* The author of The Annotated Hobbit<\/em> has a new post on “The Hobyahs: A Reconsideration”<\/a>. “Hobyahs” became known via printed books as a Scotch household bogey creature, akin to the common Midlands \/ Northern English ‘Hob’ and ‘Lob’<\/a> — but made rather more scary to children due to their vivid picture-book illustrations. As the article explains, Tolkien was interested in the word’s resemblance to his own word and he publically asked about its dissemination… although that interest came after The Hobbit<\/em>.<\/p>\n * “Un souvenir brumeux de Dante dans The Lord of the Rings<\/em> de Tolkien”<\/a> (2021). In French with English abstract. Sees a possible influence of Dante’s Commedia<\/em> on the Dead Marshes chapter in The Lord of the Rings<\/em>… <\/p>\n “Dante could have been a model for Tolkien. Despite the specificity of each text, the marsh appears as a space with a paradoxical nature, between life and death, between water, earth and fire. A space dominated by the indistinct and the deceptive, in which the presence of a guide is indispensable”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Regrettably they appear to refuse and “404” all links, except to the home page or if found by internal search. You’ll have to search for “Tolkien”.<\/p>\n * The Imaginative Conservative<\/em> has a new ‘short but informative’ post on “The Inklings and the Outbreak of World War II”<\/a>. The Inklings… <\/p>\n “worried that England would be next on the invasion list, and they began to enumerate the innumerable times they had publicly condemned the Nazis.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n * “One Graph to Rule them All: Using NLP and Graph Neural Networks to analyse Tolkien’s Legendarium”<\/a> is an open-access paper for a December 2022 conference<\/a>. The researchers use new computational methods to… “study character networks extracted from a text corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Legendarium.” An early version is available on Arxiv<\/a>. Note that NLP = ‘Natural Language Processing’ computer-science, not the pseudoscience of ‘Neuro-linguistic Programming’.<\/p>\n
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