{"id":18272,"date":"2025-09-21T15:14:56","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T14:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/?p=18272"},"modified":"2025-09-21T16:55:54","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T15:55:54","slug":"tolkien-gleanings-334","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2025\/09\/21\/tolkien-gleanings-334\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Gleanings #334"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings<\/a> #334<\/p>\n

* From Italy, “Una Compagnia all’interno della Compagnia: Frodo, Sam e lo spirito del comitatus”<\/a> (2025) (‘A company within the company: Frodo, Sam and the spirit of the comitatus’<\/em>). In Italian, with a very lengthy English summary at the back. Freely available online. Examines…<\/p>\n

“the concept of comitatus – the bond of loyalty and protection between a leader and his followers, central to ancient Germanic society – and tries to trace its transformations through literary and historical tradition up to its modern reworking by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* Now listing on Amazon, the scholarly collection Tolkien’s Medievalism in Ruins: The Function of Relics and Ruins in Middle-earth<\/a><\/em>. Shipping just before Christmas 2025, at a ruinous \u00a390 (hardback only, as currently listed). Although the publisher’s page<\/a> pegs the release at 16th October, and anticipates that a slightly cheaper ebook version will also be available. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

* VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center<\/a><\/em> (2024) has “The Historical Perspective: Gleanings from C.S. Lewis’s Personal Library”, plus reviews of What Barfield Thought<\/em>, The Battle of Maldon Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth<\/em>, Tolkien’s Faith<\/em>, and book notes for “Something Has Gone Crack”: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War<\/em>, and The Fall of Numenor<\/em>. Freely available online.<\/p>\n

* A Vintage Dutchman<\/em> goes “Exploring Geoffrey Bache Smith\u2019s Impact on Tolkien”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* A Masters disseration from the University of Iceland, “Puck’s Medieval Ancestry: The Puck Figure in Medieval Evidence and Late Collected Folklore of North Atlantic Europe”<\/a> (2024). Freely available online. <\/p>\n

* Some readers may also be interested in the chapter “From Homer to John Eugenicus: The Long Journey of Riddles through Greek and Byzantine Literatures”<\/a> (2024), freely available online…<\/p>\n

“Another mysterious poet who is credited with the composition of seven riddles is a certain Theodorus Aulicalamus. […] The first riddle in [his] small collection still baffles the scholars, who are not sure about its real solution:<\/p>\n

  Even if am not alive, I have two heads;
\n  my nature belongs both to the sea and to the land.
\n  If you cut my head, made up of a double sign,
\n  you change neither my name, nor my nature.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d suggest “the tide” fits well as an answer, if the Greek symbol of the tide(s) was Neptune’s trident. If one made a horizontal cut across the top of the head of a simple trident, it would still be a trident.<\/p>\n

* And finally, “How to practice leisure like a hobbit”<\/a>. To which one might add: invent activity-songs (for bath, walking, etc) and the occasional riddle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings #334 * From Italy, “Una Compagnia all’interno della Compagnia: Frodo, Sam e lo spirito del comitatus” (2025) (‘A company within the company: Frodo, Sam and the spirit of the comitatus’). In Italian, with a very lengthy English summary at the back. Freely available online. Examines… “the concept of comitatus – the bond of […]<\/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-18272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tolkien-gleanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18272","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=18272"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18279,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18272\/revisions\/18279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}