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.

Anna Smol usefully rounds up the papers set to be presented Tolkien at Kalamazoo 2019. Of interest to me, re: my forthcoming book, and being noted here for my future reference (I’ll see if I can find open access versions in nine months or so) are…

* Two on time…

“Of Niggle and Ringwraiths: Tolkien on Time and Eternity as the Deepest Stratum of His Work”. Robert Dobie.

“The Eschatological Catholic: J. R. R. Tolkien and a Multi-Modal Temporality”. Stephen Yandell.

* Three on stars…

“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.” Kristine Larsen.

“‘It Lies Behind the Stars’: Situating Tolkien’s Work within the Aesthetics of Medieval Cosmology”. Connie Tate.

“Cynewulf, Copernicus, and Conjunctions: The Problem of Cytherean Motions in Tolkien’s Medieval Cosmology”. Kristine Larsen.

* And one of personal hobbit-ish interest…

Queer Hobbits: Language for the Strange, the Odd, and the Peculiar in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Yvette Kisor.

Relational Archaeologies and Cosmologies in the North, coming soon. Some dunderheaded cover-bot at Routledge has given it a most misleading cover photo of a moose crossing a road. Either they’re hoping for the Northern Exposure crowd, or the bot’s auto-semantics module confused animistic with animal.

Surely Routledge makes enough profit on its over-priced academic books that it can afford some proper cover designers? But apparently not. It’s time that authors started demanding oversight of their cover designs at academic publishers, I’d suggest, as the trend toward robo-designers increases.

Anyway, despite the misleading cover, the book is actually a survey of… “animistic-shamanistic cosmologies and the associated human-environment relations from the Neolithic to modern times” in the far-north, which incorporates the latest thinking and discoveries. Looks fascinating. No ebook, but the paperback looks somewhat affordable at about £30. It’s due toward the end of July 2019.

Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist is now on pre-order as a searchable Kindle ebook. Publication date is set for 8th August. Lovecraft scholars have long had such an annotated list of ‘all books owned or read by’, which I think is now in its fifth edition. But this new book will be the first time that Tolkien scholars have had such a useful resource.

There’s an interesting new forthcoming book for those interested in the language of Sir Gawain, and also for those seeking to place the Gawain-poet geographically via the dialect.

Back in 2013 Richard Dance published his fine and detailed study titled “”Tor for to telle“: Words Derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight“, to be found in the volume Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066-1520): Sources and Analysis. My heart sank when I learned this was from a AHRC-funded project, but on reading it I was pleased to find that Dance’s work proved a magnificent exception to the rule.

In this Dance found that…

“One could hardly, therefore, describe the Norse-derived words at this ‘fundamental’ end of the lexical spectrum as unusually deeply embedded within the author’s language; and, for all their interest in terms of the Gawain-poet’s stylistic strategies, their evidence does not justify searching for his home in parts of England reckoned to be especially densely settled by Scandinavian speakers”.

In a 2014 paper for the British Academy he mentioned that a… “full etymological analysis of the words derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain will appear in a future
publication”.

Now Amazon brings a date for this future publication. Dance’s full book Words Derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Etymological Survey will weigh in at chunky 256 pages. Published by Wiley-Blackwell, the book is set to appear on 7th June 2019.

Finland’s Minna Sundberg has a super new illustrative chart of the “Nordic Languages in the Old World Language Families”. The amount of leaves indicate the size of the current-day population speaking that language.

Useful for getting your head around what came from where. A small additional translator inset would be been useful for converting the sort of terms one encounters in deeply researching pre-LOTR Tolkien, such as “Old Norse”. It would have been nice to have just a couple of orienting dates. The Indo-European (Aryan) family had its origins in the Near East just over 8,000 years ago from today, for instance, with a big diffusion into Europe around 5,000 years ago.

Minna is the fine comic artist and storyteller making the ‘young adult’ graphic novels Stand Still. Stay Silent (ongoing – a future Scandanavia has returned to a state of Nordic mythology complete with monsters and magic), and A Redtail’s Dream (completed – a young boy of the North strays into the land of dreams).