Tolkien Gleanings #176.
* “Tom Bombadil and the ‘hyper-fantastic’ in J.R.R. Tolkien”, a new essay in English from the Spanish Tolkien Society. Freely available, newly posted as part of the Society’s Aelfwine 2023 set of contest-winning essays.
* Freely available, the Masters dissertation “Fantasy in Translation: an Analysis and Comparison of the English Chapter ‘The Council of Elrond’ from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and its Chinese Translation” (2023). Italian, in English with Chinese quotations. It concludes that…
“Despite several errors – some of which produce a distortion of the original text’s meaning – this [Ding Di] Chinese edition of The Lord of the Rings is important as it marked a new era for the country’s fantasy production.”
This complements the new book Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy and Translation (2024).
* New in Russian, an essay which translates as “The motif of radiance in the poems ‘Christ’ by Cynewulf and ‘The Last Wandering of Earendel’ by J.R.R. Tolkien” (2023). Freely available. The author suggests the ‘Christ’ echoes…
“Dionysius the Areopagite, a church thinker of the 1st century, who in his work “On the Heavenly Hierarchy” directly says that the angels are filled with “sacred radiance” [5, p.21]. It is unclear whether Cynewulf was familiar with the work of the Areopagite, but the idea itself had long been comprehended by the Church and adapted for preaching.”
* “Why Tolkien Hated Dune”. A strong and long article, but “hated” is too strong a word. Even if Tolkien’s comment in a letter that “I dislike Dune with some intensity” comes close. I object to the use because the casual-fanboy clickbait-y use of “Tolkien hated…” seems a worrying new trend. He “hated” Disney. He “hated” Frank Herbert’s Dune. He “hated” modern technology. He “hated” the Roman Empire, and so on. All this seems dangerous in a world where there are some who would like to establish a false consensus, in the minds of the uninformed young, that “everyone knows” Tolkien was a hater. Such headlines may contribute to subtly establishing a climate-of-feeling about the man, which could then be exploited further by those with an anti-Tolkien agenda.
* Depressed by the media’s relentless drum-beat of doom, pessimism and alarmism, this week The Good Catholic finds hope that ““The Eagles Are Coming!”: Tolkien & the Catholic Hope of Eucatastrophe”. Well… yes. But perhaps adding a reading of the secular The Rational Optimist could triple the antidote effect.
* On “Forgetting the Way to Faerie”, with some choice quotes.
* Forthcoming in May 2024 from Manchester University Press, the book Fantastic Histories: Medieval fairy narratives and the limits of wonder. Set to examine…
“the histories of Gerald of Wales and Walter Map, the continental mirabilia of Gervase of Tilbury, and the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French Melusine romances and their early English reception”.
* “Bees in folk belief and practices before and now” (2023), free via searching for the article title “in quotes” on Google Scholar. A well-researched Estonian scholarly essay in English, with a strong medieval focus and useful awareness of Eastern Europe.
* On DeviantArt, Kuliszu of Poland, who paints often-charming naive-style artworks of Middle-earth scenes.
* And finally, Tolkien’s uncle Wilfred (1870-1938). Not much to go on at present, but who knows where slim leads might lead to?
The Spyders of Burslem 
Hello, I’m the author of “Why Tolkien Hated Dune”. I thank you for linking and for calling the article “strong”, and I appreciate your points about the title and Tolkien’s perspective. I would just like to defend my choice of words. I do believe that the word “hate” does not have nearly the same meaning as it did in the 1960s when Tolkien penned his comments, and certainly not the same as it did earlier in the century when Tolkien was developing his own ideolect and semantic impressions. It is a word that has undergone a great deal of semantic inflation, and is thus much weaker than it used to be – according to Google Ngram viewer it took on a new life after 1980 and is is more than three times more present in common usage today than it was in 1920. Someone born since 1980 – most blog readers – would likely use “hate” to express the same intensity of emotion for which someone born in 1892 would use “dislike”, let alone “strongly dislike”. Phrasing the title as “Hwætforð Tolkien misliked Dune” would be even less clickbait-y.
Regarding Tolkien as a person, I have not studied the character of Tolkien himself in depth but even a casual fanboy knows that he was a man of values, and as the saying goes “to tolerate everything is to value nothing”. Tolkien was not “hateful” in the modern sense of the word, but it seems he certainly had strong opinions about what society should value (charity, nature, selfless service) or reject (greed, materialism, egotistical pride).
I am not sure if there was an error when I posted or whether my comment was edited, but I had attempted to add a second paragraph, between the first and third, after the 1892 sentence:
You mention that the term is “clickbait-y”, and you are not entirely wrong, because the era of clickbait is both a contributor to, but also a result of, semantic inflation. On the one hand it is true that an article titled “Why Tolkien Disliked Dune” would bait fewer clicks than one that uses the term “hate”, on the other hand as mentioned above the choice of words is merely keeping step with what is a living and evolving language. Phrasing the title as [here I correct the old English from the above] “Hwætforð Tolkien āsċūnode Dune” would be even less clickbait-y.
Hi. No the first response was not edited. It was posted as written.