{"id":11778,"date":"2023-01-03T23:16:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-03T23:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=11778"},"modified":"2023-01-03T23:16:00","modified_gmt":"2023-01-03T23:16:00","slug":"tolkien-gleanings-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2023\/01\/03\/tolkien-gleanings-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Gleanings #22"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings<\/a> #22<\/p>\n

* New today, a long article on “Eucatastrophe and Evangelium: Tolkien\u2019s Devotion to St. John the Evangelist”<\/a>. At the end of this the reader learns that…<\/p>\n

“This article is adapted from material in Holly Ordway\u2019s forthcoming book, Tolkien\u2019s Faith: A Spiritual Biography<\/em> (Word on Fire Academic, 2023).”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good to hear of a new book, and from a writer who knows the theology and church history. This forthcoming title is currently listed on Amazon UK, set for a hardback release on “2nd September 2023”.<\/p>\n

* I’m not going to be tracking articles or books on Tolkien’s invented languages for Tolkien Gleanings<\/em>. But they will be noticed if they reflect on the young Tolkien and his influences. Such is a new article in the Italian open-access journal RiCOGNIZIONI<\/em>, “Tolkien and Comparative Historical Linguistics”<\/a> (2022, in English, with English abstract). This looks at the influence of the young Tolkien’s academic training on his earliest Elvish languages. Finds some influence on his… “meticulousness [and] symmetry and systematicity”, among other things. But also the age itself was somewhat encouraging him to take a “creative and free approach to his sources”, though in this he was steered by his already highly-developed “phonoaesthetic taste”. But what were his sources? The author suggests, as a glottopoeia<\/em> source for the young Tolkien…<\/p>\n

“a source not listed in Cilli’s catalogue and, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere mentioned” [which could well have been the] “Rev. George Bayldon’s
\nAn Elementary Grammar of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language<\/a><\/em>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* In the same issue of the RiCOGNIZIONI<\/em> journal, “Linguistics and Classical Tradition as Sources for Tolkien’s Glottopoiesis”<\/a>. The author focusses on picking up what are said to be many similarities to Latin, but his abstract usefully explains what the first author meant by the technical word glottopoeia<\/em> (glottopoiesis<\/em>)…<\/p>\n

“[to create his constructed languages] Quenya and Sindarin [Tolkien picked] from the templates represented by natural languages, such as Finnish, Germanic languages, Welsh and also Classical languages.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* I encountered a bit more on the local claims for the ‘Tolkien Trail’ in Lancashire<\/a>. A 2022 local press report on the walk claims…<\/p>\n

“it is clear that Tolkien did get inspiration to call the fictional region of Middle-earth, ‘The Shire’, from Hurst Green. Shire Lane can be found in the village, along with the River Shireburn and the Shireburn Arms”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is an intertwingling in the above sentence between Hurst Green in Sussex and Hurst Green in Lancashire, which few will notice. The Tolkien Reader’s Guide<\/em> and Chronology<\/em> both have this place in Sussex and not in Lancashire…<\/p>\n

“At that time the Brookes-Smiths lived at The Lodge, Hurst Green, in Sussex” and “then living in Sussex, in a country house at Hurst Green.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The confusion among Lancastrians is probably genuine, and it appears to root back to Paul Edwards’ “In the Valley of the Hobbits” article<\/a> describing much the same walk, which was then picked up and enshrined by the 2008 Tolkien’s Inspirations<\/a> PDF assemblage. The confusion appears to have arisen locally via the following reasoning: “Tolkien is known to have stayed several times at Stonyhurst and sketched it (true, though many years too late to have influenced the early landscape of LoTR<\/em>); and the lovely rural stone village of Hurst Green is near Stonyhurst (true); therefore this ‘Hurst Green’ mentioned by Tolkien sources must be the Stonyhurst one (false); and thus… the whole area must therefore have been his inspiration for Hobbiton and the Shire!”.<\/p>\n

The landscape does however appear to be very lovely and well worth a stroll, and is about 17 miles north of Manchester and on the southern edge of the Bowland Forest. Some of the pictures of fir-trees and small streams even remind one of Rivendell. But as for “The Shire” claim in the more recent 2022 press article… I suspect that Worcestershire and Warwickshire and Staffordshire may yet have something to say on the matter of Tolkien’s coining of ‘the Shire’.<\/p>\n

* And finally, on GitHub I find the very comprehensive javascript-driven “Shire Reckoning: A visualization of the calendars described in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings<\/em> Appendix D”<\/a>. The GitHub shows it was last updated in September 2022. Impressive work.<\/p>\n

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Tolkien Gleanings #22 * New today, a long article on “Eucatastrophe and Evangelium: Tolkien\u2019s Devotion to St. John the Evangelist”. At the end of this the reader learns that… “This article is adapted from material in Holly Ordway\u2019s forthcoming book, Tolkien\u2019s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (Word on Fire Academic, 2023).” Good to hear of a […]<\/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-11778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tolkien-gleanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11778","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=11778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}