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 The previously unpublished material here is reported to be Tolkien’s own prose translation of the Anglo-Saxon “The Battle of Maldon”, and his unpublished lecture “The Tradition of Versification in Old English” (late 1920s?).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.

Tolkien Gleanings #48.

* Now available, tickets for the Second Annual Tolkien Lecture with John Garth. To be given on a Friday evening, 12th May 2023 at the Elgar Concert Hall of Birmingham University (UK). Booking now on Eventbrite. I’ve never been in this Hall, but the venue sounds suitably large. Thus I imagine that the free tickets for “The Houses of Healing: Tolkien, Fantasy, and the Road to Recovery” won’t immediately all be taken.

* The Church of Scotland reports “Tolkien talk returns by popular demand”…

“J.R.R. Tolkien and The Hope of Easter”, Dr. Hood’s new talk will take place at 7pm on Wednesday 5th April 2023, and will also be streamed online.”

* In Canada on 30th March 2023, the public lecture titled “Tolkien, Middle-earth, and the Lost Inheritance of England”…

“Mark Doersken [discusses how Tolkien] sought to engage with the lost tales of pre-Conquest England and in the process changed the modern fantasy landscape. This talk is part of Literature Matters: Literature in the Community Series at the University of Saskatchewan.”

* Amazon UK is listing a new academic book of 230 pages, set for publication at the end of September 2023. Titled J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe: Context, Directions, and the Legacy. It’s a Routledge collection and, as you might expect from this publisher, the book sounds rather theoretical-political…

“The essays move between and across theories of cultural and social history, reception, adaptation and audience studies, and offer methodological reflections on the various cultural perceptions of Tolkien’s oeuvre and its impact on twenty-first century manifestations.” [also] examines the entanglement of fantasy and Central European political and cultural shifts […] across different domains from communist times through today.”

* And finally the Novium Museum in Chichester, England, launches ‘The Magic of Middle-earth’ exhibition on Saturday 1st April 2023. This is a large popular touring show, free at some venues but here with a £4 ticket price. The show will run through the summer and close on 24th September.

Tolkien Gleanings #47

* The Franciscan University of Steubenville (Pittsburgh, USA) is set to hold a Tolkien Conference in the Autumn/Fall. Titled “A Long Expected Party: A Semicentennial Celebration Of Tolkien’s Life, Works, And Afterlife”, the conference will run 22nd-23rd September 2023. Submissions of papers… “reflecting on less studied elements of Tolkien’s legendarium and recently published works” are welcomed, with a 30th April 2023 deadline.

* A listing for a French exhibition catalogue, Sur les Traces de Tolkien et de L’imaginaire Medieval (‘In the Footsteps of Tolkien and the Medieval Imagination’) reveals a large exhibition in summer 2023. The… “exhibition will feature over 250 drawings and paintings by John Howe […] concept illustrator on the two cinema trilogies The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. […] The exhibition is accompanied by authentic objects from the medieval period and punctuated by pictures that would have been contemporary for the young Tolkien, drawing notably on the works of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.” The 192 page hardcover catalogue is currently dated “21st June 2023” by Amazon UK.

* New from Word on Fire, a one-hour panel talk on YouTube… “Andrew Petiprin moderates a conversation between leading J.R.R. Tolkien scholar Dr. Holly Ordway and leading C.S. Lewis scholar Fr. Michael Ward. The pair debate and discuss J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, two Christian literary giants of the twentieth century.”

* New on Archive.org to borrow, a scan of the book War and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (2004). If the book interests, note also the course listing at Signum University for Autumn/Fall 2023, “Tolkien’s Wars and Middle-earth” with John Garth.

* And finally, a review of a recent book with chapters offering Orthodox Perspectives on Tolkien’s Fantastic Realm (2021). Among others… “Richard Seraphim Rohlins splendidly adds to the best of Tolkien scholarship by explaining in close detail the reference to medieval church architecture made by Tolkien…”.

Tolkien Gleanings #46

* The National Archives reports that… “Two handwritten letters penned by J.R.R. Tolkien have been discovered for the first time”…

“Written in 1945, shortly after Tolkien’s appointment as Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College, Oxford, the letters are part of an exchange with the British Council about funding for his research into early English languages.”

* The editors of the forthcoming academic journal The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale…

“will host an online conference via Zoom on 31st March – 1st April 2023. The theme is “Beginnings” and we will be exploring how, in many ways, the nineteenth century saw the birth of science fiction and fantasy as we know them as well as the scholarly study of folk and fairy tales.”

Sadly the deadline for registration for attendance has now passed, but hopefully recordings will become available on YouTube.

* A handy YouTube playlist for “G.B. Smith and J.R.R. Tolkien: a meaningful friendship”. This being a scholarly conference at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 21st-22nd March 2023.

* Listed as due in mid September 2023, a new edition of Letters from J.R.R. Tolkien. “Featuring a radically expanded index”, and set to be a volume of 704 pages from “William Morrow & Company (15th September 2023)”, according to Amazon UK. No further details.

* And finally, a sale listing alerted me to the fact that that there was once a place called “The Ring” at Tolkien’s Great Haywood in mid Staffordshire…

“Samuel Wyatt’s other group at Great Haywood was regrettably demolished in about 1965. Known as the Ring, it comprised a hollow hexagon formed of 16 cottages with a communal bake-oven in the centre of the inner yard.” (Country Life, 1977). One of the cottages served as a schoolroom. Erected sometime after the Great Flood of 1795, to house many of the former villagers of Shugborough. Probably built c. 1800-1806. Therefore the ‘Ring’ was there in Tolkien’s time.

Tolkien Gleanings #45

* Dr. Wotan’s Musings has full details of the forthcoming Tolkien Sessions at the Leeds International Medieval Congress (July 2023). Talks include, among others: “Tolkien’s Development of the Elvish Languages at Leeds, 1920-1925”; “Travel and the Quest Motif in Tolkien’s Work”; and “Out of the Great Sea: Of Elendil and Legends Old and New”.

* In Spain, the launch of a new national Catholic Tolkien Association…

“In the heart of the new Association are the priest Antonio Izquierdo, parish priest in Mostoles (Madrid); Diego Blanco Albarova, popular author of the children’s books in the El Club del Fuego Secreto series; and Joaquin Ocana, a “passionate Tolkinian” with experience organizing groups.”

* New on Mere Orthodoxy, a long essay on “The Death and Immortality of Mortal Men in The Lord of the Rings“.

* I see there was an essay on “Image and the Tree in Middle-earth” in issue 23 of the BFS Journal (Autumn 2022)…

Tree-imagery “throughout Middle-earth, and how it reflects historical tree imagery in Europe”.

Are there more essays of interest in the journal? Difficult to know. Curiously the British Fantasy Society’s website has only one item on its ‘journal’ tag, and the Site Map knows nothing about any journal. A Google search reveals the staff list, on which… “BFS Journal Editor, currently vacant”. First job for the new editor, I’d suggest, is a complete public list of what’s in those 23 issues and in earlier incarnations.

* And finally, Tolkneity asks “What do you think, could the map for Beowulf from the edition by Frederik Klaeber (1922) have influenced the shape of the map of Middle-earth in the first edition of The Lord of the Rings?” The answer is “no”. It only took me a minute to find Klaeber’s rather poor map in his Beowulf and The fight at Finnsburg (1922), and to discover it looks nothing like its much later Tolkien-alike re-imagining (which was made in 1973).

Tolkien Gleanings #44

* In France… “The Tolkien association is organising a symposium in the Paris region on 6th & 7th October 2023, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the translation of The Lord of the Rings into French”. I see the French also have online a fine illustrated timeline of “Tolkien on the Somme”. It’s all in HTML as a single page, and thus can be run through Google Translate.

* In Italy, a national conference on Tolkien. This event is reported to be the culmination of a long period in which advanced students at “lower secondary schools from eight Italian regions” studied Tolkien’s texts with their teachers…

“The 17th edition of Le Vie d’Europa is dedicated to Tolkien. This interdisciplinary student conference was conceived and organised by the professional association of teachers Diesse Firenze and Toscana (Didactics and Scholastic Innovation). It will be held on Friday 31st March 2023. […] in collaboration with the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan (Department of Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literature). It has the patronage of the Metropolitan City of Florence, the Municipality of Florence, INDIRE, and the British Institute of Florence.”

* In the USA, a “Colloquium on developing a digital critical edition of Tolkien fanzines”. Note… “There will also be a [Microsoft] Teams option for those who prefer to attend virtually.” 29th March 2023 is the date.

* I’ve made a few notes on the new second edition of Tolkien’s Library (2023).

* In The Medieval Review, a glowing and informative book review of Meanings of Water in Early Medieval England (2021)…

“the work of eleven scholars working on the cultures of medieval water. […] an exemplary collection, highlighting the vibrancy of the medieval world, revealing a multi-sensory, complex water landscape full of swimmers, sailors, sea monsters, scholars, and saints. […] one of the most cohesive and consistently engaging [edited collections] that I have reviewed”.

* And finally, from Madrid comes a new Spanish-language open-access study of “A Hobbit Hole: on the habitability of fantastic architecture” (2022). This ably…

“focuses on performing bio-climatic simulations that allow measuring the hygrothermal comfort level of buried architecture. As a case-study, ‘Bag End’ has been selected. How deep can natural light penetrate? What is each room’s average radiant temperature? Does it need mechanic ventilation?”

Lots of pictures and floor-plans, and entertaining even if you don’t read Spanish.