when to toast Tolkien

Friday was the anniversary of JRR Tolkien's birthday. He was born 1892, so that makes him 133.

The Tolkien Society suggests that everyone raise a glass and make the toast "The Professor" at 9 pm local time. But that doesn't stop them from holding an online gathering with the toast at 9 pm UK time and inviting members worldwide to attend. That makes it 1 pm my time, and I've attended it in the past. The Society chair reads a passage, the toast is made, and then the very large attendance is sorted into breakout groups to chat.

But this year I did something different. I'm on the mailing list for a US-based Inklings discussion group which meets online Fridays, also at 1 pm my time, and which took advantage of the coincidence to celebrate Tolkien's birthday by holding the toast at 2 pm and, it being a much smaller group, giving everybody in it a chance to read a favorite passage of Tolkien. Some prose passages mostly from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - one person's choice of Bilbo and the spiders inspired someone else to pick Shelob's Lair, despite someone else confessing to finding all the spider passages horribly creepy - and a lot of poems, including "Mythopoeia," part of "The Fall of Arthur," and my choice, an obscure 1920s poem called "The Nameless Land," my favorite Tolkien poem. It's in the collection The Lost Road as well as the new Collected Poems.

Marcel Bülles aka The Tolkienist, a friend of mine in these circles, wants people honoring Tolkien's birthday to promote his e-mail newsletter, "The Roving Ranger." I'm not sure how to get this other than to pay for a subscription to his blog at Steady, which is another service like Substack, because that seems to be why I'm getting it, but there it is. Marcel also has a website where it appears the material from his newsletter will eventually end up. Anyway, it has lots of material interesting and enticing to other Tolkienists, which is why I signed up.