The last two years I’ve participated in the Tolkien Reading Day sessions organized by Tolkien Collector’s Guide. This year, Jeremy interviewed people on various topics and he invited me and Elise Trudel Cedeño to talk about Digital Humanities and Education.

Given the Tolkien Society’s theme this year of Love and Friendship it was a particular delight to appear with Elise, one of my dearest friends and a longtime collaborator on applying the work of the Digital Tolkien Project to teaching Tolkien to both kids and adults (one of the topics we discuss).…

Every year to mark the downfall of Sauron on March 25, the The Tolkien Society announces a theme for reading, discussion, and celebration. Let’s hope that this year’s theme, Love and Friendship, will lead to positive appreciations of the variety of loving relationships that Tolkien represents in his fiction.

I’ve written some articles on male relationships, mainly in The Lord of the Rings, and particularly how experiences in the First World War pushed male friendships beyond what contemporary heteronormative society might consider conventional behaviours. For example, in looking at Frodo and Sam’s relationship in a 2004 article (available below), I found that their gentle hand-holding and caring gestures could be seen in the context of what historian Santanu Das has described as sometimes occurring among WWI soldiers. The love and friendship in such relationships could exist on a continuum that would be difficult to pinpoint as one clearly-defined identity. As Das puts it: ​“A new world of largely nongenital tactile tenderness was opening up in which pity, thrill, affection, and eroticism are fused and confused depending on the circumstances, degrees of knowledge, normative practices, and sexual orientations, as well as the available models of male-male relationships” (Das 52 – 53).

For this year’s theme, though, I would like to pick up on some thoughts that I presented at a Tolkien conference in 2013 at Valparaiso University. I had previously written about friendships in war, but I wanted to explore what happens to friends after the war, after lives lived in peace with wives and children. How does Tolkien represent the death of friends? …

Ted is one of the biggest names in the Tolkien art world. He has had the opportunity to be in multiple official Tolkien calendar, as well as illustrate editions of Tolkien’s work. Most recently, he has been involved with editions of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales! He also has a written piece in the official 2023 Tolkien Calendar. You can see examples of his work on his website! …

Unedited video of this interview is available exclusively to our patrons on Patreon! …

[audio-only version]

While there is considerable text preparation and internal tooling work being done by the Digital Tolkien Project that can’t be openly shared, I’ve been thinking for a while about public tools that do not violate the copyright holder’s rights. Today I’m happy to launch the first such tool.

I’ve taken the text of The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion all structured according to the project’s citation systems (which meant finishing the system for the Silmarillion — more on that soon) and indexed sequences of up to seven words, folding case and stripping all punctuation and diacritics. I’ve also added the Letters structured just to the individual letter (and no further at the moment).…

… With any list of this type, the immediate (and expected) response is to say ​‘well, what about [X]?’, naming a book or two the reader wd have liked to see included. 

But I’m dismayed at how few books from more than twenty years made it through. If what I’ve been reading all these years isn’t fantasy, what is? And if this truly were a fair representation of the fantasy genre as it stands today, then perhaps I’ve been left behind and it’s something else I’m really interested in. ​“Classic Fantasy” perhaps? Dunsany and Adams and Hughart, McKillip and Briggs, and a host of others absent here.…

… As Tolkien wrote of Aragorn:

So the essential Quest started at once. But I met a lot of things along the way that astonished me. … Strider sitting in the corner of the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea of who he was than had Frodo.” (a wonderfully interesting letter to W.H. Auden, 7 June, 1955, Letters, 216)

But even with such a surprise — and the letter goes on to detail more — Tolkien was always working with a deeper purpose, as we know from this familiar passage:

The invention of language is the foundation. The ​‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows it.” (“To the Houghton Mifflin Co.” nd, but sometime in mid-1955, Letters, 219) …

I was introduced [to Tolkien’s work] through my grandfather, who is obsessed with Tolkien’s works. He collects all the Dutch translations of his books, extended editions of the movies, various art and even makes drawings and paintings of Tolkien’s world himself. It was only natural that he introduced me to the magical world at a fairly young age (I think I saw the movies the moment they were available on DVD, and I am turning 22 this year, so you can count back :P). We also have various pets in the family who are named after Tolkien characters, so you could say the professor’s world really lives within us.…

… All this, and it’s still two days before the big event: getting back to work with the manuscripts in the Archives.…

So, thanks to Janice S. for the link about an upcoming online Tolkien event: a presentation that focused on Peter Grybauskas’ new book, A sense of tales untold. Working Zoom events into the regular schedule can be tricky, but I’m definitely planning to attend this one.…

I have, but have not yet read, P.G.‘s book. That shd soon change; I brought it with me on my current trip to Milwaukee as downtime reading.…

Rumor is filtering over from Europe about a new variant virus which hasn’t had much of an effect in the US yet. But it might soon, and thereby lies a practical concern for me.

I had been intending to put off compiling the annual bibliography for Tolkien Studies for another month, in favor of more urgent matters. But this task requires going out to the university libraries to search the proprietary databases. For two years I couldn’t do that because the libraries were closed, and I had to resort to makeshift solutions.

But now the libraries are open, some of them anyway, and I am looking forward to going.…

But before I visit the libraries I have to do first the even more extensive work in my own collection and in the public online databases, so that I can have as much information already down on my list, maximizing the efficiency of my time in the libraries by being able to pass over many of the listed items with ​“OK, I already have that one.” …

… What isn’t surprising, then, is to see an author who had originally intended to become a Classicist and who was a practicing Christian, when creating his own world and its mythology, depict the same sort of struggles as in Homer and the Bible, if not in the Ramayana. Consider the situation: on the one side, there is a fallen angel, a Maia, Sauron, and, potentially on the other, five more angels, the Maiar Istari, on the other. The five have been sent to counterbalance the one, but, whereas the one builds up fortresses and vast armies of men and others, two of the five disappear before the story begins, one has a connection with the animal world, one leads and counsels but rarely commands,…

1. In the absence of the full report, I don’t have much to say about the news that the scripts for the (unpreseved) 1955 – 56 BBC radio version of The Lord of the Rings have been discovered, save that it’s not surprising that it was Stuart Lee who discovered them, as he’s done previous estimable work on Tolkien in the BBC archives. It should be recorded that Tolkien’s own reaction to the script and performances included words like ​“dreadful,” ​“not well done,” and ​“sillification.”