dedicated to “Singing Tolkien’s Middle-earth”. Freely available online.

Tolkien Gleanings #182.

* Crowdfunding The Hobbit in Romanish… “Romanish is a unique and beautiful language and a direct linguistic heritage of the Celtic and Roman past”. Today it’s the fourth language of Switzerland, said to be the result of the long-ago influence of the spoken Latin had from the Ancient Romans.

* From the University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal… “Tolkien’s Erotic Lent”.

* Humanum Review reviews the new Holly Ordway book, in “Tolkien, Man of Faith”.

* In France, a one-day conference on “Tolkien and the creation of Middle-earth”, 25th March 2024.

* In America during September 2024, The Orthodox Christian Tolkien Conference… “The St. Basil Center for Orthodox Thought and Culture will present a conference on the relationship between Orthodoxy and J.R.R. Tolkien”.

* A critical video review of the new graphic novel Tolkien: Lighting Up the Darkness, reviewed by someone who knows how a good comic should work (art, layout, font choice and size, reader’s eye-flow, character expressions, panel scene-depth and focus, etc). Also has a flip-through.

* An online talk set for later in 2024, “The Dragon in the West”… “Professor Ogden’s book The Dragon in the West was published in 2021 — the first serious and substantial account in any language of the evolution of the modern dragon from its ancient forebears.”

* And finally, Archive.org now offers Lists to signed-in users. Make your own public or private list of items. Hopefully this isn’t just a ‘whim feature’ and the lists won’t go the same way of the late lamented ‘Amazon Listmania’, when millions of users put a lot of time into curating lists… only to hear the sudden click of Amazon’s corporate jackboots and find that every list had been deleted. At present, re-ordering items in your Archive.org list is not possible. You’re stuck with the usual labels for re-sorting. Thus presenting a publication-date sequence of a magazine is not possible.

Tolkien Gleanings #181.

* New from Walking Tree, the book The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. An edited collection which includes among others “J.R.R. Tolkien, Walter Scott, and Scott-ish Romanticism”, and “‘The Backs of Trees’: Tolkien, the British Theological Romantics, & the Fantastic Imagination”. Available for pre-order from Amazon UK and possibly other Amazon sites, with a publication date of 31st March 2024.

* Also new from Walking Tree, the single author book Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium. With a foreword by Tom Shippey and an introduction by Thomas Honegger. Available now.

* Free scans of books by R.R. Marett, Tolkien’s personal tutor at Exeter College from 1913. Most are collections of his famously lucid and focused lectures, and many can be downloaded.

  – The Birth of Humility (1910, inaugural lecture) (To ‘read online’ only)

  – The Threshold of Religion (1914, enlarged and revised second edition)

  – Psychology and Folk-lore (1920)

  – The Diffusion of Culture (1927, printed lecture) (To ‘read online’ only)

  – The Raw Material of Religion (1929, printed lecture, not online)

  – Faith, Hope and Charity in Primitive Religion (1930–1932)

  – Sacraments of Simple Folk (1933) (To ‘borrow’ only)

  – Head Heart And Hands In Human Evolution (1935)

* And finally, the latest issue of the open-access journal on fan-works, Transformative Works and Cultures. The topic of the issue is ‘Fandoms and platforms’, meaning online platforms rather than role-playing flets. Includes “The Fading of the Elves: techno-volunteerism and the disappearance of Tolkien fan fiction archives”.

Tolkien Gleanings #180.

* Coming soon from the Catholic University of America Press, The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation (May 2024)…

“This book is the first sustained attempt to show not only the centrality of recovery to Tolkien’s fantasy, but the way in which his fantasy affects that primal recovery in every reader. […] for Tolkien fantasy has within itself a healing power through which intellectual, moral and existential paradoxes are resolved and our intellectual and perceptual faculties are made whole again”.

* Free online under Creative Commons on Calameo, Dragon Verde #15 (September 2023), from the Colombia Orodruin Tolkien Society. With cover art by Thomas Orn Karlsson of Sweden.

Collects the best articles from the “eighth to the thirteenth editions of Dragon Verde.” Article titles in English translation:

  – Echoes of Middle-earth.
  – Dragon Fire and Wild Swords.
  – From Linguistics to Metaphysics: interview with Carl F. Hostetter.
  – The Rings of Power and their Influence in the Fate of Middle-earth.
  – Tolkien and the Celts.
  – Dwarven Chronicles.
  – Meowing and Barking in the Hobbit Hole. (Seems to be about dogs and cats).
  – The Spanish connection of J.R.R. Tolkien.
  – Modernity as seen by Tolkien.

Since Dragon Verde #15 is under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, the articles are free to be translated. You’d screen-capture and then use either Microsoft OneNote or ABBYY Screenshot Reader to get the text out for translation. Both are good for use with smaller 72dpi type.

* Older issues of Dragon Verde used to be found as free flipbooks on Issuu, and are technically still there. But they’re blocked. My guess is the Society has thus moved to Calameo from the Issuu service. Issuu having now made itself toxic to publishers, due to their gangster-like behaviour. A year or two back now Issuu suddenly locked down their wealth of free magazine issues, then made extorting demands for payment to unlock them. Issuu also adds insult to injury, by misleadingly blaming the magazine’s publisher for the blocking…

That’s why it’s always a good idea to mirror your free flipbook PDF magazines at The Internet Archive (Archive.org).

* Newly added to the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, a long and detailed review in English of the substantial catalogue for the 2023 Italian exhibition ‘Tolkien: Uomo, Professore, Autore’. This medium-sized exhibition has now transferred from Rome to Naples, where it runs from 16th March to 2nd July 2024.

* Some notes on Berin’s Hill in Oxfordshire.

* And finally, look again at Amazon UK’s pre-order price for the three-volume dead tree edition of the Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. As I write, this has dropped from £90 to a more affordable £60. The drop is seemingly due to an avalanche of pre-orders, making it a ‘best-seller’ long before publication. (Update: Now back up to £90).

The new John Garth talk ““An Entirely Vain and False Approach”: Literary Biography and why Tolkien was wrong about it” reveals he’s found a Berin’s Hill, at Ipsden in Oxfordshire. Which Garth says is the place where Tolkien’s Birmingham Oratory good friend Fr. Vincent Reade came from, and where Reade’s family was the ‘head family’ of the village. Garth also says it was near to the location of the Birmingham Oratory’s boarding school, and my consultation of a map shows the proximity was some five or six miles.

I find that a 1919 Little Guide’s guide to Oxfordshire (reprinted from the 1906 first edition) has it that the hill name “preserves the name of St. Birinus”. Birinus (d. 649 or 650AD) was a man who would offer Tolkien a saint potentially bridging, in his lifetime, the old Christianity of the Roman Empire and the later British Christianity. As such the name and its apparent place-affiliation would certainly have interested Tolkien, and the connection would certainly have been relayed to him by the learned Fr. Vincent Reade.

The book Saint Berin, the apostle of Wessex (1902) has it all, bar any later tweaks. St. Birinus was sent by Asterius (Archbishop of Milan) to “scatter the seeds” of the faith and convert Mercia. But on crossing the channel and landing he was permanently stalled among the West Saxons, after discovering that they were still utterly pagan (he had been told otherwise).

The author gives an interesting link with Cornwall, while first exhaustively trying to establish and divine the forms of the name. His name and saint’s day were documented as venerated at St. Micheal’s Mount in Cornwall, before the 13th century and probably well before — since an 867 A.D. Canterbury calendar in the Bodleian also has the saint’s day. This would give Reade and Tolkien a good reason to have visited St. Micheal’s Mount on their visit to Cornwall in 1914. I couldn’t place them there in my recent book-chapter on the visit, though the Mount was within sight from the cliffs and was ‘just around the corner’ from where they were staying.

The book linked above also saves Tolkien scholars looking for the name’s meaning, since… “Birinus is meaningless in English”. It was a Latinization of some Frankish or perhaps Lombardic name. The author favours Lombardy for the name, but many other sources have the saint as “probably” Frankish. After some deliberation the author leads us (nearly) to the likely name of Beorn. Hmmm, that sounds rather familiar…

“The name, therefore, is most probably Teutonic [Germanic], and the same that becomes in the Scandinavian form Biorn” and he offers a quote from Baring-Gould… “Probably Bjorn or Baerin or Berin, a compound expressive of Bear in some form, High or Low German”.

Which rather voids the hill, regrettably, since this means that Tolkien could have had his Beren name simply from ‘Bear’, with the implication of ‘warrior’. Though in Tolkien’s Noldorin Beren means “bold”. Similar.

Of Berin’s Hill in Oxfordshire the 1906 book usefully gives a description…

“From the foot of it two remarkable tracks, hollowed out to the depth of some feet in the chalk, diverge on either side of the modern roadway which has superseded them, and meet again upon the summit. The villagers say that before the road was made, half-a-century ago, one of these hollow ways was used for ascent, and the other for descent. Whatever may be the true explanation of their form, there can be no doubt of their extreme antiquity. At the point where they meet again upon the hill-top they enclose a pair of earth-circles, each with a shallow surrounding trench. In the wood below, a few yards from the double track, is an ancient well, to which common belief and the judgment of antiquaries agree in assigning a Roman origin. Numerous coins also, from Claudius to Constantius, have been found here, and various Roman remains exist abundantly all around […] Berin’s Hill is upon the Chilterns, where certainly the Briton lingered long after he had been driven from the neighbouring valley. All along these hills we find a trace of the older language in the hollow “combes”…”

The author draws partly on “Ms. notes by the late Mr. Edward Anderdon Reade of Ipsden House”, on the hill and the history of its name. Presumably an older relative of Fr. Reade.

The well was explored and dug by local archaeologists in 1969, and their report noted “the well had been explored by Mr E. Reade [1807-1886] about 100 years ago” (SOAG Bulletin 62, “The ‘Roman Well’ near Ipsden”). The 1969 digs found a wealth of material including “one 2nd-century Roman sherd decorated with combing”, but the Roman claim is still lacking structural evidence.