{"id":17813,"date":"2025-08-10T19:27:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T18:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=17813"},"modified":"2025-08-29T17:02:18","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T16:02:18","slug":"tolkien-gleanings-319","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2025\/08\/10\/tolkien-gleanings-319\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Gleanings #319"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings<\/a> #319<\/p>\n

* The latest edition of the journal Translation Review<\/em> reviews Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy, and Translation<\/em><\/a> (2024) ($ paywall).<\/p>\n

* Oronzo Cilli’s new article on “Tolkien, Trains, and Two Discoveries: Meccano and Hornby”<\/a>. Hornby here refers to the famous brand of British model-railway trains, and their associated track layouts running through home-made miniature landscapes of lovingly crafted chicken-wire, papier-mache and pipe-cleaner trees. There was nothing unusual about this at the time, since ‘model railroading’ (as Americans may know it) was once a hugely popular male hobby in Britain. Even today, the hobby still sustains a regular glossy news-stand magazine.<\/p>\n

* Dimitra Fimi on “Tolkien, Landscape Archaeology, and the First Age of Middle-earth”<\/a>, specifically the great landscape monuments that endured into the Third Age.<\/p>\n

* New in the journal The Literary Scientist<\/em> “What Did She Know About Transformation That We Don\u2019t?”<\/a> (2025). Freely available online.<\/p>\n

“An old woman lingers in Sir Bertilak\u2019s castle, silent and unnoticed. Only at the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight<\/em> is her name revealed […] Far from a mere enchantress, her manipulation of life forms, elemental forces, and bodily change aligns with alchemy\u2019s quest for transmutation, renewal […] In medieval thought, metals were purified into gold through trial, just as Bertilak becomes a vessel of endurance and near-immortality to test Gawain\u2019s virtue. The Green Knight\u2019s seasonal return and survival of decapitation embody alchemical ideals of regeneration and the Elixir of Life.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* From the University of Birmingham, “‘Stille as the stone, or a stubbe other’: Mineral and Energy Imaginaries in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”<\/em><\/a> (2025). To appear in Studies in the Age of Chaucer<\/em>, but already freely available online in Open Access.<\/p>\n

“Situating the poem within the context of its geographical allusions to (in sequence [of travel]) regions of coal, lead, and wood\/charcoal, it argues that these are components not simply of the poet\u2019s worldbuilding but the text\u2019s narrative logic. It locates Sir Gawain and the Green Knight within the Galfridian tradition \u2013 derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth […] engaged with the island\u2019s terranean and subterranean riches.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A useful focus on gold, silver, lead and charcoal. Though the author regrettably assumes Gawain ceases his journey in the Wirral, and that Hautdesert and its precisely-described topography is somehow a purely imaginary place. Yet the text itself clearly tells us he goes through<\/em> the Wirral and carries on into very different and obviously real-world upland terrain — which incidentally had medieval lead mining at the time of the authorship of Gawain<\/em>. re: coal the author might also wish to know that in 1257 Queen Eleanor had protested that Nottingham was too smoky and sulphurous due to sea-coal burning, and therefore uninhabitable for her and her court. Eleanor decamped for the cleaner air at Tutbury Castle in East Staffordshire. Sea-coal was being mined near Tunstall (North Staffordshire) from 1282 onwards, along a ridge only a few miles south of Sir Gawain’s likely route. <\/p>\n

* In Italy at the end of August 2025, a two-day Tolkien Music Festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* The Narnia Fans<\/em> website has an interview<\/a> with the maker of the new book Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the Worlds of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien<\/em> (2025).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings #319 * The latest edition of the journal Translation Review reviews Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy, and Translation (2024) ($ paywall). * Oronzo Cilli’s new article on “Tolkien, Trains, and Two Discoveries: Meccano and Hornby”. Hornby here refers to the famous brand of British model-railway trains, and their associated track layouts running […]<\/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-17813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tolkien-gleanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17813","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=17813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17965,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17813\/revisions\/17965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}