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Beyond Bree

Nancy Martsch, editor



The front page of <span class="push-double"></span>​<span class="pull-double">“</span>Beyond Bree” for April, 2022
Beyond Bree: 2022-04

April, 2022

10 April 2022

In this issue: 2 notes, 1 review.

Notes

Priscilla Tolkien on stage, reading aloud
Priscilla Tolkien addresses
Tolkien 2005: The Ring Goes Ever On”
Aston University, Birmingham; August, 2005
[Photo by Sancho Proudfoot, from File 770]

Priscilla Tolkien

Daniel Helen, p. 1

Priscilla Tolkien has died at the age of 92. She passed away peacefully on 28 February 2022 after a short illness.…

She studied English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1948 – 51. In the early 1950s, she took secretarial work in Bristol and Birmingham, where she observed urban poverty that led her into a career in social work. After studying social sciences at the London School of Economics in the late 1950s, she worked as a probation officer in Oxford.

Priscilla later returned to academia, teaching social work at the University of Oxford and later at High Wycombe College. She taught English at Beechlawn Tutorial College and tutored literature classes from her home 1982 – 2005.…

6th Tolkien Conference in Budapest, Hungary

Dániel Karakas, p. 4

Magyar Tolkien Társaság celebrates its 20th anniversary this June. As part of these celebrations, the Society, together with the Institute of English Studies at Károli Gáspár University, is organising an international conference related to the life and work of J.R.R. Tolkien. The topic of the Conference will be Myth, Imagination, Literature.

Date of the Conference: 23 – 26 June 2022. Location: Károli Gáspár University, Budapest. Online participation will also be possible.…

Reviews

The opening paragraphs of Nelson’s review

“Ancient tales of ruin” in Tolkien’s imagination: A review of A sense of tales untold: Exploring the edges of Tolkien’s literary canvas by Peter Grybauskas

Dale Nelson, p. 2

… Grybauskas shows us how Tolkien gives us bits here and there that relate to the War of the Last Alliance, which ended the Second Age.… As we read, the great episodes of the Third Age War of the Ring pass before us as matters of immediate excitement yet as connected with depths of time.

Within the principal story, other stories may be only partially told because only some of the details are known, or may be deliberately suppressed.…

As well as giving short measure on Tolkien, the book must be faulted for its abundance of verbal clichés. Youngish college teachers try to please their students with clever allusions to pop culture. These don’t look good in cold print. Academic books can avoid stuffiness without resorting to them.

The physical book is unimpressive, which is a shame; I’ve reviewed several Kent publications lately and been impressed by their superior manufacture. The present book costs as much as Tolkien’s Cosmology but has half the number of pages, and they are bound to the spine by glue rather than gathered in durable sewn signatures. The cover has some kind of shiny material over boards rather than buckram. It seems shrinkflation” has come to Kent’s book publishing.

Grybauskas seems generally to be well-informed about matters of fact, but he should not state that Tolkien is known” to have admired” the fantasy-world short stories of Lord Dunsany. (5) Grybauskas cites no source for this claim.…

A Sense of Tales Untold is endorsed by outstanding Tolkien scholars Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter, but it should have been a better book.…

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