{"id":19609,"date":"2026-07-13T17:18:51","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T16:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/?p=19609"},"modified":"2026-07-14T05:14:48","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T04:14:48","slug":"tolkien-gleanings-439","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2026\/07\/13\/tolkien-gleanings-439\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Gleanings #439"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings<\/a> #439<\/p>\n

* Alas, Not Me<\/em> digs into the LoTR<\/em> drafts and excisions, to throw more light on the recent discovered “Crickhollow” letter, in “Treebeard on Tom Bombadil”<\/a>. Yes, Tolkien excised a section where Treebeard discusses knowing Bombadil. Which is something the new letter refers to. <\/p>\n

* John Garth tracks down the exact date that Tolkien had a \u00a3400 Leverhulme Fellowship<\/a> award in the mid 1930s, and discusses the likely impact. (Substack, but free).<\/p>\n

Industrialist and philanthropist Lord Leverhulme had died in 1925 leaving part of his legacy to scholarships for research. In May 1933, his trustees announced they would annually be handing out \u00a312,000 in research fellowships.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* New on Archive.org, a scan of a 1952 printing of Gordon and Tolkien’s Sir Gawain & The Green Knight<\/a><\/em>. This was… “the most widely used text of the poem for forty years”, in classrooms, until 1967.<\/p>\n

* From Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, Eastern Europe, the undergraduate final dissertation “The Influence of Germanic Myths on J.R.R. Tolkien in Relation to the Character of Smaug”<\/a> (2026). Freely available online, in English.<\/p>\n

* The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has just published a new page on “Tolkien and the Somme”<\/a>, with images, details on the duties of a signals officer, plus a FAQ.<\/p>\n

* Thinking of visiting England this summer? Yes, for once we are having a rare real<\/em> summer, complete with England in a World Cup and an inundation of iconic Red Admiral butterflies. Dorset’s Royal Signals Museum<\/a> could be an interesting Tolkien-related stop for your tourist itinerary, if travelling over to Cornwall. Though be warned that it appears the First World War section is relatively small…<\/p>\n

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

The museum’s First World War horse-drawn cable wagon<\/a> (see image, lower right) is interesting, in relation to the possibility that Tolkien worked closely with horses at the battle-front. The new Commonwealth War Graves Commission page for Tolkien (see above) has… “Laying and repairing telephone wires across shell\u2011torn ground, often under bombardment” as a key duty of a Signals Officer.<\/p>\n

* Need some suitable beach reading, this summer? There’s a new book from an Australian research centre, which has a matching theme. Whispers from Celtic Seas<\/a><\/em> (June 2026) asks…<\/p>\n

What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, showing how they preserve memories of dramatic environmental change — floods, land loss and shifting shorelines — carried forward through oral storytelling for generations. Drawing on cutting-edge geological and archaeological research, this book recasts these tales not as fantasy, but as historical testimony grounded in lived experience. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* Google Earth desktop is a useful tool for research on localities in the British Isles. I also find it far more reliable\/faster than the Web version, especially for Streetview. But download it while you can, because Google will no longer be maintaining or distributing it from next year. They said last week… <\/p>\n

“While you can continue using Google Earth Pro desktop, it will no longer be available for new downloads beginning on June 25, 2027”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* Another useful tool was the British Library’s thesis database. This was attacked by a likely-Russian ransomware gang in 2023, and the records lost. Now after four years it’s back online, after much painstaking restoration. “EThOS records restored”<\/a> reported the British Library last week…<\/p>\n

“metadata records of over 650,000 theses from UK universities have been loaded onto the new platform<\/a>. This includes around 14,000 additional\u202ftheses that have been added to the service since the cyber-attack.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The latest “Tolkien” search-result is now 2024. Records have hyperlinks to repositories and one interesting item was thus discovered, not already noted on Gleanings<\/em>. The Illustrated Letter: A practice-based investigation of epistolary storytelling through illustration<\/a><\/em> (2023), a PhD which used Tolkien as a case-study. Open access and freely available.<\/p>\n

* And finally, The Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction has released the new issue of their annual journal, Gramarye<\/em> 29<\/a> (Summer 2026). Their website has the contents list.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings #439 * Alas, Not Me digs into the LoTR drafts and excisions, to throw more light on the recent discovered “Crickhollow” letter, in “Treebeard on Tom Bombadil”. Yes, Tolkien excised a section where Treebeard discusses knowing Bombadil. Which is something the new letter refers to. * John Garth tracks down the exact date […]<\/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-19609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tolkien-gleanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19609","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=19609"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19632,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19609\/revisions\/19632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}