An Inkling

As I mentioned in the last issue, I’ve been thinking lately about Tolkien’s writings on fate and free will in The Nature of Middle-earth. In one manuscript he writes about the Elven understanding of the interaction between a person’s radical free will and the Fate of the world or Iluvatar’s design:

E.g. one of the Eldar would have said that for all Elves and Men the shape, condition, and therefore the past and future physical development and destiny of this “earth” was determined and beyond their power to change, indeed beyond the power even of the Valar to alter in any large and permanent way. (They distinguished between “change” and redirection. Thus any “rational [?will-user]” could in a small way move, re-direct, stop, or destroy objects in the world, but he could not “change” [them] into something else…The Downfall of Numenor was “a miracle” as we might say, or as they a direct action of Eru within time that altered the previous scheme for all remaining time. They would probably also have said that Bilbo was “fated” to find the Ring, but not necessarily to surrender it; and then if Bilbo surrendered it Frodo was fated to go on his mission, but not necessarily to destroy the Ring - which in fact he did not do. They would have added that if the downfall of Sauron and the destruction of the Ring was part of Fate (or Eru’s Plan) then if Bilbo had retained the Ring and refused to surrender it, some other means would have arisen by which Sauron was frustrated; just as when Frodo’s will proved in the end inadequate, a means for the Ring’s destruction immediately appeared - being kept in reserve by Eru as it were.

He then further discusses the level of intentionality that Elves believed they must have in order to exercise the will. Quenya “ambar” (“the world”)

was to the Eldar more obviously related to *mbar’ta [Fate] than we might feel it to be since “fate” so far as they recognized it was conceived as a much more physical obstacle to will. They would not have denied that (say) a man was (may have been) “fated” to meet an enemy of his at a certain time and place, but they would have denied that he was “fated” then to speak to him in terms of hatred or to slay him. “Will” at a certain grade must enter into many of the complex motions leading to a meeting of persons; but the Eldar held that only those efforts of “will” were “free” which were directed to a fully aware purpose. On a journey a man may turn aside, choosing this or that way - e.g. to avoid a marsh, or a steep hill - but this decision is mostly intuitive or half-conscious (as that of an irrational animal) and has only an immediate object of easing his journey. His setting-out may have been a free decision, to achieve some object, but his actual course was largely under physical direction - and it might have led to/or missed a meeting of importance. It was this aspect of “chance” that was included in umbar.

In the same manuscript, Tolkien contextualizes these concepts by also discussing “Eldarin philosophers” and their thoughts on the issues involved. From that, and from the continuous distinctions (which I have bolded above) between Elves and (presumably) a modern day “us,” it seems that Tolkien was attempting to present this as an Elvish conception: how the Elves understood and spoke about these concepts - as opposed to how we might understand them in common parlance today.

It also seems that Tolkien connected these writings in his mind with the Music of the Ainur because he added a rough paragraph at the end of this manuscript that included: “Let the Music of the Ainur [be an] ancient legend from Valinorean days…[?after it] [Eru’s] foreknowledge was complete to the smallest detail - but He did not reveal it all. He veiled the latter part from the eyes of the Valar who were to be actors.”

Why is this significant? In my mind, the above passages and Tolkien’s larger discussions about Fate and Free Will become essential keys to understanding the brief, but controversial statement in The Silmarillion: “Therefore he willed that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else…” As many have noted, this phrase cannot possibly mean that Elvish lives are predestined or “fated” in the modern sense of the word, such that they have no free will (as compared to Men); otherwise the entire moral structure and development of The Silmarillion make no sense. But if it does not mean that, what does it mean? With the above passages from The Nature of Middle-earth, perhaps we have a better understanding of what the Elves might have meant by the Music of the Ainur being “as fate” to the world outside of Men.

What I wrote this month

On the blog this month, and somewhat related to the above thoughts, I wrote about the potential similarities between the Old English concept of wyrd and Tolkien’s invented word umbar, as well as the complicated nature of “Fate” in Tolkien’s views.

What I read this month

I recently finished the first volume of Tolkien’s Collected Poems.

Two poems that have stood out as I came to the end of this volume are “Companions of the Rose,” written in honor of Tolkien’s friends R.Q. Gilson and G.B. Smith who had recently died in WWI, and “A Dream of Coming Home,” written about Tolkien’s wife Edith. Here is an excerpt from “Companions of the Rose”:

And part of “A Dream of Coming Home”:

Neither is one of his best poems, but both are emotionally charged and clearly convey Tolkien’s sense of longing, nostalgia, and bitterness of separation. You can even sense some fairy magic in his farewell from Edith in the section above. I hope to have some more thoughts about at least one other poem from this volume in a future blog post or another issue of Mathoms…

Douglas Anderson examines different editions of George MacDonald’s The Golden Key to try to determine which section Tolkien planned to quote in his draft manuscript of “On Fairy-Stories.”

Sticking with the “fate” theme of this newsletter, Stephen Winter reflects on the fates of Gollum and Frodo, whether they are deserved, and what the proper response to them might be.

Somehow I had missed this painting from Miriam Ellis, of Tuor, Idril, and Earendil and “sea-longing”:

The crash of the waves evokes for me Tolkien’s two paintings “Cove near the Lizard” and “Caerthilian Cove & Lion Rock,” which depict scenes from the Cornish coast that Tolkien experienced during a trip in his youth:

I believe this trip was a significant one for Tolkien’s own sea-longing and imagination, giving rise to his beautiful poem “The Horns of Ylmir.” (By the way, Miriam has a brand new book of Shire paintings available for those interested.)

The Hoard

I’ve been working to fill out my collection of Parma Eldalamberons, which are dedicated to publishing Tolkien’s manuscript papers on his invented languages. Below are volumes 12, 16, and 18, which have arrived this month.

Thanks to the hard work of Christopher Gilson, nine of the volumes that published Tolkien’s linguistic manuscripts have now been made available by print-on-demand through either Barnes & Noble (U.S.) or The Great British Bookshop (U.K.). In fact, there is a lot of print-on-demand material available related to Tolkien’s languages. In the below photo from right to left are the Parma Eldalamberons, the Collected Vinyar Tengwar (available on Amazon), and the collected issues of Quettar (the spiral-bound books - available on Lulu).

That’s all for now - thanks for reading and subscribing! More to come soon.

An Inkling

I recently finished a closer study of The Nature of Middle-earth than I had done before. This book is so essential for understanding Tolkien’s Middle-earth. It is like a giant appendix to Morgoth’s Ring, which itself may be the most important volume of The History of Middle-earth.

In the section of the book titled “Dwellings in Middle-earth,” is a brief discussion of the Elven root mbar, from which the words ambar (settlement) and umbar (a decision or decree) are derived. In discussing the word “umbar,” Tolkien writes:

In Quenya . . . umbar meant a decision, issuing in an ordinance or decree by some authority; hence also it might mean the fixed arrangements, conditions, and circumstances proceeding from such a decree. It was a word of lofty associations, mainly used of the dispositions and will of Eru, with regard to Creation as a whole (in full Eämbar), to “this World” in particular, or to persons of great importance in events.

In a footnote to the above passage, Tolkien writes that

Umbar could thus correspond to History, the known or at least the already unfolded part, together with the Future, progressively realized. To the latter it most often referred, and is rendered Fate or Doom. But this is inaccurate, so far as genuine Elvish, especially High-elvish, is concerned, since it was not in that use applied only to evil events.

There is much to say about these passages and they are closely connected to another manuscript in The Nature of Middle-earth, “Fate and Free Will,” in which Tolkien discusses the meaning of the Sindarin word amarth (“Fate”) derived from the same root. I may try to explore some of this in a future blog post or subsequent issue of Mathoms. But one thing that looms large in the background of these writings is the Old English concept of wyrd, and whether Tolkien was here seeking to explore the various nuances and meanings of that word in his Elven languages.

What I wrote this past month

Last week I wrote on the blog about how Tolkien is often overlooked in the landscape of modern Beowulf studies and has more to teach us about Beowulf in the future.

I also recently appeared on the “I Might Believe in Fairies” podcast hosted by Aaron Irber. We had a great conversation about Tolkien, dragons, myths, Faërie, and more! If you love those things please check it out and listen.

What I read this past month

I recently enjoyed this exploration of Tolkien’s engagement with Old Norse texts by Oronzo Cilli.

Jason Fisher writes about the fifteenth anniversary of his book Tolkien and the Study of His Sources. I am thankful for the book and for Fisher’s long and continued history of Tolkien scholarship and writings.

I appreciated this moving reflection from Stephen Winter on Theoden’s moment of complete simplicity.

The latest edition of Forgotten Ground Regained: A Quarterly Journal of Alliterative Verse is an homage to Tolkien and his imaginative world. The recent issue is titled “Alliterative Verse in Arda.” I particularly enjoyed the poems “The Making of Angrist,” “A Good King,” and “The Death of Beor the Old.”

The Hoard

In last month’s issue of Mathoms, I inexplicably forgot to include photos of the recent Myths and Legends Box Set #2, which I received. This is a most welcome addition to the recent matching sets of The History of Middle-earth and Myths and Legends Box Set #1. Tolkien’s edition of The Old English Exodus has been out of print since the (small print run) first edition 40 years ago, and Finn and Hengest has been out of print in hardcover for a long time as well.

As with the other box sets in the series, the books come with reversible dustjackets.

After several years of searching I finally found an affordable copy of The Saga of the Volsungs, translated and edited by R.G. Finch, as part of the Nelson’s Icelandic Texts series. Finch’s book seems to be the rarest of the series.

This was the last one of the series I was missing. Gabriel Turville-Petre, Tolkien’s student, friend, and colleague, was one of the general editors of the series, along with Tolkien’s friend Sigurður Nordal. (Turville-Petre’s wife, Joan, would later edit Tolkien’s edition of The Old English Exodus, included in the box set above.) Tolkien’s son Christopher edited one of the books in the series (which was recently reprinted and is now widely available in paperback). At least three more volumes of the Nelson’s Icelandic Texts series were planned but the series apparently ended at four, and the others were never published as part of this series.

Thank you for reading! More to come soon!

An Inkling

One of my (many) ongoing reading goals is to sequentially read through (or about) every known Tolkien letter. Many people do not realize that there are more than 1,000 known Tolkien letters not published in the revised and expanded edition of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (which itself has more than 500 letters in it). I started this project about a year ago and have slowly made my way through more than one hundred of them, only five (!) of which have been published in the printed volume of Tolkien’s letters. There are many things one learns going through this process (I’ve written about some of them and will be writing about more).

The overarching feeling I have been getting is how few letters of Tolkien we have at various points early in his life. We know he was writing a lot to Edith and others at this time, and yet there are so few letters at all from various years. It is of course probable that in Tolkien’s early life, when he was moving frequently from place to place (both related to the war and his early family and career changes) and did not have a settled position as a professor, that he was either not using carbon copies to save letters, or that such copies were lost, or that the recipients of his letters did not hold onto them. It if also likely that a number of his personal letters to family have not been publicly shared (and may never be shared) due to their personal nature. For example, in certain periods when we know Tolkien was away from Edith, there are no known letters between them, yet it is unthinkable, given what we know of Tolkien’s relationship with Edith and his past letter-writing history with her, that he was not writing to her at these times. In the recent Collected Poems volumes, there are references to letters between Tolkien and Edith, of which we were previously unaware, for example. We also know of very few letters between Tolkien and his brother for the whole early portion of their lives.

From double digit (known) letters in 1913-1917, we know of only a combined seven letters written by Tolkien over the four-year period of 1918-1921. These were significant years for Tolkien. He was a new father, began work at the Oxford English Dictionary, he began (Ainulindale) or continued (the Lost Tales) early Silmarillion material as well as work on his Elvish languages. He also took up his first formal teaching position at the University of Leeds and began work on his first “book” (A Middle English Vocabulary, which was originally intended as a glossary for the back of another book but came out separately due to Tolkien’s delay in finishing it). I hope that as the work on Tolkien scholarship progresses and as we move further from Tolkien’s own lifetime, that we will discover more letters from these early, formative periods, and that hopefully more will be released by the Estate.

By the way, if you are interested in these unpublished letters, you can follow along with my thread exploring them on X/Twitter here, or you can do your own studies and research using The Guide to Tolkien’s Letters and Hammond and Scull’s Chronology.

What I wrote this past month

Last week on the blog, I wrote about Bilbo’s influence on Samwise Gamgee and a long exploration of Sam’s love of stories, poems, and songs. By the way, for those interested, you can also subscribe to my blog (completely free) to receive new blog posts in your email inbox.

What I read this past month

I had the occasion this past month to re-read Tom Shippey’s Author of the Century. It is still such a great read, even more so now that we have more access to some of the more obscure Tolkien works it discusses such as The Battle of Maldon and The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun. Along with The Road to Middle-earth, it is an indispensable part of anyone’s early journey into Tolkien scholarship.

Over at Tolkien Guide, there is a nice review of The Wind in Our Ears, a book I am very much looking forward to reading about Tolkien’s most ardent friend and supporter in his youth, G.B. Smith.

I’ve also been spending time with Eleanor Parker’s Conquered: the Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England. It’s a unique approach to the Norman invasion through the eyes of the English who lived through it and those who wrote in the immediate or recent aftermath. This book is refreshingly different from much of the studies of the Anglo-Saxon period. It’s a subject I think Tolkien would have been very interested in and would have had many thoughts on. He probably read much (perhaps most) of the source materials, of course.

Tolkien’s translation of the Middle English Sawles Warde has been published and is very interesting. I am hoping to spend more time with this in the future and write a bit about it. You can also watch a short video about the discovery here.

This past month I finished the new paperback edition of Christopher Tolkien’s The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise. Published with this book for the first time is Christopher’s essay on “The Battle of the Goths and the Huns,” which had been previously published separately. It was a great decision by the publisher to add the essay to this edition due to the related content but also because it’s something that very few Tolkien fans have probably read and deserves a wider readership. It is both very similar to and very different from his father’s style, especially in its conclusion, and it’s a good reminder that Christopher was very much his own person while still being very much his father’s son.

The Hoard

I finally bought the Uppsala Books edition of Rider Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes, with an introduction by Tom Shippey. This was a favorite of Tolkien’s in his youth, and he once said it was “as good as most sagas and as heroic.”

I added another version of Tamburn Bindery’s Poetic Edda. I originally thought this was going to be leatherbound, though it turned out to be imitation leather. Still great quality for the price, with gold page edges, a book ribbon, and a fun Viking coin thrown in as a bonus. I really love this edition. Inside are hand drawn illustrations, with the original text and translation - you can see some photos of the interior of the clothbound edition I have if you go back to Mathoms No. 4.

I haven’t really bought much other Tolkien-related books lately as I’ve been trying to take advantage of the various university press summer sales that have been ongoing. Here are some of the fruits of those sales for those interested in good books beyond Tolkien! (the books are from the following university presses: Princeton, Mississippi, California, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska)

That’s all for now. More to come later this month!

An Inkling

A couple years ago, I wrote a blog post about some similarities between Tolkien and the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. One of the things I noted at the time was:

Whether Hopkins himself visited Rivendell’s inspiration, Lauterbrunnen, I do not know, though it seems likely since Hopkins is known to have visited both Interlaken and Jungfrau and Lauterbrunnen lies directly between the two.

Had I spent a bit more time researching the post back then, I would have discovered that Hopkins did, in fact, visit Lauterbrunnen, writing in his 1868 travel notes: “Interlaken by steamer; walked up foamy Lüt-schine Vally to Lauterbrunnen.” (transcription here, image of notes here) Here’s Hopkins’s handwritten notes:

This is basically the same route Tolkien would travel through Lauterbrunnen 43 years later: from Interlaken to Jungfrau. In Letter 306, more than 50 years after his trip, Tolkien would describe it to his son Michael thus:

I am.... delighted that you have made the acquaintance of Switzerland, and of the very part that I once knew best and which had the deepest effect on me. The hobbit's (Bilbo's) journey from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods, is based on my adventures in 1911: the annus mirabilis of sunshine in which there was virtually no rain between April and the end of October, except on the eve and morning of George V's coronation…Our wanderings mainly on foot in a party of 12 are not now clear in sequence, but leave many vivid pictures as clear as yesterday (that is as clear as an old man's remoter memories become). We went on foot carrying great packs practically all the way from Interlaken, mainly by mountain paths, to Lauterbrunnen and so to Mürren and eventually to the head of the Lauterbrunnenthal in a wilderness of morains…I left the view of Jungfrau with deep regret: eternal snow, etched as it seemed against eternal sunshine, and the Silberhorn sharp against dark blue: the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams…I do not suppose all this is very interesting now. But it was a remarkable experience for me at 19, after a poor boy's childhood.

The passage Tolkien refers to from The Hobbit is this one: “Bilbo never forgot the way they slithered and slipped in the dusk down the steep zig-zag path into the secret valley of Rivendell.” As Bilbo enters the valley, we get his famous thought exclamation “It smells like elves!” One wonders if Tolkien had a similar impression in Lauterbrunnen itself?

Lauterbrunnen has had other famous literary visitors besides Tolkien and Hopkins. Goethe wrote a poem, Song of the Spirits over the Waters, about the Staubbach Falls waterfall in the valley, likening the soul of man to the waterfall. Schubert attempted several musical settings of Goethe’s poem, most notably this choral version for eight male voices, which is powerful, at times moving, but also confusing in its structure and variation.

Tolkien’s and Goethe’s tributes to the beauty of this valley are rather well-known, so I wondered in my old post, whether Hopkins’s penchant for portraying the divine within the beauty of nature may have had one of its sources in Hopkins’s experience in Switzerland. In returning to the question again, I at first thought the Staubbach Falls waterfall may have had some influence on Hopkins’s poem “It was a hard thing to undo this knot”:

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.
The rainbow shines, but only in the thought
Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,
For who makes rainbows by invention?
And many standing round a waterfall
See one bow each, yet not the same to all,
But each a hand’s breadth further than the next.
The sun on falling waters writes the text
Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.
It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

Unfortunately, it appears the poem was written four years before Hopkins’s trip to Switzerland; though, perhaps it might have described his later experience at the falls well.

In The Hobbit, on Bilbo’s return journey, he returns to Rivendell and “heard the elves still singing in the trees, as if they had not stopped since he left.” He heard the elves singing:

Here grass is still growing,
And leaves are yet swinging,
The white water flowing,
And elves are yet singing
Come! Tra-la-la-lally!
Come back to the valley!

As Tolkien sat beside the fire in his last years, remembering his special trip to Switzerland, one wonders how often he wanted to “come back to the valley,” and would it still smell like elves if he had?

What I wrote this month

On the blog, I mused on Tolkien’s poetic imagination, and the resonances among Tolkien’s early World War I poetry, his Legendarium, and classical myths.

What I read this month

Douglas Anderson has a great first Substack post about books dedicated to Tolkien during his lifetime. The ones I did not already own have been on my to-buy list for some time and I took the opportunity to add most of them to my Tolkien collection.

A delightful and humble reflection from John Garth about the (very well-deserved) popularity of his book Tolkien and the Great War.

I recently finished this Inklings Studies Supplement: Tolkien and the Relation between Sub-creation and Reality. It was a very solid collection of articles, with a number of new approaches for Tolkien scholarship and some very interesting insights.

Fellowship & Fairydust has a great interview with Inklings scholar David Bratman. Bratman is especially eloquent about the failure of Peter Jackson to understand Tolkien’s story:

Faramir’s lapse in the movie, for momentary lapse is what it turns out to be in the storyline, is illustrative of a continuing theme which is the movies’ greatest continuing flaw. The good characters keep suffering failures of nerve. Faramir seizing the Ring, Gandalf socking Denethor in the teeth, the Rohirrim fleeing away from Saruman, Aragorn fearing he’s too weak to be king, Frodo abandoning Sam in the wilderness because he no longer trusts him, Legolas having a nervous breakdown at the Battle of Helm’s Deep (I bet most have forgotten that, but it’s there), are all ridiculous and superfluous additions that seem to be serving the purpose of “humanizing” the characters by showing them as having weaknesses.

Jackson has missed the point and the structure of Tolkien’s story. Gandalf and Aragorn, let alone Faramir and Legolas, are not the protagonists or heroes of Tolkien’s story. The four hobbits are…It’s the hobbits who suffer failures of nerve in the book…Faramir and the others have already gone through any crisis of self-faith they’re going to have before we meet them; and they’ve come out stronger for it. Their purpose in the story, from a structural viewpoint, is not to be the heroes but to provide noble figures, above quotidian heroism, for the hobbits to look up to and try to emulate. In the end the hobbits succeed at this (much of it shown in the Scouring, and where’s that in the movie?). We need this kind of nobility to look up to; that Tolkien has it while authors like George R.R. Martin do not is a key to the continuing esteem in which Tolkien is held. To excise this theme is to lose the moral heart of Tolkien’s story.

Miriam Ellis has a new painting of Ioreth in the Houses of Healing. She’s not the only one who’s been thinking about Ioreth lately, as Jane Beal’s recent article in Mythlore explores Ioreth’s role in the context of “narrative medicine.” While I thought Beal’s focus on narrative medicine occasionally felt like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, the article is a welcome, close examination of Ioreth, an often overlooked, but truly wonderful character.

A beautiful reflection from Stephen Winter about Gimli’s fear on The Paths of the Dead:

And before we judge him for such a fear, we might examine our own hearts to see the fears that lie within. Both those fears of which we are aware and which we might fight with all our strength; but also those fears of which we may be unaware, that might take us unawares as they do here with Gimli. Of course, we do not know what fears they might be but if we know that they lurk within us, we might be more gentle with ourselves when they appear, and more gentle with others who are overcome by their own fear.

Music of the Ainur

When writing about Bilbo returning to Rivendell, it’s always a great idea to listen to some music. Here are some of my favorite renditions of the elves’ song “The dragon is withered”: by Joshua Burnell, by Bluefax, and by Clamavi de Profundis.

The Hoard

Some of my collection additions since the beginning of the year, most of which have been featured in more detail in previous issues of Mathoms:

Following Douglas Anderson’s Substack post (linked above) I bought a 1st Edition of The Hamish Hamilton Book of Dragons edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. The book is dedicated to Tolkien and features poems by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

I also received this edition of Þe Wohunge of ure Laured, edited by Tolkien’s friend W. Meredith Thompson, who dedicated the book to Tolkien’s wife, Edith, and thanks Tolkien in the preface for “wearing his own ring of power” when giving advice. The title translates to “The Wooing of Our Lord,” and it is a Middle English meditation on Christ’s suffering love for humanity. Thompson (nicknamed Merry Tom) was a dear friend of the Tolkiens and he frequently corresponded with Tolkien and Edith for the last decade of their lives

That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

An Inkling

When I first received the three volumes of Tolkien’s Collected Poems, I foolishly thought I would devour them all within a few months. And maybe if I had just read them straight through I would have. Instead, I discovered what many others have as well: these are monumental achievements of scholarship. Almost every line and footnote can seemingly be scrutinized and mined for new insights into Tolkien’s life, poetry, and Legendarium.

As one example only, in the biographical background and history about Tolkien’s first published poem “Goblin Feet,” can be found quotations from two previously undocumented letters Tolkien wrote to Edith in 1915. In the first letter, Tolkien wrote asking Edith, “Why didn’t you like the first of the ‘Goblin feet’ verses darling? Too mothy and batty?” In the second letter, he wrote to her: “‘Goblin Feet’ is a little swamped and rather disappointing in print.” Nothing groundbreaking of course, but these two brief snippets we now have provide further context to one of Tolkien’s most significant developments as a young writer: his growing dissatisfaction with smaller, fairy-sized elves. The two letters also demonstrate that we have many more Tolkien letters of significance left to discover.

Anyway, over the course of the past two years, I have been meticulously making my way through the first of the three volumes. This has yielded some interesting observations, some of which I have blogged about before, some of which I am planning to write about in the future. One poem I read this month was originally called “Courage Speaks to a Child of Earth,” and then was later changed to the title “The Two Riders.” Tolkien wrote this decades before he ever conceived of The Lord of the Rings, and it ostensibly has nothing to do with the book. Reading it, however, I was immediately struck by how much the first part of the early version (Draft A) of the poem reminded me of Gandalf riding Shadowfax:

Tis a rhythmic course
On a strong-limbed horse
With the round earth fleeting under:
The Wind in our ears
Is roaring years,
And his beating feet are thunder
His sweat is a-reek,
Yet the things we seek
Are a million miles out yonder
O good is speed,
And yet, more we need -
There is not one hour to squander.
…
Yea! though mighty the Sun
when his course is run
And his beauty doth not blind us
O’er the world’s pale rim
Till our days blow thin
And the stars are all behind us

As I said, for me, I cannot help but think of the various descriptions of Gandalf’s ride to Minas Tirith, as told from Pippin’s point of view:

The dark world was rushing by and the wind sang loudly in his ears. He could see nothing but the wheeling stars, and away to his right vast shadows against the sky where the mountains of the South marched past…Gandalf cried aloud to his horse. ‘On, Shadowfax! We must hasten. Time is short. See! The beacons of Gondor are alight, calling for aid. War is kindled…’ …Then Shadowfax gathered himself together and sprang away, and the night flowed over him like a roaring wind….It was twilight: the cold dawn was at hand again, and chill grey mists were about them. Shadowfax stood steaming with sweat, but he held his neck proudly and showed no sign of weariness.

What I wrote this month

This past month on the blog, I wrote about the legacy of Bilbo and explored an unspoken, potential reason why Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli may have abandoned the Quest at the Breaking of the Fellowship.

What I read this month

I finished Tolkien and the Study of His Sources, a collection of essays edited by Jason Fisher, and highly recommend it. It’s an excellent arrangement of insightful studies of a variety of likely sources for Tolkien, written in a fairly disciplined manner (i.e., noting similarities and resonances, rather than uncritically claiming direct influence).

I am just starting to make my way through the cornucopia of new Tolkien scholarship released recently. From the new Inklings Studies to Mythlore, there is ample new reading material. Having myself reviewed Ben Reinhard’s The High Hallow, I was interested in Holly Ordway’s new review of the book. She felt much the same as I did apparently: there are bright spots in the book, but overall it suffers from a lack of depth and definition. A decent introduction for new readers, but not as promising as one might hope based on its title and premise.

Tom Hillman is always worth reading, and his Tolkien Society Award-winning article (“The Tides of Time, the Tides of Fate, and the Power of Song”) from last year’s The Journal of Tolkien Research touches briefly on a facet of Sam that I hope to explore in a forthcoming blog post. It is also very closely concerned with some other material I am working on related to Tom Bombadil. For me, the essential question of the article, which one may view as a gateway to a profoundly important aspect of Tolkien’s world, is this: “how powerful must Song be in a Secondary World designed through Song, which in the end will be healed through Song?” But read the whole article for many more excellent insights.

Congratulations also to Miriam Ellis on her award-winning artwork: “The Long Winter 1158: Gandalf Helps the Hobbits.” Her blog post about the piece last year is a lovely reflection on the theme of pity in Tolkien’s work.

Bradford Lee Eden has prepared a fascinating partial bibliography of the library of Tolkien’s son, Michael.

I very much enjoyed this anthology of Old High German poetry edited by Brian Murdoch and published by Uppsala Books. This is a book I think Tolkien might have a lot to say about. I especially enjoyed the Hildebrandslied, which reminded me vaguely of a more formal, less chaotic version of the Finnsburg Fragment. My biggest complaint is that the book is far too short! I’d have loved a full translation of the Evangelienbuch along with a full translation of The Heliand to compare it to.

The Hoard

Some recent additions to my library and Tolkien collection. I added a copy of another Uppsala Books publication: Geoffrey Russom’s The Syntax of Beowulf. The book appears to be a highly technical analysis of the syntactic structure of Beowulf, which will require careful attention and from which I expect to learn a lot.

The first volume of Malcolm Guite’s long-awaited Arthuriad has arrived: Galahad and the Grail. I bought the deluxe slipcased edition:

The poetry is moving and the illustrations by Stephen Crott are delightful. I’ve just started reading it, but I can already tell this is a treasure of a book I will return to often.

Another beautifully illustrated book I received this past month is this edition of The Poetic Edda hand-illustrated by Joel Trumbo of Tamburn Bindery.

With a host of hand-drawn illustrations, chapter-heading details, and a dual-language text, this has the feel of a special Medieval manuscript version of the text.

More to come in a few weeks. Thanks for reading!

An Inkling

There is a part of Morgoth’s Ring in which Tolkien is re-working early parts of The Silmarillion in a section called “The Rape of the Silmarils.” I was reading this a few weeks ago and made a connection I hadn’t before. The quote that stood out to me was this one:

Then again there was silence, and thought was stilled. But after a while Nienna arose, and she went up onto the Mound; and she cast back her grey hood, and her eyes shone like stars in the rain, for her tears were poured out, and she washed away the defilements of Ungoliante. And when she had wept she sang slowly, mourning for the bitterness of the world and all hurts of the Marring of Arda.

This is after the attack of Morgoth and Ungoliant, who have destroyed the Two Trees and stolen the Silmarils. It differs little from the published text of The Silmarillion, and the differences are not my concern here. Nienna’s tears wash away “the defilements of Ungoliante,” and her song mourns for the world. After the Noldor leave Valinor, we read in The Silmarillion that

Manwë bade Yavanna and Nienna to put forth all their powers of growth and healing; and they put forth all their powers upon the Trees. But the tears of Nienna availed not to heal their mortal wounds; and for a long while Yavanna sang alone in the shadows. Yet even as hope failed and her song faltered, Telperion bore at last upon a leafless bough one great flower of silver, and Laurelin a single fruit of gold.

Nienna’s tears clean and water the mound of the Trees, enabling them to bear one last flower and one last fruit, which in turn become the Moon and the Sun. And we may recall that when Yavanna originally sang her song of power to bring forth the Trees, it was Nienna who “thought in silence, and watered the mould with tears.” So Nienna’s tears help to bring forth both the Trees themselves and the fruit and the flower that become the Sun and the Moon.

After the publication of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien sought to add context and backstory to Gandalf’s character, and he wrote more specifically about the role of Olórin (Gandalf) in Valinor before being sent to Middle-earth. Tolkien wrote: “Wisest of the Maiar was Olórin. He too dwelt in Lórien, but his ways took him often to the house of Nienna, and of her he learned pity and patience.” In this way, Tolkien provides an origin-story for Gandalf’s focus on pity, a theme that is of supreme importance in The Lord of the Rings. But Tolkien also gives us another connection I had overlooked until now. Gandalf, by learning directly from Nienna, has a special understanding of sorrow. Nienna, who mourns for the Trees after their destruction, and whose tears brought the Trees to life in the first place, is the one to teach Gandalf. This gives new depth of meaning to Gandalf’s words at the Grey Havens:

Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.

“Do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” Indeed, Gandalf has learned about tears and sorrow firsthand from Nienna. He knows that her tears produced that great beacon of hope, the Sun. And he knows that Nienna’s tears also produced great beauty in the Two Trees. To borrow a phrase from “The Field of Cormallen,” we might say that Nienna’s tears, while sorrowful, “are the very wine of blessedness.” So when Gandalf tells the hobbits that “not all tears are an evil,” he knows this better than anyone in Middle-earth. He has seen Nienna’s tears of blessedness firsthand, tears that wash away defilement and that produce great beauty.

What I wrote this month

This week, I wrote some thoughts on the blog about the origin of the Elendilmir, as well as some similar objects that resemble it.

Also, while not something I wrote this past month, yet perhaps particularly apt for this week, which for most Western Christians is Holy Week, you may be interested in an old blog post I wrote for a previous Holy Week, about resonances of the Harrowing of Hell in The Lord of the Rings, and connections with Holy Week liturgical practices.

What I read this month

On his wonderfully specific “Silmarillion Minutiae” blog, Brian Henderson shares with readers a draft preface to an imagined catalogue of a Silmarillion book collection. An enjoyable read for book collectors, or just fans who want to know about the publication history of The Silmarillion:

The Silmarillion might be regarded as the fulcrum work in Tolkien publishing, sitting at the cusp between the “primary” work published in Tolkien’s lifetime, and the flood of posthumous material—presented with the ‘burden’ of commentary (beginning with Unfinished Tales in 1980)—that was to follow. In collecting terms, it is unquestionably overshadowed by that primary material: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (amongst others). And in Tolkien studies it feels rather marginalised, having been superseded—certainly for the academic and scholar—by the voluminous History of Middle-earth series. It is a work that sits in neither camp.

However, from a literary perspective, this makes The Silmarillion the most intriguing. Presented as a single stand-alone text, only the publication of the History of Middle-earth would reveal the more complex reality. The interplay of the internal imagined world of story-tellers, compilers, redactors, translators, and fabled books; the external reality of Tolkien the author, with his variant texts, feigned history, and material retold in longer and shorter forms in varying styles; and the editorial role Christopher played in assembling this material for publication—all of these features, together, combine to make The Silmarillion a compelling primary- and secondary-world literary artefact.

In The Journal of Tolkien Research, Clive Shergold has a short and enjoyable pictorial article about the Welsh railway wagons Tolkien saw in his youth, which helped spark his interest in the language.

Having recently written my own reflection about the character of Merry Brandybuck, I was pleased to read Stephen Winter’s lovely reflection on Merry and Pippin:

There comes a moment in every life when we realise that the grown ups are not going to turn up and whatever happens next we are going to have to face it alone. For some people that moment will come far too soon but whenever it does come it will always feel that it has come when we are not prepared for it. At that moment we will feel utterly inadequate for what we are about to face and like Pippin in Minas Tirith we will want Gandalf to make us feel better or like Merry on the road to Edoras we will plead with Aragorn not to leave us behind but we will receive nothing. Like Pippin we will feel like a pawn in the wrong game or like Merry we will feel like a useless piece of baggage. But like both of them we will be carried to a place where there is no-one else to act and we will either run away or do what we can.

I read this a few years ago when it was published, but I had occasion to return to it for research this past month and highly recommend Jane Beal’s article about finches in The Lord of the Rings. Birds are an underexplored area of symbolism in Tolkien’s works, and Tolkien would almost certainly have known of the widespread Christological significance of the goldfinch in Medieval and Renaissance art. Beal also explores a variety of different aspects of finches in connection with Tolkien. A very worthwhile read during Holy Week.

Giovanni Carmine Costabile compares some interesting similarities between the Tibetan Story of the Boy with the Deformed Head and the tale of Beren and Luthien. Not much to go on besides the similarity of the scenes in terms of whether Tolkien had read the Tibetan story or not; i.e., we have no evidence of such. I do have a comment on something Costabile says at the end, however. Here is a section near the end of his article:

Furthermore, the same notions constitute an even stronger reason to exclude that Tolkien may have been inspired by Anglo-Saxon elves in his devising his Middle-earth Elves, since in Old English elves are the offspring of Cain. In Letter 236, Tolkien commented that “[i]n all Old English poetry ‘elves’ (ylfe) occurs once only, in Beowulf 112, associated with trolls, giants, and the Undead, as the accursed offspring of Cain”. Tolkien did not agree with such a negative association, as he makes clear in his prose translation of Beowulf 112: “ogres, goblins, and haunting shapes of hell”.

This reference to Letter 236 omits the important context immediately preceding Tolkien’s comment about elves in Beowulf: “‘elf’ we should suppose to be associated only with rheumatism, toothache and nightmares, if it were not for the occurrence of aelfsciene ‘elven-fair’ applied to Sarah and Judith!” Which itself is an acknowledgement that there is a reference to the beauty of elves in a positive light in Old English.

Finally, with a hat tip to David Haden, I enjoyed this first issue of a forthcoming seven-issue series in graphic novel/comic book form about the life of Durin the Deathless from Turner Mohan and Sergio Artigas. Here’s few images to interest you:

The Hoard

Some recent additions to my library and Tolkien collection. I added a Second Impression of B.L. Joseph’s Elizabethan Acting to my collection.

The book explores acting practices in Elizabethan England. As General Editor of this Oxford English Monographs series, Tolkien contributed editorial oversight, comments, and encouragement to the author.

I also added a First Edition, Second Impression of Tolkien and Gordon’s edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to my collection. First Impressions of this book tend to cost more than $1,000, so this is probably the closest I’ll get to the original for while.

Here’s an updated view of the Tolkien and Sir Gawain section of my library:

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

An Inkling

Last month, I wrote about the similarities between Tolkien’s description of Grond at the Gate of Minas Tirith and the Beowulf-poet’s description of Grendel approaching the doors of Heorot. While reading Dick Ringler’s edition of Beowulf, I noticed that he explains this technique as “echo-words,” and he discusses the effect it would have had on those listening to Beowulf (and similar tales) in oral tradition:

“There are many small-scale cycles in the poem and these can often be identified by the presence of ‘echo-words.’ These are words or phrases that occur two or more times within such a short hailing-distance of each other that their repetition is unlikely to be merely accidental. Echo-word cycles often mark the beginning and end of scenes and actions and thus help identify separate building blocks of the narrative. As a sort of ‘punctuation for the ear’ the device would have been very useful in a living oral tradition (to which it may well owe its origin.”

“Echo-words are also frequently used to build suspense and underpin climaxes. In the original of the account of Grendel’s approach to Heorot, the verb com (‘he came’) is repeated three times, each time in a context that shows the monster drawing progressively closer to the door of the hall. This sequence is imitated in the translation. It creates–and was almost certainly intended to create–a buildup of terrified apprehension (and we may even imagine the poem’s original hearers glancing nervously toward the door of the room in which they were sitting).”

In addition to the use of echo words to describe the approach of Grond, which I highlighted in my blog post, Tolkien uses the technique again when describing the Witch-King’s entrance into Minas Tirith. Ringler’s description of “terrified apprehension,” seems particularly apt here:

“In rode the Lord of the Nazgul. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgul, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.”

What I wrote this month

On the blog, I wrote a long, deep dive into the many details that are overlooked about Merry Brandybuck, and why he is one of the most underrated characters of The Lord of the Rings. Merry is one of my favorite characters in The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien writes some wonderful moments for him. I hope if you love Merry as I do that you will find time for a long read and explore what makes Merry such a great character.

What I read this month

John Garth recounts an eventful year of interesting Tolkien research and discoveries.

I’ve been revisiting Diana Glyer’s Bandersnatch, which is a great, accessible introduction to the Inklings, and it occurred to me that it would also work as a fantastic text for high school creative writing students to study and learn about the benefits of writing within a community of friends and collaborators.

I have been slowly working my way through a backlog of blog posts by Tom Hillman, whose thoughts on Tolkien are always worth reading. One of his posts from late in 2025 provided an excerpt of a draft he is working on for his next book. This draft, aside from its other interesting points, was particularly notable to me for its conclusion:

Once Túrin proclaims himself the “Conqueror of Fate,” the narrator unironically accepts this declaration because he knows something the reader does not. He knows and believes the prophecy about Túrin’s return. Even when explaining the meaning of the title at the beginning of his tale, he follows up by emphasizing the connection in Men’s minds between this tale and the evils they suffered from Melkor and his drakes, a statement echoed by the prophecy in the tale’s final words (69-70, 116). It will not do to leave a Conqueror of Fate and drakes out of our calculations.

I have long thought that the prophecy of Turin at the Dagor Dagorath is a (perhaps the) key to interpreting Turin’s tale. If you are unfamiliar with the prophecy, it is essentially that Turin will come back at the End of Time and kill Morgoth himself, avenging the Children of Hurin, and implying that Turin himself may be redeemed at the End. If we think Tolkien believed this prophecy, then it must shape how we view Turin and his story in significant ways. I look forward to potentially more tidbits from Tom’s forthcoming book and to the book itself at some point in the future. (If you are interested in Tom’s first book, Pity, Power, & Tolkien’s Ring, you can read my full review of it here, in which I heartily recommend it).

Tolkien scholars Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull have posted a number of interesting updates on their blog lately. One dives into their assessment of which editions of The Lord of the Rings have the most accurate text. Their conclusion:

But read the whole post for more details. They have also provided a number of updates to their “addenda and corrigenda” pages on their website. If you have never explored their addenda and corrigenda pages, they are a tremendous work of scholarship in themselves and worth reading.

As part of my ongoing study of Beowulf, I made a close study of Tolkien’s Finn and Hengest during the second half of 2025. This is one of Tolkien’s most difficult books (perhaps his most difficult?), and its main thrust goes against Tolkien’s own predilections as set forth in his famous lecture “The Monsters and the Critics,” by eschewing the monsters in Beowulf to focus on the historical foundations and building blocks of the text.

Tom Shippey has said of it: “The book is one of the most difficult books I’ve ever come across in all my life... What it is, is 2,000 footnotes in search of a text.” A significant part of the difficulty, though not all of it, is that the book is ordered in a completely absurd fashion. If you are interested in reading this book, first make sure that you are already very familiar with Beowulf. Second, make sure to read the book completely out of order! After the introductions, read the translations of the texts and the reconstruction, followed by the commentary, leaving the most difficult section, the glossary of names (with which the book starts), for the end.

Anyway, Nicholas Birns wrote a scholarly paper about the book that I just finished the past month, which serves as a great capstone to reading Finn and Hengest, because it contextualizes the work within and compares it to Tolkien’s fictional corpus. I don’t always agree with all of Birns’s assessments, but his insights and connections are worth reading regardless. For those who may be especially interested in learning more about Finn and Hengest, I would also recommend Tom Shippey’s book Beowulf and the North before the Vikings, which discusses the book at some length, in the context of examining the broader historical underpinnings of Beowulf.

For Music Web International, Nicholas Fuller has written an extensive review of the recent The Lord of the Rings opera cycle composed by Paul Corfield Godfrey. Here are some excerpts:

“Godfrey…has composed the most monumental operatic achievement since Wagner - and potentially the most popular opera since Turandot a century ago…his cycle is at once musically complex, artistically serious, and theatrical entertainment in the grand manner. LOTR has a rare and real sense of showmanship and dramatic construction, and a dazzling array and mastery of moods…Godfrey, in fact, has revived grand opera for the 21st century.”

Here is a trailer for the opera, in which you can hear bits of various songs and scenes. If you listen all the way to the end you will catch a fun little bit of jolly Tom Bombadil. There are also some individual songs available to sample: the Lament for Boromir is dramatic and beautiful; the Troll Song is enjoyably goofy. You can buy the entire 15-CD opera cycle here.

Deborah Vass wrote a lovely reflection on Pauline Baynes’ life and art. Baynes is most famous for illustrating Tolkien’s and Lewis’s works.

Music of the Ainur

What I’ve been listening to a lot lately: Tolkien’s “The Lay of Beowulf,” set to music by Tristan McDowell van Tine. My four-year-old son loves the song, though he did complain about nightmares of Grendel once or twice. Oops!

Just this past week, Graham Scheper shared a video of his rendition of “Ides Ælfscýne” from Tolkien’s “Songs for the Philologists.” It is an Old English poem Tolkien wrote about the romance between a mortal and an elven woman. Scheper sings the poem to the traditional tune that Tolkien intended for it to be sung to, and provides Tom Shippey’s translation on the screen. Even if you don’t understand Old English, this is very well done and just by listening to the sound of the words, you can appreciate the beauty and simplicity of Tolkien’s folk poetry. If you are interested in how “Ides Ælfscýne” might be related to the character of Eowyn, I explored that briefly in a blog post last year.

The Hoard

Some recent additions to my library and Tolkien collection. Since I have been reading Beowulf so much, I decided to treat myself to a few nice editions. The first is a beautiful printing of a hand-drawn and handwritten edition of Beowulf by Joel Trumbo of Tamburn Bindery, with facing-page original text and translation, interspersed with Medieval manuscript-worthy illustrations. You can buy an ebook of the manuscript here.

The other nice edition I bought was the Easton Press edition of Tolkien’s Beowulf. It’s gorgeous and really well-made.

That’s all for now. Until next time - thanks for reading!

I don’t intend this to be a “what’s new in the world of Tolkien” newsletter. Marcel Bülles’s Roving Ranger Newsletter already does a great job of that. And David Haden’s Tolkien Gleanings also scours the web for new, Tolkien-related tidbits. If you are not already following them, I recommend doing so. Instead, this newsletter will just be an informal update on what I’ve been reading and thinking about lately. It could be a recent Tolkien article or event, but it could also be some book or article written 20 (or 50) years ago. Given the informality of this newsletter, I may also stray from the Tolkien path to more “Tolkien-adjacent” topics as well. I will continue writing my more formal, Tolkien-centric posts for the blog, but this will be a sort of monthly check-in on what I’ve been up to. I hope you enjoy!

An Inkling

Sometimes I’ll have some thoughts that are interesting enough for the blog but I don’t have the time to write a full post or there may not be enough meat on the bone for a full post. I’ll share those here as “inklings.” Here’s the first one:

The popular C.S. Lewis podcast “Pints with Jack” shared on X (Twitter) that they had just recently learned the origin of the word “quisling,” which Lewis uses in Mere Christianity. That caused me to consider that there’s an interesting coincidence related to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the word “quisling.”

The word "quisling" first became used in Norway in 1933 to refer to the followers of Norwegian politician Vidkun Quisling. After Quisling's attempted coup in 1940 to concede Norway to the Nazis, it entered English as a word to describe traitors and collaborators with the enemy. Years ago, Wikipedia (incorrectly) noted that J.R.R. Tolkien had used the word “quisling” in his 1939 lecture “On Fairy-Stories”:

But the quote relied upon was actually the version of “On Fairy-Stories” that was printed in 1947. It would seem unusual for Tolkien to have used the word in 1939 to mean “traitor” prior to Quisling's actual attempted coup in 1940. And if Tolkien included “quisling” in his 1939 draft, it would be the first known use of the word in the English language, earlier than the April 1940 quotation relied upon by the OED.

It was long thought Tolkien’s original 1939 manuscript of “On Fairy-Stories” was lost. But just this year, John Garth revealed that what Tolkien scholars Verlyn Flieger and Douglas Anderson had called “Manuscript B” was Tolkien’s original lecture draft. And, the word “quisling” was found with Manuscript B. But, the word was written on a series of smaller pages. Flieger and Anderson had been able to date these pages to 1943 because, among other reasons, on the back of one of the pages were notes about a war-time Naval Cadet's course Tolkien taught in 1943.

So it appears Tolkien's first known use of the word “quisling” dates to his 1943 revisions to the text of “On Fairy-Stories.” By chance, if chance it was, C.S. Lewis's first published use of the word “quisling” came in his book Christian Behavior published in...1943. Lewis had actually first used the word in his BBC radio talks in late 1942, which were then collected and published as Christian Behavior (and then subsequently collected with more radio talks to form Mere Christianity, published in 1952).

Is it a coincidence that Lewis and Tolkien both used this word in significant manuscripts within a year of each other? Probably so. The word had just become popularized in the two preceding years and would still have been very relevant in the midst of World War II. Another possibility, though, is that Tolkien listened to the Lewis broadcast talk, or read his manuscript draft, or read the book Christian Behavior, and the word lingered in his mind afterwards.

Another alternative, which I'd like to imagine happened just for fun, is that perhaps the Inklings had a conversation specifically discussing the situation in Norway and the transformation of Quisling's name into a common English word. It's a topic - about both politics and language - that Lewis and Tolkien would be very interested in. And as a result of that conversation, perhaps they both had the word bouncing around in their heads, whence it found its way onto the pages of their separate manuscripts.

What I wrote this month

Over on the blog, I wrote about the similarities between Grendel and Grond, and how Tolkien uses a technique from Beowulf to create narrative tension during a slow-developing scene in The Lord of the Rings.

What I read this month

For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Christian Kriticos wrote a very good review of The Bovadium Fragments that appreciates its publication, does not reduce it to merely an environmentalist tract, and picks up on some of the larger themes of spiritual decay and civilizational decline: “Anyone who has read Tolkien’s letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and ‘The Bovadium Fragments’ is a work brimming with Tolkien’s fury.”

I recently had occasion to revisit John Buchan’s 1931 essay, “The Novel and the Fairy Tale.” Tolkien read and enjoyed Buchan’s works, and in this essay you can see a forerunner to the ideas Tolkien would more eloquently set forth several years later. I highly recommend it.

I loved this article about the auction sale of Tolkien’s Merton College desk: “And that is precisely why this sale matters. The Tolkien desk did not achieve its price because someone famous once brushed past it, or because it sat politely in the corner of a notable house. It achieved it because it was demonstrably used, over decades, in the making of work that reshaped global culture. It tells us something uncomfortably unfashionable about how creativity actually happens: slowly, physically, somewhere specific. Brown furniture, long written off as dull, irrelevant and unwanted, turns out to have been quietly winning all along. It doesn’t chase relevance. It doesn’t need reinvention. It waits.”

Bradley Birzer wrote a glowing review of Giuseppe Pezzini's new book Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation.

Andrew Higgins recommends the new book about King Arthur from Uppsala Books.

New in The Journal of Tolkien Research, Douglas Kane warmly recommends John Holmes’s new book, Tolkien’s Glee.

I recently finished reading Ruth Johnston’s A Companion to Beowulf. It seemed more intended for a middle-school audience and so was less interesting for my purposes, but could be of interest to a teacher or parent looking to provide additional background on the poem to younger students.

I enjoyed this article about Tolkien and dip pens.

Martin Simonson created a starting-point screenplay for Tolkien's story Smith of Wootton Major, which, if nothing else, gave me another excuse to enjoy reading the story again. If you’re in Hollywood and want to make a Tolkien film that’s a work of art, not just a money grab, here’s a great project. Get an all-star cast of voice actors and a great animation team that can go both whimsical and serious, hew closely to the book and Pauline Baynes’s art, and you’ll have a masterpiece on your hands.

I read some of Dick Ringler’s Beowulf translation to my kids recently, and it was a good choice. Definitely a solid version to read aloud for its rhythm and alliteration.

Some poetry

I recently listened again to A.E. Stallings’s lecture on Poetry as Echolocation. It’s a tour de force on how to speak about poetry. She weaves philosophy, children’s tales, and poetic technique into an accessible talk that poetry novices and experts can both enjoy.

Richard Wilbur reminds me of the Ents:

“Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth,
New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth,
And this is all their wisdom and their art—
To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.”

The Hoard

Some recent additions to my library and Tolkien collection:

I was happy to add a 1967 2nd Edition, 1st Impression of Tolkien and E.V. Gordon’s edition of Sir Gawain. This one is actually more difficult to find than 1st editions. It includes revisions by Tolkien’s student Norman Davis, who relied in part on Tolkien’s own notes for the revisions.

I was also happy to finally get a matching set of all three Coghill and Tolkien editions of Chaucer:

That’s all for now. Until next time - thanks for reading!