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Over at UneekDollDesigns, artist Debbie Ritter sells handmade dolls of famous authors and celebrated literary characters.

The collection includes the trio of ghosts who haunt Ebenezer Scrooge. Ritter has also created dolls of Jane Eyre from Charlotte Bronte‘s famous novel and Mrs. Haversham from Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit come as a matching set. Flavorpill made a list of other dolls, including Shel Silverstein, J.R.R. Tolkien and Joyce Carol Oates. Above, we’ve embedded a Mark Twain doll. What’s your favorite?

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Can’t get enough of Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit? If you’ve exhausted your Tolkien collection? Don’t despair, The Book Lady’s blog has put together a great list of books that influenced J.R.R. Tolkien.

The list includes classics like Beowulf, A Voyage to Arcturus and Lord Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder. What are your favorite books on the list?

Here is more from the blog: “Lord Dunsany was a prolific fantasy short story writer (primarily) who wrote around the turn of the 20th Century. Tolkien mentions Dunsany’s works many times in his collected letters. In one letter he talks about Dunsany’s fantasy character-naming abilities and later in life Tolkien writes fondly about Dunsany’s ‘Chu-Bu and Sheemish’ story. Tolkien also once presented a scholar, Clyde S. Kilby with a copy of The Book of Wonder to help prepare him for his role working on Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (The Lord of the Rings ‘back story’ or ‘Legendarium’ Tolkien wrote over the course of his whole life).”

 

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Actor Elijah Wood will return to Middle Earth in the two-part film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit.

Deadline New York reported: “Wood is confirmed to star in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit to be shot in New Zealand. In addition, he has signed on to play ‘Ben Gunn’ in Stewart Harcourt’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island along side Eddie Izzard.”

Besides Wood (pictured, via), other castmates returning from Lord of the Rings include: Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf, and Andy Serkis as Gollum. At the moment, Orlando Bloom is rumored to be considering his return as Legolas.

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New Zealand activists are fighting to keep filming for the upcoming The Hobbit adaptation in that country, the same place where Peter Jackson filmed the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. According to these passionate protesters, “New Zealand is Middle Earth.”

The Guardian reports that Warner Bros. executives will decide this week if the shoot will be in New Zealand.  Prime Minister John Keys will personally oversee the negotiations, hoping that producers will make a decision in his country’s favor.

The article adds: “A dispute over pay and conditions led producers to hint that they might move filming to another country. Carrying banners proclaiming ‘New Zealand is Middle Earth’ and ‘We Love Hobbits,’ a reported 2-3,000 people gathered in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, and other cities such as Auckland and Christchurch in advance of a visit by executives from the studio Warner Bros.”

continued…

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I am indebted to Jenny Schwartzberg for bringing to my attention the fact that the BBC’s extensive archives are offering up recordings of some of the great British Novelists of the past.  These are both television and radio programs and they are intoxicating.  You can hear the very voice of Virginia Woolf herself.  And on the children’s side of things, there are folks like T.H. White, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Penelope Lively.  You could get lost in there.  Thank you for bringing it to my attention, Jenny.

• New Blog Alert: And it’s a doozy too.  If you missed the fact that the magnificent Philip Nel started a blog called Nine Kinds of Pie recently, then now is the time to know.  Mr. Nel is that nice young man who teaches as a Professor of English at Kansas State University and also writes books like The Annotated Cat in the Hat and, my personal favorite, Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (that one was done with co-writer Julia L. Mickenberg, of course).  He updates his blog with frightening regularity as well.  Of course, it’s the summer.  The school year is only just now picking up.  Still, anything he cares to write is well worth your time to read.  Plus he wins an award for Best New Blog Title in our field.

• All right.  Let me see what I can do with this.  Ahem.  So Beatrix Potter was friends with Anne Carroll Moore.  Anne Carroll Moore was a famous children’s librarian who worked at the main branch of NYPL.  I am a children’s librarian who works in the main branch of NYPL.  I have seen the picture Potter gave to Ms. Moore as a gift.  Ipso facto, I’m going to weigh in on the whole Emma Thompson writing a new Peter Rabbit story news item.  I feel entirely ripped in half too.  On the one hand, I love Emma.  I honestly adore her.  I think she’s a modern marvel.  I want to be her best friend and to just listen to her talk for hours on end.  On the other hand, this marks a very bad precedent: The celebrity picture book sequel to a classic work.  No.  No no, this will not do.  We can’t have Justin Bieber writing conclusive storylines to Stuart Little or Courtney Love putting the last touch on an official return to Wonderland.  Nope.  I love you Emma, but this cannot stand.  I’m sure you’re a perfectly fine writer, but you’re making it look too enticing to the others. Thanks to @PWKidsBookshelf for the link.

• I envy not the good people charged by ALSC to regularly determine the official Great Websites for Kids as promoted by the librarians.  I’m just grateful they exist and that they’re willing to add some new additions.  Had I the power, I’d place these on my library’s children’s website pronto, if not sooner.  A magnificent resource.

• 
  7 Comments on Fusenews: I mean, a fear of tent worms isn’t all THAT ridiculous, right?, last added: 8/21/2010
  Display Comments
  Philip Nel said, on 8/21/2010 5:49:00 AM
  

  Thanks for the plug on the blog! Speaking of: am planning a brief post on Seuss’s advertising work later today.

  Jennifer in GA said, on 8/21/2010 7:04:00 AM
  

  I think Emma Thompson is one of the few celebrity-type people who could actually pull off writing a sequel to a classic book. She’s more of a writer-turned-actor than actor-who-wants-to-dabble-in-writing. She got her start as a comedy writer. I know it’s not the be-all and end-all, but she did win an Oscar for writing the screenplay adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, and she’s also adapted the Nanny McPhee screenplays. Even though she hasn’t published and works of fiction, I think her writing background is strong enough to do the job and do it well. Personally, I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt until she proves otherwise.

  Elizabeth Bird said, on 8/21/2010 7:10:00 AM
  

  Oh, I don’t deny that she may end up doing a stand-up job of it. I just worry that it sets a bad example for other celebrities. They’ll eye Emma’s work, forget the whole she’s-also-a-real-writer element, and try doing the same thing themselves. *shudder*

  rams said, on 8/21/2010 8:24:00 AM
  

  That Viewmaster Alice looks like The Lonely Doll Goes Anti-Grav.

  mhg said, on 8/21/2010 8:29:00 AM
  

  Emma Thompson already has work that sets her salary in the millions. She was “asked” to do this. Meanwhile, the usual meme for authors is that we do not make money at our profession (heard it again right there in your seminar this month BB). Publishers are telling authors to have low expectations while the jobs go to people who are not in the business and already have jobs. WTH?????? Let’s stop the poverty meme to authors and get some reality, folks.

  Tricia said, on 8/21/2010 11:25:00 AM
  

  The voice of Virginia Woolf! I don’t get the feeling she’d have enjoyed making podcasts.

  lisainberlin said, on 8/21/2010 4:37:00 PM
  

  http://www.heimel-dias.de/marchen/

  The viewmaster picture reminded me tiny boxes I found at the fleamarket here with slide rolls. Held up to the light, I realized they were fairy tales! They were popular in East Germany. The artwork on the ones featured on the website above is worth a check-out. Just click on the name of the fairy tale (sorry, the site is just in German). Weiter means continue. Have fun!

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Being a big fan of Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, I had no idea she had illustrated a version of The Hobbit as well as two books by Lewis Carroll, until I recently discovered this site. There isn’t much information and the scans are a bit small, still it’s amazing to see such rarely seen work (at least to me) by one of the world’s greatest children’s book illustrators.

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Posted by Stephan Britt on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Alice in Wonderland, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Moomins, The Hobbit, Tove Jansson

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David Macaulay becomes a genius and the hobbits ride again.

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Below Walter Moore, a lifelong Tolkien enthusiast, reviews Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Winer, three senior editors of the OED.
 

First, the bare biographical fact underlying this slender volume: J. R. R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings and Oxford Professor of Philology, spent a brief period after the First World War (1918-22) working on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which at that time had been in progress for sixty years and had at last reached the letter "W." Tolkien completed the definitions of some two dozen words, beginning with "waggle" and ending with "wold."

These contributions may not seem like much to base a book on, but, provided you are interested either in Tolkien as an author or in his place in lexicography and linguistics, The Ring of Words is well worth the read.
 

Few of Tolkien’s notes survive in the dictionary’s records, but undaunted, the authors lead us in great detail through some of the words he defined, using them as a starting-point for a history of the OED and a sketch of Tolkien’s early life. In 1918, when Tolkien hired on with the dictionary, he had been to war and returned, and had already written the earliest forms of his Elvish languages and the first pieces of what would be published as the Silmarillion. (This evolution is laid out in vast detail in the twelve volume History of Middle Earth, compiled by his son.)

Tolkien’s definitions (and some he submitted or suggested for supplements) still appear in, or have been added to, the current (2nd) edition of the OED. Look up "wan," "wallop," or "walnut" to get a taste.

OED definitions note all current and obsolete uses of a word, including early literary uses, and evidence for the word’s origin. Sometimes, as with walnut, this is fascinating reading:

walnut1

Etymology

[OE. walhhnutu str. fem. = WFris. walnút (NFris. walnödd from Da.), MDu. walnote (Kilian walnot), Du. walnoot, MLG. wallnot, -nut, LG. (Bremisch. Wörterb. wallnutt) walnut, G. walnuss (earlier wallnuss), ON. valhnot str. fem. (Norw. valnot, Sw. valnöt, Da. valnød). The first element is OTeut. *walo-z (OE. wealh, OHG. walah) ‘Welshman’, i.e. Celtic or Roman foreigner; see WELSH a.
The solitary OE. example (in a glossary c1050) is the earliest known appearance of the word in any language. The word must, however, have come to England from the Continent, but there is no evidence to show whether it belonged to the primitive OE. vocabulary, or was introduced at a relatively late date. It seems to have belonged originally to the LG.-speaking district; etymologically it meant the nut of the Roman lands (Gaul and Italy) as distinguished from the native hazel. It is noteworthy that in the languages of these countries the word descending from L. nux, when used without qualification, denotes the walnut. In HG. the word appears first in the 16th c. (adapted from LG.); but MHG. had the equivalent wälhisch nu (mod.G. dial. wälsche nuss, wälschnuss): see WALSH-NUT.
The ONF. noix gauge, gaugue, walnut (which survives in mod. Picard and Norman dialects) app. represents a popular L. *nux gallica, a translation of the Teut. word.]

There you go — it’s a walnut for the same reason a Welshman is from Wales. Language is a funny thing.
 

The middle of the book traces Tolkien’s many contacts with the staff of the OED (which he usually referred to as the "NED" or "New English Dictionary" — typical of his dry humor) after he left the project. This part of his life is well known: he became a lecturer in what was then called Philology and is now called Linguistics, accepted a position at Oxford, and started writing The Hobbit (published in 1937) on the back of an exam. Considerable space is given to the connections between the words he researched both for the OED and as a professor, and the words that evolved into places and things in Middle Earth. For example, in one pivotal (for Tolkien) line in Beowulf, we have Elves, Orcs and Ents (and, as the book adds, by way of Dungeons and Dragons, Ettins, or "bad Ents"):

eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas, swylce gigantas (ettins and elves and orcs, likewise the giants)

Likewise, the mythological hero Eärendil is derived from the Old English name for the planet Venus, and the language of Rohan is in fact almost unaltered OE. The Dwarves owe much to Old Norse — the name of the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield, for example, is transliterated from a list of (human) heroes in the Old Norse poem Völuspá.
 

It often seems that Tolkien came out of nowhere, a direct electrifying connection from the 10th Century to the 20th, but of course there were authors who inspired him, and the book approaches the works of William Morris and E. R. Eddison, both philologically and as influences on Tolkien. Works such as Morris’ House of the Wolfings were the nineteenth century’s Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien acknowledged their impact at the same time as he criticized their self-conscious archaisms. Compared to these authors, Tolkien’s prose is quite modern, except when it is supposed to feel archaic to his characters. Tolkien had very strong feelings regarding the "feel" of dialogue — it should as normal to the reader as it would to the speaker. When archaisms appear, they are old, unfamiliar things not just to us, but to the characters. As a result, Tolkien invented modern forms of numerous dead or disused Old- and Middle-English words.
 

The Ring of Words ends with an appendix of all the words devised or altered by Tolkien that now appear in the OED — an impressive list that of course includes new senses of elf and dwarf, and revived obsolete words like "orc" and "halfling," but also his invented future histories of dead Old English and Middle English words. This last part may be useful as a reference, someday, if you find yourself contemplating the etymology of modern fantasy literature, which owes so much to Tolkien.

So, again—if you’ve read Tolkien, and his "philological" use of words in his fiction interests you, this book is well worth picking up. Others may enjoy the descriptions of the danger- and thrill-filled life of a 1920s lexicographer.

OK, I made that last part up.
 

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TadMack at Finding Wonderland asks, "Wouldn't you hate for someone to be digging through your computer files for all of the story fragments you've begun and abandoned, to be published posthumously?" The question refers to the announcement that J.R.R. Tolkien's son has completed one of his unfinished manuscripts.

Speaking as an author who has a son who could easily end up a writer, I would love to have him finish one of my works. It would be as if the two of us got to work on something together, if that's not too creepy for you. I wouldn't even object to his taking an unfinished piece or an idea and giving it a "next generation" treatment. He could go ahead and let the piece evolve so it fits the culture he was then living in, even though I wasn't. It would give my work a new life and bring it to new generations.

Go for it, sweetheart.

Of course, this is all assuming he would do a good job. Otherwise...

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Well, old Tolkien reallly, according to PW:

Houghton Mifflin has acquired U.S. rights to publish the first complete book by J.R.R. Tolkien since the posthumous Silmarillion in 1977. HM bought American rights to The Children of Húrin from HarperCollins UK, which acquired the project from The Tolkien Estate in a world rights deal.

Húrin, begun in 1918, was reconstructed by Christopher Tolkien, painstakingly editing together the complete work from his father’s many drafts, this book is the culmination of a 30-year endeavor by him to bring J.R.R. Tolkien’s vast body of unpublished work to a wide audience.

HM will publish Húrin in April 2007.

This is interesting. The versions of the tales written in 1918 were previously collected in THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, Volumes 1 and 2 of THE HISTORY OF MIDDLE EARTH. Although Tolkien worked on a longer version of the Narn i Hîn Húrin as he called it, bits and pieces of this were printed in both UNFINISHED TALES and HoME. Christopher Tolkien, now 82 himself, has been laboring over his father’s papers for decades, and the Tokien scholars here at Stately Beat Manor will be very curious to see the results. To our knowledge there is no existing unpublished “complete book” by Tolkien, unless it is C. Tolkien’s redacted version of various texts, some written when Tolkien was recovering from trench fever received in the Battle of the Somme. If this is the case, we hope Christopher doesn’t make another boner like making Gil-Galad the son of Fingon in the published Silmarillion.

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Lord Voledmort, the lead bad guy in the Harry Potter saga has been voted favorite literary villain of all time, in a poll conducted by Bloomsbury, HP’s British publisher. Over 16,000 Brit kids voted in the poll, which had Sauron at #2, and, somewhat surprisingly, Lex Luthor and The Joker at #4 and 5 respectively. We say surprisingly because the DCU’s main villains exposure is certainly not in printed form. Magneto came in at #11. We a bit saddened that Annihilus didn’t make the list. Mark Millar pal and Potter author JK Rowling had this to say:

I am thrilled and honoured beyond words that Lord Voldemort has been voted best villain in the BigBadRead poll.

I am not sure how he would react ot knowing that he had won a Muggles’ unpopularity poll. A mixture of pleasure that you recognised his power and menace, coupled with fury at your nerve at mentioning his real name, I think. His author, however, is absolutely delighted.

The complete list of evil:
1. Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
2. Sauron, The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Mrs Coulter, His Dark Materials Sequence, Philip Pullman
4. Lex Luthor, Superman Graphic novels, DC Comics
5. The Joker, Batman Graphic novels, DC Comics
6. Count Olaf, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket
7. The Other Mother, Coraline, Neil Gaiman
8. The White Witch, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
9. Dracula, Dracula, Bram Stoker
10. Artemis Fowl, Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
11. Magneto, X-Men Comics, Marvel Comics
12. Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
13. Zaphod Beeblebrox, HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
14. Captain Hook, Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
15. Napoleon the Pig, Animal Farm, George Orwell
16. Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
17. Miss Trunchbull, Matilda, Roald Dahl
18. Cruella de Vil, 101 Dalmations, Dodie Smith
19. The Wicked Witch, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum of the West
20. The Grinch, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Dr. Seuss

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