The Fifth Roving Ranger
Folks,
a warm welcome to this, the fifth Roving Ranger newsletter!
Events
The Tolkien Society of the Magallanes Region in Chile has to go online as well with their VI Concilio Tolkien and you can follow them from July 28th-August 2nd and bring your Spanish up to par!
TheOneRing.net did a special for this year’s online Comic Con, including John Garth, and you can watch it on Youtube: Dispatches from Middle-earth: What’s New for Tolkien Fans | Comic-Con@Home 2020.
Please always refer to the International Tolkien Fellowship Facebook group for Tolkien-inspired events the world over.
Essays & Scholarship
Alan Reynolds mentioned with the Tolkien Society Facebook group a picture which had been put online by none other but the World Rugby Museum in 2017 including J.R.R. Tolkien which many may have missed. Tolkien scholar John Garth who recently published Tolkien’s Worlds added information to this picture on the very blog post with the World Rugby Museum; he also posted more on this via Twitter.
Reviews and Book News
According to the NPD Group, a US-American market research company, e-book unit sales rose by 31% in the US for the month of April which does not come as much of a surprise as this was the first month the consequences of COVID-19 were fully felt in the US. The good news buried in this:
Young adult e-book sales grew 10 percent over to 2019, driven largely by double-digit increase in fiction sales. The science fiction category enjoyed the highest unit-sales gain, led by “The Hunger Games,” by Suzanne Collins, and “The Hobbit,” by J.R.R. Tolkien. [my emphasis.]
Sharing his reading experiences with his 5-year-old grandson Logan he writes:
Logan and I had already begun exploring “The Hobbit,” and now here we were in the middle of an adventure that would carry us along on a journey complete with Beorn the bear and Bard the bowman. Surely we would get to gold before the greedy dragon could fly there. [Source: Paywall and/or Pressreader subscription.]
A lovely picture of Robert Quilter Gilson’s grave at Becourt Military Cemetery. For more pictures on the cemetery visit this site.
Film franchise, merchandise and Amazon series
There are hundreds of so-called hobbit holes the world over as franchise-related tourism grows ever bigger and whole nations struggle to get the next big thing to their shores with as many incentives as possible. I would have to spend too much time to just name the ones in Europe but this one has been co-funded by the European Union; I thought that this Spanish version of the film hobbit holes is worth a mention. (Just to be clear: I am very much pro-European ;))
In the same vein is this cute piece of news in hobbit hole landscaping.
And on a similar note this Welsh ‘hobbit house’ has been making the news’ round. Please read the small print on this one!
Please don’t ask me why it’s hobbit hole week for me, I don’t know, either, but I just remembered that 2019 the UK Shed of the Year was Bux End.
Ryan George who does the Pitch Meetings for ScreenRant has finally done the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings Meeting. Find out in less than six minutes what had to be said to get the film trilogy going.
If you are interested in VR technology, Virtual Tolkien might be for you. This 5 minute VR experience is meant for Oculus Rift or Windows Mixed Reality devices.
Also, please be aware that if you happen to have a fancy plate Frodo might follow you.
In other news
The Blog Roll
These are blogs you really should be following if you’re interested in Tolkien …
Some of these, you may find, are not as active as one would hope; but even if they have not posted anything new for a long time they are repositories of great essays and research on all things Tolkienian and always worth your time. The blog roll – and this very newsletter! – has been inspired by Troels Forchammer’s Parma-kenta and his excellent Tolkien Transactions he did for seven years – they are still sorely missed!
Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, ‘Too Many Books and Never Enough’
Dimitra Fimi, ‘Dr. Dimitra Fimi’
Jason Fisher, ‘Lingwë — Musings of a Fish’
Douglas A. Anderson, ‘Tolkien and Fantasy’
John D. Rateliff — ‘Sacnoth’s Scriptorium’
John Garth, ‘John Garth’
David Bratman, ‘Kalimac’s Journal’
Jenny Dolfen, ‘Jenny’s Sketchbook’
Andrew Higgens, ‘Wotan’s Musings’
Anna Smol, ‘A Single Leaf’
Edmund Weiner, ‘Philoloblog’
Robin Anne Reid, her blog
Annalisa Palmer, her blog
Various, The Mythopoeic Society
Various (Bradford Eden, ed.) Journal of Tolkien Research (JTR)
Various, The Tolkien Society (TS)
Southfarthing Mathom
Various, The Mythopoeic Society, ‘The Horn of Rohan Redux’
Sue Bridgwater, ‘Skorn’
Tom Hilman, ‘Alas, not me’
Michael Martinez, ‘Middle-earth’
Bruce Charlton, ‘Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers’
Various, ‘Middle-earth News’
Jeffrey R. Hawboldt, ‘Expressions of Substance’
Ryszard Viajante Derdzinski, ‘Tolknięty’
Stephen C. Winter, ‘Wisdom from The Lord of the Rings’
Troels Forchhammer, ‘Parma-kenta‘
Marcel Aubron-Bülles, ‘The Tolkienist‘
Jeremy Edmonds, ‘Tolkien Collector’s Guide‘
Aubrey, ‘Diverse Tolkien‘
Elyanna, ‘itariilles‘
Pictures credits: Gandalf, Eowyn, the Shieldmaiden and Ancalagon the Black by Çağlayan Kaya Göksoy.
Please also visit the artist’s Artstation.
If you are interested in my other Tolkien-related work please have a look:
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