Tolkien Gleanings #53.

* Available now, a new edition of the open scholarly journal Mythlore, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2023). A half-dozen or so articles are of Tolkien interest, including “Delving Too Greedily: Analyzing Prejudice Against Tolkien’s Dwarves as Historical Bias” (asks if his dwarves were really antagonistic to and destructive of nature, as is often casually assumed). Also a short article by Verlyn Flieger in pursuit of a possible trace of wartime code-breaking in Tolkien, and another book-review for The Gallant Edith Bratt.

* Book publisher Walking Tree has a large round-up of recent reviews of their books, although the Web links are spread across multiple posts. Start at the publisher’s 31st March post and then move forward (i.e. click on each “Newer items” link), downloading the most interesting PDFs as you go.

* Various multi-paper Tolkien sessions are scheduled for the giant International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, 11th-13th May 2023. Including: “Religion along the Tolkienian Fantasy Tradition: New Medievalist Narrative”; “Tolkien and the Middle Ages: Tolkien and the Scholastics”; and “Christopher Tolkien: Medievalist Editor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium I: The Works” followed by “II: The Interactions”. The papers are not (yet) online, but the titles are…

* A new one-hour YouTube recording of a lecture on “Hope Beyond the Walls of the World: J.R.R. Tolkien and Christian Virtue”, given this Easter at Bethlehem College and Seminary, Minneapolis, USA. High-quality audio, of a good clear speaker.

* Thanks to Sebastiano Tassinari, who drew my attention to the fact that the “70 years since J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sir Gawain lecture in Glasgow” event now has tickets available on Eventbrite. The date is 27th April 2023.

* And finally, the blog Tolkien: Medieval and Modern has a new post on the current thinking on the history of ancient Welsh and English…

“the archaeological community until fairly recently [thought] that the Anglo-Saxon invasions were overblown and that the English had a large amount of Briton in them. But a very recent genetic study of Anglo-Saxon graves (Gretzinger, Sayer, Justeau et al, 2022) proved that they indeed had overwhelmingly Germanic heritage.”

This seems to me to be over-claiming for this new study of ancient DNA. What the research actually found was that…

“the individuals who we analysed from eastern England [i.e. mostly what were then the fenlands and coastlands] derived up to 76% of their ancestry from the [adjacent] continental North Sea zone, albeit with substantial regional variation and heterogeneity within sites”.

Many were women. Thus it’s open to question if some of these were descendants of women brought from overseas as ‘old country’ brides for the new settlers of eastern England.

Tolkien Gleanings #52.

* An online partial Film Preview at Archive.org, 15th April 2023. The forthcoming film is The Forge of Friendship: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. This would appear to be the same as the online Web series filmed and VFX’d in London in early 2023, then called Fellowship: Tolkien & Lewis.

“Hosted by: The Internet Archive and co-sponsored by Northwind Institute and C.S. Lewis Society of California as part of their weekend conference on ‘Tolkien & Lewis in a Digital Age’.”

* “Tolkien’s Easter Joy in The Lord of the Rings…

“Tolkien’s use of the date is not some artificial mechanism by which he links his tale to the Christian myth to come, but a deliberate placement of his tale in history, and not just history, but salvation history”.

* A new Journal of Inklings Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 ($ partial paywall). The lead article is relevant to Tolkien, “The Conversions of C.S. Lewis: Notes on Rethinking Their Chronology and Character”. There are also free public reviews of: The Fall of Numenor; The Road to Fair Elfland: Tolkien on Fairy Stories: An Extended Commentary; An Anthology of Iberian Scholarship on Tolkien; Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss: Steps on the Developmental Journey; In the House of Tom Bombadil; and Performing against Annihilation: Identity and Consciousness in J.R.R. Tolkien. Other book reviews, such as for Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism and Critics of Enlightenment, are found to also consider Tolkien.

* And finally, a public lecture on “Holidaying in the Middle Ages”. Being the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, 6th June 2023.

Now available for download, Tolkien Gleanings issue 3. My free 48-page ‘zine for Tolkien scholars, collectors, and others. Also available via Gumroad.

Among other things, this issue collects my recent ‘Tolkien Gleanings’ blog posts into one handy PDF. The clickable Web links are retained in the PDF.

Tolkien Gleanings #51.

* “The bees of Beorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional Middle-earth” (August 2022), a Bee Histories article by a bee specialist. Warning: the site pops up a page-blocking overlay. If you want more on Tolkien, bees and honey-cakes, then the Tea with Tolkien podcast had a guest episode “On Beorn & Beekeeping” (2019) with beekeeper Daniel Stewart.

* The Archdiocese of Madrid has launched a crowd-funder… “to create the world’s largest geo-location map along a walking trail based on The Lord of the Rings“. This being their… “79 mile ‘El Camino del Anillo’ in the Sierra Norte hills”, about 20 miles north of the Spanish capital city of Madrid.

Launched in 2020, this is an apparently “Tolkien-esque” and openly Catholic eight-day hill-walking trail. The idea seems to be to take a depopulating landscape and — over time, building on what’s already there — to make it a circular journey through varied landscapes evoking those of The Lord of the Rings.

* The Poetic Edda: A Dual-Language Edition (2023). In this new free Creative Commons PDF book of nearly 900 pages… “there are thirty-six texts, giving us one of the fullest translations of the work” into English. Not to be confused with the Prose Edda.

* And finally, The Hollywood Reporter has seen Amazon’s viewing figures for That Recent TV Series, and reports this week that “only 37 percent” of buyers actually finished watching the eight-episode series.

Tolkien Gleanings #50.

* Forthcoming is a new scholarly book from Kent State University Press, titled Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many. Due toward the end of 2023, with Amazon UK currently offering a shipping-date perilously close to Christmas, “12th December”. The publisher’s blurb has the book as a…

remarkable work of close reading and analysis, Thomas P. Hillman gets to the heart of the tension between pity and the desire for power in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. As the book traces the entangled story of the One Ring and its effects, we come to understand Tolkien’s central paradox: while pity is necessary for destroying the Ring, it cannot save the Ring-bearer from the Ring’s lies and corruption. […] Instead of turning his interpretation to allegory or apologetics, Hillman demonstrates how the story works metaphorically, allowing Tolkien to embrace both Catholic views and pagan mythology.

* Also forthcoming later in 2023, a new graphic novel about the young Tolkien, provisionally titled Tolkien: Lighting Up The Darkness. That title may change before publication, since the Estate would appear to have a clear case of trademark infringement regarding the front-cover’s sizing, styling and colour of ‘Tolkien’…

The book lists as “112 pages”, so it’s not the sort of chunky 240-page graphic novel that an English reader might expect. Indeed, those 112 pages are probably padded, since I see the French site Tolkiendil mentions “82 pages” of actual story. Which suggests it’s a French BD. Yes, turns out that it’s an English translation of a BD already available in French, Tolkien: Eclairer les Tenebres (2019), and in Italian as Tolkien: Rischiarare le Tenebre (2021). A Tolkiendil review picked up some small factual errors, but was generally positive. The interior art looks excellent.

* The new French fannish magazine Generation Cites d’Or #10 (2023) is a “Tolkien Special”, with articles.

* And finally, in May 2023 Canada’s Maple Moot will happen in Toronto, taking the theme of ‘Northern Spirit’…

“an ancient virtue […] we will explore the meaning of Northern Spirit, its thematic influence in Tolkien’s legendarium, and its origins in fantasy and literature.”

Tolkien Gleanings #49.

* Newly published in the UK, the hardcover edition of the Tolkien book The Battle of Maldon: together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth. The previously unpublished material here is reported to be Tolkien’s own prose translation of the Anglo-Saxon “The Battle of Maldon”, and his unpublished lecture “The Tradition of Versification in Old English” (late 1920s?).

* A one-hour YouTube lecture on “J.R.R. Tolkien on Homes and Havens” (2021). The audio is excellent. This has now become a paywalled scholarly article of the same title, published in the new edition of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture (Spring 2023).

* A recent Texas Tolkien Talk Podcast discussed the recent biography The Gallant Edith Bratt with the book’s author Nancy Bunting.

* A Signum University announcement this week, Introducing “Tolkien Illustrated: Picturing the Legendarium”. This being a trailer for a Summer 2023 online course at Signum, booking now and starting…

“Monday 1st May 2023, with a one week break from 19th-23rd June for Mythmoot. […] ‘Tolkien Illustrated’ will include two 90-minute live lectures Mondays and Thursdays 10:00-11:30 AM ET (3:00-4:30 PM GMT) and one one-hour discussion session per week as assigned (four hours total weekly).”

* And finally, a demo of a fragment of The Silmarillion as read by an ElevenLabs AI-generated TTS voice. Rather pleasing and clear, considering it’s just a quick demo generated from YouTube clips of the older ‘grandpa’ Tolkien speaking to the media in the 1960s. So far as I’m aware, there’s no legal infringement. You can’t copyright the sound and accent of a voice, due to the ‘prior art’ spread among millions of previous voices.