Tolkien Gleanings #188

Tolkien Gleanings #188.

* Tolkien researcher Oronzo Cilli now has a new blog at tolkienarchive.blogspot.com. New there is a freely-available post headed “Tolkien’s Undisclosed 1946 Lecture on The Notion Club Papers at Stonyhurst”. The blog’s RSS feed is here.

* Now available for download for Tolkien Society members, Amon Hen #306 (April 2024). This has interesting articles on religious pilgrimage and LoTR, on the signalling handbooks in Tolkien’s library in relation to signalling in LoTR, and a detailed look at Carcharoth the Wolf, among much else. The October 2023 advert for a graphic designer is likely still ‘in play’, judging by some of this issue’s rough edges. Two new copy-editors are reported, but no-one to streamline the layout and sequencing. Hopefully that someone, when found, will re-design without destroying Amon Hen’s current comfy and homely feel. A sympathetic makeover wouldn’t need much. Coherent font choices and sizes, columns of text for easier reading, an indicative colour for each regular section, jettison some DTP-isms such as the ill-fitting header-frames, do much better copy-fitting, and don’t squish the photos. I’d probably also have all the full-page art as a coherent ‘Gallery’ section at the back, with an extra four gallery pages as a small incentive to get the digital edition.

* The Naples stop for Italy’s medium-sized touring exhibition, titled ‘Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author’, has reportedly been a big hit… “in just three weeks, from 16th March to 7th April 2024, the exhibition had 34,795 entries”.

* Seemingly newly posted(?), a “An Interview with Howard Shore”, recorded in 2003. Shore being the composer of the superb soundtrack for the original LoTR movie trilogy.

* On YouTube, Prof. Tom Shippey on Beowulf, Sci-Fi, and Tolkien. Being a 90 minute Patreon Q&A from last October, which I appear to have missed at that time.

* Interesting to see that the novelist John Cowper Powys (A Glastonbury Romance etc) was also a lucid thinker on culture. Archive.org has his book The Meaning of Culture (1929) as a new ‘to borrow’ item. This led me to the Digital Library of India’s open PDF version for the book’s 1932 reprint in Jonathan Cape’s ‘Life and Letters’ series. Note however that the 1932 book has a new and far less forthright author’s introduction, which voids his pithy 1929 summary of the Englishman’s view of other major strands of culture. This older introduction still seems useful today as a snapshot of the national-literary worldview in which Tolkien was also immersed…

* I’ve now heard the new 2023 version of Phil Dragash’s full-cast unabridged fan-project of Fellowship. I find that Farmer Maggot and Merry and even the early Strider have been re-voiced, and that I rather prefer the voices in the older 2013-14 version. If asked I’d thus still recommend the older 2013-2014 version, with the 2023 version only for the Moria sections. 2023 containing as it does the previously inadvertently-omitted section at the Doors of Moria (the latter part of the wading of the pool-edge, the first encounter with the likely site of the Doors of Moria and the holly trees, and then the short but poignant section involving Bill the pony).

Just one instance of the voice changes:

2013/14 version: “Strider” at 2:28, in the Inn at Bree. “But one thing interested me. Please remember, said one of them that the name BAGGINS (emphasised) must not be mentioned”.

2023 version: “Strider” at 2:30, in the Inn at Bree. “But one thing interested ME (emphasis). Please REMEMBER (semi-emphasis) said one of them, that the name of Baggins must not be mentioned”. (No emphasis on “Baggins” here, in fact the opposite).

It appears the changes appeared in a “2014” version, unknown to me, from which the 2023 version was apparently created (simply by splicing in the missing section).