{"id":18750,"date":"2026-01-12T19:16:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T19:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/?p=18750"},"modified":"2026-01-15T10:21:52","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T10:21:52","slug":"tolkien-gleanings-374","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2026\/01\/12\/tolkien-gleanings-374\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Gleanings #374"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings<\/a> #374<\/p>\n

* All of Phil Dragash’s original recordings (2026)<\/a>, on a 9Gb .torrent. This new ‘complete collection’ including all outtakes, versions and extras, now issued in a bundle via the Internet Archive for…<\/p>\n

“…the sake of completeness and preservation. […] all versions of each chapter, original and re-recorded, preserved in their unedited form. […] All files provided here are encoded in MP3 at 192 kbps.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This treasure-trove potentially now gives the opportunity for an audiophile to ‘patch to perfection’ Dragash’s full-cast Lord of the Rings<\/em> unabridged soundscape. Perhaps with the aid of the voice-cloning AI called Chatterbox to replace a few mispronunciations or skips, plus the AI prompt-to-SFX generator Stable Audio Open. <\/p>\n

* New in the book Transformations of Oral and Written Narratives: The Interdisciplinary Approach<\/a><\/em> (2025), the chapter “Tolkien\u2019s refashioning of the Volsung material in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun and the depiction of the titular hero as a world-saving typos Christi”. Freely available online, in open-access and Creative Commons Sharealike.<\/p>\n

* A new podcast discussion on “Middle-earth and Modern Meaning: Tolkien, Barfield, and the Soul of Story”<\/a>…<\/p>\n

“In this conversation, philosopher Robert Rowland Smith is joined by psychotherapist and writer Dr Mark Vernon to explore the imaginative world of J.R.R. Tolkien and the often-overlooked influence of Owen Barfield.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* The French Festival of Classical Languages<\/a> (February 2026) will have a short session on ‘Tolkien and the Memory of Antiquity’.<\/p>\n

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

* Possibly of interest to some readers of Gleanings<\/em>, the new biography The Buried Man: A Life of H. Rider Haggard<\/a><\/em> (2025).<\/p>\n

* Now booking in Oxford, Magdalen College’s Lord of the Rings<\/em> Marathon Screening<\/a>, a one-day screening of the extended movie trilogy. Tickets likely to vanish in a twinkling, as it’s only \u00a320 inc. food.<\/p>\n

* Oxfam charity-shop volunteers in Scotland have turned up a 1968 edition of Tolkien’s The Hobbit<\/em> among the donations. It turned out to be a rare schools edition of which only around 50 copies have survived. Now sold for \u00a33,000.<\/p>\n

* And finally… some of the Google Earth (desktop version) overhead imagery for the UK now has a “1945” toggle. Thus one can see Barnt Green and its train station as it was at the end of the war. Including a quiet back-lane that would have led from the back of the station to the north corner of the village. The alignment of modern roads (yellow) on old roads seems slightly mis-registered, presumably so one can actually see the old roads.<\/p>\n

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

At the top of this back-lane, which still bears the evocative name of ‘Fiery Hill’, one would have turned immediately right into the village, through this unusual tall railway archway… <\/p>\n

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

The arch recalls the shape of the entrance to Moria in LoTR<\/em>. One can imagine that if an imaginative boy encountered it in 1900s rural darkness, on the way to the train station and back to Birmingham, it might have for a moment seemed a sort of forbidding door to a dark underworld. Though one would have to get a modern straight-on photo to compare the dimensions exactly with those of the Moria entrance, to see how precisely they match.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings #374 * All of Phil Dragash’s original recordings (2026), on a 9Gb .torrent. This new ‘complete collection’ including all outtakes, versions and extras, now issued in a bundle via the Internet Archive for… “…the sake of completeness and preservation. […] all versions of each chapter, original and re-recorded, preserved in their unedited form. […]<\/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-18750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tolkien-gleanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18750","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=18750"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18757,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18750\/revisions\/18757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}