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 Tolkien’s previously unpublished essays on Middle-earth, in a book set for publication toward the end of June 2021.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.

“The Staffordshire Knot Inn” and its folk in the 1910s, currently on eBay and possibly of interest to collectors of material related to Tolkien’s time in Staffordshire.

One can almost see Gaffer Gamgee, Lobelia, and Butterbur the innkeeper.

A detailed response to the criticism of the new book Tolkien’s Library, from the author.

Half of it is a usefully detailed investigation into Tolkien’s likely input into the Davis revision of the Tolkien & Gordon edition of Gawain.

Some interesting sounding papers in a Tolkien session planned for the Leeds International Medieval Congress 2020…

Borders in Tolkien’s Medievalism III.

* Boundaries and Marches: Marked and Unmarked Edges in Tolkien’s Maps, by Erik Mueller-Harder, Independent Scholar.

* The Walls of the World and The Voyage of the Evening Star: The Complex Borders of Medieval Geocentric Cosmology, by Kristine Larsen, Central Connecticut State University.

* Time-Travel, Astronomy and Magic Mirrors: The Borders between ‘Reality’ and ‘Otherworlds’ within Middle-earth, by Aurelie Bremont, Sorbonne Universite Paris.

Two new Tolkien books seem of possible interest to me, in the Amazon forward listings.

A Dictionary of Sources of Tolkien is from David Day, the prolific and unofficial encyclopaedist of Middle-earth. It looks interesting enough to sample the free 10% on Kindle, when it sees publication in a few days. After the abundant illustrations are subtracted it looks to have perhaps 350-pages of commentary on sources. At 544 pages in total, the 10% sample of the book should be enough to make a judgement on its usefulness and depth or not.

Also of note is a new French book La Terre du Milieu: Tolkien et la mythologie Germano-Scandinave (trans. Middle-earth: Tolkien and German-Scandinavian mythology). A translator is listed, which led me to discover that it’s a French edition of Rudolf Simek’s 2005 200-page German book Mittelerde: Tolkien und die germanische Mythologie. That led me to a preview of the Contents page in German on Google Books, which could then be run through Translate thus…

1. J.R.R. Tolkien: The medieval researcher as a novelist

Tolkien’s life and scientific career
The novelist
Tolkien and the Old Norse literature
The songs of the Edda and the prose Edda
Old Icelandic sagas
The Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus

2. Geography and geographic names of Middle-earth

Cosmography and Cartography
Tolkien’s World: Middle-earth
Otherworldly realms
Waste lands, wastes
Mountains and forests
Water and sweetbreads
Landscapes and parts of the country

3. Persons of Scandinavian origin

Dwarfs (dwarves) in the Edda and Tolkien
The Kings of the Rohirrim and their ancestors
The Hobbit families
Other influences from Old Norse

4. Odin’s appearance

Gandalf and Odin
Saruman and Odin
Sauron and Odin
Manwë and Odin

5. Natural mythological elements

Who is Tom Bombadil?
Ents and Entfrauen
Beorn, the Gesrairwandler

6. The friendly members of the lower mythology

Hobbits
Dwarfs (dwarves)
Elves
Wasa (Woses)

7. The menacing powers of lower mythology

Orcs
Goblins, Bilwig (goblins)
Uruk-hai
Trolls
Giants
Balrogs

8. Mythical animals, mythical animals and animal monsters

Dragon and Dragonhunt
Eagle
Wolves and wargs
Werewolves
Oliphants

9. Runic writings

The variants of Futhark
Tolkien’s creative approach to runes
Dwarf runes and moon runes
Cirth und Angerthas
Symbol-rind Zauberrunen
The runic inscriptions in Hobbit and Lord of the Rings

10. Motifs from the German mythology and heroes of legend

The One ring
The King in the Mountain
The Shadow Army
The Broken Sword
The worship of the gods without a temple
Zahi Nine
Revenants, “Funeral Items” (barrow-wights)
The Earendil myth
High Heights, Thrones (High Seats)

So, to pack that lot into just 200 pages makes it look like a broad survey. A quick search leads me to just one review online, in German. Turns out the author of the book is… “a professor of medieval German and Scandinavian literature at the University of Bonn”. The reviewer notes that… “Very commendable in this context is Simek’s effort to find out which Nordic literature was published and available in the United Kingdom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when Tolkien was a student and [lecturer?].” Our knowledge here is still somewhat limited (even now, with Tolkien’s Library in print), but the reviewer notes that Simek is not afraid to “speculate” on what Tolkien read and/or knew. The book looks like an interesting overview, but… it’s not in English.

The Birmingham Tolkien 2019 Programme, now online in PDF.

It was a roaring success, apparently, other than a slightly cramped venue. Sadly the event was too expensive for me, despite the relative proximity of Stoke-on-Trent to Birmingham. It would have cost at least £400 to do it properly. But it’s good to see the booklet online and giving an excellent summary with abstracts.

For my own future reference, talks given at the event and of interest to me:

* “The Wright Stuff”, Ian Spittlehouse. The influence of Joseph Wright at Oxford. This is “the third in a series re-appraising the work of Joseph Wright and its influence on Tolkien”, so one assumes a book at some point. One might hope also for a substantial appendix that surveys all his other tutors.

* “The lost connections of Tolkien’s first map of The Lord of the Rings: Reconstruction”, Erik Mueller-Harder. Again, one of a three-part series, and one thus assumes these will become a book at some point if the rights can be obtained for the required images.

* “Rivers of flame and a great reek rising: volcanoes and the horror of the sublime in Tolkien’s Legendarium”, Sian Pehrsson. Not looking in the right places, judging by the abstract, but it sounds interesting.

* “Blessed trees? The White Trees of Gondor and the Royal Oak compared and contrasted”, Murray Smith. The author admits there’s no real evidence of a linkage, but I can see that it’s a perfectly valid comparison to make given the historical context and Tolkien’s politics.

* “Forests, Trees, Huorns, and Ents”, Johanne Tournier. Appears to be a broad survey of Tolkien’s close attention to trees in his life and work.

* “The Shape of Water in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, Norbert Schurer. Judging by the abstract, ‘water’ is obviously too slippery and vast a topic to grasp all in one go. But the paper could be stimulating.

* Five or Six Ponies?, Jessica Yates. A small niggling problem in the text of The Lord of the Rings re: the journey to the Old Forest, and apparently now with three possible solutions. I like small puzzles like that, not least because they can often inadvertently lead one on to bigger discoveries.

* A conference report mentions a study of Nodens and how Tolkien might have gone on to work elements of the lore into his Legendarium, though I don’t spot it in the programme booklet.

I see that the book Tolkien’s Library has been published and is rather chunky. The free 10% sample for Kindle readers gives the introduction and the first 90 entries (and curiously, no table-of-contents). There appears to be no dating on the entries re: when read. I assume there’s a date-ordered “book X was read in year Z (or decade Y)” table at the back, so that one can glimpse something of his intellectual progression.

Newly available online, Richard Dance’s final book-length edition of Words derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An etymological survey (2019).

* Table of Contents, Acknowledgements, Abbreviations.
* Part One (Introductory remarks, 238 pages).
* Part Two (The word-by-word analysis, 600 pages).

I trailed the book back in mid-April 2019.