{"id":12303,"date":"2023-02-10T16:28:07","date_gmt":"2023-02-10T16:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=12303"},"modified":"2023-02-10T16:28:07","modified_gmt":"2023-02-10T16:28:07","slug":"tolkien-gleanings-39","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2023\/02\/10\/tolkien-gleanings-39\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Gleanings #39"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings<\/a> #39<\/p>\n

* John Garth talks about working with original Tolkien source-materials, among other things, on the latest Prancing Pony Podcast<\/em><\/a> (#278, 5th February 2023).<\/p>\n

* I see the new book Thanks for Typing: Remembering Forgotten Women in History<\/em> (2021) has a short ten-page section titled “Edith Tolkien in the eye of the beholder”. I then found there was a very brief review-note in a recent Mythlore<\/em> on this, which called this section a “sound” survey of how Edith was understood in public forms such as a memoirs, biographies and (now) cinema. What little can be had of it via Google Books suggests it’s indeed a useful survey of her later stereotypical incarnations, as “Romantic Heroine”, “Unhappy Ever After”, “Proud and Opinionated Princess”, etc.<\/p>\n

* A long sample of an ElevenLabs TTS Tolkien AI narrator voice<\/a>. Not bad, a little ‘Indian English’ in places, but very listenable. It sounds almost as if they trained this AI voice on the official LoTR<\/em> audiobook narrator and then trained that against readings by a similarly very refined high-caste Indian English-speaker. The disadvantage with these new AI TTS voices is that (so far) none can be produced offline and they require monthly paid subscriptions. For offline you’d still need to use the old-school TSS voices (the abandonware IVONA 2 Brian, British<\/a>, is still the best such) and then in the Balabolka software you’d hand-craft various XML tags that control and shape how a TTS voice talks.<\/p>\n

* Another demo, this time of AI-cloned Stephen Fry narrating The Hobbit<\/em><\/a>. Impressive, and it’s from the Poland-based ElevenLabs again. A good demo, but if I plan to spend 8-12 hours or more with an audiobook I’ll still want it read by a human. Because I know that after ten minutes you get the aural equivalent of sea-sickness, even with these new AI TTS voices. <\/p>\n

But that said, there are millions of good books which will never be an audiobook in any other way, and we’re only at the very beginning of the AI revolution. The results will get even better by 2024, 2025… and all the moaning and hand-wringing and EU ‘bans’ in the world won’t stop that from happening now. Of course, I do recall an account of Tolkien ‘casting the demons out’ of an early dict-a-phone machine (an early form of voice-recorder) before he would speak into it… so it’s highly unlikely he would have approved of such things. But they’re here to stay now.<\/p>\n

* And finally, it appears that the rather pleasing 1975 Frank Frazetta Lord of the Rings Portfolio<\/a><\/em> is back in print(?). Certainly $80 seems remarkably low, if what’s being offered is really one of the original 1975 run of the portfolio. So I’m assuming a reprint facsimile? Anyway the prints are b&w pen and ink drawings and are not too far from how I see the story, apart from his early-1970s ‘glam mag’ Eowyn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings #39 * John Garth talks about working with original Tolkien source-materials, among other things, on the latest Prancing Pony Podcast (#278, 5th February 2023). * I see the new book Thanks for Typing: Remembering Forgotten Women in History (2021) has a short ten-page section titled “Edith Tolkien in the eye of the beholder”. […]<\/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-12303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tolkien-gleanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12303","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=12303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}