News from Bree and other random discussions

[Maria]

Now that's something that might actually get me to travel again.

[RoseMorninStar]

I'm really curious as to how that will all shake out legally. If it comes to fruition, it will very possibly be less than a 1/2 hour from my home. I've always said I live in the 'north shire'.

[RoseMorninStar]

The (potential) creator has said they are working on the legal issues for the Hobbiton Stay Wisconsin project and they hope there will be news on this front come Monday..

[N.E. Brigand]

Unlike the 1987 storm, I don't think Tolkien predicted this one.

[Inanna]

What storm?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

In his work The Notion Club Papers, Tolkien mentions a great storm in England, on 12 June 1987. The actual Great Storm of 1987 occurred in October of that year. Christopher Tolkien points this out in the book Sauron Defeated (in which the Notion Club Papers are included), saying "my father's 'prevision' was only out by four months".

[Inanna]

Interesting… thanks, V.

[Eldy]

What makes the storm episode really memorable is that while The Notion Club Papers are set in the 1980s, they're preceded by an elaborate framing device, describing the discovery of the fictional manuscript in 2012 and competing theories as to its nature and the date of its composition. The in-universe textual scholars theorize that the manuscript was written in the 1940s, given the age of the paper and "the idiom of the dialogues, which is old-fashioned and does not represent with any fidelity the colloquial language either of the nineteen-eighties or of the present time." However, a great storm in 1987 is an important event in the story, and within the framing device, there was a "real" storm on the same date, leading the scholars to speculate that portions of the story had been rewritten after that time to make it fit. The in-universe Foreword notes that others speculate it was a mystical form of foresight on the part of the author.

This is all quite esoteric, but it forms an eerie and/or amusing parallel with the real world history of The Notion Club Papers. They were written by Tolkien in the 1940s, set in the 1980s, and when 1987 rolled around in the real world, there was indeed an infamous storm that year. Tolkien thus predicted a major meteorological event—and he "predicted" people reading the NCP and remarking at the coincidence. Though Tolkien's prediction was, as Voronwë notes, off by four months, unlike the prediction of the in-universe storm of 1987.

[Inanna]

I’ve never heard about this book of his! Is it a book? How come I don’t own it??

[Voronwë the Faithful]

As I said before, it is in the book Sauron Defeated, Volume 9 of HoMe, which is the last of the volumes of HoMe that cover the drafting of LotR. Half of Sauron Defeated gives the history of the end of the Third Age and then the rest covers the Notion Club Papers.

[Inanna]

Thank you, V. I missed that part.

[N.E. Brigand]

Is it now a acceptable on Wikipedia to present articles like this? This one, created about a year ago, is rather detailed and extensive for an encyclopedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_in_The_Lord_of_the_Rings

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I've only skimmed it, but what a bizarre article!

[Eldy]

The Tolkien articles on Wikipedia have been massively overhauled and expanded over the past two-ish years, and it's almost entirely the work of one editor. They are certainly of unusual scope and depth for encyclopedia entries; I've never seen any other work of fiction get that treatment on Wikipedia. I know a lot of franchises, including Star Wars, used to have a multitude of articles detailing various aspects of their settings, but Wikipedia's admins started mass deleting those years ago, I assume because it didn't look good to have more articles about Pokémon than some entire academic fields.

In contrast, the new crop of Tolkien articles are structured more like literature reviews, or brief introductions to Tolkien scholarship for a lay audience, which is very different than exhaustively detailing Secondary World minutiae. There are also articles for many more Tolkien scholars than before (Verlyn Flieger has had one since 2007, but I never expected to see Gergely Nagy get his own page). A number of these recent articles, including the time travel one, have received Wikipedia's "good article" distinction, and Beowulf and Middle-earth was recently the featured article of the day on the home page, so I doubt they're going anywhere soon. But it is a pretty weird development.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

There's even one called "Finwë and Míriel" that among other things describes the cover of my book.

Alas, though my friend Jason Fisher has a page, I did not make the list of Tolkien scholars that he deemed important enough to give a page of their own.

[Eldy]

A glaring omission.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Frelga]

Why not make one?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm not sure if that is directed at me, but if so I find it a pretty surprising question.

[Inanna]

It’s really not. It’s a wiki. You can add to it. You have a scholarly book, articles and reviews.