I've just posted a new piece at Tolkien Oddments substack. Here is the beginning. You can read the entire piece freely at this link.
More on Madlener
Last summer, I published a piece in The Journal of Tolkien Research on “Josef Madlener’s ‘Der Berggiest’: Not the Origin of Gandalf.” It is freely available here. My point basically was that it was chronologically impossible for a postcard first printed in 1935 to have influenced The Hobbit, and specifically the character Gandalf, whose origin was in the late 1920s, while the manuscript of the bulk of the tale was in existence by early 1933 for C.S. Lewis to be reading it. After that piece was published I had some interesting correspondence with some people, notably Carl F. Hostetter, who suggested better matchings of Madlener’s titles for the six-postcard series “Gestalten aus Märchen und Sage” (Characters from Stories and Legends) with the illustrations themselves. (I had noted that a few of the titles had “questionable associations.”) ...
