Tolkien Gleanings #239

* New in open-access from Italy, “The Tengwar and the Angerthas: an analysis of Tolkien’s Runes” (2023). PDF freely available, but the website is currently unresponsive when trying to download.

* A new Parma Eldalamberon 23: The Feanorian Alphabet, Part 2 & Eldarin Pronouns. “Released: 19th September 2024”, as a print-on-demand book.

* Available on 30th September 2024, the new book Celebrating Tolkien’s Legacy from Walking Tree, and now listed on Amazon UK. A misleading title, but the contents took rather interesting…

    1. “Tea in Hay” [speculation on a possible day-trip from Birmingham to Kinver, as a boy].

    2. The 1897 Diamond Jubilee and the Long Awaited Party.

    3. May Incledon, the Other Suffield Aunt.

    4. J.R.R. Tolkien: Ambidexter. [Tolkien was ambidextrous].

    5. For Want of a Biography, the Story Was Lost [on the roadblocks which prevented a full biography].

    6. 1904: Mabel Tolkien, Living and Dying.

    7. The Interlace of Autobiography and Faerian Imagery in “Smith of Wootton Major”.

    8. Tolkien as Forgotten Utopian.

    9. Christopher Tolkien as Editor: The Perils of Kinship.

* In the latest The Quietus an article in which… “Skye Butchtard remembers their dad’s collection of cassettes on which he recorded the 1981 radio adaptation” of The Lord of The Rings. ($ paywall) (And they also throw ad-blocker users off the site — thus the link is to Archive.is).

* “Exploring Tolkien” with Dr. Patrick Curry, a £95 four-week course in October 2024. With a slant toward myth and faerie. Booking now.

* And finally, two illustration exhibitions on the western outskirts of London. At the Heath Robinson Museum near London, the large exhibition “The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy” from 28th September to 5th January 2025. Might be combined with the relatively nearby exhibition “Flower Fairies: The Magical World of Cicely Mary Barker”, which runs 22nd October 2024 to 27th April 2025.

Tolkien Gleanings #238

* Mythcon 53 (August 2024), with abstracts and now also videos and PDFs. A wealth of items, but a few I noted included…

    – The Niggling Bandersnatch: Tolkien’s Revisionist Tendencies and the Canon of Middle-earth (video and panel transcript).

    – Seeking, hesitating and doubting in Tolkien’s ‘Smith of Wootton Major’ (PDF ‘coming soon’)

    – The Eschatology of Tolkien’s Middle-earth (video and transcript).

* A new German Tolkien documentary, due for TV broadcast on 5th December 2024, Tolkien: Die wahre Geschichte Ringe (‘The True Story of the Rings’). 90 minutes, by Jean-Christoph Caron (ZDF/ARTE, head of documentaries) and Matthias Schmidt. There was an in-cinema preview presentation for those involved, on 13th September.

* Due for publication in a few days, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Very Short Introduction, a pocket-book in the Very Short Introductions series.

* The new rolling issue of Journal of Tolkien Research has its first article, on “The Wayland-legend and the First Age of Middle-earth”.

* More previously-paywalled lectures on Tolkien by Rachel Fulton-Brown, now free on YouTube. Further to the earlier video releases I mentioned in Gleanings #229, the ongoing release of her series now continues with “A Notion of Time” (live). Then: “A Deeper Delve”; “Falling Wide Asleep”; “Norman Castles”; and “A Taste for Tongues” (all scheduled for airing soon).

* A new podcast, Tolkien’s Philosophy of Fairy Stories with Dr. Philip Chase, Chase being a medieval literature specialist and now also a fantasy author.

* Wormwoodania unearths “A Secret Sussex Fantasy”…

“The Man Who Was Sussex, A Hand-Book for Hikers (1933). This begins when two hikers get lost in a mist near Chanctonbury Ring, the great earthwork and landmark [and are then] rescued by a local who seems to be both fully human and yet with an ancestral and elemental quality, and he then guides them around other historic and scenic sites in the county. As the title suggests, he is in fact the personification of Sussex and its storied landscape.”

The likeness is not mentioned but it sounds somewhat LoTR-like to me, in terms of the scene with the hobbits on the Barrow-downs and Bombadil. Published by the major publisher Duckworth I see, so I assume it had some publicity at the time — and might have come to the attention of Tolkien. There are also four copies currently on eBay, suggesting it had a reasonable sale at the time of publication. The book is not yet scanned and online. Tolkien’s Bombadil in poetry was of course earlier than the book’s date of 1933, but the more expansive Bombadil of the LoTR chapters was written in autumn 1938.

* Now online, titles of the papers to be presented at the Tolkien and His Editors seminar.

* And finally, Princeton University’s online Index of Medieval Art should by now be free for all to use. It looks like it is, on a flying visit. The plan was that it would be perpetually ‘free to use’ from 1st July 2023 onward, for “researchers at all levels”.

Tolkien Gleanings #237

* Yesterday saw the happy event of the publication of Tolkien’s Collected Poems as a three-book slipcase edition and ebook. But note also the substantial new free Addenda and Corrigenda page for the book… “noting a few errors we failed to see before our book went to press, as well as inevitable additions”.

* A joint review of the new Collected Poems, at the Tolkien Collector’s Guide website. Freely available online. The unpublished poems discovered here are said to be “many more than were reported” by the advance publicity. Also noted is that this is partly a biographical work, since “the informative commentaries also contain much new biographical and bibliographical information”, especially in terms of pinpointing various dates in his life. Physically this first printing is reported to be fine in hardback, as judged by the high standards of book collectors, being printed in “Italy by Rotolito” and nicely bound and shipped.

* John Garth reviews The Collected Poems in this week’s TLS ($ paywall).

* Nothing on YouTube and only one lone Amazon UK review of the book, at present. The Amazon reviewer thinks well of their purchase, but states that on browsing the contents-list he finds it… “leaves out many of his shorter poems, especially most of his unpublished compositions written in languages other than modern English”.

* In other newly-published books, The Critic magazine has a glowing review of The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (2024), said to be the first such general history “since Humphrey Carpenter’s Secret Gardens in 1985″. Haunted Wood gives Tolkien a joint chapter with T.H. White. The review is freely available online. The book is now available as a Kindle ebook and in hardback. Judging by the review and the contents-list, this book offers a distinctly British view. Which of course is quite justified by history. But… not even Anne of Green Gables (British Canada)? Nope. According to the Haunted Wood author, the Anne-girl is “not a central part of the canon” of children’s literature. Which will be news to many. At least the Molesworth books are mentioned a few times, in passing.

* On a more mundane but equally timely note, Bondwine Books looks into the matter of Aragorn’s likely tax policy…

“I can tell you Aragorn’s tax policy in seven words that used to be famous in England, and that Tolkien certainly knew well: ‘The King shall live of his own’. Meaning, the daily expenses of government are met by the income of the royal estates, without direct taxation. In wartime, the King depends upon his people to fulfil their feudal obligations and report for unpaid (short-term) military service.”

We also know that when the King grants lands in a huge place such as Middle-earth, he can ask no more than that the new colonists keep up the key bridges and roads, and speed the King’s messengers. As in the Shire, which only has to maintain the key bridge leading to the greenways and Bree.

* New to me, the substantial Ghosts in Middle-earth: Germanic, Norse and Anglo-Saxon Remnants in Tolkien’s Fictional World (2009). Freely available from Academia.edu. Or (for non-members) by searching for “Ghosts in Middle-earth” in quotes on Google Scholar. Scholar has an arrangement with Academia.edu for seamless free downloads of PDF files.

* And finally, the new scholarly article “Ofer Hronrade — Defining the Long-Enigmatic Hron of Old English” ($ paywall), offering… “an exhaustive contextual study of the Old English word hron — and its relationship with the common word hwael — as well as statistical analysis of British marine biology, this paper seeks to demonstrate that the meaning of hron should indeed be separated from the Modern English word ‘whale'” [which is as Tolkien had suggested, though his suggestion was widely disregarded].

Tolkien Gleanings #236

* PRINTmag has a new and long interview with the creator of the new partly-a-comic-book book The Mythmakers, telling the story of Tolkien and Lewis for young readers. Many of the comic-strip interior pages are shown. Freely available online.

* A new issue of the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research has begun its rolling progress. Only one paper added so far, “Teaching Song and Holiness: An Exploration of the Mystic and Syncretic Elements of Tolkien’s Earliest Elvish Language Invention”.

* Digital Tolkien has a new Poems — Tolkien Poetry page, which appears to effectively serve as a useful interactive A-Z of what’s to come in the Collected Poems.

* In northern England, Leeds Central Library (the city’s public library) is to host a Tolkien Centenary Lecture on 23rd October 2024. Only 29 tickets left to hear Claire Rae Randall on what were apparently Tolkien’s local sources, and how these can still be…

found hidden in plain sight here in Leeds and more widely abroad in Yorkshire, from Treebeard the Ent in Headingley to Helm’s Deep in the glacial landscapes of the Dales.

Also related to Leeds, a reminder that one of the calls for 2025 Tolkien at IMC Leeds (7th-10th July 2025) was “J.R.R. Tolkien as Teacher and Mentor at Leeds and Beyond”. The deadline has just passed for IMC Leeds Tolkien proposals, but presumably this means a set of videos on the topic in the second half of 2025. I’d suggest we might also have a complementary set of papers on Tolkien’s own mentors and tutors, at some point in the future.

* Advance themes for the Annual UVM Tolkien Conference at the University of Vermont. 2025 will be “Tolkien and War”, and 2026 “Tolkien and the Medieval”.

* A stamp-collecting Tolkien Philatelic Society has been formed and hopes to grow… “So far we have just a handful of members and are looking for more.”

* More broadly related to the popular side of pre-LoTR fantasy culture, a call for scholars and collectors to contribute to The Pulpster #34, the annual of pulp history. In 2025 this will take the theme of ‘Masters of Blood and Thunder’. These being the writers Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter of Mars, Tarzan etc), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood), and Edgar Wallace (Sanders of the River, crime novels, King Kong script), who will also be the focus of the 2025 PulpFest. However the editors are open to other ‘blood and thunder’ writers who published in the pulps. The editors also seek articles which appreciate your favourite villain from the 1910s-1950s pulp magazines (or their later book reprints).

* And finally, a remarkable ‘Eye of Sauron’ ring has been newly unearthed by archaeologists here in the UK. No reports, as yet, that it makes the wearer invisible.

Tolkien Gleanings #235

* Now available, the topic-list for the latest programme of public Tolkien talks in Oxford. Starting 17th October and running through to Christmas.

    1. Holly Ordway: ‘Tolkien as Interpreter and Transformer of Culture’.
    2. John Garth: ‘Quisling and Prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard’.
    3. [HALF-TERM, NO TALK]
    4. Mark Williams: ‘A Harmless Vice: Tolkien’s Invented Languages’.
    5. Giuseppe Pezzini: ‘The Authors and Styles of The Lord of the Rings‘.
    6. Grace Khuri: ‘Echoes of Anglo-Saxon England in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings – From Page to Screen’.
    7. Michael Ward: ‘C.S. Lewis’s Influence on The Lord of the Rings‘.
    8. Stuart Lee: ‘The ‘Key-spring’ of The Lord of the Rings?’.

* Kristine Larsen has a new paper which briefly looks at “”A fear of anything large and alive, and not easily tamed or destroyed”: Kaiju in The Lord of the Rings“, kaiju being Japanese for rampaging giant monsters. She has noticed that the appearance of LoTR coincided with the post-war craze for giant destructive monsters — atom-age mutants in America’s B-movies, and the kaiju (Godzilla etc) of Japan’s monster cinema. Freely available online.

* Law & Liberty magazine’s new “Inklings on the Move” article turns out to be a long joint review of the recent books Tolkien’s Faith and C.S. Lewis’s Oxford. Freely available online.

* On YouTube, a July 2024 interview with the author of the acclaimed book Reading Tolkien in Chinese (2024).

* And finally, The Shire Way, a fledgling long-distance… “walking route in the heart of England dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien and his tale The Lord of the Rings“. Currently being walked, tweaked and recorded, it aims to run from the Lickey Hills just south of Birmingham, due south down through rural Worcestershire and down to Evesham. Then to hook north again through the adjacent rural Warwickshire, and thus arrive back in south Birmingham.

“If one is seeking to emulate as nearly as possible the journeys in Tolkien’s books, the outward three stages to Evesham should be walked between the 23rd and 25th September; the homeward three stages to Birmingham between 31st October and 2nd November.”

Six days for experienced hiking walkers, probably more for Tolkien-like pottering and peering-under-leaves. Though all walkers are warned that… “prolonged rain can turn the low-lying parts of Worcestershire into muddy quagmires” and thus slow progress.

One of reasons given for creating the walk is that…

Surprisingly and sadly, Tolkien is underappreciated in his home region and many places associated with his upbringing are overlooked, run-down or already destroyed. Without visitors, this crucial aspect of the English-speaking world’s literary heritage is in jeopardy.

I look forward to a full finished route-book with Wainright-like maps and sketches, and perhaps one day walking it. Though at present the project seems to be ‘early days’, with an ETA for the finished online route-guide of spring 2025. Still, the recent Two Saints Way through Staffordshire and Cheshire shows what can be done in five years by someone determined to create a specialist long-distance path. I understand, having been a small part of the making of the Two Saints Way, that thankfully England doesn’t put too much bureaucracy in the way of such individual enterprise. No tedious committees, time-limited permits, or state rubber-stamped approval is required for such things. Tolkien-the-anarchist would surely have approved of that.

Tolkien Gleanings #234

* Now released, a preview of the front cover for the Kindle ebook version of the forthcoming Collected Poems.

* The Jewish Journal has a new article on “Tolkien’s Timely Testimony”, and its importance in the current climate. Freely available online.

* A new long post at The Blog of Marzabul, “”And That Means Comfort” — On the Shire as anti-Faerie”, asks… “is the Shire rather less safe and idealised than one might imagine?” In fact, a sort of “anti-Faerie”? Well, yes, I’d say so… if one reads closely and gleans the wider context from the text. Such as something the blog article omits, that the Shire has four seasons. As anyone who lives in the British Isles knows, that means discomfort for much of the year. The Shire is also known to have had some very hard winters within living memory. For instance the winter in which the Shire was invaded by the white wolves, a winter which a young Bilbo must have experienced.

* A new special issue of the open-access journal LinguaCulture, on “C.S. Lewis: The Re-enchanted Academic” (June 2024). Includes, among others, “The Dauntless Don: How C.S. Lewis Became a Public Intellectual, 1938-1944” and a review of the book Many Times and Many Places: C.S. Lewis and the Value of History (2023). Freely available online.

* Releasing at the end of September 2024, the book The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien. Not the graphic novel I vaguely thought it was, since it turns out to be… “prose interspersed with images and narrative comics”. Also, seemingly not aimed at sophisticated teens and adults, since it’s to be published by Abrams Fanfare… “a new imprint from Abrams Children’s Books dedicated to comics for young readers”.

* A new young children’s picture-book, in hardcover for spring 2025, Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the Worlds of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Pre-ordering now.

* The Spectator magazine has a new article on “The expensive business of quoting poetry” ($ possible paywall, though I had the whole article)…

“the idea that there’s a distinction of legal status between [prose and poetry] is bizarre. It seems perverse and unwarranted that you could quote great paragraphs of Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy, in a critical work about Seth, without a by-his-leave. But that you’d need to avoid quoting more than a line or two from his verse novel The Golden Gate.”

* In The Birmingham Mail (29th August 2024) ($ paywall)… “More than 10,000 Classic FM listeners selected their favourite scores. Howard Shore’s music from the [LoTR] fantasy films, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, took the top spot.” For the benefit of those outside the UK, I should add that Classic FM is the UK’s main free-to-air classical music radio station.

* Apparently in France translations of Tolkien’s books are published by a relatively small publisher, Christian Bourgois. The French press report that it has this week been bought out by Groupe Madrigall, the third-largest publishing group in France.

Tolkien Gleanings #233

* A new Beyond Bree book review, hosted as an archived PDF at the publisher Walking Tree, reviewing The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024). Freely available online.

* The latest Journal of Tolkien Research has added a long and thorough review of Reading Tolkien in Chinese (2024).

* At the VoegelinView, a review of the book Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination (2023).

* The Catholic Theology Show podcast’s latest episode is “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Catechesis on Creation”. Free on YouTube.

* At The European Conservative, the new article “Tolkien’s Paradise”… “If we consider the characteristics of Paradise present in various religious traditions, we can easily compare and identify them with the features of the wondrous lands in Middle-earth.”

* Earth and Heaven blog has a new 2024 review of The Messiah Comes to Middle-earth (2017). Now a book of three printed lectures, but originally part of… “Wheaton College’s Hanson Lectureship Series, [in which] Wheaton College President Philip Ryken examines the thesis that various characters in [LoTR] represent different aspects of the nature of the Messiah”

* The Spanish open-access journal Helice: Critical Thinking on Speculative Fiction publishes in Spanish and some English. Of special note is the 2023 English article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe (1838-1938), and Beyond: A Historical Overview”. Freely available online.

* A scan at Archive.org of a late-1970s ‘blank pages notebook’, with sketchy illustrations as framing marginalia, titled A Hobbit’s Travels: being the hitherto unpublished travel sketches of Sam Gamgee (1978). Its companion A Hobbit’s Journal was also published in the same format and by the same artist, though Archive.org only has the cover freely available online. There appear to have been four such notebooks by the artist, the others being A Tolkien Journal (faces of the Fellowship and others), and A Walk Through the Shire (various scenes of hobbit life in the Shire).

* And finally, NewsThump hilariously reports “New power station to be powered by J.R.R. Tolkien spinning in his grave”.