Tolkien Gleanings #11

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #11

* Many intelligent reading youngsters graduate themselves from The Hobbit straight into The Lord of the Rings, often at the early age of 11-13. I recall one lad I knew who read it avidly in the bike-sheds at school, when aged barely 11. I think I read it a few years later than red-haired Nigel, and can recall some of my first responses (such as being rather annoyed that Tolkien was suddenly introducing a new character, Dernhelm, more than half-way through). But more generally what does one think, at such an age, of the challenging larger work? There’s now a public PhD thesis on the topic, ‘Small Hands Do Them Because They Must’: examining the reception of The Lord of the Rings among young readers (2020, Glasgow University).

* The Melborne Catholic this week, on “How Tolkien nearly lost his faith — and what drew him back”… “Out of wickedness and sloth I almost ceased to practise my religion […] I regret those days bitterly” (Tolkien).

* The Tolkien Experience podcast has a new interview with Brian Sibley, whose “newest project The Fall of Numenor is a book that pulls together Tolkien’s writings” on the topic, and makes a coherent book from them.

* The Adherent Apologetics podcast has a new interview, “Holly Ordway: The Christian World of J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings”.

* Scholars and Storytellers has a new blog post titled “Reconstructionary Tales”, on Tolkien and Guy Davenport. Who, as it turns out, was once one of Tolkien’s university students. I can add that Davenport also rather amusingly pranked the first wave of eager LoTR language-delvers. He claimed that all the names that Tolkien gave to various hobbits could actually be found in his local telephone book for Lexington, Kentucky (later shown to be untrue, sadly). More seriously he also detected the influence of a “von Essenbach” in The Lord of the Rings. Definitely not a household name in the Anglosphere, but von Essenbach (1170 – c. 1220) was a poet of the mystical Arthurian epic Parzival in medieval German. On which one Richard Wagner later based his 1882 opera, and the rest is history.

* The Parma Rumillion blog has a new post on “Tolkien and Stonyhurst College” in Lancashire. Tolkien made a delightful pen-sketch of the “New Lodge at Stonyhurst College”, which is shown in the post and which I had not seen before. But the blog post finds that… “the school and the area’s connection to Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings is wildly exaggerated”. There are questions about… “the Tolkien Trail promoted by [local tourist-board] Visit Lancashire and local businesses, although the leaflet does have a picture of New Lodge. The trail is a bit of a wild goose chase quite frankly, not using the public right-of-way to get a good view of the school and visiting places without meaningful Tolkien connections.” But Parma Rumillion kindly offers readers an alternative route, with maps. And a warning about a strange local Jobsworth who drives a little white van.

* And finally, as we head toward Christmas, a short meditation on “The Importance of Being Jolly”…. “J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits provide an example from fiction; their response to the goods of everyday life, such as food, drink, and tobacco, is one of gratitude and exultation.”

Piccadilly (1929)

by futurilla

Local lad Arnold Bennett’s movie Piccadilly (1929), now on YouTube. I missed hearing about a recent big-screen screening in Stoke-on-Trent. If you did too, you can still catch it on YouTube. At least, you can until the copyright cops come for it. Only ‘1927 and before’ material is technically in the public domain in the U.S., as of 1st January 2023.

Tolkien Gleanings #10

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #10

* I was sorry to hear of the passing of Professor J. S. Ryan, one of the few scholarly writers on Tolkien who had also studied under Professor Tolkien. I still have his books Tolkien’s View and In the Nameless Wood on my shelves, and a number of their otherwise-scarce essays proved useful in writing my own recent book. Douglas A. Anderson has assembled a biography of Ryan, and he has a Web link to a fuller obituary.

* Newly online in open-access in 2021, the final published version of “Middle America meets Middle-earth: American discussion and readership of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings, 1965-1969″ (2005). The first half being an very in-depth history of the copyright problems with the book in America. Then we eventually get to a section on the first brief ‘craze’ for Tolkien among the more discerning elements of American’s youth, and the response to it…

[even when critics actually looked at the book] “… criticisms very frequently have had less to do with The Lord of the Rings itself than with their aversion to the type of book they think it to be, and equally to the type of reader attracted to such books.”

* The venerable U.S. magazine The National Review this week reviews the new Tolkien book The Fall of Numenor. Mostly gushy praise + a long potted summary, but it’s useful to have such a summary.

* Forthcoming, a “revised and expanded edition” of The Silmarillion Primer. Amazon knows nothing about a first edition. But a little digging reveals it actually first appeared as a publisher’s bi-weekly blog-post series, at Tor.com back in 2017-18.

* And finally, ominous news re: Tolkien Estate’s licensing deals for 2023. “LEGO BrickHeadz, The Lord of the Rings versions” are coming soon to toy stores. This hideous-looking line of plastic tat, specifically designed to look squat and monstrous, even has a pair that defiles “Aragorn & Arwen”. Ugh. I’ll spare you the pictures.

Regrettably I also see that the Tolkien Society is seeming to endorse such orc-work, through allowing Lego items into their “Best Artwork” annual category.

Tolkien Gleanings #9

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #9

* An Exploration of Tolkien’s Changing Visions of Faerie Through His Non-Middle-Earth Poetry (2021). A PhD thesis for the University of Glasgow, UK. The .PDF is online and public. Sees Bombadil as having one possible source in the 17th century Tom O’Bedlam.

“… analyses the themes, language, and folklore of Tolkien’s non-Middle-earth poetry, arguing that it is possible to see three sometimes overlapping phases […] an initial phase when he explored who and what the fairies were; a second divergent phase where Tolkien at once studied the worlds and poetic styles of the medieval works he taught at Oxford yet also used his Faerie poems to protest the excesses of modern living; and a third phase where he increasingly merged his Christian beliefs with his concept of Faerie”. Concludes by showing how these approaches might have been woven into the late tale “Smith of Wootton Major”.

* Free online, a blog article for a medical humanities site, “Fangorn, the Shire, and Beleriand: Tolkien’s Disabled Landscapes” (2022)…

“… we do not abandon lands after they are changed, or when their value is diminished in our eyes. The Ents reclaim Isen. The Hobbits remain in the Shire [and restore it, even though] neither goes back to the way they were before they were impaired.”

* From Kent State University Press, the book Inkling, Historian, Soldier, and Brother: A Life of Warren Hamilton Lewis (December 2022)…

“examines Warren Lewis’s role as an original member of the Oxford Inklings [and C.S. Lewis’s brother, drawing on] unpublished diaries, his letters, the memoir he wrote about his family, and other primary materials, this biography is an engaging story of a fascinating life, and period of history”.

* Free online, a long scholarly blog post on “The Medieval in Middle-earth: Anglo-Saxon Elephants and Tolkien’s Oliphaunts” (2020).

* And finally, to Tolkien’s cherished town of Warwick in the West Midlands of England. A giant Lord of the Rings style ‘trebuchet’ siege-engine is to be built there. The 22-ton wooden machine will be the world’s biggest, and by 2023 it should be ready for flinging oliphaunt-sized loads around the grounds of Warwick Castle. Seen here is their earlier smaller engine, which is being retired.

Garth states (Worlds, p. 191) that it is “not unlikely” that the young Tolkien brothers took the train from Birmingham to the annual Warwick Pageant in the castle grounds. Though in those days there may not have been reconstructed siege-engines, it seems vaguely-possible that the castle could offer displays of scale models set in battle dioramas.

Tolkien Gleanings #8

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #8

* A Concise List of Lord of the Rings Textual Changes (1954-2021) by Zionus (2022). Free, online, and covering the published editions rather than the drafts. Finds… “70+ changes unrecorded by others [and] a dozen possible errors in the latest edition.”

* Tolkien, Europe, and Tradition: From Civilisation to the Dawn of Imagination (2022). From… “a specialist in Germanic studies [who] demonstrates the European heritage that inspired Tolkien by explicating the finer details of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian myth, the Finnish Kalevala, Greco-Roman influence, and much more.” Appears to be a translation from the French. Despite the grandiose title, it has just 48 pages of core text. As such it can hardly be called a book, and at a guess it may be a printed lecture?

* An August 2023 summer school with John Garth, at the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education, “An Introduction to Tolkien’s Mythology”. “From £1,315”. Fully booked in a bang and a flash, of course.

* A short report on the John Garth lecture, given in November 2022 as part of Marquette’s large Tolkien exhibition in the USA. The lecture…

“‘Whispering Leaves: How Tolkien’s Manuscripts Reveal the Secrets of His Creativity’ ran a little over an hour […] Garth teased a little bit of his next project as well. He said he was working on a book, tentatively entitled “Tolkien’s Mirror,” wherein he seeks to ground the work of The Lord of the Rings in Tolkien’s intra-war period (1918-1939) and World War II years (1939-1945), and show that much of Tolkien’s world-building reflected contemporaneous events, including those worldwide.”

* Vermonter Jeb J. Smith’s newly-funded Kickstarter book A New Perspective on J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-earth. Funded but not yet produced and shipped. The blurb is off-putting. For instance, claiming that it’s… “the first book of its kind to place Tolkien within his proper context” [re: how his] “worldview impacted his mythology”. Tom Shippey and others might wish to disagree. Also makes it sound like the author is going to be reliant only on his examination of “a wide range of Tolkien’s writings” and little else.

* And finally, a new Creative Commons Sharealike picture of the Entrance and cloister of the Birmingham Oratory, home-from-home for the young Tolkien. I’ve here given the view a de-modernising, shadow lift, and a b&w fix. Feel free to re-use under the same CC licence.

The ancient Lyme, the new Lyme

by futurilla

Good news locally. Newcastle-under-Lyme council is set to plant 850 lime trees by 2023, on their now-derelict council golf course at Keele. The planting is being pitched as a key part of a ‘new Lyme’ forest, named after the ancient forest now long-gone, and other sites are also being planted (but not with limes). Similar large planting schemes are underway in Stoke-on-Trent, and there is also a large private planting of native woodland in Eccleshall, and along the HS2 route.

The Lyme is one of a half-dozen local ancient forests discussed in detail in the new “The Forests and Elite Residences of the Earls of Chester in Cheshire, c. 1070–1237” (The Des Seal Memorial Lecture), in Anglo-Norman Studies XLIII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2020. Sadly this is paywalled at JSTOR but it is of obvious importance for any tracing of the Gawain journey from North Wales to the Staffordshire Moorlands, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

I can get enough of the Anglo-Norman Studies article to summarise a bit, re: the Lyme. It suggests Lyme does not actually mean “lime trees”, but most likely comes from the Latin limen, meaning ‘threshold (of a house)’ or ‘boundary line’. The Lyme was a dense belt of protective forest running along the Cheshire / north Staffordshire / Shropshire border, some 50 miles long and augmented by impassable Cheshire mere-bogs and high escarpments that rise as the Cheshire Plain meets Staffordshire. Difficult to trace today, but the monk Lucian of Chester (monk of St. Werburgh) mentioned it (possibly c. 1195) as “(Cestra provincia) Lime nemoris (limite lateraliter clausa)”. Later others talk of it, including a Shrewsbury charter which knew it as “nemus quod Lima dicitur”. Through the dark wood of the Lyme passed all the passable routes from Cheshire into north Staffordshire. The forest probably linked strategically with other protective forests that lay between the Dee and the Peak, which the article also discusses.

I now speculate a little. If it dates from pre-Norman times must be unknown, unless pollen archaeology might one day shed some light on that. Lucian’s text is available in a 1912 scholarly reprint and he is said by the Latin-reading editor to be keen to give credit to his lord for creating the Lyme. Yet such a landscape-work is one of many generations, and his Lord may only have put things in order and filled in gaps of some earlier Mercian version of the Lyme. That would be my guess, but just a guess.

What we can be sure of is that from the Lyme the local places of Audlem and Burslem partly take their names. Though this does not mean that the Lyme once flowed directly around the foot of the hill and churchyard of Burslem. It would be more likely that it was way over toward Red Street and Bignall Hill, thick and thorny on the slopes and banks running down to the Cheshire Plain. Though thinning woodland may have stretched back from there, perhaps as far as the western lip of the Fowlea Valley opposite Burslem, which would make Bradwell Woods a relic. Thus Burslem would have lain some way SE of the Lyme, but near enough to take its placename (‘Burgweard’s Lyme’) from it. What Lyme might have meant to Burgweard, if it ever had a tree-ish meaning, we can’t know. But one placename study suggests ‘Elm’ as a possible meaning for ‘Lyme’. In which case the Lyme forest would have been rather tall, since elms are very big trees.

The obvious enemy that the Lyme might be defending the English heartlands against were raiding incursions from North Wales and Ireland. In total it probably formed a wide 55-mile arc from Market Drayton in Shropshire through north Staffordshire and south-east Cheshire to near Ashton-under-Lyme in Lancashire. So far as I know no-one has ever tried to map its likely spread, with reference to relic woodland and suitable terrain. An interesting ‘retirement project’ for someone, perhaps.

Tolkien Gleanings #7

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #7

* The new book From Imagination to Faerie: Tolkien’s Thomist Fantasy now has a partial Google Books preview and TOCs…

* “The Vyne Ring in context: powerful people and powerful rings during the end of Roman Britain”, an open-access English chapter from the sumptuous and scholarly Rings of Power print book (2019, 2 volumes) on the cultural archaeology and thinking on ancient finger-rings. Readers will recall Tolkien’s connections with this and Nodens.

This open-access chapter also gives the TOCs, and there one finds the essay paired in the book with Thomas Honegger’s German-language “Tolkien und die Tradition der Ringe der Macht”. I find an English version of Honegger’s article is freely available. The book’s TOCs also show that most of the other chapters are in German. There appears to be no open-access version, other than these chapters.

* The new book Beowulf as Children’s Literature (December 2021, $ paywalled on JSTOR) considers the 100 or so children’s adaptations of Beowulf which appeared during the 19th and 20th century, and at the end has a chapter on “Children’s Beowulf for the New Tolkien Generation”.

* The open-access “To Bring Back some Eagleness to Eagles: On Bird Worldings in the Bronze Age” (2020). Relevant to Tolkien’s understanding of eagles in ancient Northern history and tales. The…

“research community has paid very little attention to avian creatures [and] birds seem to vanish from the air [in recent cultural studies of farming and landscape, since] Marxism still seem to rule contemporaneous Bronze Age research”.

Goes on to provide an interesting non-communist cultural/archaeological study (“According to north European birdlore, eagles were thought to be immortal”), and then the last third rapidly leaves the Bronze Age and comes up to date.

New book: As Best We Can

by futurilla

I’m pleased to learn of another writer on the topography and people of the Potteries, via stumbling on a new book with poems about Stoke-on-Trent. The poet Jeffrey Wainwright had a 2020 collection from noted poetry publisher Carcanet, As Best We Can. Wainwright was born and schooled in Stoke (specifically Sandford Hill, Longton) in the 1950s. Then went to university in Leeds and took his first job on the Welsh coast. Local poems, of Etruria and Longton, in his new book include…

* “”Crockery”, a sequence of six poems […] on the products of Josiah Wedgwood’s factories draws in history, politics, class, art and aspiration.” The lustrous products of the factory are contrasted with the imagined lives of Etruria’s workers.

* “”Who Was St. Chad?” evokes the Anglican church my mother attended as a girl. She was part of a strong religious culture, mainly Anglican and Methodist, that existed in Stoke-on-Trent in the first half of the 20th century and has all but disappeared in the course of my generation and since.”

* “”Dreams of Lennox Road” [memories of] the street where I spent the first 18 years of my life.” The top end of Longton, shading into Florence / Normacot.

* ““The Prims” [on] the austere and charitable Primitive Methodists, who emerged in the early 19th century, often drawn from the poorest workers.” This originated on Mow Cop and… “had strong popular appeal in the Potteries up to the mid-twentieth century when Wainwright was a boy”.

The last quote is from the Times Literary Supplement review, which wrongly guesses “The Prims” is set the “Victorian Black Country”. The poem’s use of the word “potbanks” in describing the topography places it rather in North Staffordshire. There are big bottle-ovens (for glass, rather the clay) in Wordsley, in south Staffordshire at the far semi-rural south of the Black Country. But they are not there called “potbanks”.

Possibly there are other Stoke poems in his earlier collections. Would there be enough for a dedicated book of the Stoke poems, one wonders? Perhaps illustrated with new pen drawings?

Gummage restored

by futurilla

Worzel Gummidge: The Complete Restored Edition on Blu-ray in the New Year. This is the original 1979-81 children’s series, seventeen hours in total over five discs. Reworked by the British Film Institute from the original film negatives, which had been found mouldering away in barn. Pre-release reviews report a sparkling HD picture and excellent sound, for this classic series. Previous releases, even the box-set, had an abysmal sub-VHS picture quality. This was made even worse in YouTube clips.

Great to see such a fine evocation of the countryside given this treatment at last, and we can now see some of the all-time perfect gems of TV (such as “Choir Practice”) as they should be seen.

Tolkien Gleanings #6

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #6

* A download of a lecture by Prof. Giuseppe Pezzini (University of Oxford), Tolkien on the Nature and Purpose of Christian Art. “This lecture was given on 21st April 2022 at The Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst as part of the ‘Catholicism and the Arts: An Intellectual Retreat’.” (Online August 2022). Be warned that the Centre’s disastrous podium microphone often goes haywire and this, combined with the very heavy Italian accent, makes for a difficult listen. See also his open-access journal article “The Lords of the West: Cloaking, Freedom and the Divine Narrative in Tolkien’s Poetics” (2019).

* A theological podcast from October 2022 interviews the French author of the new book From Imagination to Faerie: Tolkien’s Thomist Fantasy (July 2022). The interview and discussion are excellent. I can’t locate any reviews of this book, as yet, even on Amazon.

* Amazon is now listing Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist: Second Edition Revised and Expanded, due 31st January 2023. The book is currently listing as a Kindle ebook only, and the listing previews an appealing new cover…

* Further out in time, a major new Tolkien book has been announced for the end of March 2023 and this is pre-ordering now. To be titled The Battle of Maldon: together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, it will have Tolkien’s scholarly notes and “unpublished and never-before-seen texts and draft”. Plus related essays by Tolkien, and the text of his lecture “The Tradition of Versification in Old English”.

* Tolkien Studies, Volume 19, 2022 Supplement (July 2022, $ paywall). Has a single book-length article, “The Chronology of The Lord of the Rings”. This appears to be the first full publication of Tolkien’s own day-by-day working ‘grid chart’ for The Lord of the Rings, used by him to keep track of which characters were where on which day. I seem to recall that I saw a large section of this at the Bodleian exhibition in Oxford, a few years ago. This special Tolkien Studies supplement has extensive scholarly notes and an introduction. Amazon UK appears to know nothing about it.

* New in the questionable Brazilian Journal of Development (not in DOAJ or the Brazilian aggregators, and I won’t index it in JURN), a November 2022 article in English. “J.R.R. Tolkien: an analysis of the English conservative political culture” is said to be drawn from a Masters dissertation.

* In The Spectator magazine ($ paywall) this week, “In defence of fairy tales”…

“A recent opinion poll has revealed that they terrify people under the age of 30, who consider them horribly inappropriate for children [and] ‘sexist’ and old-fashioned and outdated.” [Yet] “Some of these fairy tales date back 6,000 years […] That they have lasted, often scarcely changed, over the intervening millennia seems to me evidence that they contain certain immutable truths, applicable to all, regardless of whether we were chasing the last handful of mammoths or attempting to split the atom. [But today they are too often seen as] simply conduits for grievance and resentment” [And when such] “stories are read with blinkers on … The real point of the story is entirely lost.”

* And finally, the new research study “The Influence of the Mother Tongue on the Perception of Constructed Fantasy Languages”. Researchers found that Tolkien’s Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin sounded the most mellifluous to German and Japanese speakers. While Orkish which the second most favoured language among Chinese speakers.

Tolkien Gleanings #5

by futurilla

Tolkien Gleanings #5

* The open-access paper GIS & Middle Earth (online 2021). GIS = computer-assisted mapping and map-making. Complete with free DEM height-map downloads, containing the entire terrain of Middle-earth.

* I see that An Unexpected Journal had a special issue on The Imaginative Harvest of Holly Ordway (Christmas 2021). This was inspired by her book which surveys the modern writers whose books Tolkien might have read.

* Calmgrove has a long August 2022 blog article in which he scrutinises some claims made for Tolkien’s Sidmouth (a small English seaside resort)…

“It seems to me that the most likely way that Sidmouth may have inspired Tolkien was that it provided periods of relaxation and escape in which to allow his imagination to run where it wanted, rather than any specific aspects of the Devon seaside and Jurassic Coast. Did Tolkien really “essentially” turn Sidmouth into the Shire and did the Jurassic Coast truly inspire the landscapes, flora, and fauna of the hobbits’ homeland? Or are the town’s advocates chasing a chimaera?”

At first glance there may be some disagreement with Garth. Calmgrove has… “While in Sidmouth he brought the hobbits far to the east of the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs to The Prancing Pony in Bree”, while Garth instead has him writing from Bree to Rivendell (Worlds, p. 74). Actually the Chronology supports both, since when he arrived in Sidmouth for a long holiday (“1st-15th September 1938”, Chronology) he already had the “In the House of Tom Bombadil” chapter done, if the reference to “Chapter VII” is the same as the book’s published chapter numbering. Tolkien then spent the holiday writing the tale from there up to Frodo meeting Gloin at Rivendell. What Calmgrove doesn’t snag is that Garth notes that Tolkien found the name Barnabas Butter on a old Sidmouth gravestone (Worlds, p. 21, side column).

* The December 2022 event “On Dragons and Dinosaurs” at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History…

“On the 1st January 1938, J.R.R. Tolkien gave his thoughts on dragonlore and dinosaurs in an illustrated lecture at the Museum not discussed anywhere else in his works. [Now we stage a live] once-in-a-lifetime re-run of Tolkien’s lecture featuring his original slides, supporting specimens, and documents.”

Completely sold-out in a bang and a flash, of course. Hopefully it will be recorded and placed online after the event. “Tolkien’s Deadly Dragons” has an account of the original lecture.

* Dr. Philip Irving Mitchell’s ongoing public archive of online classroom handouts on Tolkien and Medieval Tradition. With useful short summaries such as Emotional Monarchy in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (August 2022).

* And finally, The Times Diary: Tolkien’s flag flying again (October 2022, $ possible paywall)…

“A historic Oxford pub where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis used to drink [has reopened, post-lockdowns] after supporters each paid at least £1,000 for a share in a 15-year lease. As well as being de-modernised to create a suitably Inklings air, The Lamb and Flag will now host book launches and talks.”

And The Spectator magazine ($ paywall) has an October 2022 article by a leader of the group, describing… How we’re saving Tolkien’s pub.