{"id":11755,"date":"2023-01-02T23:35:41","date_gmt":"2023-01-02T23:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=11755"},"modified":"2023-01-02T23:35:41","modified_gmt":"2023-01-02T23:35:41","slug":"tolkien-gleanings-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2023\/01\/02\/tolkien-gleanings-21\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Gleanings #21"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/category\/tolkien-gleanings\/\">Tolkien Gleanings<\/a> #21<\/p>\n<p>* As posted here yesterday, my new musings on the question <a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2023\/01\/02\/could-tolkien-have-seen-the-pre-raphaelite-collection-at-birmingham\/\">&#8220;Could Tolkien have seen the pre-Raphaelite collection at Birmingham?&#8221;<\/a> along with my newly colorised picture of the interior in 1911.<\/p>\n<p>* I came across a 2017 paper I&#8217;d not heard of before, from Tolkien scholar and astronomy specialist Kristine Larsen. The Harvard aggregator for astronomy papers has it as <a href=\"https:\/\/ui.adsabs.harvard.edu\/abs\/2017AAS...22915802L\/abstract\">&#8220;Oxford Astronomer John Knight Fotheringham (1874-1936) as Unwitting Godfather of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Fictional Luni-solar Holiday \u201cDurin\u2019s Day\u201d&#8221;<\/a>, with a substantial abstract but no PDF link. My guess is this paper was later partly folded into her <a href=\"https:\/\/scholar.valpo.edu\/journaloftolkienresearch\/vol8\/iss1\/3\/\"><em>Journal of Tolkien Research<\/em> article on Durin&#8217;s Day<\/a>. The latter is freely available as a full-text .PDF file. But some researchers may also want the original abstract re: some details on Fotheringham.<\/p>\n<p>* The two <em>Mallorn<\/em> issues produced in 2020 have now popped their locks, these being issues <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.tolkiensociety.org\/mallorn\/issue\/view\/61\">60 (Summer 2020)<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.tolkiensociety.org\/mallorn\/issue\/view\/62\">61 (Winter 2020)<\/a>. They appear to be the latest. Despite still being labelled on their landing pages as &#8220;not open-access as it was published within the previous two years&#8221;, on a hunch I found I could download the full PDF downloads. I assume some auto-bot has popped the locks for 2023 without any human intervention. Included and of interest to me are&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong># 61:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; &#8220;Tolkien on Holiday&#8221; surveys Tolkien&#8217;s uses of holidays, and his personal thoughts on the real thing. Doesn&#8217;t note that a chunk of the early part of <em>Fellowship<\/em> was written while on holiday.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; &#8220;In the Moon Gleaming&#8221; on Tolkien&#8217;s uses of &#8216;Man in the Moon&#8217;. Unaware of the Shropshire and Hereford links, which would have been well known to Tolkien as a West Midlands medievalist.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; &#8220;The Tolkien Art Index&#8221;, giving a history of building &#8220;an online <em>catalogue raisonne<\/em> of all published Arda-related artwork created by J.R.R. Tolkien&#8221; and a short guide to the structure and usage.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; &#8220;There and Back Again? Tolkien\u2019s Brief Visit to Sussex in 1904&#8221;. He went for a long extended stay, and most likely also took day-trips out. The article discovers a likely address in Hove (of &#8216;Brighton &amp; Hove&#8217;). With a rider in the form of &#8220;Tolkien in King\u2019s Heath&#8221; in the following issue, which picks up a misinterpretation of the 1901 census (though relating to King&#8217;s Heath in Birmingham, rather than Hove).<\/p>\n<p>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; A good review of <em>Tolkien&#8217;s Library: An Annotated Checklist<\/em> and yet another short review of <em>Tolkien and the Classics<\/em> (it must have had 20 or more by now).<\/p>\n<p>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; A long letter of reply to the earlier &#8220;Checking the Facts&#8221; article, which had been critical of certain aspects of Tolkien studies.<\/p>\n<p><strong># 62:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; &#8220;Tolkien\u2019s Fantasy Landscape&#8221;, a fine lead article which examines a Tolkien &#8220;1915?&#8221; dated painting in detail, and with painstaking topographic and astronomical cross-referencing. Also has much to say about Tolkien&#8217;s brother Hilary.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; A joint review of the recent Oxford, New York City and Paris <em>Tolkien<\/em> exhibitions. Notes the great popular successes, each in a different way but alike in terms of vast visitors numbers and red-hot catalogue \/ book sales. Has nothing to say about any serious notice given to the shows, if any, by weighty art-world critics. I had to laugh at the glowing description of the ticket system at Oxford&#8230; &#8220;a cleverly designed ticket booking system guaranteed that every visitor had the impression of entering a shrine of peace and quiet with enough space and time to take it in&#8221;. When I was there the ushering in\/out was abandoned and the place was rammed. I managed to stay in for well over two hours.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; Reviews of the books <em>Something Has Gone Crack<\/em>, <em>Tolkien\u2019s Cosmology<\/em>, and a rather pickily critical one for Garth&#8217;s <em>The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>* Birmingham Museums now have <a href=\"https:\/\/dams.birminghammuseums.org.uk\/asset-bank\/action\/viewDefaultHome?browseType=folders\">their long-awaited CC0 collections online<\/a>. It&#8217;s been around in various forms since 2018, but now at last it has good-sized downloads freely available without sign-up. My searches suggest there&#8217;s not a great deal of Tolkien interest in there, but there is a pleasing old pencil sketch of what appears to be the Library entrance corridor in Tolkien&#8217;s school on New Street. Possibly an unfinished drawing, or meant to evoke the original appearance of the interior&#8230; as I see lines hinting at a tall bookcase on the right-hand wall.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/oldimages\/library_king-edwards_new_st_birmingham.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/oldimages\/library_king-edwards_new_st_birmingham.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"603\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-11758\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>* And finally, one for the book-sniffers. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=OsAqtsX-ck8&amp;t=72s\">Dr. Joe Schwarcz on the smell of old and new books<\/a> at YouTube (2021).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tolkien Gleanings #21 * As posted here yesterday, my new musings on the question &#8220;Could Tolkien have seen the pre-Raphaelite collection at Birmingham?&#8221; along with my newly colorised picture of the interior in 1911. * I came across a 2017 paper I&#8217;d not heard of before, from Tolkien scholar and astronomy specialist Kristine Larsen. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tolkien-gleanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11755\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}