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).
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.
I made an interesting and expenses-paid trip to Oxford today, for the Tolkien exhibition. On arrival I was glad to be able to thoroughly peruse the two new Tolkien books. The bookshop there had open inspection copies. The small £12 paperback, which I thought I wanted, proved only to be a cut-down of the full £25 ‘book of the exhibition’.
Thus I came away with the big £25 paperback version (above), and perused it on the train home to Stoke. I’m already very pleased with it, even on ‘a first flip’ and without the good reading-glasses. The book is almost as good as seeing the exhibition itself, I’d say, if you can’t get there. More so in many ways, because it’s fairly dark in the gallery for archival reasons, and no photography is allowed. Plus it was also very crowded (caused by people lingering, without being ushered out, and the next lot of people coming in behind). I dodged around and stayed in for about two hours. Excellent, though the religion is of course unmentionable.
Curiously Amazon UK only has the hardback of the £25 book. And they mis-state the page-count as 288 pages. It’s actually a hefty 416 pages, not including fold-out card covers. I’m assuming here that the Bodleian Library are not selling some super-sized special edition that’s only available in their shop.
Anyway for the edition I had… lovely paper, great design and printing, though I felt it was too often ‘padded’ in terms of the layout. I could have cut it down by 24 pages, with no loss of anything except pointless empty white space, and saved a few trees.
It was fascinating to see the size of certain things in the exhibition, including the “Book of Ishness”. I saw Tolkien’s painting “Eeriness” (January 1914) for the first time, showing ‘trees with reaching hands’ decades before the Old Forest and Ents. It was also good to finally see his painting “Beyond” (January 1914) in colour. The pyramids are blue and the star is red, not what you might expect of what (in black & white) appears to be a straight desert pyramids scene. Both are in the book in colour. “Beyond” may have been in the exhibition, but if so then I couldn’t find it.
The £25 book also has the first page (1913) of Tolkien’s ‘hours’ logging book’, by which he proved to Edith that he was working hard as promised.
I also saw the frontage of Exeter College, and even stepped through an open gate-door and thus saw the lawned quadrangle for a minute before the security guard appeared. Sadly the around-the-corner doorway to the Fellows’ Garden was as close as I got to the garden, though one could just about see the trees.
The Museum of the History of Science was also visited, in terms of the ground floor and upper floor permanent exhibitions (the temporary political shows in the basement were skipped). I was pleased to see they allow non-flash photography (a policy nowhere stated on their website). I got a couple of nice macro pictures with my pocket digicam (stabilised by slightly resting the lens rim on the glass case, no flash)…
Astronomical Compendium, by Humfrey Cole, London, 1568 (Inventory Number: 36313, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford).
And they had a loan of the late Danish clogg almanac, which makes an interesting comparison with the Staffordshire Clogg Almanacs I’ve previously blogged about here…
All three Oxford pictures in this particular blog post are placed under Creative Commons Attribution.
Maps for Saxon Britain and Norman Britain. From Charles H. Pearson, Historical Maps of England, 1883, third edition revised.
At the edge of The Peak, “Badecan Wyl” is ‘Badecan’s Well’, or today the town of Bakewell.
New Tolkien letter(s) at auction, with an interesting quote being given from one letter…
“I can only hope that the ancient proverb (attributed to King Alfred): ‘When the bale is at the highest, then the boot (betterment) is ever highest’ may prove in your case true.”
Old English bale appears to have been mostly a shorthand for ‘tormenting woe, caused by deliberate mischief and wickedness – usually arising from hate, envy and similar’. Could also include actual wounds and bodily binding arising from the same.
It was obsolete by the mid 1500s, but the use of baleful survived in poetry and today that word can still be used and understood in poetry and fantasy literature. Usefully in the descriptive context of a character or animal only having one eye, and that eye having a ‘baleful’ aspect to it. Or a star of ill-omen having a similar ‘baleful’ aspect to it.
Boot is interesting. We still have something like boot in the modern ‘booty’, meaning gathered-up and taken-away treasure. The getting of which would of course lead to betterment, enrichment.
But boot is not in Bosworth-Toller, and instead one needs to search for bót, ‘mending, repair, remedy, improvement’ (also compensation).
The original saying is found in the The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, Volume 3…
When the bale is hest,
Thenne is the bote nest.
Which indicates that it’s one of the sayings attributed to a wise-man named “Hendyng”, who thrived in the mid 1200s in what is now the West Midlands.
Some of the Hendyng translations at ‘The Complete Harley’ seem a bit off, seemingly skewed by the later interpretive verses that precede each saying. For instance, the horse one makes more sense and is wiser and more wryly Midlands-y as: “He is free of his horse, who never had one.” But the “boot” saying is translated there as:
“When the pain is highest,
Then is the remedy nighest”
The word bale here is presumably being translated as ‘pain’ due to the context supplied by the preceding words. But that seems only partly justified by the context, which is evidently using ‘pain’ as a shorthand for what is expanded a few words later as treye ant tene, ‘trouble and grief’, rather than as a precise pain-word meaning ‘bodily agony’. Thus the translation of bale as ‘pain’ risks misleading the modern reader. Given this, and Tolkien’s suggestion of ‘betterment’ for boot, a translation might better run:
When the woe is worst,
Then betterment is not far off.
In modern parlance, something like:
When things are really bad,
It can only get better.
Which means it’s not quite the same in sentiment as the similar modern saying…
“Every cloud has a silver lining”.
It’s a little more active that that. The ‘betterment’ here comes from the anticipation that there will soon be ‘action in-the-world’ to fix things and to actively restore things to how they were before. On the other hand the modern understanding of “Every cloud has a silver lining” suggests more of a time-delayed ‘mental reconsideration and re-framing’ of, and ‘learning from’, the misfortune. Something which then potentially leads to the discovery of a new unexpected element in the resolving situation. The addition of this unexpected element then actually makes things better than they were before.
Four handy online dictionaries or lookups, for those studying historical aspects of the British Isles…
Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary online.
Digital Index of Middle English Verse.
Coming in June 2018, Humphrey Carpenter’s J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography done as an unabridged 10-hour audiobook.
And at the start of August, Tolkien: Treasures, a 144-page coffee-table book from the Bodleian Library… “that showcases the highlights of the Tolkien archives held at the Bodleian”.
Then later in August, The Fall of Gondolin.
New on the National Catholic Register: “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Birmingham Oratory”.
“Arriving in Birmingham, England’s second city — population in its metropolitan area in excess of 3 million people — I was dismayed to find that the city did not possess a Tourist Information Centre. Not a formal one, at any rate — there is an informal one in the City Library though. It was there I asked for information on the “Tolkien Trail.” The answer I received only increased my dismay: “Is that in Birmingham?”
Yup, that’s Brum city centre and the local council apparatchiks, alright. Apparently it’s been like that for years, with the default position (before the current utter unknowing) being: get the Tolkien freaks on the bus to south Birmingham…
“…when I sent media graduate Alma Sanz Fazio in there recently as a test, she was told to catch a bus to either Sarehole Mill (even though it doesn’t reopen until the spring) or Hall Green Library. What a welcome for a first time visitor from Madrid.”
Difficult to avoid the feeling that some of this attitude from the Council is snidely political. Anyway, the lesson is: do your research before you arrive at a place, including virtually ‘walking the route’ by using Google StreetView.
What are ‘the Tolkien basics’ of the West Midlands, then, if you don’t have much time? This is how I’d do what’s still there and is worth seeing. Given that so much has been swept away, there are some ‘maybe’-places and substituted ‘equivalents’.
1. Early morning train from London to Birmingham. Walk from Birmingham New St. station to the Birmingham Museum & Art gallery for the Pre-Raphaelite and Burne Jones collections, Birmingham city centre. (There’s no proof that he and the TCBS were influenced by this world-class collection, as schoolboys. But the long-gone school was at the other end of the street from the gallery, and how could a group plotting a resurrection of the English spirit never have seen this collection?)
I’d skip Moseley in the south of Birmingham entirely, especially if you have to struggle to get there by a bus grinding down the main road (very bad idea). Though the Moseley Bog can ‘have its moments’, if visited in a sunny springtime on a quiet weekday.
2. Uber from the city centre out to the Birmingham Oratory and perhaps a peep at the nearby 4 Highfield Road site. (I have found one mention, as aside in a blog post, that as a boy the young “Tolkien served Fr. Morgan’s Mass daily”, but I’ve never seen any scholarly reference to that apparent fact or its source). The devout may also want to then go on to the Catholic Cathedral. Again, no proof I know of that he was ever actually at the Cathedral, but how could he not have ever been there?
3. Train from Birmingham New St. to Stafford. Once beyond Wolverhampton, you’ll get a flavour of the mid Staffordshire lowland countyside from the windows. Then at Stafford you’d walk away from what has to be ugliest train station in England (sorry!), and through the pretty and safe adjacent river-park, for lunch at The Soup Kitchen. This is on the principle that the Soup Kitchen is about as close as you’ll get, in wood-panelling / atmosphere / uniformed waitress service, to the long-gone Barrow’s Stores tea-rooms in Birmingham in which the TCBS would meet. Then an Uber from Stafford out to the nearby Great Haywood in mid-Staffordshire.
4. The sites of his First World War camps on Cannock Chase, near to Great Haywood. The Essex Bridge, though trees now mean that Shugborough Hall can no longer be seen from the bridge approach.
5. Uber back to Stafford train station then on north to Stoke-on-Trent train station. An Uber for a quick look at 104 Hartshill Road in Stoke and perhaps the pleasant back part of the Butts where he learned to shoot live rounds with his rifle. Then hop back in the Uber and out of Stoke and up into ‘The Gawain country’ around Wetton Mill and up onto Cauldon Low for a sunset look at the barrow-downs in the west of the Peak District (don’t get trapped by the fog!). Again, there’s no proof he was ever there. But it seems difficult to imagine that (if he thought the North Staffordshire claims for Gawain worth considering) he didn’t venture up there during his holidays in Stoke, to see the landscape of the Gawain text he’d spent much of his life working on.
6. Back to Stoke-on-Trent in the dusk and catch the direct two-hour inter-city train to Oxford. Do Oxford the next day (perhaps two days), then back to London.
New Addenda and Corrigenda for the “now so big, it’s square-shaped!” new edition of the J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide.
If your letter box and/or wrists can’t quite cope with such hefty slabs, I see there are now Kindle ebook tablet editions of the 2017 edition. Although these don’t show up as links from Amazon’s hardback/boxed-set page. Here are the links to the ebooks:
* Volume 1: Chronology (£24)
* Volume 2: Reader’s Guide – PART 1 (£5)
* Volume 3: Reader’s Guide – PART 2 (£24)
So £53 for the lot. Not bad, and on the Kindle these are also keyword-searchable to boot (albeit individually, rather than all three at once — I know of no tool that will index across multiple .mobi files, even they were to be DRM free).
What is the difference between Reader’s Guide – PART 1 and PART 2? The publisher’s description is useless on that point. But thankfully there’s a view of the Contents page on Google Books:
Apparently the Index in Vol. 1 and Vol. 3 are both duplicates of each other, and presumably they refer to the pages of the print version.
