{"id":19651,"date":"2026-07-17T19:41:29","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T18:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/?p=19651"},"modified":"2026-07-18T10:23:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T09:23:51","slug":"tolkien-gleanings-442","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2026\/07\/17\/tolkien-gleanings-442\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Gleanings #442"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings<\/a> #442<\/p>\n

* The Oxford Tolkien Network has posted six YouTube videos<\/a> from their latest series of public talks… <\/p>\n

   – “Charting Faerie: Cartography as the Threshold of Enchantment”.
\n   – “Lexical Palimpsests: Old English and Old Norse Loan Words in Tolkien’s Gnomish Lexicon<\/em> (1917)”.
\n   – “Downfalls and Ruins: Tolkien and the Lost World of Catholic England”.
\n   – “The Verbal System of Quenya: Structures, Functions, and Linguistic Models in Tolkien\u2019s Linguistic Invention”.
\n   – “Genealogy of Smaug: draconic influences on Tolkien”.
\n   – “Tolkien the Parodist: Revisiting Songs for the Philologists”<\/em>.<\/p>\n

* Also new on YouTube, “Taking Tolkien’s 1920 Old English Exam”<\/a>…<\/p>\n

“In 1920, Tolkien sent a practice exam to a student at Somerville College, Oxford, to help her study. These questions, many of which were taken verbatim from previous exams, give us a fascinating insight into what Old English education at Oxford might have been like 100 years ago.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* The Tolkienist<\/em> has a new long and footnoted essay on “”The Man, O Muse, inform, that many a way \/ Wound”: On Aragorn and Odysseus as Wandering Men in Tolkien and Homer”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* New on Archive.org from the author, the book of personal memoirs Meditations: Contemplations Straight Out Of Joburg<\/a><\/em> (2024). This has the brief “Winter in Bloemfontein” (Tolkien’s birthplace and home for his early years), which modifies one’s assumption that the city was always very hot. <\/p>\n

“Wintertime in Bloemfontein is not cold … it\u2019s bitterly cold.” At best one could expect a “bitterly cold” morning, and a “bitter cold and unforgiving, razorblade breeze”, even when the winter sun was shining and promising some thawing later in the day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* The latest edition of the Spanish open-access journal Razon y fe<\/a><\/em> is a special issue on ‘Death: a limit, a truth and a promise’. It has the Spanish-language article “Death as a Gift and a Problem in Tolkien\u2019s Writings”, with an English title and abstract.<\/p>\n

“… it is argued that Tolkien presents death as an original gift of the one God, constitutive of human freedom and of his openness to a hope that transcends the world. [The] denial of finitude reappears symbolically in the One Ring, which offers a false overcoming of time at the price of dehumanization …”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* TheOneRing<\/em> rounds up all the relevant panels and merchant tables for LoTR<\/em> franchises at the San Diego Comic Con 2026<\/a>. Panels at this huge event will include, among others…<\/p>\n

   – Musical Worldbuilding.
\n   – Building Worlds like Tolkien.
\n   – Designing Games in Middle-earth.
\n   – LoTR<\/em>: New Age of Adaptations.<\/p>\n

* And finally, in Italian but auto-dubbed by YouTube, Paolo Nardi has the new short talk on “From Wade to Earendil: Tolkien\u2019s Lost Tale”<\/a>. Tolkien’s character of Earendil is discussed in the context of the primary-world lost tale of Wade.<\/p>\n

I’d add that it is possible to get a ‘magical’ meaning out of a key primary-world reference to Wade found in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale<\/em>. Chaucer has an old man determined to marry a young wife. The old man does not want to marry a woman over the age of 30, and says so thus:<\/p>\n

I woll no woman of thirty Winter age \/ It nis but Beanestraw and great forage
\nAnd eke thise old widowes (God it wote) \/ They connen so much craft in Wades bote
\nSo muchel broken harme whan hem list \/ That with hem should I neuer liue in rest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I want no woman who has seen thirty winters.
\nShe’ll be nothing but old stringy straw and dry weeds.
\nAnd if she’s one of those old widows, God help us!
\nThen — like Wade’s boat — she’ll know how to get so much out of her hole,
\nAnd will go on moaning even when she pleases [in bed],
\nThat with her I should never live a restful life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words an old window-woman would be adept at withholding sex until nagged-at chores were done by the husband. Then the old man comically imagines that even in bed she would still go on moaning out her complaints and demands. The implication could be that the hold of Wade’s boat magically concealed more inside than it appeared to on the outside: a sort of medieval TARDIS. Possibly there is then some relation here to the *weydh-<\/em>, the ‘hunt’ and the implied ‘catch-bag of the hunt’ containing the day’s take of hunt-meat and\/or fish. The hold of Wade’s boat might then be akin to a sort of magical bottomless ‘catch-bag of plenty’ — from which any treasure or weapons or tools or food might appear to serve the tale. Wade’s lost tale was apparently a “ridiculous romance” (or so said Chaucer), so such fanciful and magical notions might well have been present in it. <\/p>\n

Note also that the six surviving lines of the lost Wade epic enigmatically mention ‘nixies’ and water, which may interest some readers of Gleanings<\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings #442 * The Oxford Tolkien Network has posted six YouTube videos from their latest series of public talks…    – “Charting Faerie: Cartography as the Threshold of Enchantment”.    – “Lexical Palimpsests: Old English and Old Norse Loan Words in Tolkien’s Gnomish Lexicon (1917)”.    – “Downfalls and Ruins: Tolkien and the Lost […]<\/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-19651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tolkien-gleanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19651","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=19651"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19665,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19651\/revisions\/19665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}