Predictable Matt wrote:

I can share a lovely review that I've just picked up - it's on p.4 of The Yorkshire Post on 12 August 1925, in a section headed (rather delightfully) "The Library Table".

This review of the Tolkien/Gordon edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight gives a brief but evocative background to the manuscript origin ("the writing is small, the ink has faded considerably, and some lines were blotted against the opposite page, when the manuscript was written"). There is also an overview of the various tools that support the reader.

(in terms of copyright, no authors are named at all on the page shown)

Matt this is awesome thank you for sharing with us.

onthetrail wrote:

Matt this is awesome thank you for sharing with us.

You're welcome! I have one more Gawain review on the way but I haven't been able to find that many

Dale Nelson wrote:

Does anyone have the magazine -- I think it was The New Republic -- in which Dick Plotz placed his notice about the Tolkien Society of America (I'm not sure it was called that, at the time)?

I don't, but the library of the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm does - it was indeed The New Republic. After the initial meeting at the end of February 1965, I assumed the ad would have been quite soon after, but I had to leaf through the classifieds as far as the 29 May issue before I found it --

Here's another newspaper review of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, this time in The Guardian (then The Manchester Guardian) on 16 June 1925.

Again the review sings the praises of the poem, though noting too its difficulty: "The language, extraordinarily rich in vocabulary and idiom, is far more remote than Chaucer's from our own."

And again the work of Tolkien and Gordon is highly praised: "The two Leeds professors...have provided the most complete and scholarly apparatus for the explanation of the text and subject matter".

One of the nicest things for me in collecting reviews of Tolkien's works (especially early ones) is coming across a lovely, elegant or thoughtful turn of phrase. I found such an example in a Swedish review of LOTR from a literary magazine published in 1967 (I assume that the occasion was the first publication in a small-format paperback in Sweden, though this isn't made explicit) --

"For me this epic saga represents not just fiction of the highest quality. It is also an expression of a way of seeing the world in its completeness, of...learning to listen and be still amongst the flow of events. Or as a tree-creature says: 'to spend a week just breathing'".

Thinking of the ongoing thread about the copyright proceedings (https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/n ... wtopic.php?topic_id=5286), one can't help but notice how wide of the mark was this prediction in a review of The Silmarillion in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1978, which hit my postbox today:

"Every chapter has enough material in it for a novel - and it was these novels that I really wanted. I suspect these novels will eventually be written by others; and The Silmarillion, like the Bible, will become a source book for fantasy novels".

Predictable Matt wrote:

Thinking of the ongoing thread about the copyright proceedings (https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/n ... wtopic.php?topic_id=5286), one can't help but notice how wide of the mark was this prediction in a review of The Silmarillion in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1978, which hit my postbox today:

"Every chapter has enough material in it for a novel - and it was these novels that I really wanted. I suspect these novels will eventually be written by others; and The Silmarillion, like the Bible, will become a source book for fantasy novels".

There's still time for that prediction to come true.... thankfully (for me personally) not in my lifetime though. 😅

Ha! Fair point

And now I'm stuck wondering what fantasy novels have been inspired by the Bible... 🤔

Predictable Matt wrote:

Ha! Fair point

And now I'm stuck wondering what fantasy novels have been inspired by the Bible... 🤔

How about Armageddon end of the world type stuff…and then there are exorcist stories…and then there is…😀

Some could be more horror/sci-fi than fantasy