Tolkien Gleanings #225

* Sessions set for the 2025 International Congress on Medieval Studies, among others, include: “Fire, Dragons, and Jewels, O My: Medieval Poems and J.R.R. Tolkien”; “Tolkien and Old Norse”; and “Tolkien and Medieval Conceptions of the Sea”. The calls are now online.

* The Messengers from the Stars open-access journal seeks contributions for a special issue in 2025 to be themed “‘Getting Medieval’: Fantasy and the Middle Ages”. Deadline: 3rd February 2025.

* Found, another 10-year embargo dissertation for an Irish B.A. (Hons.) Design for Stage and Screen degree. But different from the one noted in Gleanings #224. “The Safe Haven: The depiction of salvation through sanctuary and scenography in The Lord of the Rings” (2014 undergraduate dissertation, released after embargo April 2024). A study of the visual aspects of the archetypal spaces of sanctuary with reference to LoTR. Identifies architectural methods that “creatively retain what threatens to disappear”, and considers the presentation of salvation “via ornamentation and embellishment”. Freely available online, and under Creative Commons.

* The Federalist magazine fisks a newspaper journalist who “Completely Botches Lord Of The Rings”… “It is untenable to equate the Ring simply with power. Tolkien did not write a story about why power is evil, but about why domination is evil. To understand Tolkien, it is essential to distinguish between the two.” Freely available online.

* On YouTube in Italian, “Fear leads to suffering”: myth and hope in the subcreation of J.R.R. Tolkien”. A May 2024 conference interview with Eduardo Segura at the University of Granada, Spain.

* In Brazil and in Brazilian, International Meeting for Mythopoetic Studies: The Lord of the Rings – 70 years of The Fellowship of the Ring, a three-day conference held in July 2024. The programme is still freely online as a PDF. The talks included, among others…

   – From heavenly Jerusalem to Gondolin: hermeneutics of applicability: Tolkieniana as contemplation of celestial realities.

   – Narrative solutions to editorial problems in The Fellowship of the Ring.

   – Pseudotranslation as a creative principle of The Lord of the Rings.

   – How medieval is Middle-earth? Understanding medievalism based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

   – What about second breakfast? Food and eating habits of the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings.

* A new set of Tolkien scene paintings by Miriam Ellis, posted in July 2024 on DeviantArt.

* And finally, an ‘Ink of Ages’ contest from the World History Encyclopedia with Oxford University Press. Submit your “historical or mythology-inspired short fiction”, telling a story in English in “under 2,000 words”, by 15th September 2024. Free to enter. No mention of AI assistance being allowed, or not.

Tolkien Gleanings #224

* The Leo Carruthers book Tolkien et la religion: Comme une lampe invisible (‘Tolkien and Religion: An invisible lamp’) is to be (re?)published by the Sorbonne shortly, and apparently runs to a chunky 340 pages. This suggests an expanded edition, compared to the page count of the earlier 2016 edition, but that’s just my guess. Amazon UK currently lists the book for publication on the 12th September 2024. [Update: Yes, I’m right. The Sorbonne list it as a “2ème édition”, 2nd edition].

* Another conference paper, newly added to the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, “Tolkien’s Orphaned Heroes: Kullervo, Hurin and the Limits of Fostering”. Freely available online.

* “A Lord of More Renown than Arthur: Tolkien’s Corrective and Compensatory Approach to the Arthurian Tradition in his Legendarium”. A lengthy non-fiction item in a new undergraduate collection from The University of Price Edward Island in Canada, titled Into a New Tongue. This being the UPEI Arts Review edition for Spring 2024. Freely available online.

* From the Institute of Art, Design + Technology, Ireland, Authentic Fantasy: The representation of the Shire as a nostalgic arcadia (2013 with a 10-year embargo, freely online April 2024). Being an undergraduate dissertation for a B.A. (Hons.) Design for Stage and Screen degree, “a study of the visual and design references within the Shire in the film adaption of The Lord of the Rings“. The core focusses…

“on the Victorian era from which Tolkien drew inspiration in creating the Shire and its characters. Director Peter Jackson and conceptual designers use this era strongly as a reference within their research and design methodologies, and the study explores how, although we are looking at the Victorian era, there is a strong use of medievalism within the design reflecting the influence of the medieval period on Victorian art and aesthetics.”

* Signum University’s October 2024 modules are now listed. Note the eight-session course “The Music of Middle-earth”, and also the unusual “Ink Spots and Tea Stains: What we Learn from C.S. Lewis’s Writing Habits”. Booking now.

* Oxford is to host another repeat of Tolkien’s ‘Lecture on Dragons’. This time it will be staged at The Story Museum in Oxford, on the 22nd September 2024. Free, and booking now. Tolkien originally gave this lecture on New Year’s Day 1938 at the University Museum, Oxford, as part of the Museum’s Christmas lecture series for children. In 2024 its recreation will be… “Presented by Professor John Holmes, [who will] re-run Tolkien’s lecture featuring his original slides.”

* The Arkhaven Nights podcast is to interview Rachel Fulton Brown. Scheduled for Friday 9th August 2024. Also, it appears that Fulton Brown’s huge Tolkien lecture series, previously paywalled, may be going free. I’ll post more on that later, once a few more free recordings are posted.

* And finally, Sami Makkonen’s gritty 300-page graphic-novel adaptation of The Kalevala is still sticking to its 24th September 2024 release-date for the English translation. Preview pages are now floating around the Internet. His workflow is to ink the page manually, with marker pens on board. Then to scan the page, to be able to digitally colour and tweak it in the computer.

Tolkien Gleanings #223

* Added to the latest edition of Journal of Tolkien Research, a new review of the book Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium (2024).

* The UK’s latest Country Life magazine has an article on the wealth of Tolkien letters currently up for sale. No paywall on this article, at least for me.

* “Tolkien: A Thoroughly Modern Medievalist”, a new episode of a one-hour podcast which discusses the links between “faith and beauty”. This episode “featuring Dr. Holly Ordway” for a wide-ranging discussion on Tolkien in historical and national context.

He’s extremely English, and he has very English habits of expression. Which include at times being extremely hyperbolic, and at other times being extremely understated […] I’ve been spending a lot of time in England, for more than a decade now. It sunk in gradually that the English, for all they have outwardly similar appearances to Americans, are very different from Americans. [Tolkien’s English / West Midlands / Oxford manner] has made it extra puzzling for Americans in particular to puzzle Tolkien out.

Since his hyperbolic comments, largely meant to be amusingly offhand and/or playfully conversation-provoking, have sometimes been taken literally. Tolkien’s mumbling, and the nature of printed-word interviews conducted by journalists, also means that the vital role that intonation plays in English speech is missed.

* Also new on YouTube, the Digital Tolkien project offers advice on “How to use Search Tolkien and Cite Tolkien”.

* At Word on Fire, “Celebrating the Epochal Publication of The Fellowship of the Ring 70 Years On”.

* New to me, an abstract for an ambitious undergraduate dissertation from Bangladesh, “Beyond the Walls of Night: Completing Tolkien’s Untold Armageddon”. In English, from 2021…

“Despite the copious amount of notes that Tolkien left behind, no definitive conclusion to this narrative has been released by the Tolkien Estate so far. Various hints and clues, however, have been scattered by the author [and thus the dissertation attempts] to compile into a coherent conclusion [the extant details of the] Final Battle [in which, as prophesied] the world would be destroyed and renewed.”

* And finally, scholars may be interested in easy bulk-backup of a list of precious Web URLs, using the cryptically named Save Page WE. This is the only Windows desktop freeware I know of that can take a .TXT list of URLs, and work through them automatically, saving each URL (Web page) as an encapsulated archival .MHTML file. If you have 100s to save, be sure to first tick ‘Close tab after saving page’ in Settings or you’ll run out of system memory. Free for Chrome-based Web browsers.

Tolkien Gleanings #222

* New to me, and published without fanfare a few days ago, the new book Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien’s Legendarium. 13 essays on the topic. There was a call-for-papers exploring Tolkien’s built places, back in 2019 in Amon Hen #279. Then a series of panels on the topic at a Mythcon a few years ago. Essays in the finished book include, among others: “Re-Enchanting Built Spaces: On Dwarves and Dwarven Places”; “Stone Monuments and Imperfect Cultural and Personal Memories in The Lord of the Rings”; and “The Many Faces of Lake-Town”.

* B&W artwork relating to 1981 BBC Radio adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Destined for the BBC’s Radio Times listings magazine, by the look of them.

* More recently newly at the auctioneers, and still for sale, a long letter under the title “Sherlock Holmes letter from 10th January 1947”. Original and signed by Tolkien.

The letter describes Sherlock Holmes and Mycroft as having “quite a sniff of priggery about these two precious gents” and Conan Doyle as “not himself distinguished as a particularly acute thinker”.

The “gents” concerned might instead be Holmes and his creator Doyle, it’s left a little ambiguous. But on balance I think the letter-owner’s description is probably right. Doyle had died in 1930, and he had long been deeply deluded by spiritualist charlatanry. Thus I doubt any Sherlockians will quibble with Tolkien’s other assessment. But evidently Tolkien in 1947 was familiar enough with the Holmes tales to feel able to make his judgements. Did he perhaps re-read Holmes to pass the long nights of fire-watching duty during the Second World War? Just my guess.

Update: the letter sold for £20,000.

* New in the Sage journal IDS, the article “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium as Heterodox Palaeoscience” ($ paywall)…

“… the influence of a range of palaeoscience topics on Tolkien – some of which were outside the mainstream of his time before becoming accepted – are [not] well known. This article synthesises research into the conception of Tolkien’s usage of heterodox palaeoscience in his works, [in order to then] explore the reception of those themes in his fiction.”

* Tolkien scholar David Robbie is launching his new book Great Haywood, Past and Present, People and Places, at Rugeley Public Library on 9th September 2024. “Pre-booking not required. A short talk, followed by Q&A and discussion”. The village of Great Haywood, in mid Staffordshire, was well known to the young Tolkien during the First World War. The talk is part of the nation’s annual Heritage Open Days at various venues, which will take place in early September.

* From the Italian Tolkien scholars, a new article in Italian on “Tolkien in Bulgaria”, this being a profile of Lyubomir Nikolov who translated The Lord of the Rings. This follows this week’s news from Radio Bulgaria that “Bulgarian writer Lyubomir Nikolov has passed away at 74”.

* And finally, The Lord of the Rings is 70 years old tomorrow. Imagine popping down to the local bookshop, on what the untampered original weather records show was a dry and pleasantly cool summer day, at the end of July 1954. A Thursday appropriately enough (the day being named after the thunder-god Thor, as you’ll recall). Then strolling home with a crisp newly-printed Fellowship hardback neatly wrapped in brown paper.

Tolkien Gleanings #221

* In Switzerland, the exhibition “In Tolkien’s footsteps”. A wide variety of works, presumably all inspired by Tolkien and Middle-earth, have been placed… “along an easily accessible hiking trail behind the historic village of Blatten” and these form an outdoor ‘walking’ exhibition. From 20th July until 10th August 2024.

* Newly added to the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, the long paper “Holding His Attention: Tolkien and ‘Modern’ Science Fiction”.

* At Signum, an online summer-school course in “The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium”. Now a confirmed course, starting 5th August 2024 and running through the month in eight sessions. Booking now.

* Signum will also be marking three years of their online short-courses, with a showcase event on 16th November 2024. This will be a free online event, open to all.

* New on Archive.org, Period Homes magazine for July 2007. With a three-page photo-feature on a custom-built private museum, which houses a large Tolkien collection including many “books, manuscripts and artifacts.”

* New on YouTube, the July 2024 Update for the Digital Tolkien Project.

* New to me, Rudyard Kipling’s Songs from Books (1913), a large collection of songs drawn from his books up until that time. I’m no expert on the topic, but it’s perhaps evidence that Tolkien was not without forerunners in the heavy inclusion of songs within Edwardian popular / imaginative literature. Note also Kipling’s elaboration of a vividly realised future-world, with various appendices and extra matter appended to his seminal “With the Night Mail” which birthed ‘hard’ science-fiction.

* And finally, an oldie from 2011 but new to me. The tobacco-scented Pipes Magazine on “C.S. Lewis: Novelist, Scholar, Broadcaster – and Pipe Smoker”. His… “shorter pipe is a Tetley’s Lightweight, and the longer pipe is a Cub Foreign”. His favourite… “pipe tobacco blend was Gold Block … also smoked the original Three Nuns”. A quiz-question stumper and ice-breaker follows naturally: “What might Tolkien have understood by the words ‘Tonight I’m packing Three Nuns into my Tetley’s Lightweight, Tollers'”.

Tolkien Gleanings #220

* The Telegraph ($ paywall), gushes that…

“a newly unearthed document has revealed it was an ‘instrumental’ meeting with his friend, C.S. Lewis, in 1930 that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to begin sharing the imaginary languages and mythologies of Middle-earth with the world. The document, which was hidden away in the records of Magdalen College in Oxford, indicates that Tolkien spoke his secretly invented Elvish tongues and told stories about Middle-earth for the first time at a previously unknown meeting with Lewis and other members of Magdalen’s elite, intellectual Michaelmas Club”.

* The Italian press report that the Tolkien exhibition in Turin has now closed. This was the second venue and the show was again a great success, welcoming over 149,000 paying visitors in just over three months. The next venue will be the city of Turin at the Reggia di Venaria, said to be opening there “in a few months”.

* A 2023 article in the undergraduate Drover Review asks “Did Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Influence Tolkien While Writing The Lord of the Rings?”

* Looks like a new book will be ‘flying wingman’ alongside John Garth’s long-awaited next book on a very similar topic, The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945. The book is coming in June 2025 according to Amazon… “historian Joseph Loconte tells for the first time how the dark shadows cast by the Second World War utterly transformed the lives and literary imagination of Tolkien and Lewis.”

* New at Theology of Law, the article “Shire Justice: What hobbits can teach us”… “‘shire justice’ is akin to the Biblical idea of shalom, something that every society needs if it is to flourish.” Was in a 2013 collection of essays, but is here freely available as what looks like a pre-print PDF.

* The Thoughts on Tolkien blog considers “The Prayers of Sam Gamgee and Sir Gawain”.

* Now free on Archive.org, a basic scan of Ralph Elliott’s book The Gawain Country (1984). Long out-of-print and difficult to obtain as a personal reading-copy, until now. Here the scan is extended, by appending some of Elliott’s later work on the topic.

* The Church Times reviews the sumptuous new book C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (2024).

* And finally, University of Oxford Podcasts: A Walk around C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (2021). Which, in large part, was also Tolkien’s Oxford.

Tolkien Gleanings #219

* J.D. Vance is likely to be the next U.S. Vice-President by November, barring further assassination attempts. He tells the enquiring media… “A lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien”. See also the new article “The Political Vision of The Lord of the Rings”, posted at the Gerald R. Ford Leadership Forum. This appears to be intended as a brief backgrounder, for those in the American political class who are now curious about Tolkien.

* “Death and the Soul in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, a recording of a conference paper given by Stratford Caldecott in 2013, but which has only now surfaced online (via his family).

* In the latest ANQ journal, “Two Norse Literary Analogues of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beacons of Gondor” ($ paywall). The first page is free.

* Now on Archive.org, a scan of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine #45 (Fall/Autumn 1999). This has an interview with Guy Gavriel Kay, who helped Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion.

* A poetry and plaques walking-tour in Oxford…

“We stood outside the former rooms of C.S. Lewis and read the feverishly atheistic poems he’d written there as an undergraduate, long before he became a noted voice for Anglicanism. We read wayfaring poems by Tolkien, playfully claiming him for Univ’s history (our [University College Oxford] College Archivist notes that early in his career, Tolkien was a peripatetic tutor and taught the occasional Univ student; Merton’s Fellows were graciously amused to hear that we included Tolkien in our tour and several have already signed up for Univ’s 2024 poetry tour in Michaelmas term.)”

* An online Signum University course potentially starting September 2024, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Text, Translation, Film”. It will only run if enough people sign up for it.

* And finally, TheOneRing.net has a new Exclusive Interview with Sir Richard Taylor of Weta Workshop. For the movie’s Minas Tirith…

“we literally piled a whole lot of cardboard boxes together, sprayed them with urethane foam, carved them back, and then started building onto them. Never could we think that this miniature would end up going on to be exhibited in a museum, having a life well beyond the movie. If we had known, we would have built it a little better. But we were building them so cheap, so fast, that I really was of the view that the only thing that mattered was that they just needed to hold up for the filming.”

Tolkien Gleanings #218

* Those with a small dragon-hoard to hand may be able to swop it for Tolkien’s calligraphic transcripts of the poems “Namarie” and “A Elbereth Gilthoniel”, along with his notes…

“… As a ‘divine’ or ‘angelic’ person Varda/Elbereth could be said to be ‘looking afar from heaven’ (as in Sam’s invocation); hence the use of a present participle. She was often thought of, or depicted, as standing on a great height looking towards Middle-earth, with eyes that penetrated the shadows, and listening to the cries for aid of Elves (and Men) in peril or grief. Frodo (I 208) and Sam both invoke her in moments of extreme peril. The Elves sing hymns to her. There is said to be no religion in The L.R., but if this is not ‘religion’, what is it?…” (Tolkien)

* Also recently at auction in the UK, the original of Eric Fraser’s map of Middle-earth. The map was “…drawn by Eric Fraser in connection with the 1981 BBC radio adaptation. It appears, however, to be entirely unpublished”. Looks to me like it was made to be a double-page pull-out for the BBC’s flagship Radio Times magazine, anticipating a listing of programme dates in small type as a side-column. Now sold.

* Now on YouTube in full, Neil Gaiman’s recent major Tolkien Lecture 2024 in Oxford, in which he talks about “Libraries and the Fantastic”.

* The Catholic Herald podcast this week talks with Holly Ordway about Tolkien and faith.

* The new book Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020 (July 2024) has Tolkien scholar Thomas Honegger on “Visualising the Elves throughout the Centuries”. Also a chapter suggesting William Morris has had an enduring influence on fantasy visuals, and another on the challenges of fantasy map-making. I find the book can be freely had in open-access from the publisher as a single .PDF file.

* Happening this weekend, the 3rd Faith, Art and Myth Congress in Argentina, 19th-21st July 2024. Centred around Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Chesterton.

* And finally, Warwick Castle Hotel re-opens with a full-size…

“Animatronic Knight and Horse which comes to life. […] The 60-room Warwick Castle Hotel officially opens on 22nd July 2024. Blending beautifully into the castle’s surroundings, the exterior of the hotel resembles a medieval long hall, with a rough-cast render, timber cladding and shingle roof tiles.”

Sounds like a possible location for a small select Tolkien conference, especially given Tolkien’s Warwick connections in his youth?