{"id":14934,"date":"2024-02-10T16:23:47","date_gmt":"2024-02-10T16:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=14934"},"modified":"2024-02-10T16:23:47","modified_gmt":"2024-02-10T16:23:47","slug":"tolkien-gleanings-167","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2024\/02\/10\/tolkien-gleanings-167\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Gleanings #167"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings<\/a> #167.<\/p>\n

* The Tolkien Society has a new set of free video recordings on YouTube<\/a>. The short talks from a recent event include, among others, “Pagan Magic and the Marvelous: Songs of Enchantment in The Silmarillion<\/em>” and “Tolkien\u2019s Depiction of Cremation in the Context of Catholic Canon Law”.<\/p>\n

* A new illustrated article on “Tolkien and The Swan Press”<\/a>, a venture for which Tolkien wrote contributions during his tenure at Leeds University.<\/p>\n

* A new article muses on “Introducing Tolkien Fans to the Western Canon”<\/a>, with the author suggesting that Tolkien readers may like to initially sample Beowulf<\/em>, Ivanhoe<\/em>, and Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse<\/em>.<\/p>\n

* A fine cover illustration by Matt Stewart for the latest Amon Hen<\/em> #305, the bulletin\/magazine of the Tolkien Society. Now that I’ve found a regular job at last (if only cleaning toilets in Stoke-on-Trent) I’ve been able to justify the \u00a330\/$40 cost of joining the Society to access their publication back-issues and presumably the coming issues for 2024. Thankfully PayPal didn’t freak out at the unusual payment, and the Society’s membership bot didn’t confuse me with the apparently-banned David Day (phew<\/em>). In due course I hope to post a listing of the most interesting-to-me articles, which are (only) obtainable via membership.<\/p>\n

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* The YouTube video series My Life In Objects<\/em> flips through and discusses<\/a> Journeys of Frodo: An Atlas of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings<\/em>. A fine book which is in need of a reprint, as used prices continue to soar. If you’re quick there’s currently a paperback copy on Amazon UK for \u00a328, with shipping from Amazon itself — which means it can be conveniently sent to a locker for pick-up.<\/p>\n

* Been and gone in January 2024, a talk in Liverpool on “To the boy most cunning in Thucydides: the classical world of J.R.R. Tolkien”<\/a>. I don’t yet see a recording on YouTube.<\/p>\n

* Recommended for scholars, the Windows genuine freeware AnyTxt Searcher<\/a>. This speedily indexes inside your PC’s documents and then lets you search across them. It was a bit iffy five years ago when the old DocFetcher was still the best free option, but the developer has kept at it and 2023 saw a big spurt of development. It’s now very useful for scholars, has a dark mode, and appears to lack only proximity search<\/strike> Update: for proximity-search, turn on Regex by selecting \u2018Regular Match\u2019 in the search type drop-down, and use\u2026<\/p>\n

\\b(?:hobbits\\W+(?:\\w+\\W+){1,6}?supper|supper\\W+(?:\\w+\\W+){1,9}?hobbits)\\b<\/em><\/p>\n

This example will find all instances of \u2018hobbits\u2019 within 9 words of \u2018supper\u2019.<\/p>\n

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* And finally, talking of the tech world… the craze continues for naming new technologies after Tolkien characters. The lastest is Smaug-72B, the apparently hottest open-source AI chatbot that… “surpasses other advanced open-source models [and] excels in reasoning and math tasks”. Though with the current blistering pace of AI development, ‘Smaug’ likely won’t stay top-dragon for more than a few weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings #167. * The Tolkien Society has a new set of free video recordings on YouTube. The short talks from a recent event include, among others, “Pagan Magic and the Marvelous: Songs of Enchantment in The Silmarillion” and “Tolkien\u2019s Depiction of Cremation in the Context of Catholic Canon Law”. * A new illustrated article […]<\/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-14934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tolkien-gleanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14934","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=14934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}