Announced and on Amazon UK now, a new book-length survey of Tolkien’s places. It’ll be by John Garth, with the cooperation of the Tolkien estate. We’re going to have to wait a bit for it to appear, though, as Princeton University Press won’t be publishing Tolkien’s Worlds: The Places That Inspired the Writer’s Imagination until 17th March 2020 June 2020.

If every place in his life were to be covered then that’s a lot of ground to cover, and at just 192 pages (inc. pictures, bibliography, index etc) I’d guess the book might then be more of a gazetteer with short precise entries and inset mini-maps.

But I suspect, from the title, that it’ll just be the places which can be definitely be 100% tied to literary inspiration. In which case I can see how it could be done in the page-count. I guess the book may also be oversize, in which case there would be room to be more expansive. Possibly it’ll be a mix of the two approaches, with an expansive focus on the inspiring places, and a tighter but exhaustive listing of all the others — maybe each with a 1-to-5 ‘probability ranking’ for the various local claims of possible inspiration.

I assume Princeton University Press will have a crack team of picture researchers on such a prestigious job, so it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with.

In my day, a book of horror stories by H. P. Lovecraft was on the school’s official ‘book pick’ brochure for 12 year-olds. In fact that was how I first encountered him…

Today, on Lulu.com, the hand-wringing prudes say “no” to accessing any book tagged with ‘Lovecraft’, even the many scholarly works on the master…

Prince Charles’s big Watercolour World charity is starting to bear fruit. The project aims to get all watercolour pictures properly scanned and online without watermarks or other encumbrances. The first batch is now online from The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery. They’re not all local scenes, but a few are and two of these are corkers.

“Adam’s Tile Pottery c.1840-1890” by Anon. According to the un-zoomable map, this was at the top end of the London Road in Stoke, just before the turn up toward Hartshill. Roughly about where the new animation training centre’s going to be, opposite the former Woolworths.

“View of Hartshill Church, c.1890.” Hartshill in Stoke-on-Trent. Looking over the back gardens and tucked-away allotments on the left hand-side of the road up from Stoke, as the road ascends toward the Church and the Jolly Potters pub. Neither building seen on either side of the church is the Vicarage, which is out-of-sight from this perspective except for its chimneys. One imagines a hot-air balloon and a precariously balanced painter, to get this view, or perhaps some temporary wooden scaffolding, or a small flet up in a tall tree.

This 1890s maps shows the approx. vantage point of the artist, and his direction of view over to the church.

What of the credit? It is clearly labelled on the picture as by “C. C. Lynam”, although the museum’s record page has the painter as Lucy Lynam. At a guess, perhaps a sketch by C. C. which was then later coloured by his wife Lucy? But assuming the picture itself is correct, then was this “C. C. Lynam” the “Mr. C. Lynam, F.R.I.B.A. [i.e.: an architect]” who wrote the antiquarian essay “A few jottings on some Staffordshire Camps”? Of whom the North Staffordshire Field Club noted in 1892…

“his portrait ought to be painted with a drawn sword in his hand, keeping off the restoring vandals from our ancient camps [the old name for Iron Age hillforts and Roman stations] and beautiful mediaeval architecture, all traces of which he so jealously guards.”

It might be. There was a Lynam family who lived at “The Quarry, Harts Hill, Stoke-on-Trent”, interested in architecture and antiquities. Indeed a Congress of architects took place at their home in 1895…

“The final meeting was held in the garden at the Quarry, Hartshill, about a mile out of Stoke, the residence of Mr. C. Lynam, where, beneath an ancient timber roof now covering a large pavilion, the concluding business of the Congress took place”.

The Quarry was “on the corner of Hartshill Road and Quarry Road”, meaning that it was only a few yards from the vantage point taken by the artist of the above picture. One wonders if the roof of the “large pavilion” in timber might have had a viewing tower from which the picture above was painted?

One can also note that a Stoke-on-Trent architect was central to Arnold Bennett’s famous story “The Death of Simon Fuge” (written March-April 1907).

Anyway, the picture is certainly from the family of the architect Charles Lynam, who designed many of the better late Victorian buildings in the Potteries, such as the Public Library down in Stoke. Although I can find no trace of him ever having used a middle-name starting with C., so I can’t quite be sure that the “C.C.” of the picture does not indicate his son. He had 14 children, and apparently his eldest son was a Charles C. Lynam, aged in his 30s when the picture was painted. My feeling is that the picture’s record sheet mis-attributes it, and that this younger “C.C. Lynam” was the painter.

Watercolour World also has a geo-located map, which reveals a picture of “Long Bridge, near Shugborough” near Stafford. This being the Essex Bridge, with Haywood glimpsed on the left.

The British Museum also contributes “Untitled (Mow Cop)” by John Charles Robinson, a rather pleasing massing of mossy foliage, lichened rocks and distant views, in which the artist avoids the folly castle entirely.

Snagged from eBay, some pages from a mid 1970s booklet on the reclamation of the old Potteries Loop Line for pedestrians and cyclists. A pleasing pen-and-ink drawing, map, gradient cross-section, and list of key dates.

I’m preparing a new expanded ebook edition of my recent print book on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I’m now near to completion on it, and only need to: i) plug in two additional print-only sources I’m awaiting postal delivery of; ii) get the images looking as good as they can on the Kindle ereader and 10″ Kindle HD, while also keeping file-size down; and iii) then give the resulting generated ebook a proof-reading looking for mis-formatting in the HTML. And, of course, then upload it to Amazon. It’ll have indented quotations and hyper-linked ’round-trip’ footnotes.

“If you go down to the woods today…” here in The Potteries.

New in the Shropshire Star, “Larping about: The life of Shropshire’s real role-players”.

Oh dear, SFX magazine is not so keen on the first of the new ‘young Tolkien’ biopic movies. Their review gives Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien (May 2019) just three stars and barely a quarter of a page. The dire new Hellboy gets two and a half stars, by comparison, in the same issue. The main complaints seem to be un-engaging acting and lack of cinematic flourish…

[The love] scenes are earnestly performed, but don’t feel particularly cinematic or engaging. The better sequences are those that follow Tolkien while he’s suffering from trench fever during World War I, where – delirious – he starts hallucinating the bones of future ideas.”

Good to hear, from the Lovecraftian Rlyeh Reviews, that…

“On the tail of Old School Renaissance* [in tabletop RPG gaming] has come another movement — the rise of the fanzine.”

There’s more good news. The article unwittingly made me aware of a new British Midlands-based fantasy game, which the particular fanzine in question is dedicated to celebrating and exploring…

“The Midderlands, the horror infused, green tinged interpretation of the medieval British Isles flavoured with Pythonesque humour and an Old School White Dwarf sensibility, published by Monkey Blood Design and first detailed in [the book] The Midderlands – An OSR Setting & Bestiary.”

The game is made by MonkeyBlood and Glynn Seal, who is presumably based somewhere in the Midlands. A 2018 review of this points up the transmuted West Midlands setting for the game…

“the Midderlands goes a step further [than most medieval-ish RPG fantasy], taking the English West-Midlands and twisting them into a grim, grimy, gritty, green-tinted land full of monsters, weirdness and subterranean horror.”

The author is in Walsall. I wonder if he might care for a Brummagem add-on? There seems to be a big space on the map where a surreal steampunkish Birmingham might arise, filled with Broomies and mysterious Buzz Tins…

Ey… or what about a Stoke-on-Trent addon? Stoke seems to be slightly off the north of the Midderlands map, even though we’re in the Midlands. We could be all liminal and mysterious to the game’s dwellers. [Update: I wrote one]

Anyway, looking at The Midderlands online store I see not only a second issue of the fanzine and the original book (£30, successfully Kickstart’d, seemingly paper only), but also some award-winning mapping.

Apparently it runs on Swords & Wizardry Complete, which looks fairly short and is now officially free as the Revised PDF.

* Old School Renaissance — “seeks to recapture the magic of the early days of tabletop RPGs, particularly early Dungeons and Dragons” (Fantasy Faction).

Art UK now has images of the Stoke-on-Trent paintings by Maurice Wade. Specifically, Longport and Middleport on the edge of Burslem, plus widely-seen pictures from Etruria and some obviously commissioned for the new Wedgwood factory at Barlaston. It’s similar to the more colourful work of his fellow Potteries painter Jack Clarkson. Here are Wade’s Longport and Middleport pictures, with my explication of exactly where they are and what they show…

On the Trent and Mersey Canal towpath at the edge of Middleport, looking north. On the right are the garages sited at the foot of Middleport Park alongside the canal. Ahead is the point at which the footpath from Wolstanton to Burslem crosses the canal on a bridge and enters into Middleport from the west, passing from the left to the right of the picture.

This is the other end of the Wolstanton to Burslem footpath-way (seen crossing the first picture in this post, above), but here we see the the point at which the footpath enters/exits Middleport on the east side. The viewer of the picture is placed in the position of a visitor from Burslem who has walked ‘down the back’ by the quiet Navigation Lane, has gingerly crossed the often-flooded patch of the lane at the corner by Rogerson’s Meadow, and is about to enter into Middleport (probably with trepidation, if not a local) by ascending by the sloped path up to Dimsdale St. Usually known as ‘the Dimsdale St. bridge’, it crosses a disused dry canal spur. Here’s a 1960s photo from the bed of the dry canal, looking south under the bridge…

On the Trent and Mersey Canal towpath at the edge of Middleport, headed north toward Longport. The tall buildings are part of Burgess and Leigh, aka Burleigh, aka Middleport Pottery. Behind the hedge on the left, allotments slope down to the Fowlea Brook.

Seems to be the Trent and Mersey Canal towpath at Longport, looking north toward the Bradwell Wood (would be visible behind the line of the bridge), with what is now the boat-building yard and Steelite on the right. One can just make out the grilled gate-fence that gave canal-access to the beer-garden of the pub which was sited just before the bridge and to the left of the towpath.

A typical Middleport/Longport scene, with a slightly sloping road letting onto a back-alley. He’s got the telegraph pole exactly right.

What’s missing here is the people, for which you need to go instead to the paintings of Arthur Berry. Middleport was one of the strongest communities in the city, until its deliberate destruction as a community — first by twenty years of official neglect and then by the Council bulldozers levelling the most important parts of it.

Ugh, total utter scumbaggery from Pepsi… Pepsi Plans to Project a Giant Ad in the Night Sky Using Cubesats…

Pepsi says it’ll use an artificial constellation, hung in the night sky next to the stars, to promote an energy drink.

Any brand which uses this form of stellar ‘advertising’ deserves to be totally eradicated and closed down, by a co-ordinated worldwide negative reaction.

Ebenezer Rhodes, in his travel book Peak Scenery (1824 reprint)…

* he suggests the Derbyshire Peak as one of the roots of the landscape of the gothic novel… “Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, who was a native of Derbyshire, often visited Haddon Hall, for the purpose of storing her imagination with those romantic ideas, and impressing upon it those sublime and awful pictures which she so much delighted to pourtray: some of the most gloomy scenery of her “Mysteries of Udolpho” was studied within the walls of this ancient structure.”

* an apparently Roman eyewitness letter on the erecting of stone circles is recalled and quoted by him, on visiting the ancient stones of Stanton Moor. However, he was not to know that “Quintus to M. Tullius Cicero” was actually a fake devised by one of the antiquarians of the time. It seems to have been produced by the Earl of Buchan.

* [At Tissington he finds the survival of the…] “WELL-FLOWERING, and Holy Thursday is devoted to the rites and ceremonies of this elegant custom. The day is regarded as a festival; and all the wells in the place, five in number, are decorated with wreaths and garlands of newly-gathered flowers, disposed in various devices. Sometimes boards are used, which are cut to the figure intended to be represented, and covered with moist clay, into which the stems of the flowers are inserted, to preserve their freshness; and they are so arranged as to form a beautiful mosaic work, often tasteful in design and vivid in colouring: the boards, thus adorned, are so placed in the spring, that the water appears to issue from amongst beds of flowers. On the occasion the villagers put on their best attire, and open their houses to their friends. There is service at the church, where a sermon is preached; afterwards a procession takes place, and the wells are visited in succession: the psalms for the day, the epistle and gospel, are read, one at each well, and the whole concludes with a hymn, sung by the church singers, and accompanied by a band of music. This done, they separate, and the remainder of the day is spent in rural sports and holiday pastimes.”

* on the silence of a Peak town at night… “There is hardly any silence more solemn and profound than that which pervades a country town at midnight. In the fields the sighing of the winds is heard amongst the branches; whenever the breeze stirs the very quiver of the leaves is audible, and there is a voice in every grove and thicket. Sometimes the low of cattle, the twitter of a lone bird among the bushes, or the purling of a stream, breaks the stillness of the night, even where the dwellings of men are few and far apart; but in the midst of a throng of houses, the habitations of beings like ourselves, the idea of silence is alien to the feeling that prevails, and the mind being sometimes more powerfully influenced by associations than actual existences, the stillness of a town is more awful and impressive than the stillness of the country.”

* his account of a a hobbit-like hill near Buxton has already been noted here.