Tolkien Gleanings #5

* The open-access paper GIS & Middle Earth (online 2021). GIS = computer-assisted mapping and map-making. Complete with free DEM height-map downloads, containing the entire terrain of Middle-earth.

* I see that An Unexpected Journal had a special issue on The Imaginative Harvest of Holly Ordway (Christmas 2021). This was inspired by her book which surveys the modern writers whose books Tolkien might have read.

* Calmgrove has a long August 2022 blog article in which he scrutinises some claims made for Tolkien’s Sidmouth (a small English seaside resort)…

“It seems to me that the most likely way that Sidmouth may have inspired Tolkien was that it provided periods of relaxation and escape in which to allow his imagination to run where it wanted, rather than any specific aspects of the Devon seaside and Jurassic Coast. Did Tolkien really “essentially” turn Sidmouth into the Shire and did the Jurassic Coast truly inspire the landscapes, flora, and fauna of the hobbits’ homeland? Or are the town’s advocates chasing a chimaera?”

At first glance there may be some disagreement with Garth. Calmgrove has… “While in Sidmouth he brought the hobbits far to the east of the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs to The Prancing Pony in Bree”, while Garth instead has him writing from Bree to Rivendell (Worlds, p. 74). Actually the Chronology supports both, since when he arrived in Sidmouth for a long holiday (“1st-15th September 1938”, Chronology) he already had the “In the House of Tom Bombadil” chapter done, if the reference to “Chapter VII” is the same as the book’s published chapter numbering. Tolkien then spent the holiday writing the tale from there up to Frodo meeting Gloin at Rivendell. What Calmgrove doesn’t snag is that Garth notes that Tolkien found the name Barnabas Butter on a old Sidmouth gravestone (Worlds, p. 21, side column).

* The December 2022 event “On Dragons and Dinosaurs” at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History…

“On the 1st January 1938, J.R.R. Tolkien gave his thoughts on dragonlore and dinosaurs in an illustrated lecture at the Museum not discussed anywhere else in his works. [Now we stage a live] once-in-a-lifetime re-run of Tolkien’s lecture featuring his original slides, supporting specimens, and documents.”

Completely sold-out in a bang and a flash, of course. Hopefully it will be recorded and placed online after the event. “Tolkien’s Deadly Dragons” has an account of the original lecture.

* Dr. Philip Irving Mitchell’s ongoing public archive of online classroom handouts on Tolkien and Medieval Tradition. With useful short summaries such as Emotional Monarchy in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (August 2022).

* And finally, The Times Diary: Tolkien’s flag flying again (October 2022, $ possible paywall)…

“A historic Oxford pub where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis used to drink [has reopened, post-lockdowns] after supporters each paid at least £1,000 for a share in a 15-year lease. As well as being de-modernised to create a suitably Inklings air, The Lamb and Flag will now host book launches and talks.”

And The Spectator magazine ($ paywall) has an October 2022 article by a leader of the group, describing… How we’re saving Tolkien’s pub.

Tolkien Gleanings #3.

Newly noticed at the latest edition of Journal of Tolkien Research, the short conference paper “Tolkien’s Coleridgean Legacy” (i.e. Coleridge).

Also new there, a review of the book Law, Government, and Society in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Works (2022). Another review from 2021 is found here.

New website: Tolkien and Alliterative Verse – A resource for students, poets, researchers, and anyone interested in J.R.R. Tolkien’s poetry, from Anna Smol. Has a Descriptive Bibliography for Tolkien, a guide to finding a small handful of worthy writing to introduce Alliterative Metre, and (“coming soon”) a guide to Secondary Sources.

Old, but new to me: “The Horns of the North: Historical Sources of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Trilogy” (1976). A short conference paper, now online. Some interesting early suggestions for sources, in a major but little-known event in Turkish / central European history.

Updated archive: Tolkien Journal, The 1965 – 1972, said yesterday by the curator to be newly in searchable .PDF form at fanac.org.

Audio interview: Writing About Tolkien, with John Garth (2022). Reveals that Tolkien at Exeter College has gone to a second edition. Nicer format (the first was laser-printed and stapled), adds some of the materials and high-res pictures used for the Bodleian exhibition, and has a few updates, according to a podcast interview with the author. £14 from his website. Not on Amazon, and not likely to be.

The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale. An open-access journal flagged as “Journal coming soon!” from Middle Tennessee State University. Will seek to focus on…

“the time period in which the modern genres of science fiction and fantasy began, and in which the academic study of fairy tale and folklore has its roots.”

Relevant to the 1906-1926 Tolkien, since his world was partly formed by the products of that earlier time in the late 19th century. Much as today someone would have been formed by the 1966-1986 period, though still living and working in the 2000s and onward.

This blog now has a new tag category for posts, Tolkien Gleanings. This has the more news-y posts on Tolkien items and exhibitions, not my essay-posts on Tolkien. I’ve gone back through the blog and retrospectively tagged relevant posts, back to about 2016. Movie stuff is not included, and the focus is on scholarship.

This new post tag (‘category’ in WordPress speak) means there is now also an RSS feed here just for posts tagged with Tolkien Gleanings. Though, as I said, my Tolkien essay-posts — such as the recent Foxy Tolkien? — won’t show up in this.

Here’s another of my occasional round-ups of interesting new-ish items of Tolkien scholarship. No-one else appears to be publicly tracking such material (I looked hard, including on Twitter). So I guess I had better do it. And I guess I can’t go on calling these posts “mega-tolks”, so Tolkien Gleanings seem apt and also mellifluous. I had also better number them. Thus… welcome to Tolkien Gleanings #2.

* “Shakespeare’s Faerie Art of Enchantment through Tolkien’s Lens: A Historiographical Introduction”. A new Masters dissertation for the University of Toronto, freely online.

* “Reconstruction Of Medieval Consciousness In The Constructed Middle Ages Of J.R.R. Tolkien”. No download, despite offering a PDF link. But has a long abstract in English. Tolkien’s work as… “the continuation of traditions of European medieval humanitarian thought and the framework of texts that reveal the way of consciousness of people of that epoch”. Possibly the PDF download, should it be enabled, will reveal the full-text to be in Russian?

* The new paid-for journal Hither Shore 17: Brucken und Grenzen – Bridges and Borders (September 2022). Amazon UK calls it a German edition, and indeed it is published by the German Tolkien Society. But so far as I can tell there’s not also a twin English edition, and the TOCs suggest a substantial part of the issue is in English. Indeed, the issue opens with an editorial which muses on what happens when a German journal becomes substantially English. The same shift is apparently true of their conferences.

Among other items in Hither Shore 17, I noted essays in English on…

~ “Explorations into the linguistic character of Westron”. You’ll recall this is the “common tongue” of Middle-earth. Said to be very sparsely documented by either Tolkien or Tolkeinists. Concludes that Westron was a language with several inputs, one heavily Elvish in the early period, and that by the time of the events of LoTR it had diverged somewhat into regional dialects (e.g. the Shire and the Mark) — and it is thus akin to English in its history and divergences.

~ “Reconsidering Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings“.

~ “”One Must Tread the Path that Need Chooses”: The Choice of Need in Tolkien’s Moria Sequence.”

* The paywall journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences has two new Tolkien articles, “Middle-earth wasn’t built in a day: How do we explain the costs of creating a world?” and ““Never Land”: Where do imaginary worlds come from?”. Somewhat related to this theme is Kristine Larsen’s new personal essay in the free journal Messengers from the Stars #6 (2022).

* Also behind a paywall, I note that the Catholic journal Touchstone carries occasional Tolkien articles, such as “Tom Bombadil’s Dominion: A Good Reason for the Appearance of Tolkien’s Obvious Misfit” and “Why Tolkien’s Middle-earth Table Manners Matter Today”.

* New scholarly book: Tolkien ja Kalevala.

* My own “On Merry and Marmaduke” and “Foxy Tolkien?”. Both freely online.

* My new book is also available, Tree & Star: Tolkien and the quest for Earendel.

Jyrki Korpua’s Tolkien ja Kalevala (‘Tolkien and the Kalevala’, 2022, £28) is a new book relevant to the young Tolkien. It’s in Finnish and about Tolkien and his discovery and engagement with the Finnish national folk-epic the Kalevala. Like many of his time, the young Tolkien found such (then relatively newly-recovered/reconstructed) Northern mythology fresher than the well-worn southern myths of Greece and Rome. Also a window through which to peer into the deep past of a harsh and misty North. But according to reviews the new book’s author also asks if “Tolkien would have started to create a larger world without the Kalevala”, and if it would have lacked certain key character types, ideas, activities (song and music) and heroic tasks.

Tolkien ja Kalevala

Introduction

I. From folklore to fantasy

About role models, ancient heroes.
Lonnrot’s Kalevala.
Tolkien’s known Kalevala.
Tolkien’s production.
What did Tolkien think of the Kalevala?
Fusions of the Finnish language and the Kalevala in Tolkien.

II. The Kalevala story and Tolkien’s fantasy world

World creation and world order.
Singing contests and courtship tasks.
Sampo and the Silmarils.
Intermissions.
The end of the story.

III. The dark parts of Tolkien’s world

The power of song, music and words.
Nature and the elements.
Vainamoinen.
From Louhe.
From Ilmarinen.
From Kullervo.

Conclusion

Afterwords

References
Sources
Directory [Glossary?]

Alan Smith, “A Shire Pleasure”, Pipes and Tobaccos (Winter 2001), pages 20-24. An article on pipe-smoking in Middle-earth, in a trade/fan magazine for pipe-smokers.

Not on Archive.org, though a later run of the journal is. But now re-piped into the public realm via a free copy on the (Japanese?) tobacco-pipe site SoPipes.

Pipe-smoking in Middle-earth is now in a third edition at $17 (September 2022).

Medievalism, the Lost Book, and Handicraft in The Lord of the Rings (the idea of the ‘lost book’)

“What’s in a Name?” Tolkien and St. Philip Neri…

“The Congregation of the [Birmingham] Oratory itself was established in the sixteenth century by St. Philip Neri, who, despite having very little name-recognition in the wider world, is a major figure in Church history”

Catholic Culture podcast interviews Carl Hostetter on the recent book The Nature of Middle-earth.

A new review of Tolkien’s Cosmology: Divine Being and Middle-earth (2020)

In French, Les Lettres du Pere Noel de J.R.R. Tolkien : les metamorphoses editoriales d’un corpus epistolaire fictionnel (J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas: the editorial metamorphoses of a fictional epistolary corpus) (HTML, so easily auto-translated).

A large special issue of the German open-access journal Thersites, themed ‘There and Back Again: Tolkien and the Greco-Roman World’ and with deep articles in English. Including…

“Tolkien and Greco-Roman Antiquity”. (Very briefly “sketches the status of the research on the influence of Greco-Roman antiquity on the works of Tolkien” in terms of publication, including mentioning two non-English books I’d not heard of).

“Tolkien’s Ithilien and the Landscape of the Ancient Mediterranean”. (Excellent, and with a large bibliography).

“Ents, Sacred Groves, and the Cost of Desecration”. (Some discussion of sacred groves and the scholarly debates about pre-Christian animism and sacred trees. Unaware that Tolkien’s personal tutor at Oxford was one of the world’s great experts on animist ethnology).

“(Classical) Narratives of Decline in Tolkien”. (A small typo on the dating… “Tolkien had an extensive training in Classics at King Edward’s School (KES), the prestigious grammar school that he attended from 1900 to 1910” — he was actually there until the end of July 1911).

Review of the book Tolkien and the Classical World.

A new edition of the journal Mythlore brings two items of interest…

* “Notes of an Inklings Scholar: Musings on Myth and History, Promises and Secrecy, Ethical Reviewing, and the Limits of Authorial Intent”. A keynote conference speech that melded together several short essays. One of these is an entertaining evaluation of several key denigrators of The Lord of the Rings. Specifically asking: did they actually read it? On the available evidence… no they didn’t, the author concludes. I’d add, as a Lovecraft scholar, that there is also clear evidence that Lovecraft’s most dismissive critics — including a key contemporary editor and anthologist — have not read his key works such as “The Colour Out of Space”.

* Review of Tolkien as a Literary Artist. Usefully notes and details a poetry section in the book…

The analysis of “Poems and Songs”, of which there are more than 60 within The Lord of the Rings, posits that various recitations and performances serve the plot by advancing narrative development as much as to add entertainment. Kullmann notes four types of verse: Mythic, Functional, Bellicose, and Otherworldly. A handy table (pages 230-233) catalogs a breakdown of the types and their schemas. The poems are then elucidated by their textual traditions and genres, mostly related to English folksongs.

Which makes things sound very jolly. However, be warned that this is apparently also a book which lauds contemporary academic literary theory.

Also new and of note, and open-access elsewhere, are:

Light: the diegetic world-builder in J.R.R. Tolkien’s secondary world. A Masters dissertation at Glasgow.

“Ancient Sea Monsters and a Medieval Hero: The Nicoras of Beowulf”. Sees a classical influence. In a special themed issue of the scholarly open-access journal Shima, on sea and water-monsters. I also find that the earlier Vol. 15 No. 2, and Vol. 12 No. 2, were on mermaids.

News of a new Tom Shippey book, Beowulf and the North before the Vikings, from Amsterdam University Press. Here’s the blurb…

Ever since Tolkien’s famous lecture in 1936, it has been generally accepted that the poem Beowulf is a fantasy, and of no use as a witness to real history. This book challenges that view, and argues that the poem provides a plausible, detailed, and consistent vision of pre-Viking history which is most unlikely to have been the poet’s invention, and which has moreover received strong corroboration from archaeology in recent years. Using the poem as a starting point, historical, archaeological, and legendary sources are combined to form a picture of events in the North in the fifth and sixth centuries: at once a Dark and a Heroic Age, and the time of the formation of nations. Among other things, this helps answer two long-unasked questions: why did the Vikings come as such a shock? And what caused the previous 250 years of security from raiders from the sea?

It was slipped out in August 2022, when many were at the beach. The podcast History of Vikings has a late September podcast interview on the book, and appears to be the only interview. This has an .MP3 download and the excellent long interview starts at 3:10 minutes. Shippey states that he had large amounts of friendly help from Scandinavian archaeologists, eager to bring their little-read recent discoveries to a wider public. Judging from what’s said it seems to have been a very productive engagement, as discovery after discovery slotted into place in the broader framework that Shippey was able to provide.

Amazon notes of the book “New edition”. But I can find no earlier edition, and the podcast interview suggests this is a wholly new book. Shippey does mention that there was a big difficulty in getting copies into warehouses, so perhaps that’s what’s meant — perhaps the first run had to be pulped due to printing problems, and then a new one produced?

Also of note, elsewhere, the new “A Babel of Shadows: The Meaning and Function of Shadows in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings“. A fine Masters dissertation, dated 2022, from a Dutch student. Written in English.

I found what appears to be an offshoot of the January 2022 YouTube Tolkien Day lectures, which I discovered and noted here back in the summer. The offshoot video is an excellent short YouTube lecture on “The Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien”.

Many good clear points are made in just 11 minutes, but the young speaker makes the especially pithy point that Tolkien — who must surely be the most read poet of the 20th century due to all the poetry and lyrics in his books — is…

“not even mentioned in any general account of 20th century English poetry, so far as I’m aware”

I recently found what appears to be a similar state of affairs in art history bibliography, judging by the massive new unified art history bibliography for 1910-2007. Just six hits for a simple search on “Tolkien”, and one of those spurious…

* Drawings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1976)

* Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien (1979)

* The invented worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien : drawings and original manuscripts from the Marquette University Collection (44 page exhibition catalogue)

* J.R.R. Tolkien : artiste et illustrateur (1996, French)

* “Elements of myth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and selected paintings of Paul Klee” (1980 microfilm dissertation, probably tangential)

* A collector’s guide to costume jewelry (spurious result, author is also named Tolkien)

… which seems odd. Because some of the many contributing mega-libraries must surely have at least one or two key pre-2007 Tolkien art books in their collections. Although, being charitable, I suppose such books may have proven so popular that they were either stolen, had the best pictures razored out, or simply fell to bits and were discarded.

Perhaps some kind soul could send the relevant publication data to the new openbibart.fr art history bibliography, in the hope that they might add the missing books and articles on Tolkien’s art? Alternatively, perhaps someone might make a comprehensive annotated bibliography on the art, fully up to date?