Tolkien Gleanings #194

Tolkien Gleanings #194.

* Walking Tree has just published the book The Songs of the Spheres: Lewis, Tolkien and the Overlapping Realms of their Imagination (2024). They have a table-of-contents and description. I see the book includes, among what sound like heavier articles, “The Nostalgic Fantasy of “Good Plain Food” in Narnia and Middle-earth”.

* The Herbal History Research Network will have a… “celebration of 15 years since the network was founded”, in London on 16th October 2024. At their blogs you can find things such as an overview of the curious Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm which talks of “waybread” as one of the nine ingredients. The relevant section is given in translation.

* A new masters dissertation “J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit in ELT”. ELT being edu-speak for English Language Teaching, in this case with children in a “lower secondary school” some 100 miles east of the city of Prague. Lesson plans are included. Freely available online, in English.

* One I seem to have missed in the Christmas 2023 rush. The blog Tolkien & illustration posted “John Howe in Tolkien’s footsteps: exhibition review”, illustrated with photos. The solo art show was in Brittany and ran until the end of January 2024. Howe’s exhibition has since been shipped to Finland, where it will be on show again from 6th July to 18th August 2024.

* New at Signum University for May, the first session of “A Journey Through The History of the Hobbit”. Booking now.

* I’m still skimming my way back through the 300+ Amon Hen issues, focusing on reviews and articles. Found in Amon Hen No. 173… a note on “Vinyar Tengwar Number 41 (July 2000). This issue boasts of three unpublished linguistic items by Tolkien to which Carl Hostetter provides notes. […] The third piece is Tolkien’s exacting study of the word “óre”.” I find that the Vinyar Tengwar Web Shop now offers a link to the Collected Vinyar Tengwar 41-50 as a 400-page paperback for less than £10. However, this must be óre the Quenya word, and Tolkien Gateway website confirms this. Thus it’s not a study of the first part of the primary-world name Orendel (12th century German cognate for the Anglo-Saxon earendel).

* Talking of Orendel I stumbled on the book Bridal-Quest Epics in Medieval Germany. A Revisionary Approach (2012). Still available from The University of London at £20 (Amazon UK has it, but at high ‘academic library’ prices), the book covers four epics including Orendel and has “a detailed history of the textual scholarship” given in English. If the book has a concise and complete overview in English of the pre-1939 black-letter German scholarship on Orendel, then it would certainly be of interest to me. A review of the book is encouraging. Not only do we get a lucid history of the scholarship in English, it seems, but also… “The chapter on Grauer Rock: Orendel was my favorite. Its brilliant analysis puts at the center of its inquiry the text’s eponymous gray robe, a wonder-working robe or tunic worn first by Christ and later by the epic’s hero, Orendel.”

* On YouTube, Tolkien’s poem: Bagme Bloma, but in Proto-Germanic… “Tolkien wrote this poem in Gothic, but I have reconstructed it for you in its father language.”

* And finally, The Exeter Book, source of the word earendel, has been newly read aloud by the Librivox audiobook volunteers. Now available, free and pubic domain.

Tolkien Gleanings #193

Tolkien Gleanings #193.

* An update on the forthcoming Tolkien’s Collected Poems, from the editors. The book will be in three volumes, not one volume as previously mooted, and these will be slip-cased in a box. 1,620 pages in total. The mid September dead-tree release date is currently holding. There will be an index (my guess: presumably an index to the names, places and themes in the poetry, as well as all the other material). I can add that Amazon UK also now lists a £45 Kindle ebook version, set for the same release date.

* Peter Jackson’s “remastered” and “extended” original LoTR movie trilogy is to be shown in cinemas for the first time. Sadly it’s not a general-release run for the “4K Ultra HD” extended versions, despite cinemas desperately needing box-office after suffering strings of flops. It’s just a very limited showing in the USA. Tickets on sale now, for June 2024.

* Released early next week, the short book J.R.R. Tolkien: A Catholic Life. From an American writer who apparently worked on the topic for a number of years, independently from and unconnected with Holly Ordway. It will be interesting to see if he can fill any of the ‘gaps’ in Ordway’s work (e.g. early influence of the poet Francis Thompson, late religious life while in Stoke-on-Trent with his son), although it seems it’s not a table-trembler — Amazon UK has it at just 126 pages. The cover is artfully blended, but one hopes the licencing fees have been paid… it contains a collage of movie-actor stills above a central Tolkien picture rights-managed by Getty Images.

* A new undergraduate disseration, “Where the Blue Flowers Grow: Sehnsucht and Eucatastrophe in Christian Fantasy Literature” (2024). Freely available online.

* New on YouTube, The Catholic Current podcast on “Hope for the Hopeless/The Philosophy of Tolkien”, talking with the author of the book The Philosophy of Tolkien (2005).

* John Garth is set to give a talk in Leeds tomorrow. Last time I looked, £15 tickets were still available…

* Late news of an American lecture which was set for 26th April, “Ariosto, Tolkien, and the Italian Way to Fantasy”. The event has now been and gone, but one can hope a recording will show up on YouTube at some point. I believe Tolkien is on record as never having read or encountered Ariosto.

* The British Fairies blog has a new post on “Faery cups — thefts & punishments”.

* And finally, a new PhD thesis on Mythical Middle England: A Quest to Capture Cinematic Imagery in Suburban Worcestershire which among other things… “provides a theoretical toolkit for academics and artists to better understand how genius loci can be represented” on the screen. Or will provide, since it’s under embargo at the Kent University repository until March 2027.

More from Stoke and Staffs

New and local on Archive.org…

* Up the Garden Path (1986) (Rare D&D light-hearted fantasy-adventure module, produced for the 1986 Stoke Garden Festival and modelled on the site)

* Silverdale: the five road ends – a memoir of a 1940s childhood in a North Staffs mining village (2011)

* Oil paintings in public ownership in Staffordshire (2007) (Completist catalogue)

* History of the 8th North Staffords (1921) (British Army)

* Staffordshire Vol. 1: Natural History, Early Man, Romano-British Staffordshire, Anglo-Saxon Remains, Political History, Social and Economic History, Ancient Earthworks (1968) (Victoria Country Histories).

* Artists in industry : West Midlands (1984) (Artist placements in West Midlands industrial companies)

Tolkien Gleanings #192

Tolkien Gleanings #192.

* New in the Durham postgrad journal, the article “Archaic Pronouns in The Lord of the Rings”. Freely available online. I wasn’t previously aware of this open-access journal, and it’s now been indexed in Jurn. Jurn is my custom search engine (CSE) for open arts & humanities journals and, as with all CSEs, please note that it responds best to a sophisticated search query. Just tapping in a couple of keywords won’t cut it.

* New on YouTube, a recording of John Garth discussing “Tolkien and Lewis – Friendship That Redefined Fantasy” at the Bradford Literature Festival.

* Mercator reviews Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023).

* The Spanish Tolkien journal Nolme has just published its sixth issue. Articles include, among others, “Not of This World: Landscapes of the Imagination in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, and “Oral tradition in The Lord of the Rings“. (Titles here translated, articles in Spanish).

* New on Archive.org, the Yorkshire Dialect Society Transactions for 1928, in which George Taylor reviews the then-recent book A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District. One Professor Tolkien provided what the reviewer calls a “valuable” introduction to this, and the book is found to be relevant to Sir Gawain…

“It is a pity that the author has not come across kei, meaning “left”, used in the expressions kei neiv (left hand), kei-bokt (left-handed), and kei-boki (a left-hander, as at cricket). This is the O. Dan. [Old Danish] kei, and occurs in the fourteenth century Sir Gawayn [Gawain]. The most recent editors of which state (erroneously), that “kay [is] found only in Lancashire and Cheshire dialects.””

* New on YouTube, the April 2024 Update for the Digital Tolkien Project.

* In continuing to read back through the Amon Hen back-issues, I learned of a book I wasn’t yet aware of. Or may have just glanced at briefly some years ago, but discounted as not scholarly enough for my recent book. The short guidebook Tolkien’s Oxford (2008) looks entertaining and probably useful for pavement-pounding visitors. Across 144 pages many photos and maps are said to accompany… “a concise, knowledgeable and charming textual narrative which takes you chronologically from the likely route of Tolkien’s first journeys to Oxford as an aspiring student up to his grave in Wolvercote Cemetery” (from the very short review in Amon Hen #214). Still available, in paperback. I wonder if it will have information about exactly where The Silmarillion was assembled and written?

* And finally, the Wormwoodiana blog on “Radio Ghosts of the Mid Twentieth Century”, discussing the book Radio Camelot: Arthurian Legends on the BBC, 1922-2005 (2007).

Tolkien Gleanings #191

Tolkien Gleanings #191.

* The latest Touchstone magazine reviews Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology ($ paywall).

* As part of the one-day Leiden University symposium on Religion and Fantasy, a short talk on “Tië eldaliéva (The Elven Path): The First Legally Recognised Tolkien Church in the World”. There’s a long abstract available… “To distinguish itself more clearly from the movement of self-identified Elves, Tië eldaliéva recently decided to rebrand itself as The Way of Arda’s Lore (WAL).”

* At Leeds, “Uncovering a C.S. Lewis poem in Special Collections”. The poem is now published with commentary in the latest Journal of Inklings Studies: Vol. 14, No. 1 ($ paywall).

* I’m reading back through more than 300 issues of The Tolkien Society’s Amon Hen. I was pleased to reach #232 (Nov 2011) and there learn of a kindly gift to Birmingham. In 2011 the Tolkien Trust gave substantial funds for free scholarships at Tolkien’s old school in the city, restoring these to the level they were in 1911. In #231 it was further noted, in an Amon Hen conference report, that… “Tolkien’s family had been extremely generous to King Edward’s in the past, in grateful recognition of Tolkien’s time there”.

* Amon Hen #232 also had interesting details of… “his mother Mabel’s family […] Mabel and her sisters Edith May and Jane, and a younger sister, Rose, who died in the mid 1880s.” I don’t think I was aware of this before, and it throws a poigniant light on Tolkien’s choice of ‘Rose’ for Sam in LoTR.

* At the University of Glasgow online repository, the scholarly article “Tolkien, Shakespeare, trees, and the Lord of the Rings” is to be released… “on 9th October 2025 … under Creative Commons Attribution”. It appears to be a survey of Tolkien’s changing attitudes to Shakespeare, leading into a special focus on Hamlet as a source for walking trees and then a discussion of Shakespeare’s Warwickshire-bred “arboreal sensibility” as a unconscious influence on LoTR.

* My speculative article musing on “A site for a new national Tolkien Centre?”.

* The venerable Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction now has a substantial part of the run of its Gramarye journal in e-book form. #16 has “In Search of Jenny Greenteeth” & “‘A Fairy, or Else an Insect’: Traditions at Fairy Wells”; #14 had “From Ogre to Woodlouse: A Journey through Names” [possibly on woodwose?]; while #13 had “Tolkien’s style”. Regrettably one needs to register before ordering, and there’s no indication if PayPal is a payment method or not.

* In the USA, Boise State University needs people who can lead discussions on constructed fictional languages, for a forthcoming course to be run by the Department of Linguistics.

* And finally, for those too young as yet to enjoy The Hobbit… I’m pleased to see that the Dragons Friendly Society now has the classic original Noggin the Nog on DVD and also a Pogles’ Wood four-DVD set including the 14 lost episodes. PayPal accepted.