Tolkien Gleanings #309
Tolkien Gleanings has been in abeyance for three weeks, due to my installing Windows 11 and porting over all the software and settings. Don’t worry, it’s a ‘Superlite’ version of Windows 11, not Microsoft’s full-on nightmare blue-screen bloatware. I was going to move to Linux Mint, but then I discovered the Superlite version of Windows 11 — no bloat, no Microsoft account, no adverts, no privacy-invading telemetry, no ‘apps’, no ‘your hardware is too puny’, no forced updates. All of that actively ripped out, rather than just suppressed via a few tweaks in the settings. It can even look and feel like Windows 7 (install Open Shell + StartAllBack, and change the wallpaper). Lovely. It’s just as fast on a trusty old workstation, and it means I can get all the latest software and access various local open-source AI tools.
* Now published Arda Philology 8, which has…
– Almost Certainly Almaida: An Investigation of Numenor’s Lost City-name.
– “Unrecorded” Germanic: An Art-language for England.
– Rank-frequency Distributions of Aesthetic Units.
– Vocalization of Spirants in Sindarin and Noldorin.
– Shorthand Signalling: A New Source for the Tengwar?
The latter by John Garth, and presumably related to the wartime signalling methods known to Tolkien. Also of note, a new podcast interview with John Garth on Tolkien and war.
* New from Eastern Europe, “Tolkien and ‘The Fear of the Beautiful Fay’: Breton Folklore and Christian Imaginary in Fantasy Literature”, in the journal Limba Literatura Folclo. Freely available online, in Romanian with English abstract.
* New from Glasgow, what appears to be a dissertation or thesis on “The Creative Uses of Irish Literature in Works by J.R.R. Tolkien”. I can’t tell which it is at present, because the university repository server has crashed (possibly this is related to the major cyber-attack which has taken out Glasgow City Council, at a guess).
* New in Historioplus: The e-Journal of the History Department of the University of Salzburg, “‘What about side by side with a friend?’: Dissecting the ‘Elves versus Dwarves’-trope, which looks at the primary-world historical origins of the notion. Freely available in English.
* Newly added to the rolling current issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Bilbo’s Boethian Heroism”. Freely available online…
“… little scholarly attention has been paid to his development of Boethian ideals in The Hobbit, especially in regard to Bilbo’s heroic arc and the importance of luck on his journey. I argue that Tolkien develops Bilbo’s heroic identity and his famous “luck” as the actions of Fortune on behalf of Fate and divine Providence, interpreting the influential theology from Boethius’s ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ as a new kind of heroism that fulfils the teachings of Lady Philosophy.
* The National Catholic Register reviews the new book The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (2025), in “For Tolkien, the Mass Was Life’s Greatest Drama”.
* Kalimac’s Corner reveals, in a mid-June 2025 post, that…
“Tolkien Studies is alive and well. It’s just delayed. A combination of various personal difficulties, on top of never having quite recovered from the dent in our schedule caused by the 2022 supplement, are the cause. But the 2024 (tsk) issue should have gone to the publisher (more processing time) within a month from now.”
* Wormwoodiana brings news of the new book of essays Borderlands and Otherworlds (2025) which has, among others…
– Some Supernatural Fiction of the Early 1920s. [British literature survey]
– Charles Williams and His Circle: Four Vignettes.
– The Haunted ’Forties: Wrey Gardiner and Poetry Quarterly. [1940s British literature]
– Three Fantasias of the ’Forties. [“]
– Modernity and Tradition: The English Fantastic in the ’Forties and ’Fifties. [1940s and 50s]
* The Lingwe blog muses on “The Ulsterior Motive” and other unpublished writings of Tolkien.
* The Alas, not me blog has perceptive musings on “Dreamflowers and Lotus-eaters” in The Lord of the Rings.
* New on YouTube, a new batch of videos of the Oxford talks series, including, among others, “J.R.R. Tolkien at the BBC”. The BBC was the nation’s main broadcast network for the British Isles and Commonwealth.
* YouTube now has a recording of the 2025 Tolkien lecture, which this year was given by Birmingham’s historical-fantasy / romance novelist Zen Cho. Touches on the importance of fantasy for the reader’s inner-life, the evils of censorship and censorious peer-pressure, and the threat of AI as a quick-fix which may bypass “the effort of living in this world” (and the lessons that can teach us).
* Now online for free at Academia.edu, “Christmas Games and Paper Castles: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a Court Holiday Poem”, a chapter from Studies in the Literary Imagination (2023). I assume a two-year embargo has now expired, and hence the chapter is online for free. Get the PDF without signing up, by searching the title on Google Scholar. Excellent, but the author hasn’t read my book on Gawain and its setting. He usefully notes the appearance of ‘woodwoses’ as a fantastical addition to a court performance in 1348, citing a 1999 Yale University Press book…
“[For] the household of [King] Edward III, celebrating Christmas [in 1348] at Otford, there were masks for men, with heads of lions, elephants and phantoms (‘vespertiliones’) mounted on top, and separate masks of woodwoses and virgins. A few days later, at Epiphany, at Merton, there were 13 costumes for dragons and men with diadems.” — from The Great Household in Late Medieval England, 1999, p. 94.
* Five years in the making, and shipping this week, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters. Also includes surveys of modern “Monstrous Angels”, plus “Demons and Monsters of Mesopotamia”, and “Ghosts of Mesopotamia”, which means ancient Babylon and the Babylonian Empire.
* A new June 2025 version of the freeware Anytxt, the best full-text search tool for desktop PCs. Can now “filter search results by filename”, along with all the other features such as the ability to run regex and proximity queries. Very useful for scholars with large digital caches of papers and books.
* The Free Online Library has a wealth of freely-available long-ago local newspaper articles, which roll out to the public once their usefulness to publishers expires. New at the Library is “1905 Mill View Was Tolkien Inspiration”, which is a short gushy 2012 article from The Birmingham Mail. One item of note is on the sources of the mill-pool…
“[The Sarehole Mill] water wheel is powered not by the River Cole, which flows nearby, but an adjacent pond which is fed by a now built-over head race along the Wake Green Road and a stream from Moseley Bog.”
Also a Roy Edwards letter to the Mail editor from Christmas 2012…
“I lived at Fern Cottage 32 years ago. My late mother loved to visit a magical ‘glade’ sited near Cardinal Newman’s burial site, Rivendale, in the garden at the back. This led to a desire to research Tolkien which revealed that he walked via the Lickeys to Barnt Green station to catch the train to Birmingham. A born ‘Rednal-ite’, I recognised many of the scenes depicted in the Hobbit as those relating to his route to the train – the blacksmith next door to the cottage; the trees blowing all around his home; the river running by the Tea Rooms; the Rose & Crown where Strider was met; the large Beeches of Milkwood situated at the top of Rose Hill; the climb up a cliff-like sandstone hill where he could well have met Gollum; Bittell reservoir and the final stretch to the train which breathed fire and smoke – could this be the Dragon? Tolkien’s brother often met him at the station. They would have spent time exploring the Lickey Hills. Thus fact provides inspiration for fantasies. In later years he frequently visited the Oratory summer home next door and even spent many of his courting years walking the hills. Finally, enter the lookout at the top of Beacon hill and you will not only see the Two Towers, but you will survey the vast view across the Malverns to the land of Mordor in the distance – Tolkien country if ever there was.”
His “across the Malverns to the land of Mordor in the distance” would be looking SW towards rural Herefordshire/Gloucestershire, which is hardly Mordor. Possibly the glimpse of the distant Ross-on-Wye hill-country was meant? Though it would make more sense if “Malverns” = Midlands, and thus the viewer would be looking towards the heavily industrial Black Country. Possibly a mis-typing of a hand-written letter?
* And finally… “Best places for a Tolkien fan to visit in England?”, with answers.