My new book The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth is now available as an ebook. In 22,000 words it carefully identifies 135 points or ‘cracks’ in The Lord of the Rings and related material, ‘cracks’ in which one might write new fan-fiction stories. The book is a side-project arising from my forthcoming scholarly book on Tolkien.

I’m pleased to present The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth. My new book is available now, and is a side-project from my larger scholarly Tolkien book. It should be of interest to RPG players, as well as to fan-writers of Tolkien stories.

The Cracks of Doom is a fully annotated and indexed list of ‘Untold Tales’ in Middle-earth, pointing out the ‘cracks’ where new fan-fiction might be developed. There are 125 entries and these usually lightly suggest ideas for story development. It will also be useful for scholars seeking to understand what Tolkien “left out” and why, or those interested in ‘transformative works’ and fandom.

Contents:

1. Introduction: “On Untold Tales in Middle-earth”.

2. Writing guidance: “Faith, Duty and Fun: plan and style in Middle-earth fiction”.

3. The list: ‘Openings, Gaps and Cracks’. 125 entries. Note that this is only for LOTR, inc. the Appendices. It also draws on Unfinished Tales, books in the History series, and for one item I also reference the Letters. It does not, of course, cover the vast amount of material in The Simarillion.

PDF sample with index. The full book has 64 pages, about 22,000-words, and a full name and place Index. The book is wholly unofficial, and very respectful of Tolkien’s vision.

There’s also a Kindle ebook version, slightly expanded with some additional entries. Also available now.

I think I’m fairly safe with the title, re: the Estate. Tolkien is not mentioned in the title, and “The crack of doom” was a common colloquial phrase in the Edwardian period, being found in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act IV, Sc. 1.

There’s a fine Christmas present for Tolkien scholars, the journal Mythlore Vol. 21 | No. 2 (1996) is now newly free and online in public. It’s a very large edition and contains the elusive proceedings of a major 1992 conference. It has per-chapter downloads, so it’s a simple matter to download only the articles you need and compile them to a truncated PDF that suits your needs. Including the editorial, I bagged 10 articles and ended up with a manageable 100-page ebook on my 10″ Kindle HD.

There is now a dedicated website for the Jake Whitehouse collection of First World War photographs and postcards relating to mid Staffordshire. The tight focus is the First World War and the area around the military camps on Cannock Chase, the camps themselves, and places the soldiers might have visited such as Rugeley, Alton and Stafford.

There are about a dozen pictures of the Haywood villages and a couple of Shugborough, but Tolkien scholars will be most interested in the wealth of camp pictures.

While we’re waiting for the slow-as-treacle big-screen Tolkien biopics to arrive (two are said to be due), Radio 4 is to repeat the one-hour “Tolkien in Love” Afternoon Play drama this Sunday, 9th December 2018. Appears to have been first broadcast 2017. It follows a 30-minute mid-morning documentary of the same title, broadcast by Radio 4 in 2012.

The BBC has no Listen Again for this drama, though its Web page promises it will be “available shortly after broadcast”. The earlier Tolkien in Love documentary has long-since been made “unavailable” from the BBC. Surprisingly, neither broadcast appears to have been pirated or sent to Archive.org.

Update: now on Archive.org.

Five new online lectures on Tolkien and his interest in languages, from Oxford, with one per podcast. I have no interest in the intricacies of his invented languages, but in this case it’s real languages such as Old Norse.

Regrettably they’ve only put up the videos, and they’re over a Gb each to download and there’s no plucking torrent so the download speed can’t be throttled back. We don’t all have gigaspeed Internet like Oxford does.

Now online, a new issue of the leading journal Tolkien Studies, Volume 15, 2018. Especially interesting for me are…

* “Doors into Elf-mounds: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Introductions, Prefaces, and Forewords”. No abstract, but it appears to be a brisk survey and summary of such?

* “Tolkien’s Classical Beowulf and England’s Heroic Age”. No abstract, but it appears to be on the influence of Virgil and similar authors Tolkien would have known from his days at school and university?

* And of course the usual The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2015 and Bibliography (in English) for 2016.

The latest Mythlore, September 2018 is also available. In which the lead essay is of interest…

* “”No Pagan Ever Loved His God”: Tolkien, Thompson, and The Beautification of The Gods”. On the Catholic poet Francis Thompson, now deeply unfashionable but whose best work was once ranked alongside Blake. The young Tolkien was a strong late admirer. At first glance it looks like Thomson’s Essays are being considered here as an influence, and especially one on paganism.

A new Tom Shippey lecture is always a treat. There’s a new one on the Oxford podcasts website, “Tolkien’s turning point: Tolkien and the history of tongues”.

Regrettably it’s only offered as video, and the Oxford University server gives me stuttering playback when streaming. There is however a nearly 1Gb video file for public download. The talk itself starts at 2:15 minutes in.

Superb work, which I’ve now heard all the way through several times. An unabridged reading, with full-cast voices done by an outstanding verbal mimic and actor, expertly melded with the movie’s music and sound FX from the movies and public-domain sources. Can one man do all the voices? Yes, he’s a natural prodigy and he does so with the greatest of ease — imagine ‘Mike Yarwood, trained by the RSC’. With a little help from the examples of the movie voicework, all the voices and accents are also just as you’d expect them to be. Even Bombadil and Gollum.

I can’t link to it here, but if you know what you’re doing with .torrent files and torrent software like qBittorent, search: dragash “2013-2014” 192kbps limetorrents Hint: the Yandex search engine doesn’t censor torrent results like the others. Or if you use Tribler, try just “Dragash”. This search should land you somewhere near the last available version, the one in which Phil had gone back and tidied up some errors of delivery in the early chapters and given us the full uncompressed edition. “Uncompressed” means that 3.9Gb is the size you want.

Bear in mind that you’ll need to own the extended-cut DVD movie trilogy of The Lord of the Rings, the book itself, and the official soundtrack album, to legally download this outstanding free non-profit fan-work. If you also want all the Appendices read aloud then you’ll also need to buy the official unabridged audiobook reading, when you’ve finished with Phil’s full-cast reading.

Phil’s recording is slightly too sibilant (‘sibilance’) on high-response headphones, so you may want Impulse Media Player which offers a graphic equaliser for reducing treble and boosting bass, as well as a slider to slightly slow down the speed of reading — so you can better savour the text and dialogue. This is one of the great audioworks of our time, as well as running for 48 hours, and so you want to be sure you’re listening to it properly.

Update, 2019: I now recommend AIMP as it’s Windows desktop freeware which does all that Impulse Media Player can, but also has simple and editable bookmarks.

Update 2020: since Summer 2020 Phil Dragash’s marvellous version of The Lord of The Rings is now also on Archive.org, with torrents and in its final 2013-14 version…

* The Fellowship of the Ring. (“A Journey in the Dark” has a small encoding ‘skip’, as does the LimeTorrents version, which cuts a few minutes recounting the discovery of the doors of Moria and the unpacking of Bill the Pony).

* The Two Towers. (There is slight but unfortunate elision in the chapter “The Road to Isengard”. Nothing is missing, but the lack of a 10 second gap and a music-change between “…vanished between the mountain’s arms. // Away south upon the Hornburg…” can be confusing to the listener. Since the same group of beings is being described, but their activities are in different and far-separated places at different times).

* The Return of the King.

Update, 2022: No Hobbit from Dragash, but there is an unofficial unabridged “The Hobbit (Audiobook) – J.R.R Tolkien | Soundscape by Bluefax” at Archive.org since November 2020, inspired by Dragash’s work. With music and FX. Young British narrator, with a facility for acting but not Dragash’s world-class talent as a superb mimic. Like the above Dragash LoTR, to legally download this you will need to already own the official book, audiobook and the movie soundtrack album.

Below is the best AIMP graphic-equaliser setting I can get for good headphones, with speed at 97% and Bass at +33%.

A handy new list of Tolkien’s Published Art, which is a newly-revised update of the art section to be found in J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide (2017 edition). It’s kindly been placed online for free by the authors, in PDF.

Incidentally, I see that I previously wrongly called the Companion and Guide a third edition, in a previous and hasty “oh, gosh look!” blog post. It’s actually the second edition, and my error here has been corrected.

Newly released PhD, ‘A Creeping Thing’: the Motif of the Serpent in Anglo-Saxon England (2017).

“This thesis aims to survey and interpret the symbolic role of the serpent in a number of different, clearly defined contexts and look for common associations and continuities between them. In finding these continuities, it will propose a underlying, fundamental symbolic meaning for the image of the serpent in Anglo-Saxon England.”

The Imaginative Conservative has a good new review of Tolkien at Exeter College.