So, many thanks to friend Denis for sharing the following link, in French, offering another view of the current Lord Dunsany's efforts to return part of the land on his family estate to a more natural state.
Good for him.
I know if I had land I'd plant it in trees and set up as many protections for the trees as possible.
So far Ld D has shown an admirable stick-to-his-guns-yness: let's hope he continues as he's begun.
Plus of course it's great to see the glimpses inside the castle.
--John R.
So, thanks to J.'s sharing the link to this piece, I found out about the new Le Guin Award, which celebrates non-violent solutions to problems. Too many fantasy works rely on violence as a solution; Le Guin wanted to encourage those who explored other options.
"The Prize will be given to a writer whose work reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work, including but certainly not limited to: hope, equity, and freedom; non-violence and alternatives to conflict; and a holistic view of humanity’s place in the natural world."
As a pacifist, I'm glad to see that point of view being a major focus.
I assume this will be a yearly event, although the announcements I saw don't actually state that.
Co-incidently, yesterday I saw an image of the new Le Guin stamp, which I'd heard about but not seen; it features a scene from LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (the desperate sledge-journey across the ice).
Finally, I had missed or forgotten the news (from September 2019) that a new film/streaming video adaptation of the EarthSea books was in the works:
"Before she died in January 2018, Le Guin had given the producer her blessing to turn her work into a series of films. The adaptation since has been re-envisioned as a television series. An Earthsea miniseries based on the book series, with the teleplay co-written by Le Guin, aired on Sci Fi Channel in 2004."
I'm a bit dubious about the 'blessing', given similar claims made by the people in charge of the previous EarthSea series, which was (a) awful and (b) bore little resemblance to Le Guin's work. We'll just have to see if this most recent adaptation does a better job of conveying the appeal of Le Guin's story. Assuming, that is, that Le Guin's story turns out to be suitable for adaptation.
So, congratulations to the winner of this year's Mythopoeic Award for best work of Inklings Scholarship, John M. Bower for TOLKIEN'S LOST CHAUCER,* who came out on top of an impressive list of finalists this year: McIlwaine, Cilli, Garth, and the contributors to A WILDERNESS OF DRAGONS.** Bower was gracious in his acceptance speech, praising each of the runner-ups.*** Best of all, he announced that he is now under contract with Oxford University Press to produce his next book, TOLKIEN ON CHAUCER, 1913 - 1959 --- which sounds like the edition of Tolkien's writings on Chaucer some of us had hoped for in the first book. More primary Tolkien material made available is a good thing in my reckoning.
The other big winner, for the Fantasy Scholarship (Non-Inkling) Award, is Anna Vaninskaya's FANTASIES OF TIME AND DEATH, which looks at Eddison, Dunsany, and Tolkien: two neglected authors put in context with the most famous fantasy author of them all. In her acceptance, Vaninskaya mentioned that this book was the first installment of a much bigger project; I'll be interested to see what comes next.
--John R.
*a book I reviewed for TOLKIEN STUDIES.
**disclosure: I was a contributor and editor of the volume.
*** "John Rateliff is one of those Tolkien scholars that I learned quickly to consult for unrivaled expertise in books like THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT." Gosh.
So, the artist S. H. Sime, best known as the illustrator of Lord Dunsany, is best known for his black-and-white work. I knew from various researches during my dissertation he did some color work, but it was not until I had a chance to visit the Sime Gallery in Worplesdon that I realized how much color work he did, mostly landscapes but also a few portraits (including a memorable one of John on Patmos's vision). Some of these used a very unusual and striking technique I've never seen elsewhere. Of the two piece I hope will show up as links within this post, the first is called "Patterned Hills" and the other I think "Dark Forest". Has anyone come across this technique before?
--John R.
So, the new issue of THE JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES has just arrived, and my eye was drawn to their review of a new book out by Mark Neal and Jerry Root, called THE NEGLECTED C. S. LEWIS: EXPLORING THE RICHES OF HIS MOST OVERLOOKED BOOKS". I found their list interesting, if unnecessarily limited by their decision to focus entirely on his academic works. The eight books they chose are as follows:
1. THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE
2. THE PERSONAL HERESY (Lewis vs. Tillyard)
3. ARTHURIAN TORSO (w. Ch Wms)*
4. O.H.E.L (I admit I've never read this one myself)
5. STUDIES IN WORDS (the second of these eight I haven't read. perhaps best summed up as 'Lewis does a Barfield'. a book Tolkien disliked)
6. AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM (probably the most controversial of all these eight)
7. THE DISCARDED IMAGE (which gets my vote as by far the best of the books they cover)
8. LETTERS TO MALCOLM (which doesn't seem to fit in their theme or thesis at all).
If I were to recommend any of Lewis's books as 'neglected', I'd opt for THE DISCARDED IMAGE (a little gem that shows off Lewis the lecturer at his best) and SPIRITS IN BONDAGE (the only relic of his early Yeatsian period). And then of course there's THE DARK TOWER, which a lot of Lewis scholars like to pretend doesn't exist as the simplest way to avoid dealing with it.
--all in all, sounds like a worthwhile project with some quirks.
--John R
--current reading THE NATURE OF MIDDLE-EARTH. Still (Again).
*it's interesting to see that biographical revelations about Wms are having a trickle-down effect -- in this case on the part of the reviewer
So, one of the things that arrived last week was a flyer for Max McLean's latest CSL film/stage adaptation. Rather than yet another iteration of the Jack & Joy story, this one focuses on young Lewis from childhood to his conversion -- that is, the period covered by his autobiography. And like his autobiography, it's a look at his early life narrated by his older self looking back.
I admit to being a bit amused by the film's subtitle "The Untold Story of C. S. Lewis". I'd have thought between CSL's autobiography (SURPRISED BY JOY), the first SHADOWLANDS movie, the SHADOWLANDS play, the second SHADOWLANDS movie, the major biographies (at least four by my count),* et al, that had been pretty well covered by now.
In any case, the date of this 'One Night Only' event is November 2nd (a Tuesday).
--John R.
--still waiting for a film about JRRT and CSL in the thirties and forties. Complete with Janie Moore.
*Green & Hooper, Sayer, Wilson, and McGrath
So, I was looking for something else when I came across a passage I'd marked in Clyde Kilby's TOLKIEN AND THE SILMARILLION. After pointing out various parallels between Tolkien's myths and the Old and New Testaments, Kilby goes on to say
In this connection I should mention a lengthy account
which Tolkien asked me to read. It was in the form of
a Job-like conversation on soul and body and the
possible purpose of God in allowing the Fall so that
He could manifest His own sovereignty over Satan
all the more, of Christ's incarnation, the spread of
His light from one person to another, and the final
consummation at Christ's return. He said he was
not certain whether to include this in The Silmarillion
or publish it separately.
[Kilby p 61-62]
I assume Kilby is talking about The ATHRABETH here, though the description he gives doesn't seem to match up with that work very well. But we do know that Kilby read the Athrabeth and made careful notes on it. Unless there's another work that's been published somewhere in the wilderland that is HME X-XII and N.o.M.e and I just missed it.
--JDR
So, thanks to Janice for this photo.
Bonus points if you can tell which is Tarkus and which Tyburn.
--John R.
--current reading: THE NATURE ON MIDDLE-EARTH (these sections on Elven demographics).
So, there's a meme going around lately that's punchy but fails in the facts department. Usually I give such stuff a pass, but this one offers a good example of fact rearranged to make a better fiction.
Here's the post that's making the rounds:
First of all, I'd like to point out that Tolkien didn't have an editor on LotR. As a result, he had control of the text to an extraordinary degree, even over minutia like the spelling of dwarves. His argument here was with the typesetters at the printer, not with his publisher.
Nor was FELLOWSHIP rejected by an editor: this mis-statement is a mash-up of the complicated maneuverings* whereby Tolkien essentially engineered Allen & Unwin's withdrawal in order that he could to submit it to Collins instead -- who promptly dropped the ball, leading Tolkien to go back to Allen & Unwin instead.
It was the Puffin Books edition of THE HOBBIT that upset Tolkien by changing his text without his permission, especially since he only discovered what they'd done after the book was in print and on store shelves. As a result he refused to allow Puffin to reprint their edition, something they were eager to do.
A&U did irk JRRT when their printer made the same sort of changes with the first volume of LotR, but Tolkien insisted they use his preferred spellings and got this set right (see below).
Here's how Humphrey Carpenter, author of the authorized biography of JRRT, describes it:
He was . . . infuriated by his first sight of the proofs,
for he found that the printers had changed several of his spellings,
altering dwarves to dwarfs, elvish to elfish, further to farther,
and ('worst of all' said Tolkien) elvin to elfin. The printers
were reproved; they said in self-defence that they had merely
followed the dictionary spellings. (Similar 'corrections' to
Tolkien's spellings were made in 1961 when Puffin Books
issued The Hobbit as a paperback, and this time to Tolkien's
distress the mistake was not discovered until the book had
reached the shops.)
[Carpenter, TOLKIEN: A BIOGRAPHY, page 221]
As for the OED, I've heard this little quip before. I think it comes from an interview or memoir but cd not trace its source in time to include it in this post. Tolkien did work on the OED at the beginning of his career but he actually worked on the final sections --e.g words like walrus (W) not dwarves (D).
So, a fun little story but not exactly what happened.
--John R.
*essentially Tolkien wanted a publisher to commit to publishing LotR and THE SILMARILLION together as a two-volume set, when what the publishers wanted was LotR (which was actually finished, though still in need of a lot of work) with a future option on Silm (which was still far from finished).
UPDATE Oct 18th: and here's what I hope is a better link --JDR
So, in addition to the new book out on Edith Tolkien, there's another book just out that includes a chapter on Mrs. T.
THANKS FOR TYPING: REMEMBERING FORGOTTEN WOMEN IN HISTORY, cmp Juliana Dresvina.
From the description given on the publisher's website, the book as a whole reminds me of Johanna Russ's HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING (unfortunately).
For those who might be interested in the book and to give an idea of the range here, I've copied the Table of Contents below. Of these, of course it's Chapter 16, Edith Tolkien in the Eye of the Beholder, by Maria Artamonova, that catches my attention.
So, a while back I discovered Swan River Press because they occasionally do some Dunsany. This small press based in Dublin focuses on Irish writers like Le Fanu and others of the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century who wrote supernatural fiction. I'd never heard off Meade before, but based on the description below, taken from the back cover copy, what's not to like?
her specialty was medical or scientific mysteries
featuring doctors, scientists, occult detectives,
criminal women with weird powers, unusual medical
interventions, fantastic scientific devices, murder,
mesmerism, and manifestations of insanity
Both prolific and popular, she definitely sounds like someone worth knowing about. I'll post again once I've read the book.
For those interested in finding out more, here's a link:
http://www.swanriverpress.ie/titles.html
--John R.
--current reading: yesterday I read a Thomas Ligotti story for the first time
So, this week's new addition to the books in my office is THE GALLANT EDITH BRATT: J. R. R. TOLKIEN'S INSPIRATION by Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays (Walking Tree Press, 2021).
This comes as the latest entry in what seems to be a new and promising branch of Tolkien scholarship: biographies not about Tolkien himself but about people who were important in his life, to round out his milieu. First there were the two books (booklets, really) about his aunt, Jane Neave. Then the full-length biography about Fr. Francis Morgan, his guardian (originally in Spanish but since translated into English). And now this new book about his wife, Edith Bratt Tolkien.
I haven't had time yet to give this one more than a glance, but even that's enough to raise some questions that I'll want to read the biography to answer.
First, this biography ends around the time its subject was thirty. But Edith Tolkien lived to be eighty. Did nothing of interest or importance happen to her after around 1918? That seems, at the mildest, unlikely.
Second, Carpenter is harshly treated. The authors may have a good reason for that, but I've beginning to think that maybe it's time to call an end to Carpenter-bashing.
Third, the book seems to bog down at one point over the question of whether Tolkien knew Sanskrit (I'd say yes) and whether it was an important influence on him (I'd say no --certainly not as much as, say, Gothic).
Looking forward to reading the thing and seeing if I learn the answers to these and other questions.
--John R.
--current reading: "The Mirror of Galadriel"
"[The trees] stood up in the twilight like living towers
. . . amid their ever-moving leaves countless lights
were gleaming, green and gold and silver"
Thanks to Lisa and to our driver (Rick?), this morning we went from a single solitary v. lonely kitten (NAVEEN) to a roomful of kittens, nine in all, all between the ages of three and six months old. I don’t think it’ll be long before they find homes.
I'm pretty sure I bought this at one of my visits to the Wade Center. I had clearly put this aside in hopes of at some point re-assembling it. But looking at it now, years later, I've concluded it's a lost cause. So, alas, out the door.
The quote on the mug, by the way, reads
"Daybreak is a never-ending
glory . . . getting out of bed is
a never-ending nuisance."
The logo identifies it as coming from The American Chesterson Society, a group I've never belonged to. Based on other things it was found with suggests that it became an x-mug around 2013, so I probably got it a few years before that.
--John R.
---current reading: "The Bridge of Khazad-dum"
"What an evil fortune!" [muttered Gandalf]
"And I am already weary."
So, this month began with my newest publication, a piece I wish I'd never need write at all: a memoir of my friend Richard West, one of the all-time greats when it came to Tolkien scholars and a close friend of almost forty years (he was Best Man at our wedding).
I'd recently written about how much I enjoy visiting Milwaukee because it's a chance to see old friends. One of the sad things about visits to Milwaukee is that in addition to getting together with friends I'm also strongly reminded of friends who are no longer with us. Taum Santoski of course, and also Jim Pietrusz, the most dedicated reader I've ever known, and now Richard.
For the past few years I've visited Marquette twice a year for research trips of from one to four weeks each, And during each of those trips Richard wd take the morning bus over from Madison one day. We'd meet up for lunch and walk down to Miss Katie's diner,* then spend the afternoon pursuing our own researches at the Archives. As the time for the six o'clock bus back to Madison neared I'd walk him down to the bus station (just as years earlier he or one of the other Univ.Wisc.Tolk.Soc members had walked me back from their meeting room to the Madison bus stop for the last bus to Milwaukee), the two of us talking up a storm the whole way. I'll miss those visits, and those talks. And reading the eventual published results. Richard was also a dedicated participant in a long running series of Tolkien symposiums; the fellowship from this will continue but diminish by this absence.
He loved Tolkien scholarship
and cats
and the company of like-minded scholars,
Old English and Old Norse literature,
and C. S. Lewis and the Inklings,
folk dancing,
and of course Perri.
Here's a link to the journal's site: my memoir for Richard is in Volume XVIII
https://wvupressonline.com/journals/tolkien_studies
--John R.
*sometimes joined by Bill Fliess, Marquette Archivist, or Stephen Sullivan, an alumni of TSR from before my time and fellow Alitterate who happened to be Richard's cousin.
Well, that was quick.
The long hard drought we struggled with all summer --the kind of drought that kills trees and does other permanent damage -- is now over. How do I know? Because yesterday they activated the Flood Warning system
--John R.
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