Another round up of interesting new Tolkien items, mostly free:

The Journal of Tolkien Research has a new issue. Three new papers from the prolific Kristine Larsen, all of interest.

* Who Maketh Morwinyon, and Menelmacar, and Remmirath, and the Inner Parts of the South (Where the Stars are Strange): Tolkien’s Astronomical Choices and the Books of Job and Amos.

* Smaug’s Hoard, Durin’s Bane, and Agricola’s De Re Metallica: Cautionary Tales Against Mining in Tolkien’s Legendarium and the Classical Tradition.

* “Ore-ganisms”: The Myth and Meaning of ‘Living Rock’ in Middle-earth.

Also three indexes, all apparently new, to key Tolkien journals.

Another bumper Mythlore issue, including…

* All Worthy Things: The Personhood of Nature in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium.

* The Shape of Water in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. (water symbolism)

* The Enigmatic Loss of Proto-Hobbitic. (the languages of early hobbits)

The latest Fafnir has…

* Book Review: Music in Tolkien’s Work and Beyond.

* Book Review: Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium.

Unexpected has…

* Pius Samwise: Roman Heroism in The Lord of the Rings.

A paywalled book chapter, but of mild interest…

* Medieval Animals in Middle-earth. Update: May also be open access (temporary?) here.

Also an event, The Inklings and Horror: Fantasy’s Dark Corners – Online Winter Seminar 2022.

Tolkien Studies 2021 has landed on Project Muse. Including, of interest to me…

* Speculative Mythology: Tolkien’s Adaptation of Winter and the Devil in Old English Poetry.

* A review of Garth’s fine new book The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth.

* The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2018.

* Bibliography (in English) for 2019.

A full listing including abstracts is at Tolkienists.

Yet more interesting new papers on Tolkien, freely online…

“Tolkien, Manuscripts, and Dialects”.

“Where the Shadows Lie: Tolkien’s Medieval View of Free Will, Temptation, and Evil”.

“Earendel and the Dragon” (compares the three battles against Melkor “to depictions of astronomical events in … medieval annals”).

“Tolkien Beyond the Myth” (Law & Liberty review of the new book Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages).

“Journey Back Again: Reasons to Revisit Middle-earth” (Mythlore book review, summer 2021).

“The ancestors of J.R.R. Tolkien” (abstract only, paper withdrawn… “his grandfather John Benjamin (1807-96) had a thriving music business at 70 and 87 New Street”, Birmingham).

“Retracing Classical Motifs: Classical Reception of Greek Epic Cycle in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion” (substantial abstract and bibliography only) (if you’re not a member of Academia.edu you can only get the public PDF download via a link from a Google Scholar search).

“Tolkien : essai d’une lecture philosophique” (in French, appears to argue that Tolkien’s major creations can be considered a legitimate “work of philosophy” even though he was not a trained philosopher).

More new or newly-online Tolkien scholarship of interest, freely available:

* Kristine Larsen has “Numenor and the “Devouring Wave”” in the Journal of Tolkien Research. She also has “”I am Primarily a Scientific Philologist”: Tolkien and the Science/Technology Divide” (2019, expanded), and “”While the World Lasted”: End Times
in Tolkien’s Works” (2015), both newly showing up on Google Scholar. The latter two are on Academia.edu, which if you’re not member only allows linked PDF downloads from a Scholar search — thus you’ll have to search for the titles there.

* Review of Tolkien and the Classical World. The title and cover page of the review has the book as 2021, but the review’s header has it as 2017. The only paper I’d want has an abstract which puts it at December 2020, “”Eastwards and Southwards”: Philological and Historical Perspectives on Tolkien and Classicism”… “it is argued that Tolkien is fascinated with the spread of culture from an area which seems to map onto the Caucasus-Caspian region. In this he appears to follow the German Indo-Europeanists Otto Schrader and Victor Hehn, rather than the ‘Nordicist’ school represented by Karl Penka and Hermann Hirt.” There is also a usefully different abstract here. The book is not yet on Amazon UK as Tolkien and the Classical World, and is not to be confused there with the earlier Tolkien and the Classics (2019) which is on Amazon and has a different editorship. Tolkien Gateway has Tolkien and the Classical World as being released January 2021, which I’ll take as valid over the other dates. eBay seems to be your best current bet for getting a copy.

* Newly open access at Mallorn (2018, released via the two-year paywall) “The Lovecraft Circle and the Inklings: The “Mythopoeic Gift” of H.P. Lovecraft”, and “Checking the Facts” (appears to closely pick up and scrutinise various scholarly errors of recent years).

* “Deep Roots are Not Reached by the Frost”: Tolkien and the Welsh Language.

* “A Ray of Light: The Theological Vision of Letter 89”. (On Academia.edu, which if you’re not member only allows linked PDF downloads from a Scholar search — thus you’ll have to search for the title there).

* “The Theopolitical Vision of G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien and its Contemporary Relevance” (Appears to be in Spanish, but is in fact in English). Related are the various essays on Tolkien and Distributism of recent years, which are now getting to be enough to fill a book.

* J.R.R. Tolkien’s sub-creation theory: literary creativity as participation in the divine creation.

* Comments from Beyond Bree, on the recent book Something has Gone Crack.

Past surveys: Unleash the mega-Tolk! and More recent Tolkien work.

Here are some more picks from the latest public and free Tolkien scholarship, following my last such. That was posted here back in November 2020.

* “The ‘Polish Inkling’: Professor Przemyslaw Mroczkowski as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Friend and Scholar”. May have something relevant, re: exactly when Tolkien first discovered his true ancestry. (Update, no insight re: ancestry, but it does illuminate Tolkien’s publication-history in Poland)

* “The Tale of the Old Forest: The Damaging Effects of Forestry in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Written Works”. “… Finally the essay reconstructs a linear history of the Old Forest through posthumously published materials such as Unfinished Tales of Numenor & Middle-earth to discover the causes of the Old Forest’s villainy”. (Update: lacks the hoped-for focus on deep-history ’causes’, unconvincing on these)

* “Tolkien and the Age of Forgery: Improving Antiquarian Practices in Arda”. “…Drawing on previously unpublished folios from Tolkien’s undergraduate notebooks…”. Nice, anything that gets access to unpublished items from that period is of interest to me. (Update: the “folios” turn out to be just lecture-notes from a first-year lecture he attended)

* “Alcuin and Cynewulf: the Art and Craft of Anglo-Saxon verse”. Text of the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture for 2019. A section at the end… “considers the authorship and identity of Cynewulf”. Yes, since 1954 he’s no longer been considered by academics to have penned the actual earendel lines, but interesting all the same. (Update: the Appendix is substantial, and reconsiders the neglected ‘was he the Bishop of Lindisfarne’ suggestion, which was an early suggestion that was overtaken by later findings re: Mercia).

* “‘I Dwelt There Once’: Home, Belonging and Dislocation in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”. (Philosophy dissertation from Finland, and it looks fairly sound). (Update: An excellent piece of work, very illuminating of an important theme running through LOTR).

* “‘Her Enchanted Hair’: Rossetti, ‘Lady Lilith’, and the Victorian Fascination with Hair as Influences on Tolkien. “Gitter may claim that ‘the Victorian vision of magic hair did not survive long into the twentieth century’, but in Tolkien’s early- to mid-twentienth-century writing it is alive and well, and even embellished upon.”

The reading of my previous listing of interesting recent work yielded a variety of interesting items. Some observations: The Zeppelin essay was terrific and definitely informs the flying Nazgul and various forms of ‘far-seeing’ in LOTR. Tolkien was no palaeographer, despite his good ‘hand’ with a pen and his interest in ‘hands’ both in the speech-gestural and scribal meanings of the word. He was likely at work for the OED by Christmas 1918. The terrific new book The Transmission of Beowulf (2017) very strongly supports Tolkien’s early dating of Beowulf. The Rohirrim can be said to have early Mercian names, if one investigates the full names in the notes Tolkien made for the benefit of his translators. An Exeter Book photographic facsimile was produced in the early 1930s. A new earendel variant has been found in an early Gothic sermon. I also note that too many Tolkien items are still hidden away in tiny inaccessible journals such as Orcrist or obscure and expensive ‘academic library’ chapter collections, e.g. Larsen, Goering, and also the final reading of the earendel variant.

It’s that time of year again. Recent Tolkien scholarship of interest, noted and downloaded for my reading as a 400-page combined “mega-tolk.pdf”. All free and public unless noted.

Tolkien’s wartime and immediate post-war experience:

* “Tolkien and the Zeppelins”… “his posting to Holderness, in April 1917, placed him in the alarms and excursions of another front line.”

* “Tolkien’s Work on the Oxford English Dictionary”. New evidence… “suggests that Tolkien was carrying out work for the OED earlier than previously believed.” By Christmas 1918.

Lord of the Rings:

* “Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil: An Enigma “(Intentionally)””.

* “Tolkien’s Lost Knights”. (On how Tolkien side-stepped the worn-out ‘fantasy knights’ genre and offered more appealing heroes).

* “Tolkien’s Thalassocracy and Ancient Greek Seafaring People: Minoans, Phaeacians, Atlantans, and Númenóreans”. (Tolkien Studies, not free)

Poetry and artistry:

* “”Doworst” by J.R.R. Tolkien: A Disappeared Poem”. (Early 1930s).

* “The Living Tradition of Medieval Scripts in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Calligraphy”. (On scribal hands that may have inspired his own style).

Book reviews:

* Garth’s “The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth”.

* “A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger” (Journal of Tolkien Research).

* “A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger”. (Tolkien Studies, not free)

* “Music in Tolkien’s Work and Beyond”. (Mythlore)

* “Music in Tolkien’s Work and Beyond”. (Journal of Inklings Studies)

* “Tolkien and the Classics”.

* “Pagan Saints in Middle-earth”.

* “Hobbit Virtues: Rediscovering Virtue Ethics through J.R.R. Tolkien”.

* “Something Has Gone Crack”: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War”. (Journal of Inklings Studies).

* “Tolkien’s Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle-earth”.

* “Creation and Beauty in Tolkien’s Catholic Vision: A Study in the Influence of Neoplatonism”.

Surveys and bibliographies:

* “The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2017”. (Tolkien Studies 2020, not free)

* Tolkien Bibliography (in English) for 2018. (Tolkien Studies 2020, not free)

A new blog-post series has started, on Tolkien’s early drafts of The Lord of the Rings. Here are the first two short essays on the early days of the text and story…

Tolkien Begins the Sequel to “The Hobbit”.

Tolkien’s “The Return of the Shadow,” 1937-1939.

They appear to provide a good introductory overview, though not a huge amount of depth. While it’s true that, as a name, “Bingo Bolger Baggins is somewhat of an absurdity” to modern post-war ears, if might not have seemed so in the late 1930s. According to the dictionaries the game seems to have emerged as ‘Lotto’ from the mid 1920s onward and had some overlap with lotteries. But so far as I can tell ‘Lotto’ only became ‘Bingo [Cards]’ when these arrived as a thing after the war. Bingo halls were only a big thing after the mass arrival of TV in the later 1950s, meaning that loss-making cinemas were converted to bingo halls in the early 1960s.

There appears to be a good philological reason for the original choice of “Bingo” (Frodo’s original name) and I suspect there would be others found if I dug deep enough. But Tolkien was definitely not naming his hero after the gambling dens of the local housewives.

“Trotter” (the original Aragorn) is also mentioned in the blog posts and his characteristics also have philological roots, though these lead into Northern myth and lore rather than the linguistics via the name. Also south, to Jason.

More authoritative accounts will of course be found in the Hammond & Scull three-volume Companion and Guide, aka Chronology and Reader’s Guide, not to be confused with their The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion.

Also on matters Tolkish, I’m pleased to report that I’ve scraped up enough silver pennies to buy the new John Garth book on Tolkien’s various topographies and topophilias, emboldened by its increasingly excellent reader reviews. It’s very rare that I buy a book at full-price and in hardcover, but this has become a ‘must-read’. It should be arriving in the Amazon locker next week.

The Nature of Middle-earth. Tolkien’s previously unpublished essays on Middle-earth, in a book set for publication toward the end of June 2021. I’d imagine these are essays he wrote for his own use, to serve as guide-rails for his vast world-building and language-weaving.

“The book has been edited by Tolkien expert Carl F. Hostetter who heads the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship. The materials on which the book is based were sent to Hostetter in photocopy by Christopher Tolkien, before his passing, for potential publication”.

Sounds very interesting, though one wonders what period they’re from. The announcement has it that they will be paired with more “numerous late (c. 1959-73)” writing by Tolkien on Middle-earth, and my guess is perhaps the latter will also include published-but-rare material?

In the meanwhile, there’s Garth’s new book. I was hoping by now we’d have reviews of Garth’s Tolkien’s Worlds: The Places That Inspired the Writer’s Imagination, but they seem to be elusive.

Two scenes from the Birmingham Oratory, as the young Tolkien would have known it. Cardinal Newman’s room, and the Choir Gallery. Both newly colourised.

Now online for free, Elfwin: A Novel of Anglo-Saxon Times (1930), a stirring novel of Ethelflaeda of Mercia.

It was the first historical novel of south Staffordshire / north Birmingham author S. Fowler Wright, author of the key science fiction classic The World Below (1929). Elfwin is said to be a high quality and brisk historical novel with well-crafted and heroic characters. Albeit with a rather tiresome central female heroine, or so I’m told.

The Spectator review of 1930 had…

All who like tales of high romance and valour will enjoy Mr. Fowler Wright’s latest book when once they have made the acquaintance of its innumerable characters. The first chapter is not easy reading: the pages are littered with Danish and Saxon names, and those who are not historically minded may find it a little difficult to understand what is happening. Yet Mr. Fowler Wright avoids the sentimentalities common to those who write of chivalry, and tells his tale of intrigue with the utmost directness.

Difficult to image that Tolkien wasn’t aware of this.

Last time I looked, in December 2017, not all of Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature was online. But it appears that the entire run is now in PDF and online for free.

Note that the internal OCR of some words can throw off some searches. For instance, an internal site search for Earendel will not pick up the discussion of the early Earendel poems in the article “Niggle’s Leaves: The Red Book of Westmarch and Related Minor Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Yet a Google search of site:https://dc.swosu.edu/cgi/ will find it, as the Googlebot runs its own OCR on PDFs and the word occurs in the early pages of the article (the Googlebot sometimes doesn’t OCR all the pages).

A quick glance over the forthcoming Tolkien items, on the spring/summer 2020 book lists and as known to Amazon UK:

* A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, in the Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture series. It’s not clear what this is, but I suspect it may be the cheaper paperback edition of Blackwell’s earlier A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien (2014), which had the same page length.

* Tolkien’s Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle-Earth, by Sam McBride, from Kent State University Press. Looks promising, though the blurb suggests that close-readers of The Silmarillion will enjoy it the most. Tolkien is very subtle in dropping hints that imply the existence of ‘structures of belief’ in the Shire, and I wonder if the book will pick up on such hints. (I don’t mean physical structures such as churches, as the term indicates ‘sets of structured ideas’).

* John Garth’s Tolkien’s Worlds: The Places That Inspired the Writer’s Imagination appears to have been delayed again, and Amazon is now saying June 2020. I’d suspect that the virus may delay it even further.

Also of interest, I’ve found a French journal on Fantasy Art and Studies. In French, but with at least one English article in each issue. They have a current Call for texts and illustrations for a themed issue on Animaux fabuleux / Amazing Beasts.