Welcome to The Hall of Fire 2012

Another year brings us to the month of Bilbo and Frodo's birthday - always a lovely time - but this has not been just any year! 2012 has had so many Tolkien-related anniversaries that we could have been be celebrating different ones all the way from the Birthday Toast (2012 would have been Tolkien's 120th birthday), to the launch of the new film (predicted next winter) which coincides with the 75th Anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit, as you all know of course!

Many members have notified us of the ever-increasing number of trailers, spoilers, and fragments of information about the new film of The Hobbit, including mention of the curse of The Hobbit - is this to be the film equivalent of Macbeth we wonder! However that may work out, it is to be hoped that the film version when released will generate extensive new interest in Tolkien's work and encourage more study of his contribution to English literature. It is a matter of personal taste when judging the 'correctness' of any adaptation, but there can be no doubt that films reach the parts that other media don't reach and so spread the influence of 'Middle-earth' all over Middle-earth. May we hope one day to see the magnificence of The Silmarillion in film version. Now there's a challenge!

The major celebration for us in the Society, and our friends, has been the Return of the Ring conference in August, but if you haven't noticed already there is another even more extraordinary anniversary we might celebrate. This one reminds us that originally Tolkien and C.S. Lewis decided they should write the kinds of fiction they enjoyed because no one else could. Lewis was tasked with writing 'space fiction', and Tolkien was tasked with writing 'time travel'. As part of this he created the strange and wonderful Notion Club Papers to be found today in Part 4 of the Histories of Middle-earth: Sauron Defeated. As part of this story Tolkien created the fiction that the Papers were found as a disordered bundle, loosely tied with red string ... after the Summer Examinations of 2012. This is time-travel at its most tantalising!

For anyone interested in Tolkien's vision of the Inklings, his expertise in Old English, or his development of the Eärendil myth, the Papers are essential reading. Humorous at times, they also show how hard Tolkien tried to tie his myth-making to the real world he inhabited. The Notion Club Papers explore ideas that finally could not be made to synthesise with the Silmarillion material, but complex as they are, they shed light on the background to some of the ideas with which we are all more familiar. Sauron Defeated is available as a single volume, which makes access to The Notion Club Papers much more affordable, so if you haven't got round to them yet, they are well worth investigating.

While we celebrate the great span of Tolkien's life and publications, a tenth anniversary is also something to celebrate. The LOTRPlaza website is celebrating its tenth year this year. Websites devoted to Tolkien have proliferated over the last ten years: some are excellent, many sadly are not. So it is good to have somewhere like the LOTRPlaza where scholarship of all kinds - professional and non-professional - works together to advance the study of Tolkien's work.

News of the Education pages: in preparation for the release of the film a new overview of The Hobbit chapter-by-chapter is available for anyone in need of an introduction. This Hobbit study resource is not a teaching pack linked to the curriculum, but contains helpful summaries and word lists.

While the weather has been doing strange things all year, people have been finding the existing Anglo-Saxon study packs once again. There is also a new link on the Education pages to a separate Old English online resource.

A researcher in South Africa got in touch with a query about Tolkien's epic narrative verse. How good to find yet more interest in the poetry that has too often been regarded by critics as poor and pointless! Such hasty opinions show the amount of work that still need to be done to explain to those who remain ill-informed, that there are many reasons to regard Tolkien's poetry as a most important part of any of his narratives in which it appears. In many instances it is far more complex than it seems at first sight. In addition, taken as an independent body of work, his poetry shows an extraordinary range of styles suited to topics as diverse as the Tale of Sigurd and Gudrun, The Sea Bell, and The Man in the Moon. When the variations of some of the independent poems such as Kortirion Among the Trees and the verse tale of Beren and Luthien are taken into consideration it is possible to watch his ideas developing.

We have heard from an American lecturer who specialises in fantasy and creative writing. She asked for help to find a tour of Oxford for her students in March. Blackwell's tours don't start until May, but the Oxford Tourist Office was helpful. It is still surprising that no company as far as we could find has so far created a holiday planned entirely around the many locations throughout England and Wales that have Tolkien associations.

For a brief time earlier this year a spotlight suddenly turn towards the Southfarthing, with the controversy surrounding The Hobbit pub. Members of the smial offered help and publicity information as required, but the problem seems not to have been resolved yet.

We heard from the Italian Lothlorien Reading Group organiser that the book on Death and Immortality in Tolkien that he has edited is now published by Walking Tree: http://www.walking-tree.org/books/the_broken_scythe.php#more

Much time has been this year spent working on the Education session arrangements for 2012. Hopefully, the sessions have now provided inspiration as well as giving everyone the chance to participate in the important matter of widening awareness of Tolkien's works and the scholarship they deserve.

We are now looking forward to the unveiling of the Blue Plaque in Leeds, in honour of Tolkien's early academic career there.

It has been a rich and varied year so far, certainly one to remember for something other than the endless rain! And we still have the film to come!

Lynn Forest-Hill

September 2012