Until 23rd December 2022 at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Wisconsin, the exhibition “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript”. 147 items on show from two U.S. archives and from Oxford, including… “many which have not been previously exhibited or published”.

Design for a page from the Book of Mazarbul.

Time for another “MegaTolk”. Newly appeared interesting items on Tolkien that are open and public, since my last round-up in which was back in May 2022…

* Worlds Made of Heroes: a tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien. A complete scholarly ebook in open access, from the University of Porto. Includes, among others…

– The importance of songs in the making of heroes.

– Wounds in the world: the shared symbolism of death-sites in Middle-earth.

– From epic narrative to music : Tolkien’s universe as inspiration for The First Age of Middle-earth: a Symphony.

– Character and perspective: the multi-quest in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

– Geoffrey of Monmouth and J.R.R. Tolkien: myth-making and national identity in the twelfth and twentieth centuries. (Also a useful survey of Tolkien’s West Midlands patriotisms)

– Mythology and cosmology in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

* Song Lyrics in The Hobbit: What They Tell Us (Detects in the lyrics the different relationships that each race has with time).

* “Pearls” of Pearl: Medieval Appropriations in Tolkien’s Mythology. (Excellent study of the likely influence of Pearl)

* The image of the tree as the embodiment of cosmological and solar aspects in J.R.R. Tolkien’s works.

* The Joys of Latin and Christmas Feasts: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham.

* Medieval Animals in Middle-earth. (Found from 2021).

I’ve found a new and seemingly previously-unrecognised potential source for the name of “Bingo”, Tolkien’s original name-idea for Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. “Bingo Bolger-Baggins” was the initial name. The matter of this initial naming has puzzled many, despite it echoing “Bungo”, who was Bilbo’s father in The Hobbit. I’ve previously casually looked at the name in relation to the advent of the later modern commercial game of “Bingo” (seemingly in the 1950s as a replacement for “Lotto”). As part of another essay I also glanced at the idea that the common exclamation By Jingo! became in some trades the slang contraction of “Bingo!”.

Now a find of the popular book Merrie games in rhyme: from ye olden time (1886, London) reveals that “Bingo” was around in the culture of Tolkien’s childhood. This book of children’s games and songs was published six years before he was born. Its very first song-game is the “Bingo”…

The author the Hon. Emmeline Plunket is now better known among historians of astronomy for her scholarly Ancient Calendars and Constellations (1903, aka Calendars and Constellations of the Ancient World), and she thus appears to have been a scholar of Biblical and related astronomical systems — as well as a collector of the songs of her native land. She thus seems a reliable source, and the song is not a Victorian confabulation.

A publication review of Merrie games in the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art picks out four song-games headed by ‘Bingo’ — “There is ‘Bingo’ and the ‘Muffin Man'” — thus implying that the song-games were then common-knowledge even among parents and nannies and that their mention would ‘hook’ interested readers. Curiously the review disparages the artistic design — it was deemed not sumptuous and ornate enough for late-Victorian tastes! A short welcoming review of the book in The Antiquary also frowned on the ornate design, though for reasons left unstated.

What of scholarly attention in the modern period? Well, the book is cited, but not evaluated for authenticity, in the Opie’s The Singing Game and also in English County Songs: Words and Music. But otherwise it appears to have been totally ignored by later books.

Is there then any other good evidence for the existence of “Bingo” in English play-culture? Yes, two items can be easily found via search.

1) Tales of the Yorkshire Wolds (1894) cites… “the ancient song of ‘Bingo'” being played by the brass band at a churchyard gala at Cragside, while children nearby have gone on to play “a screaming game of kiss-in-the-ring” on the lawns.

2) Cornish Feasts and Folk-lore (1890) records… “Bobby Bingo, game of” as “very common” around Helston in Cornwall. Which links it with my recent book Tolkien & The Lizard: J.R.R. Tolkien in Cornwall, 1914 (2021). I there established that Tolkien’s companion on this seminal holiday was a musician and scholar of chant-song, and someone who had formerly been for many years the curate of Porthleven — which is the coastal port for the adjacent town of Helston and its outlying hamlets such as Godolphin.

3) It was also noted at Stone in mid Staffordshire circa 1900, as a circle/dancing game (Trans. North Staffordshire Field Club, 1901).

Thus the game-song existed as far apart as Yorkshire and Cornwall, and in mid Staffordshire, albeit late in the Victorian period and after the publication of Plunket’s popular Merrie games.

I then searched for pre-1885 occurrences. This led me to Gomme’s A Dictionary of British Folklore (aka Folk-lore). The Dictionary was actually a series, and the book is thus un-findable under that title at places such as Hathi and Archive.org. It is actually to be found online under the title The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland : with tunes, singing rhymes and methods of playing (1898, 2 Vols. in the Dictionary of British Folklore series). From Vol. 1 tumbles a wealth of detailed lore on “Bingo”…

I’m pleased to find here another Potteries children’s song collected by Miss Keary. Fellow Tolkienians will also note the prominence of ‘Sting’ and a ‘Ring’ here, both items rather well-known to readers of The Lord of the Rings.

Regrettably Gomme omits all dates from correspondents and sources, so one can’t tell if some of these song-games pre-dated the popular publication of “Bingo” in a book aimed at children. However the final note in the article, usefully reprinted from Northamptonshire Notes and Queries, points out that “Byngo” was the name of the dog in the song “The Franklin’s Dogge” aka “Ye Franklin’s Dogge”. On tracking this down, it refers to a footnote in The Ingoldsby Legends as collected and published in the early Victorian period by the Rev. Richard H. Barham. His note gives a “primitive ballad” sung in spelling-out form (the same as the later children’s song-game). The song was had via a “Mr. Simpkinson from Bath” in Somerset and is as follows…

A franklyn’s dogge leped over a style,
And his name was littel Byngo!
B wyth a Y — Y wyth an N,
N wyth a G — G wyth an O–
They call’d him little Byngo!

This Franklyn, Syrs, he brewed goode ayle
And he called it Rare goode Styngo!
S, T, Y, N, G, O!
He called it Rare goode Styngo!

Nowe is not this a prettie song?
I think it is bye Jyngo!
J with a Y– N, G, O–!
I swear it is by Jyngo!

A “franklyn” was a medieval term for a freeman [farmer?] who owned land and property, but was neither a peasant serf nor a noble. My suspicion would be that the word is perhaps a small embellishment to give a more ye olde flavour to an original folk-source, since the phrase “old man” might fit there and sing better. But this text can be found given in The Ingoldsby Legends editions of 1866 and 1852, and thus it clearly pre-dates the later child-song collectors of the 1880s and 90s. In its B-I-N-G-O spelling form it correlates well with the later children’s forms.

Searches suggest that the children’s song-game of “Bingo” appears to have been forgotten by the early 1930s, and earlier meanings would have been swept away by the advent of the bingo gaming halls of the 1950s and 60s. Though interestingly the ‘piecing out’ element could be seen as being kept, but transferred from alphabet letters to what had previously been called “Lotto” numbers. Note also that the mid 20th century bingo-hall balls ‘leap’ in the air like little dogs (numbered ping-pong balls in compressed-air ‘blower’ cages were used to pick random numbers, before the advent of digital methods).

Yet in Tolkien’s early childhood the song-game “Bingo” was evidently a well-known part of children’s play culture in England, especially so circa perhaps from 1880-1905. It was also widespread, being found as far apart as Yorkshire down to the tip of Cornwall, and from Lincolnshire across to Shropshire. There is one early example that appears to be a tavern ale-song from circa the 1840s in Somerset. If the publication of this song is the origin of a game-song’s later spread, or was simply an early random survival of something already widespread in the 1840s, must now remain forever unknown.

As for Tolkien, “Bingo” could well have formed: i) part of Tolkien’s own games in young and middle childhood; ii) been encountered still alive in Porthleven and around Helston in Cornwall in the summer of 1914, or in mid Staffordshire when he was there; iii) and/or been a focus of interest via a 1920s encounter with the publications of the English song and folk-lore collectors of the 1880s and 90s, especially in pursuit of “the little dog leaped…” relic fragments from “Hey Diddle Diddle” — a nursery song we know Tolkien was very interested in and which he incorporated into The Lord of the Rings in the form of Frodo’s tavern-song at Bree.

Of course, I should say that it’s also well known that his young children had toy Australian koala-bears named the Bingos. There was a ‘Bingo Koala’ brand of stuffed toy bear sold circa 1928-30, and which looked much like normal teddy-bears but were grey-white.

* A new Kristine Larsen paper, “Tolkien’s Blue Bee, Pliny, and the Kalevala”. Appears to be unaware of the relevance of bee-lore to Orion.

* Edmund M. Lazzari, “The Cosmic Catastrophe of History: Patristic Angelology and Augustinian Theology of History in Tolkien’s “Long Defeat””.

* “Writing in a Pre-Christian Mode: Boethius, Beowulf, Lord of the Rings, and Till We Have Faces”.

* VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center reviews Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien.

* VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center reviews Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer.

* VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center reviews Tolkien’s Modern Reading.

* A review of a new accessible book on Old English survivals, The Bone-Locker’s Speech.

* “Tolkien and the Art of Book Reviewing”.

Another batch of new writing on Tolkien and around-about. Not quite compiling to form a ‘mega-Tolk’ PDF this time, but still substantial…

* “Subtle Speech and Pronouns in Tolkien and Old English”… “in Old English poetry … dialectal ability is as important as valour, where “the hero has to prove he is a talented speaker in order to be acknowledged”.

Related is the new undergraduate dissertation “The comparative impact of Old English and Classical language on the poetics of modern fantasy”. There are thoughtful and well-sourced central sections on Tolkien… “as a lens through which to view the dissemination of the [poetic] structures of antiquity and to justify” [their re-use in fantasy literature].

* A book review of The Gallant Edith Bratt. This Journal of Tolkien Research review is a different and rather more barbed review than the Inkings journal one already mentioned here a few posts ago. Incidentally, for the sake of American readers, I note that the Inklings journal’s review has Warwick as a “city”. It’s a town, albeit with a substantial castle. As for the new JoTR review, it raises what would appear to be pertinent questions about the young Edith’s supposed status as a wealthy heiress. Her mother’s… “probate document records a healthy value for her estate, [but] we do not know if there were liabilities to set against it, or what fees were charged by its trustees, or what level of income Edith’s investments produced, or what became of them over time.”

* A book review of Switzerland in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

* A book review of A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger. See previous reviews linked here. The new review refers several times to Smith of Wootton Manor, which should of course be Major.

* “Cirdan the Shipwright: Tolkien’s Bodhisattva Who Brings Us to the Other Shore”. Whatever you may think about the Buddhist comparisons used here, a central section has a useful scholarly survey of what can be known about Cirdan.

Also noted is a call for papers (deadline now passed) for the workshop event Tolkien and Antiquity: Antiquities of Middle-earth on 3rd June 2022 in Paris. This seems to want to discover “several Tolkienian antiquities” buried in-world in Middle-earth, periods that are presumably un-named in the texts but which are assumed in-world and have broad formations akin to our ‘antiquity’ and ‘medieval’ periods, since… “We detect in [Tolkien’s fiction] an in-depth knowledge of ancient authors, Virgil … Plutarch … Tacitus … The list is not exhaustive, and Homeric inspiration, in particular, is found”.

“The Magic of Middle-earth” at Worcester Museum, in the West Midlands of the UK, this summer.

All 200 items are from a local toys specialist / collector, by the sound of it. As such I’d guess that it’s a chance to see, nicely assembled and lit by a regional museum, not only art books and suchlike items but perhaps also a range of the better toys, figures and merchandising items produced for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Wild Yorkshire today muses on Totties. In Anglo-Saxon, Wild Yorkshire notes…

‘tōta’ was a lookout post

Interesting. Bosworth-Toller has it only as the root tot, ‘a projection’. A quick look at other sources does suggest ‘lookout (post)’. The implication is that the post’s watchers look about or ‘project’ their gaze about ‘here and there’, turning their heads in a way that is uncertain to the distant viewer. An old dictionary suggests a root in Old Norse totter (still understood, as in ‘she tottered about here and there’) and there was also apparently a similar ancient Belgian word with similar meaning. ‘Tootling about’ then appears to be the more modern car-inflected form. One could today talk about a tall old person ‘tottering about’ the town on legs, but the same person would ‘tootle about’ in a small car — with the ‘toot’ part of the word implying also a certain giddiness of driving that means the horn has to be tooted more often than not. Which might cause heads to turn.

‘Unsteady, dizzy, tottering about giddily’ seems to be the broad older meaning. The 1913 Webster’s had…

Totty (?), a. [Old English toti. Cf. Totter.] Unsteady; dizzy; tottery. [Obsolete or Provincial Engish], [used by] Sir W. Scott.

“For yet his noule [head] was totty of the must”. Spenser.

In the full text of the quote we can see this relates to wine…

Then came October full of merry glee:
For, yet his noule [head] was totty [dizzy] of the must [fresh fuming juice from the wine],
which he was treading in the wine-vats see,
And of the joyous oyle [oil], whose gentle gust
Made him so frollick and so full of lust.

— Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book VII (1605), Canto VII, Stanza 39.

Consider also the use of “tot” for drinking, as in the famous British naval “tot of rum”. One is giving the seaman not only the gulp of hard liquor (the ‘tot’), but also the ‘tottering’ effect it will have on the head and gait.

Yet the word is not just relevant to dizziness caused by wine or rum or (in a few Middle-English military examples) a sharp blow to the head. “Giddy, hare-brained” is a definition from the Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1720s/30s) and shows it can imply a general colt-ish giddiness of manner.

Which brings me to the modern meaning of totty (as ‘attractive nicely-dressed girls, tall and frisky and a bit giddy’). This meaning is not understood by all, curiously. A colleague was once showing a workman round a 16-18 college, and he later reported in the staff room that he had been utterly baffled by the man’s frank man-to-man exclamations about the vast amount of ‘totty’ to be seen in the place. He assumed the workman was referring to some kind of builder’s putty that had been used on the building’s fabric. Only later was the poor fellow told the meaning which every working-man in the Black Country knew. It is a class-based word.

One can see how this meaning might broadly relate to the Old English which Wild Yorkshire and dictionaries mention. Both a tower and a ‘frisky female’ totty being, by implication, ‘tall’ and also something to which one’s eye is immediately ‘drawn to’. They are head-turners, in other words. Consider also that a tall thin watch-tower is also something which one might ascend in a dizzying spiral manner, and at the top of which one might have a dizzying head-turning view.

All of which is perhaps interesting re: Tolkien, when you consider both the old disused watch-towers at the edge of the Shire and that in The Lord of the Rings Aragorn was originally to have been Trotter. Having wooden prosthetic feet, his name might initially seem to some to have implied ‘unsteady’, ‘tottering about’. And yet Trotter implies both a pig’s trotters and a horse’s trot, which are both very firm and steady things, quite the opposite of tottering. Tot- (giddy movement, elevated, head) and trot (sure steady movement, grounded, foot) look to me like similarly-named opposites.

A fine discussion of “Hope and Despair in Tolkien”, part of a wider Tolkien Day symposium held in early January 2022 and now online at YouTube.

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.

There’s a large new digital commission… “inspired by Tolkien, Birmingham & fantasy, to be located in Birmingham city-centre. Open to “all artists” but the outcome must be digital and they anticipate some sort of… “gateway between our fantastic city and the fantasy worlds it opened up”. The aim is to attract tourists from across the region, presumably on the back of the new politically-correct Amazon TV series. The commission is an open call in the first instance. Deadline: 16th February 2022.

At the lower end of a budget I guess a well-produced audio walking-tour, with some VR for the kids, might fit the bill. The key city-centre locations would then be: 37 New St. (site of Cornish’s Bookshop); the site of Barrow’s Tea-Rooms; and the Burne-Jones collection at the Museum. The site of his school was (in his words) desecrated in a “ghastly” manner and is not now somewhere to send people. The Oratory and the Catholic Cathedral are sites, but outside the city-centre and too far to walk. Also too politically incorrect for arts managers to approve.

At the higher end of an overall budget, one might tap into the window-dressing expertise of the big dept. stores, the costumes expertise of the theatres, and the city’s digital expertise, to create a range of (somehow digitally) interactive Tolkien-themed window displays in the big show-windows.

I found a few more recent Tolkien papers / chapters which seemed of interest to me, two in open access:

* “Tolkien: sobre la trascendencia desde el corazon artistico”. Part of a 2021 Spanish-language volume of essays whose title translates as The Absent Presence: God in Contemporary Literature, from the University of Castilla-La Mancha. (Gives the initial appearance of being about the discovery of earendel, but this is quickly skipped over and the text is actually a survey-study of the creation elements in The Silmarillion).

* “Finnic tetrameter in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo in comparison to W.F. Kirby’s English translation of the Kalevala“. (A close line-by-line study, comparing the “chunks of poetry” in Tolkien’s Story with Kirby’s 1907 translation).

* Tolkien and Auden, a study in Russian with an English abstract available… “… examines the main stages of the relationship: Auden’s studies at Oxford University, where Tolkien was one of the lecturers and examiners of the poet, and the friendship that arose several decades later on the basis of a common interest of the former student and the professor in Old English poetry, as well as Auden’s deep interest in the epic novel The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s works in general. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of Tolkien’s letters to Auden, which are characterised by a confidential, friendly tone. It is noted that these letters are an important source of information about the reasons, history and ways of writing of Tolkien’s works. The situations behind specific letters are revealed through engagement with additional sources.”

My new book Tolkien and the Lizard: J.R.R. Tolkien in Cornwall, 1914 was sold in ebook as a time-limited fundraiser for my larger book on Tolkien.

Update: My thanks to the nine people who purchased copies of the Cornwall ebook. As of Sept 2022 the much larger book is now published, and it includes ‘Tolkien in Cornwall’. The new book is available to buy now, from this page.