A rather long time has elapsed since my last update, for which apologize. Mostly, there has been little new of any substance to say: I continue the slow recovery from long-COVID and continue to work on the highest-priority items: Anduin™ (which I both enjoy and am under contract for) and a chapter in a forthcoming book (ditto).

As time allows, I have designed a modern back-end for LR Citations, which will scale better (more paginations!) and will integrate with both Anduin™ and aspects of Digital Tolkien Project.

I still expect rather than hope to spruce the cobwebs off of Tolkienists​.org before too much longer, but I’m reminded of JRRT’s foreword to the first edition of LotR:

For if the labour has been long (more than fourteen years), it has been neither orderly nor continuous. But I have not had Bilbo’s leisure. Indeed much of that time has contained for me no leisure at all, and more than once for a whole year the dust has gathered on my unfinished pages.

My work is no Lord of the Rings. But then, you won’t have to wait fourteen years, either.…

… I’m always interested in where Tolkien’s ideas come from and, although he himself related this to the myth of Atlantis (see the letter to Naomi Mitchison, 25 September, 1954, Letters (197−198), If you’ve grown up in the sort of culture, both religious and general, in which Tolkien grew up (and so did I, for that matter) probably your first thought is: ​“Hey — it’s Genesis, Chapters 6 – 8! The story of Noah’s Ark and the flood!” …

I think, however, that we can see two more potential influences upon JRRT which might lie behind this story of a flooded world. First, JRRT began his academic life as an aspiring Classicist, which means that, probably fairly early on in his training, he had encountered Ovid’s (43BC-17AD) story of the only survivors of a Greco-Roman flood, to be found in Book I, lines 163 – 415 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. …

Beyond Classics, … we know that Tolkien had an abiding affection for Welsh, … and there’s a medieval Welsh legend, involving two characters, named Dwyfan and Dwyfach, who survive their own flood, when a lake monster, the Afanc, inundates the world and the two, along with two of each species of animal which they’ve loaded into a boat (the boat being called Nefyd Naf Neifion — ​“Celestial Lord Neptune”?), are the only survivors.…

Latin or Welsh were two languages with which Tolkien had significant experience, but is there yet another possible influence? In 1873, the Assyriologist George Smith (1840−1876) published an essay in Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology … which later formed part of book which caused a great deal of controversy at the time. Entitled ​“The Chaldean Account of the Deluge,” …

When I was 11, The Fellowship of the Ring by Peter Jackson was released. I couldn’t go to the cinema to watch it, but I remember doing it at a friend’s house a couple of months after the première. I loved it! The story, the special effects, the orcs, the elves, everything. After that, I asked my parents to buy me the books. From then on, there was no coming back. Nowadays I have a bookshelf with more than 60 Tolkien related books – including a collection of The Hobbit in different languages — maps, posters, paintings, figures, T‑shirts, and more.…

According to this article, the star-namers did have Tolkien in mind. Earendel was the name for the morning star (Venus) which Tolkien found in Old English poetry and which inspired him to create the character, originally of the same name, in The Silmarillion. In his later work he took to spelling it Eärendil, and that’s how it appears in the published books. (The diaeresis over the ​“a” is to remind you they’re two separate vowels, not a diphthong.)

… Old Man Willow’s behavior, however, suggests that, rather than being a symbol for mourning, he can become a source of mourning and, as such, he falls into a category of deadly plants like the once ill-famed upas tree.… This is a widespread variety of tree, Antiaris toxicaria, which can be found from Africa all the way across to the western Pacific.… Travelers’ tales reported that the plant gave off a kind of noxious fume which poisoned the landscape for 10 miles around, leaving the vicinity empty save for the bones of unwary animals and people.…

Monday was my day for researching the annual Tolkien bibliography in the library, having exhausted the free databases at home.… This was the first time I’d been there in three years, but I used to go annually so I remembered it well… Inside the library, masks were required and most everyone had one.… I settled down at a computer and spent five straight hours online searching, interrupted only by the obvious restroom breaks and much more frequent visits to the help desk, starting with one following seeing that the login screen no longer tells you what the visitor login is. (Though it does say there is one.) Then there was a hitch when it wasn’t clear that inter-library access isn’t available to visitors: it actually gives the option to enter a visitor account, and that’s sure misleading. Lastly, when I left, I gave them a list of those databases on their pull-down menu where I found that the link was broken. You’d think they’d check this occasionally themselves, but maybe not. What if they’re paying subscription fees for databases they can’t access? …

As the years have gone by, I’ve had to spend less and less time in the stacks. Even the one relevant serial that UCSC gets in hard copy that no other library in my ambit gets is now available in online databases. And now, I’m finding that the pay databases have fewer items that aren’t in the free databases than they used to. What the pay databases have is more complete citations (irritating to find a great article but the entry doesn’t give the author’s name) and, of course, many of them have full text. These I was grabbing so that I’ll have them available to hand out to the Year’s Work contributors next year.

So thanks to Carl H for this one: a link to a Tolkien Day event featuring two key figures in early Tolkiendom: Robert Foster and Dick Plotz.

Foster is author of A Guide to Middle-earth and then later of The Complete Guide to Middle-earth, expanded to include The Silmarillion. This was a book so massively useful that Christopher Tolkien himself acknowledged and praised it (in his introduction to the first volume of HoMe).

Plotz founded The Tolkien Society of America (TSA), and launched the most successful of all the early Tolkien fanzines: The Tolkien Journal.…

… Well, Lord of the Rings is my favorite, though I certainly enjoy The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. What I really appreciate is how decent and nonviolent, even though they are good at it when absolutely necessary, the charaters are and also the enduring friendships. Lord of the Rings is basically a master class in non-toxic masculinity. I think I picked up on that even when I was small and that’s why it is a story that sticks.…

A couple of conferences are coming up in the next few weeks with lots of discussion about a wide range of topics in Tolkien studies. Check out what people will be talking about in the Tolkien in Vermont 2022 conference and the PCA 2022 Tolkien Studies area — or register and listen to the full sessions! …