Tolkien Gleanings #173

Tolkien Gleanings #173.

* A talk by Tom Shippey on “H. Rider Haggard and J.R.R. Tolkien”, set for 9th March 2024. Online, but it’s a $20 ticket for the live talk. Booking now.

The talk is organised by Uppsala, who will also have Tom Shippey discussing Woden on a new YouTube video — set to air on 2nd March 2024. This one looks free.

* A free YouTube recording of the talk “Tolkien and/or Jackson? Filming Tolkien’s legendarium”, given recently by the chairman of The Tolkien Society at the venerable Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction in the UK. The listenability is just about acceptable, though it can sometimes be difficult to catch what’s being said.

* Available now, the new book Tolkien’s Transformative Women: Art in Triptych (January 2024). Here are the TOCs…

* A new post at The Green Man Review rounds up the links to past Tolkien-related reviews. Who knew there was an audiobook of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, read by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame?

* At The Imaginative Conservative, “Sir Martin Gilbert and the Inklings”…

“Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill, knew J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Inklings personally. At one memorable lunch, Sir Martin gave me his impressions of these great men and of the Oxford of their day.”

* New to me, paid-for Tolkien Fonts, hand-drawn and digitised. Nice, but pricey. There’s always been a big gap between what font makers think their fonts are worth, and what people (who are not £40k-a-year graphic designers) will pay.

* U.S. publisher Abrams has announced a new graphic novel, The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, due in September 2024. By the Christian illustrator John Hendrix. He has a hand-drawn storybook style that’s also heavily influenced by 1990s/2000s graphic design.

John Hendrix cover illustration for an article on Viking DNA.

And a cover preview…

* And finally, a new Viking houses and standing stones LORA. Meaning, a free style-guidance plugin for use in generating AI images with Stable Diffusion 1.5 on a PC.

William Blake exhibition in Stoke

At last, a reason to visit the Potteries Museum, after a seemingly endless run of unappealing shows. I missed the news of a William Blake exhibition at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. It opened before Christmas, is still on and closes on 5th May 2024. So there’s plenty of time yet to see it, perhaps alongside the new Spitfire extension and/or a look to see how political the Natural History galleries have become these days.

Probably on the River Dove in the lower reaches of the Staffordshire Moorlands.

The artist is the Potteries photographer William Blake, not the earlier visionary poet of the same name. On show at the Museum are 50 of the 1,500 Blake images held by the Museum. Perhaps 800 of these appear to be on Staffordshire Past Track. The Warrillow Collection at Keele obviously has more of his, judging by the description of the show, since some pictures have been borrowed from there.

The Museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays. But is open Wednesday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm, also Sunday from 11am to 4pm.

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Update: Visited. A small show, greatly marred by reflective glass and badly positioned lights. Meaning it’s almost impossible to get a clear all-in-view view of most of the pictures as they should be seen. The glass should have been removed, as they’re only prints and not originals. The commentary in the small postcard selection might have mentioned that many homes would have had a postcard magnifier-viewer in the parlour. Lots of political choices of picture, as you might expect. No colorised images to enliven the dour b&w feel of the room. I would have paired it with another room in full colour, of his natural ‘sacred places’ pictures shown as 3ft wide matt prints on blocks without glass. Or backlit.

The Museum’s Natural History galleries continue to be excellent and focused as before on wildlife. The only axe-grinding I saw being the entirely justifiable display about litter.

A fine font

And perhaps an otherwise lost one? Font ID services can’t seem to identify it.

Tolkien Gleanings #172

Tolkien Gleanings #172.

* A planetarium lecture on “Tolkien’s Sky”, 8th March 2024 at the planetarium in Milan, Italy. What a fine idea. All sorts of night skies will presumably be shown in the sparkling dome. Real (e.g. Tolkien’s seminal observation of Venus and the Moon), time-shifted, and in Middle-earth. Though apparently a certain level of intervention would be required for the latter, since the popular Stellarium freeware can’t wheel the stars back in time beyond a certain point.

* Stellarium Sky Cultures: Elvish, a free plugin for night-skies as shown by the popular Stellarium astronomy freeware.

* Newly appeared and nicely ‘filling up the corners’ of the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, two speculative source essays. “The Holy Thorn of Glastonbury and the Two Trees of Valinor” and Kristine Larsen’s “The Royal Astronomer and the Astronomer Royal: Tar-Meneldur and Sir Harold Spencer Jones”. Both are freely available.

* The April issue of The National Review magazine ponders “The Enduring Appeal of J.R.R. Tolkien” ($ paywall) to receptive readers, in a review of the new Tolkien’s Faith.

* Law & Liberty magazine looks at “An Arthurian Brit in the Land of the Free”, in a new review of the book C.S. Lewis in America (November 2023).

* The journal article “Teaching Students to Hope with J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle””, new on Academia.edu. Non-members of which can also get a full PDF for free, by searching for the article title on Google Scholar. Scholar has a special arrangement with academia.edu.

* Sacnoth’s Scriptorium notes the formation of the Peruvian Tolkien Society.

* From a few years back now, but only just found, a long article on “Great-Granduncle Bullroarer”. The post has fascinating details on Tolkien’s personal tutor at Exeter. The blog, though apparently in abeyance, has been newly added to my Little Delvings in the Marsh search-engine for Tolkien scholars.

* American Songwriter on “The Story Behind “Over the Hills and Far Away” [1968] by Led Zeppelin and How It Was Inspired by a Tolkien Poem”…

Tolkien wrote a poem in 1915 called Over the Hills and Far Away. Plant took no lines from the poem other than the title. The area where Plant grew up was called the Black Country. This region north of Birmingham, England, was also where Tolkien was raised in the 1890s. The rolling hills and small villages inspired the setting of Tolkien’s books. Plant lived in Worcestershire, while Tolkien lived in Birmingham.

The poem was written at Brocton Camp in mid Staffordshire and then revisited and revised in 1927. It is to be found today in The Book of Lost Tales. But Plant was raised in Halesowen, with the large carpet-making town of Kidderminster being his nearest town-of-resort during his youth. Halesowen is to the west and below Birmingham on the map, and Kidderminster further so, with the town being distinctly isolated from Birmingham and its adjacent industrial Black Country. In those days oral histories show that people from Halesowen did not class themselves as Black Country, and nor did they have the distinctive dialect. Today there is some debate, as there always is about the boundaries of ‘The Black Country’. Tolkien on the other hand went to school in central Birmingham but was raised in the south of Birmingham, and he also knew the Lickey Hills in the rolling countryside further south. It’s quite possible he never even walked the industrial Black Country proper, though he may (like Auden) have seen it on the train from Birmingham to Wolverhampton. Thus the comparison the article makes between the two environments is broadly valid, and they are near to each other and would have been similar in topography, architecture and wry self-depreciating West Midlands attitudes (so different from those of the north of England, above the invisible line of what Jonathan Meades calls ‘The Irony Curtain’). So the article’s author is only really confused in thinking the places to be “north of Birmingham” and in the Black Country. They’re not.

* And finally, The Iron Room blog has a new post which considers the Birmingham Trade Catalogue Collection : All The Tricks of the Trade for library researchers. A few years ago I see the blog also had a post on Researching Birmingham Newspapers. I’d imagine these sources have been fairly well mined for likely Tolkien family-tree biographical material, but the guides may still be of use to some.

Tolkien Gleanings #171

Tolkien Gleanings #171.

* New in Portuguese, the book A arte de encontrar Deus entre fantasias e versos: Dante Alighieri, C.S. Lewis e J.R.R. Tolkien (2024), (‘The art of finding God among fantasy and verse: Dante Alighieri, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’). Although it lists as being 88-pages long, so… perhaps more of a printed set of lectures or a dissertation?

* A call-for-papers for the conference ‘A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Arda’, to be held in Germany in June 2024. The organisers state that… “the possibilities for engaging with Tolkien’s legendarium are almost endless”. Which implies that a speculative future-oriented paper, surveying ‘what has not yet been done, but might be’, could be of interest.

* New on Archive.org, J.R.R. Tolkien: Life and Legend (1992). Being a fair scan of the illustrated catalogue for the 1992 exhibition at the Bodleian Library.

* Also new on Archive.org in PDF, a good scan of Tolkien’s edition of the Ancrene Wisse (1962) for The Early English Text Society.

* In open-access at Glasgow, “By the waters of Anduin we lay down and wept: Tolkien’s Akallabeth and the prophetic imagination”. This was the lead article in Mallorn #64 in late 2023, and is thus otherwise locked down for non-members.

* The latest edition of The Critic magazine has a short review of the new expanded Tolkien Letters, and feels… “There is a lushness to this expanded Letters“.

* On Etsy to buy, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers in Yiddish translation, in handmade editions. The Return of the King is yet to come, it seems.

* Some LORAs, for use with your PC’s local Stable Diffusion image generator. One for the clothing of the Regency Period in Britain, which means 1811-1820. Though the gentleman’s style lingered on in less fashionable places for another five years or so. Regency could be a useful addition to the arsenal of steampunk artists, but I’m thinking it might also be usefully mixed with some of the older RPGHobbit LORA, to try to generate a more ‘rural gentry’ type of hobbit?

Update: If this one doesn’t do what you want, a few days later there was also another called Regency Period SD1.5.

This week there’s also a new first attempt at a LORA for Gondor’s city architecture and streets, Minas Numenor. Not entirely convincing, judging by the samples, but it might give you a base for a manual over-painting.

* And finally, new on Archive.org, the Complete Tengwar Fonts Collection.