Tolkien Gleanings #247

* The Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference now has the talks programme online. An all-star Tolkien event. Talks include, among others…

   – “It is dear to my heart”: An art-oriented recollection of a correspondence with Christopher Tolkien (1982-1988).
   – Christopher Tolkien as Medieval Scholar.
   – Christopher Tolkien and ‘the Goths and the Huns’.
   – Continuing Christopher Tolkien’s Work in a Digital Age.

* New at Atla blog, “Yielding New Perspectives on Tolkien: An Interview with Archivist Catherine McIlwaine”.

* Voyages dans les mondes de Tolkien (‘Voyages in the Worlds of Tolkien’), new from France. It appears to be a 144-page one-off book-a-zine from the glossy French travel magazine Geo. The quickie AI-generated cover doesn’t inspire confidence that it’s an authorised publication. One Amazon review states that there are a number of errors of biographical fact, and its interview with the French nation’s current Tolkien publisher somehow managed to overlook twenty years of work on Tolkien by Vincent Ferre.

* Addiction in The Lord of the Rings and the real world: insights for physicians. A short report in a medical journal, on a conference paper of note…

“At OMED24, this theme was brought to life as James H. Berry, DO, an addiction psychiatrist, and Tolkien scholar Lisa Coutras Terris, PhD, explored how the forces that ensnare characters in Tolkien’s work mirror the real-world grip of addiction.”

* Forthcoming in 2025, The Gospel of Gollum by Italian scholar Ivano Sassanelli. The book will consider…

“Gollum as a possible exemplification or personification of the passage from the Gospel of Luke: “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be” (Luke 12,34)? To answer this question, we will use an academic approach tasked with showing some of the most important aspects of Gollum’s life and [drawing on] Italian Tolkien scholarship.”

* An online continuing-education course at Harvard on “Tolkien’s Library”, set for spring 2025.

* An online seminar set for August 2025, More Perilous and Fair: Women and Gender in Mythopoeic Fantasy… “Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the publication of Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien”.

* New on YouTube, Tolkien, Lord, and Liturgy: An Interview with Dr. Ben Reinhard.

* New on Archive.org, the Greenwood guide A Century of Welsh Myth in Children’s Literature (1998). Now out-of-print and with a few paper copies available used at £50+.

* One of the many Black Friday sales is from publisher Harper Collins, the key publisher of official Tolkien books. Also, news of a forthcoming Tolkien ‘Myths and Legend’ Harper Collins box-set. Due in June 2025, it will include Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Though in what version I’m not yet sure.

* And finally, can Harper Collins and the Estate please consider J.R.R. Tolkien’s Complete Book of the Dwarves and Dwarven-lore. It doesn’t exist. It should and could, I suggest.

Tolkien Gleanings #246

* Several things happened in America this week. A sudden and unexpected national shortage of therapy-puppies, and the election of a new U.S. Vice-President who tells the enquiring media… “A lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien”.

* The forthcoming French book Les Mondes de Christopher Tolkien now has a page on Amazon UK, as a £14 ebook for pre-order. No table-of-contents, as yet.

* A short review of the young children’s picture-book Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the Worlds of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien…

“Baynes is presented as a relatable character whose quiet, dreamy perseverance with the art she loved enabled her to serve her country as well as herself. By emphasizing the roadblocks Baynes overcame to finally reach the pinnacle of her career as an illustrator, the story helps readers understand that it is okay if your path through life is not straight and simple.”

* A long review of the new book Oxford’s War 1939–1945…

“The vast New Bodleian Library building, not formally opened until 1946, became a vault for national valuables, an air-raid shelter and the headquarters of the remarkable British Red Cross Prisoner of War Postal Book Service, run by Ethel Herdman. The Service sent reading matter to the thousands of British and Commonwealth ‘kriegies’ languishing in Axis [Germany, Japan, Italy] prison camps, as well as exam papers. The English literature [exam] scripts were marked by Professor J.R.R. Tolkien.”

I imagine this will be a useful shelf-companion to Garth’s forthcoming book on the influence of the Second World War on The Lord of the Rings, when it appears.

* Some details of a recent October 2024 talk at Stanford University in the USA, “Fighting the Long Defeat: Tolkien and Ancient Narratives of Decline”….

“Narratives of decline [from a Golden Age] are also at the core of Tolkien’s mythology, and this is just another, neglected aspect of classical influence on Tolkien. The talk will discuss the reception of narratives of decline in Tolkien’s legendarium, pointing out similarities, but also contrasts and differences [with classical models from antiquity]”

* A curious scholarly item listed for pre-order on Amazon UK, The 1879 Theft of Royal Ms 16 E VIII From the British Museum: Wars and Tolkien’s Teacher’s Role. Not Tolkien himself, but one of the young Tolkien’s teachers in Birmingham. The book reconstructs the theft and also the lost 13th century manuscript itself, which contained the only copy of the oldest French poem ‘Le Voyage de Charlemagne a Jerusalem et a Constantinople’.

* Doubtful Sea watches the excellent 1978 Charles Darwin mini-series, and is prompted to consider “Paleo-Tolkien” and his possible dino-debt to Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. The pterodactyls were quite well known to the late Victorians, the first complete scientific description being in 1891. Presumably this ‘flying dragon’ aroused a certain interest among the Edwardian public, and among boys in particular. It took various uncertain forms in book illustrations, museum postcards, etc, until our modern conception of the beast solidified in the 1950s.

* MindMatters proposes a new test for AI, alongside the well-know Turing Test, “The Tolkien Test”…

“The Tolkien test for AI is whether it can ‘create’ genuinely original work that bears no correspondence to anything a human has ever sub-created, as an extension of the original creation act and ultimate expression of originality.”

Well, yes, but that rather ignores the deep debt Tolkien had to all sorts of sources. His work has all sorts of “correspondence” to past works.

* And finally, The Folio Society Unveils £600 Edition of The Hobbit. I suspect Tolkien would have been happier to see £500 go to some good tree charity (restoring Britain’s lost Elm trees springs to mind), and for the remaining £100 to be spent on a clean second-hand Hobbit from eBay.

Tolkien Gleanings #245

* A new French book, Les Mondes de Christopher Tolkien (‘The Worlds of Christopher Tolkien’), due to be published 21st November 2024.

“This book contains testimonies from loved ones and studies on the man who not only edited thousands of pages of J.R.R. Tolkien, and mapped his universe, but who appears here as a writer and artist in his own right.”

* The artist Greg Hildebrandt has passed away. With his brother, he became one of the first major artists (‘The Brothers Hildebrandt’) to illustrate Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

* A new edition of the journal Mythlore (Fall/Winter 2024). Including ‘The Inconsistencies of Galadriel: The Influence of Earlier Legendarium in The Lord of the Rings’, among many other articles and reviews. Freely available online.

* The Troubadour reports on a recent J.R.R. Tolkien and the Oratorians discussion…

The Tolkien Society and Jesters of YHWH (JOY) household hosted a discussion about J.R.R. Tolkien and the Oratorians on Tuesday 8th October, focusing on Tolkien’s history, his encounter with the Oratory of Birmingham and his connection to St. Phillip Neri.

* Another delve into the deep topic of ‘Tolkien and War’, in the form of the University of Vermont’s 2025 Tolkien conference. This is their 21st annual conference, and will be both in person and online. The call-for-papers deadline is 2nd February 2025.

* A free webinar “From Myth to Manuscript: Exploring Inklings Archival Collections”. Booking now, for 13th November 2024.

* A new Bedlam Book Club podcast on Madness in the World of Tolkien, with Janet Croft. Discussing with reference to… “how Tolkien’s work intersects with his early life and experiences” during the First World War. Freely available online.

* New on YouTube, Prof. Paul Gondreau offers a 45-minute overview of “The Catholic Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings“.

* The feature-film Fellowship: Tolkien & Lewis appears to have been delayed and is now billed on its official site as “Coming Winter 2025”. It was, if I recall the UK filming and VFX-ing correctly, once billed as a Web series.

* Slipping into the U.S. public domain in January 2025, Joseph Gaer’s Burning Bush (1929). A thick collection of Jewish fairy-tales and “folklore legends” translated and adapted to English, published by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Gaer went on to become a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1930-35.

* Archive.org has restored user log-ins, following the hack. Scholars can also once again search across the full-text of all the scanned books and magazines. Uploading is still unavailable though, with the last upload being dated 9th October 2024.

* And finally, a new Treasure Hoard style plug-in, which guides Stable Diffusion 1.5 toward generating AI images of fantasy-style treasure-hoards. Just add dragons.

Tolkien Gleanings #244

* From Anna Smol, two new articles on Tolkien’s ‘The Homecoming’.

* A new Italian dissertation from Padua, Lo Hobbit: le origini del drago Smaug tra modello indoeuropeo e germanico (‘The origins of the dragon Smaug among the Indo-European and Germanic models’). “The study shows that Tolkien was clearly inspired by Indo-European and Germanic models to create Smaug.” No PDF download as yet, just a short abstract.

* New to me, an L.P. vinyl record of The Silmarillion Of Beren And Luthien (1977), read by Christopher Tolkien.

* At Signum University, a course on The Music of Middle-earth. Running into 2025, with a focus on the magnificent movie music of Howard Shore.

* In a May 2024 issue of the Glasgow student journal Mapping the Impossible: Journal for Fantasy Research, “Tolkien and Voice: Sound Descriptions in The Lord of the Rings“. Freely available online.

* A YouTube video from 2023, “The Promises to the Overcomer”. I probably missed it before because both the cryptic title and the blurb omitted any mention of what it was about. Turns out that the subtitle of the talk was actually “The Gifts and Rewards Given to the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings“.

* A new and sumptuous Daniel Crouch Rare Books Catalogue XXXIX: “I wisely started with a map…” – a celebration of fictional cartography (2024). Illustrated. £50 in paper, or download the PDF for free.

* Jordan M. Poss blogs on Tolkien and Buchan.

* In Oxford, a planning application has been submitted for the initial repair of the exterior of The Eagle & Child pub, one of the key Oxford pubs frequented by Tolkien and Lewis, ahead of a re-opening by the new owners.

* And finally, The Internet Archive is back online, partly. No new items after 9th October. No user log-ons or uploads. No ‘search inside’, just search of metadata. Still, it’s significantly faster than it used to be. Donations are welcomed, to help it stay online in the future.

Tolkien Gleanings #243

* New on YouTube, leading Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger on “70 Years of Reading Tolkien”. Freely available online.

* The Bodleian now has a Web page for the event Christopher Tolkien at 100: a celebration. Free and booking now.

* The latest issue of Journal of Tolkien Research is not a rolling one, but rather a fully-filled issue on “J.R.R. Tolkien and Medieval Poets” in honor of Richard C. West. As well as the articles there is also a two-page biography and an appreciation of West, plus a “Selected Bibliography of Publications by Richard C. West about J.R.R. Tolkien”. Freely available online.

* In case you missed it, the last article to be added to the previous rolling Journal of Tolkien Research was “Rimmo nin Bruinen dan in Ulaer!: Waters of Wisdom and Wonder in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring”…

“Although environmental themes in Tolkien’s works have been widely researched, the specific role of water in Elven realms — and its possible Celtic cultural connotations — remains largely overlooked.”

* More previously-paywalled lectures on Tolkien by Rachel Fulton-Brown are now freely on YouTube or will be there shortly. Among these are A Taste for Tongues; Ichor and Potatoes; The Ent in the Moon; Through a Glass Darkly; and Magic Words.

* The 2025 C.S. Lewis Summer Institute now has speaker and artist details. The July conference in Northern Ireland is themed ‘Returning Home: C.S. Lewis, Roots, & Transformation’.

* The Case for Reading Tolkien at All Levels of Catholic Education is an event set for 4th January 2025, among sumptuous-looking surroundings in Pasadena, California. Speakers include Holly Ordway.

* And finally, Pipe Smokers Den snaps some relics of Lewis and Tolkien at Wheaton College, including Lewis’s tobacco pipe.

Tolkien Gleanings #242

* The long-awaited Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-1959 book should have been released today, in hardcover and Kindle ebook.

* Now recorded and freely available on YouTube, Tolkien’s Collected Poems – Livestream chat with editors Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond.

* The European Conservative on “Worlds of Delight: The Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Being an appreciation of the wealth of Tolkien’s poetry, now newly available in the Collected Poems.

* The £25 paperback of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics is due at the end of October 2024.

* The new German collection Marchen und Gesellschaft (‘Folk and fairy tale and society’) has an essay on “J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories”: what is a fairy tale good for anyway?”. A 16 page summary and commentary, in German.

* A new Journal of Inklings Studies: Vol. 14, No. 2 (October 2024) ($ paywall, free reviews). Reviews, among others, of Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives of Tolkien’s Legendarium; and Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many.

* New in English in the Serbian journal Interlitteraria “Fictionality in ‘Fog on the Barrow-downs’: Myth and Reference”. Despite the enticing title it turns out to be almost all academic-literary theory, rather than steeped in a deep understanding of British folklore, tales, landscape and weather. Freely available online.

* New and free on Fanac.org, scans of three 1970s issues of Mythprint.

* The Malvern Gazette local newspaper reports that “Tolkien expert’s talk cancelled after hurricanes destroys his home”…

“John Garth, who was due to speak at the Coach House Theatre on Sunday (13th October), is unable to attend after his family home in the southern USA was damaged by hurricanes Helene and Milton.”

I had no idea he had moved to the USA. Very sorry to hear of the calamity, and I hope that everyone is safe along with the copies of his scholarly work. I imagine this event may also affect his forthcoming Oxford University talk (24th October), “Quisling and Prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard”?

* Joseph Loconte’s book The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 is now set for a June 2025 release.

* The Sentient Tree in Speculative Fiction is due to be published by Palgrave Macmillan just before Christmas 2024, as a £100 academic book. It’s a relatively short single-author book, and I’d guess it will have at least half a chapter on Tolkien.

* Difficult to find anything to link these days, among all the quickie cash-for-clicks clickbait that floods YouTube every day. But I guess I should mention this admittedly very-popular form occasionally (15,000-50,000 hits, compared to 5 or 6 hits for a Gleanings issue), and this week these two items look promising. The Lotus Eaters podcast discusses Tolkien the traditionalist in “Tolkien Hated Motorbikes and Loved Housewives”. While the Jess of the Shire podcast asks “Did Tolkien Hate…Everything?”…

“The Internet really loves to push the idea that J.R.R. Tolkien hated… well, everything. So, did he?”.

* And finally, Archive.org is still offline, after a serious hack. Once back, it will probably be a good idea to get the magnet links for your uploads, and host them on a blog page somewhere. If you’re still seeding the torrent, the file(s) should then remain available even if the Archive goes down again. Someone may also wish to do the same with all the vital free-access Tolkien research books and materials. It won’t be me.

Tolkien Gleanings #241

It’s the two-year anniversary edition of Tolkien Gleanings. New Patreon supporters are always welcome.

* New on YouTube, “1967 footage of Donald Swann performing Tolkien’s songs”. Apparently the only such footage.

* MIT’s Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium presents Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull on editing Tolkien. 12th November 2024 at MIT. Looks like it’s MIT students-only, though I guess we may see a recording posted in due course?

* The Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference page now has a speaker-list, though no titles of their papers or talks.

* A new edition of Amon Hen (#309, October 2024) ($ paywall), now available for download by Tolkien Society members.

    – Editorial [the magazine is “no longer accepting any fan-fiction”].
    – Tolkien’s Greater Project [is there an arc that crosses all the Middle-earth works?].
    – The Role of Inns in The Lord of the Rings.
    – Tolkien and Old Norse.
    – Art in Tolkien Books [brief considerations of some ‘illustrated Tolkien’ books]
    – Review: Reading Tolkien in Chinese.
    – They Also Serve [on the figure of Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs].

* Signum University’s list of online short-courses for December 2024 include ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas‘ and ‘The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Early Poems 2 (Volume 1: The Years 1910-1919)’.

* New at the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Wizard, Demon, Cat; Reformer, Satanist, Bureaucrat: a diachronic analysis of three modes of Sauron in the Legendarium in light of The Book of Lost Tales“.

* Anna Smol has posted her First Impressions of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.

* A ComicCon Interview With John Hendrix, maker of the new illustrated children’s book and part graphic-novel The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (2024).

* From the Ukraine, a long abstract in Ukranian for a 2024 article that… “analyses the colours in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which play an important role as key elements of creating images and atmosphere” in Middle-earth.

* New at Archive.org, Rambles in Cornwall (1928). Though not an entire scan of this chunky book. Just the two chapters on The Lizard and the Mount. These are relevant to what Tolkien might have seen on his extended walking holiday on the Lizard in 1914, a decade or so before the book’s author made several walks in the district from a base at Helston (Tolkien, by contrast, was based in Lizard Town). The author observes the landscape and coast with a critical eye, and dutifully notes any interesting features of the older local churches. He occasionally notes standing stones, prehistoric rock chambers and ancient wells.

* And finally, ‘Little Sword’: Denmark’s oldest runes found on knife blade.

Tolkien Gleanings #240

* Holly Ordway takes “A First Look at The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien”, in Word on Fire. Freely available online.

* Lingwe blogs the question “Can generative AI help us analyze The Lord of the Rings?”. The answer is currently ‘no’, at least judging by the conclusion of his test with Google’s general AI. Which is a poor AI to choose, for several reasons that have been well publicised. But that aside, problems were found by the test. For instance the AI offered up the false notion that there is the word… “Windlestraw: a type of grass mentioned in the Shire”. There is, but not in the Shire. The word was old Scots, used by Robert Louis Stevenson in his short fable “The Song of the Morrow”. Stevenson has a mysterious hooded piper appear on a dismal Scottish beach, and the sound of his mournful and depressive playing of the wailing pipes is described as… “like the wind that sings in windlestraw”. My guess would be that someone once mentioned this word in a scholarly Tolkien paper on ‘Withywindle’, and thus the AI’s confusion arose?

* Another paper newly added to the latest rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Fallen Kingdoms and Ancient Monoliths: The Influence of Atlantis and Egypt in Tolkien’s Numenor”.

* A new book-chapter, “From Old English orcneas to George MacDonald’s Goblins with Soft Feet: Sources of Inspiration and Models for Tolkien’s Orcs from English Literature” ($ paywall, free footnotes). In English, to be found in a new predominantly German-language book on various ‘orcs’ in history and popular culture.

* New to me, Insolita: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares do Insolito, da Fantasia e do Imaginario (‘Insolita: Brazilian Journal of Studies of the Unusual, Fantastic and Imaginary’). Freely available in open-access, currently with seven issues all in Portuguese. Appears to have a strong tilt toward screen culture, but it may interest some.

* A new small book, titled Recovering Consolation: Sam’s Enchanted Path in The Lord of the Rings, discussing what makes Sam the most beloved character for many readers. Just over 150 pages in paperback, and also available as a Kindle ebook.

* And finally, new on DeviantArt, a handy print-and-fold Silmarillion Guide made by a fan. At-a-glance help, for when your head is spinning due to all the names, peoples and places. Free as a 14Mb .PNG file.