The Oxford Mail has a bit more detail about one of the new Tolkien books which accompany the Oxford exhibition.

“Tolkien Treasures highlights of the Tolkien archives held at the Bodleian. It focuses on J.R.R. Tolkien’s childhood in the Midlands and his experience in the First World War, as well as his studies at school and at Oxford University’s Exeter College.”

Excellent, a nice tight focus. 144 pages and somewhat affordable too, at £12 retail. It’s on Amazon UK under the slightly different title “Tolkien: Treasures” and at an even better £10.50.

Witcutt’s “Notes on Staffordshire Folklore”, sent in and printed in Folklore, 1941, Vol. 52, No. 3, pages 236-237. He had had a similar short set of entries a year later in Folklore, though those were more ghost-y and not as interesting (Black Dog / Headless Horseman / Phantom Carriage / supposed Witches).

The online English newspaper archives are locked down behind a paywall, but material was often syndicated widely (i.e. was pushed through a press syndication service, where any subscribing paper could run any of the stories or articles on offer at no extra cost). For the benefit of independent scholars and researchers, here are links to three free newspaper collections, useful for searching for syndicated material. The Welsh one is especially useful for the UK, as Welsh newspapers carried a lot of syndicated content.

Welsh Newspapers Online. 15 million articles, fast and easy to use.

California Digital Newspaper Collection. Freely Accessible Repository of Digitized California Newspapers from 1846 to the Present.

Library of Congress newspapers. Mostly to about 1923.

Doubtless family-history researchers will be aware of more, but these are the three big “go-to” ones I tend to use.

This may interest readers fascinated by Stoke-on-Trent pottery history. A tour of Doulton’s London factory in 1895, Lambeth. The process of making and the production line was much the same there as in North Staffordshire.

“the good folks in Lambeth … call it “Doulton’s place,” and the big gates and the palatial buildings that enclose and comprise it are variously inscribed “Doulton and Co., Lambeth.” … I gathered that Messrs. Doulton and Co. possess about half-a-dozen “Pottery-Lands” scattered about in Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and Lancashire, one at Paisley, and one in Paris.”

Offa’s Dyke Journal, with Volume 1 due 2019 as a new Open Access scholarly journal.

Peasant houses in Midlands England…

“It used to be thought that only high-class houses had survived from the medieval period. Radiocarbon and tree-ring dating has now revealed that thousands of ordinary medieval homes are still standing in the English Midlands.”

Smell of heritage: a framework for the identification, analysis and archival of historic odours, Heritage Science Vol. 5 No. 2, 2017…

We… “create[d] the Historic Book Odour Wheel, a novel documentation tool representing the first step towards documenting and archiving historic smells.”

Also rather a useful quick ‘smell lookup-tool’ for fantasy writers with characters who frequent ancient archives and suchlike, I’d suggest.

A new local novel on Amazon: A Potteries Boy: a story of friendship and adversity set in smoky pre-war Stoke-on-Trent.

A detail of Turner’s engraving “Lake of Thun”, Photoshopped to remove figures and re-colour etc, and thus turned into a potential book cover for a book on thunderous Northern topics. Feel free to use, I’m placing this version under Public Domain. Original at embedded link.

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/359776

Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time: The Mabinogion, coming Thursday 10th May 2018.

New on PastTrack: May 1964 on The Grange, Burslem, looking toward part of Shelton Bar.

What’s remarkable is the three strip-gardens seen on the right, possibly the top grassy bit of allotments, with what might even be small fruit trees. One of the most industrial and polluted sites in western Europe, and there are gardens in it that wouldn’t look out of place in a rural medieval monastery.

It’s another example that illustrates the way that the rural and the industrial co-existed in Stoke-on-Trent.

Nice to know that the dobbins roaming the haggis-moors are of a certain vintage cast…