Tolkien Gleanings #441

* Newly added to the latest rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, Kristine Larsen’s “Echoes of Medieval Timekeeping in Middle-earth and Valinor”. Freely available online.

“… investigates medieval resonances and echoes in a sample of his various schemes, demonstrating how Tolkien’s use of medievalist timekeeping is consistent with, and greatly adds to, his creation of a self-consistent invented world.”

* Details of the forthcoming programme for Omentielva Minquea 2026. Conference papers to be presented include, among others…

   – Surveying Christopher Tolkien’s Pronunciations.
   – Epigraphy, Philology, and the ‘Found Manuscript’ Topos in The Lord of the Rings.
   – “On Aelfwine’s Spelling”: An Analysis of Elvish Spelling in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Old English Manuscripts.

* The 3rd Swiss Tolkien Conference will take place in March 2027, on the theme of “Maps and Landscapes in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, with Thomas Honegger. A Walking Tree book of the conference proceedings will follow.

* Newly published, The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis (2026), from Oxford University Press. The ebook is available now, the print editions are delayed until August.

With the “upsidedownedness” of childlike wonder, Lewis reveals what Dickieson calls a “Theology of the Small,” filled with “sacred paradoxes” and offering a hopeful, transformative invitation to spiritual life.

* Just published, the book The Heaviest Ideas in the Universe: A Philosophy of Heavy Metal (2026). Includes the chapter “We Write Songs About Swords and Wizards from Space: Fantasy Metal and the Aspiration of Re‐enchantment”. The ebook is available now, the paperback is delayed until later in July.

* A call for papers for a one-day online conference from the Ukraine’s Centre for Fantasy Literature Studies, themed around the “Mysteries of Night in Fantasy Worlds”. Deadline: 31st October 2026.

* A new website from Middle-earth Enterprises, in the form of the newly-purchased lotr.com. It’s possible to join the waitlist there. After I joined I read… “the official club is taking shape in public beta”, and was told to wait for an email invite. It sounds like an ‘official’ fan-club, then, presumably to follow the various ventures planned by Enterprises?

* Talking of official LoTR franchises, some readers may recall that Gleanings recently stumbled on the abundant old-school Tolkien RPG output of Iron Crown Enterprises, issued under official licence in the 1980s. But there was more. I now find they also produced a series of solo-play paperbacks, starting in 1985. These were a cross between the simpler ‘choose your own adventure’ books of the time, and a more fully-fledged ‘rules and map’ boxed RPG. All packaged in a single self-contained paperback book at a pocket-money price.

* And finally, a new long “Introduction to Alliterative Verse for Readers and Writers of Speculative Fiction”. Freely available online. Tolkien had at least three notable contemporaries doing the same thing, the article notes, who beat him to publication…

“… by the mid-1950s, with the publication of The Lord of the Rings, we can already identify three examples of something that has since become almost commonplace: a piece of speculative fiction, featuring not only embedded poetry, but poetry in what general readers would surely consider a decidedly archaic mode.”

Tolkien Gleanings #440

* GoFundme fundraising for the “Crickhollow” Tolkien letter is now at £16.5k, of the £19k needed for the town to pay the auctioneer’s bill.

* Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien (2006) is now available in Italian translation. I see the English version also now has an affordable ebook version.

* “Phonaesthetics and the Music of Words”, a new podcast interview with Dr. John Holmes of the University of Steubenville. Free on Youtube.

* Quite understandably, your breath may not have been taken away on hearing of the new Handbook of Critical Respiratory Studies (2026). But note that (gasp!) it has the chapter “Breathing as Metaphor and Lived Experience in the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda: A Cultural Analysis”…

“Breath pervades the Old Norse imagination as both metaphor and lived reality. This chapter examines representations of breathing in the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, analyzing how Norse cosmology and myth make meaning of breath in cultural context […] Breath figures in the affective atmospheres of the sagas: sighs of grief, battle cries, and communal horn blasts at Ragnarok all illustrate breath’s relational and emotional dimensions. The analysis also shows how breath is ‘enacted’ through material and ritual contexts, from magical objects like Odin’s horn and the dwarves’ impossible ‘breath of a fish’, to the embodied practice of oath-swearing and prophecy.”

* A new PhD thesis from Italy, Anthropology of the Fantastic: Intangible Heritage, Community Engagement, and Socio-Cultural Innovation in Museum Practice (2026). Researched at museums in Italy and Canada. Freely available online, in English. The thesis appears trapped in an online page-viewer with no download button, but one can winkle out the PDF download link.

“… investigates the potential of the fantastic as a tool for socio-cultural innovation and community engagement, examined through an anthropological perspective and applied within museum practice. [Seeks to demonstrate] how the fantastic can be mobilized within cultural institutions to foster participation, strengthen territorial relationships, and support processes of socio-cultural innovation”

* Signum University’s adult education programme SPACE has been renamed ‘EverLearn’. Their new list of September 2026 online short-courses includes “Tolkien’s Great Tales: The Fall of Gondolin” and “Beginning Quenya 2”.

* The touring exhibition The Magic of Middle-earth has now reached Bewdley Museum in Worcestershire, where it has just opened. It runs until 27th September 2026. If you time it right, you could also combine it with the first Medieval Hereford Festival in August 2026.

* And finally, the National Folklore Survey’s Folklore Matters podcast has begun a second series.

Tolkien Gleanings #439

* Alas, Not Me digs into the LoTR drafts and excisions, to throw more light on the recent discovered “Crickhollow” letter, in “Treebeard on Tom Bombadil”. Yes, Tolkien excised a section where Treebeard discusses knowing Bombadil. Which is something the new letter refers to.

* John Garth tracks down the exact date that Tolkien had a £400 Leverhulme Fellowship award in the mid 1930s, and discusses the likely impact. (Substack, but free).

Industrialist and philanthropist Lord Leverhulme had died in 1925 leaving part of his legacy to scholarships for research. In May 1933, his trustees announced they would annually be handing out £12,000 in research fellowships.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of a 1952 printing of Gordon and Tolkien’s Sir Gawain & The Green Knight. This was… “the most widely used text of the poem for forty years”, in classrooms, until 1967.

* From Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, Eastern Europe, the undergraduate final dissertation “The Influence of Germanic Myths on J.R.R. Tolkien in Relation to the Character of Smaug” (2026). Freely available online, in English.

* The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has just published a new page on “Tolkien and the Somme”, with images, details on the duties of a signals officer, plus a FAQ.

* Thinking of visiting England this summer? Yes, for once we are having a rare real summer, complete with England in a World Cup and an inundation of iconic Red Admiral butterflies. Dorset’s Royal Signals Museum could be an interesting Tolkien-related stop for your tourist itinerary, if travelling over to Cornwall. Though be warned that it appears the First World War section is relatively small…

The museum’s First World War horse-drawn cable wagon (see image, lower right) is interesting, in relation to the possibility that Tolkien worked closely with horses at the battle-front. The new Commonwealth War Graves Commission page for Tolkien (see above) has… “Laying and repairing telephone wires across shell‑torn ground, often under bombardment” as a key duty of a Signals Officer.

* Need some suitable beach reading, this summer? There’s a new book from an Australian research centre, which has a matching theme. Whispers from Celtic Seas (June 2026) asks…

What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, showing how they preserve memories of dramatic environmental change — floods, land loss and shifting shorelines — carried forward through oral storytelling for generations. Drawing on cutting-edge geological and archaeological research, this book recasts these tales not as fantasy, but as historical testimony grounded in lived experience.

* Google Earth desktop is a useful tool for research on localities in the British Isles. I also find it far more reliable/faster than the Web version, especially for Streetview. But download it while you can, because Google will no longer be maintaining or distributing it from next year. They said last week…

“While you can continue using Google Earth Pro desktop, it will no longer be available for new downloads beginning on June 25, 2027”.

* Another useful tool was the British Library’s thesis database. This was attacked by a likely-Russian ransomware gang in 2023, and the records lost. Now after four years it’s back online, after much painstaking restoration. “EThOS records restored” reported the British Library last week…

“metadata records of over 650,000 theses from UK universities have been loaded onto the new platform. This includes around 14,000 additional theses that have been added to the service since the cyber-attack.”

The latest “Tolkien” search-result is now 2024. Records have hyperlinks to repositories and one interesting item was thus discovered, not already noted on Gleanings. The Illustrated Letter: A practice-based investigation of epistolary storytelling through illustration (2023), a PhD which used Tolkien as a case-study. Open access and freely available.

* And finally, The Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction has released the new issue of their annual journal, Gramarye 29 (Summer 2026). Their website has the contents list.

Tolkien Gleanings #438

* The recently discovered ‘Crickhollow letter’ from Tolkien has sold for £19.5k [$26k, inc. auctioneer fees], to the Welsh town of Crickhowell. The local press report “It’s coming home: Welsh town wins bid to buy Tolkien letter”. The town’s GoFundme page has so far raised £14.5k, but a little more is still needed. The letter not only confirms that Crickhowell was the place-name inspiration for Crickhollow, but also reveals a previously unknown aspect of the LoTR plot.

* From Spain, more details about the recent discovery of the Tolkien translation “Soul’s Ward”, in an English article on the website of the University of Granada, “University of Granada project leads to the discovery of a previously unpublished document by J. R. R. Tolkien in an Oxford library”.

“In addition to this discovery, the TRANSMEL project has facilitated the first translation into Spanish of ‘The Figure of King Arthur’ […] the Arthurian essay by Charles Williams, a member of the Inklings literary group alongside J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.”

* Paolo Nardi has a long interview with Erica Martin on Fashion, Costumes, and Appearance in The Silmarillion and in related books such as HoME, History, Nature, and Peoples. They also discuss colour symbolism, and there’s a suggestion that the battle-masks of the dwarves in the Fifth Battle could be made of a material that gave some protection against dragon-fire. Free on YouTube.

* Catholic News considers “The Lord of the Rings and the Victory of Confession” in relation to the key scene with Boromir…

“This scene is often interpreted as a sort of confession because Boromir makes the three acts of the penitent which are required for the sacrament. These acts are first contrition (one must be sorry for one’s sins), secondly confession (you have to tell your sins to the priest), and finally satisfaction (you have to make up for your sins, usually through the penance assigned by the priest).”

* A new report discusses five notable results from the 2025 Survey of Tolkien Fanfiction Writers.

* New in the paid Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, “From Narnia to Neverland: A Guide for Developing and Teaching Popular Culture-Themed [‘PCT’] Courses” (2026) ($ paywall).

“this study gathered data-driven advice for instructors teaching PCT courses. Qualitative data were collected from 59 higher education instructors from across the United States, who represented a wide range of disciplines and were currently teaching or had formerly taught a PCT course.”

* It occurred to me that ageing eyes may find the tiny font and wide one-column layout of the Journal of Tolkien Research PDFs rather a burden. Freeware to the rescue! Willus’s K2pdfopt is genuine old-school freeware available for Windows and other desktop OS. There’s also a version that can run on PCs with older Intel CPUs. K2pdfopt is meant to convert two-column scientific papers for easier reading on old hardware ebook readers. But with its default settings (seen below) it works fine for simply converting PDFs to a more readable format. Works quickly, outputs to the same PDF format.

Tip: Skip along to page 3 or 4 before pressing “Preview”, to get past a PDF’s introductory boilerplate pages. The default “Max columns: 2” appears to refer to input, not output, and does not need to be changed.

* The Polytranslator now offers English to Tolkien Elvish, and other Tolkien-invented languages.

“Polytranslator offers specialized translators for rare, ancient, indigenous, and modern dialects, from Old English and Ancient Greek to living regional varieties.”

* And finally, an eBay snap of what’s said to be the Army cap-badge for Tolkien’s old school, King Edward’s in Birmingham. (But I should add ‘buyer beware’, as many supposedly ‘original’ Army cap-badges are cheaply restruck new strikes from the old moulds). The dragon and Arthurian sword makes me wonder… i) is this the cap-badge of the King Edward’s School Officers Training Corps, aka ‘cadets’? And ii) did it always have that design, even when Tolkien was a KES officer cadet in 1909-1911?

Tolkien Gleanings #437

* The latest Entmoot Podcast is a long interview with the editors of the recent ‘Asexuality’ special issue of the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research.

* A Tolkien-focused report from the Oxford English Graduate Conference 2026. Substack, but free.

* Personal Canon Formation on “Tolkien and the Myth of Decline”. Substack, but free.

* The Middle Ages in the Modern World conference calls for papers, for 22nd-24th June 2027 in Oxford. Note especially the suggestion for “Oxford and medievalism” as a possible theme. Deadline: 30th September 2026.

* Law & Liberty magazine considers “The Seeing Stones of Modern Warfare” in relation to Tolkien. Freely available online.

* The cover is now available for the forthcoming Tolkien comic biography I mentioned previously on Gleanings. The format is a ‘BD’ — a eurocomics format that usually takes the form of a relatively short high-quality graphic novel, printed oversized on good paper and in hardback, and usually with a self-contained story. The book is due in mid August 2026, in French from Futuropolis. There are also now a few more details about the approach taken…

“Alternating intimate biographical moments from his life and scenes from his novels, the authors show us how these personal events are at the source of the mythology that Tolkien created.”

* An Interactive Timeline of Middle-earth, newly online and free at Elfenomeno.

* I’m pleased to learn of Pavane: a Critical Companion (2024), via an excellent long review on the BSFA website. Freely available online.

“Pavane is a particularly British work, a book made up of a cycle of stories, and one imbued by religion, sense of place, and the mythical past of the English countryside. [In an alternative history where Catholic Spain triumphed over England, there is still] faery magic, a component of a specific form of British myth and fiction dating back to before Shakespeare, [which] features in [the sections] “The Signaller” and “Lady Margaret”. Roberts mines the English countryside, and often specifically Dorset, to explore a hidden faery world, creating an emotional resonance for the reader with the landscape itself.”

This classic fix-up novel of 1968 has had some terrible covers over the years, but the U.S. Doubleday first-edition hardback was quite pleasing. The edition’s blurb cannily managed to intrigue readers of both Lovecraft and Tolkien, while the art gave a very subtle nod towards the Sphinx and the Machine of The Time Machine…

* And finally, this week the Throwback Review reviews the book Middle-earth Role Playing (1984), and notes the large hinterland of expansion books it spawned in the 1980s. There was a second edition of the main gamebook, and…

“[the publisher ICE also] produced a huge body of regional sourcebooks, adventures, and campaign material, and that may be what many people remember most fondly. Even players who did not love every corner of the [main book of] rules often loved the books. MERP invited you to roam far beyond the most familiar corners of Tolkien’s fiction, turning Middle-earth into a place you could explore in layers. That sense of scope was one of the game’s great accomplishments. It helped teach a lot of players that a roleplaying setting could feel like a scholarly hobby in itself, something to read, collect, and immerse yourself in even when you were not actively playing.”

On Archive.org, one can find the Iron Crown Enterprises Consumer Catalog Spring ’87. This notes a Lords of Middle-earth Vol 1., the first in three part series, with the first profiling all “the great ones” of Middle-earth and beyond. The second book in this series focused on the Men and Mannish races, and the Third on Dwarves, Orcs, Trolls, Elves and Hobbits.

Also of interest as reference/inspiration for fan-fiction writers, though it seems that getting hold of a set in paper would cost a small fortune today.

Tolkien Gleanings #436

* A new rolling issue of the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research is underway, Volume 24, Issue 2. This currently includes, among others, a lead article on “Tolkien, Modernism, and Mass Art”, a review of Arda Notebooks: The Best of I Quaderni di Arda (2026), and the conference paper “”Then Daddy began a story”: Storytelling in Tolkien’s home and our own”.

* From Finland, the new Masters dissertation, “Miehia, jotka rakastavat miehia: Miesten valinen emotionaalinen laheisyys Taru sormusten herrasta” (2026) (‘Men Who Love Men: Emotional Intimacy Between Men in The Lord of the Rings’). Freely available online.

* The new book Lunar Gothic: The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination (2025) has the 16-page survey chapter “Illuminating the Darkness: Lunar Representation in Children’s Literature”.

* The latest edition of the journal Literary Imagination has the article “Leavis, Lewis, Eliot, and the Prospect of Disciplinary Renewal” ($ paywall), which surveys the battle over Eng. Lit. between C.S. Lewis and the Leavis-ites. The free introduction appears to serve as a fairly good abstract for the paywalled article.

* More Tolkien letters are up for auction at Sotheby’s. Tolkien’s 1960s correspondence with Eileen Elgar, a resident of Tolkien’s favourite Miramar Hotel in Bournemouth. An August 1966 letter to her remarks that Tolkien was set to embark on a Mediterranean cruise that would travel as far east as Smyrna.

Turkish Smyrna in 1966 held little of the old Greek magic and Ionian free-thought, since in 1922 the invading Turks had totally burned the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city along with most of their inhabitants. Tolkien’s fellow passengers likely went directly from the modern Turkish port-city, on the day-trip to ancient Ephesus which was an hour to the south. That would have been the attraction, not the city. By 1966 the Austrian excavations there were substantial and allowed tourists to walk down the grand marble Arcadian Way and sit in the vast ancient drama theatre which once held 25,000 spectators. But it was the Christian associations that would have been the draw for many.

This theatre was later a gladiator arena, and at that time also a key site for the apostle Paul and his followers. Ancient Ephesus also has a Marian association, in that Mary would appear to have lived there after the resurrection of Jesus (John 19:26–27: “the disciple [John] took her [Mary, mother of Jesus] to his own home”). Possibly the tourists would also have visited a reputed ‘House of Mary’, conveniently located in the hills just a little south of ancient Ephesus, a house which had been ‘discovered’ via a 19th century nun’s religious visions.

Did Tolkien see the place? Perhaps. Edith was with him on the cruise, but had fallen and badly injured herself on the first day of the cruise. They thus did “little sightseeing” in Tolkien’s own words. She was however well enough to be carried ashore at the port, but if Tolkien then left her to take the coach to visit ancient Ephesus and the reputed ‘home of Mary’ must remain a mystery. It would be a pity if he hadn’t done so before returning home, after sailing so many thousands of miles.

Mallorn 22 also notes in passing… “Parallels between the ‘Seven Sleepers’ of Ephesus and the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves”. The legend, said to have been very popular during the mediaeval period, is also somewhat similar to that of the ‘sleeping King Arthur and his knights’ belief in Britain. The legend in brief…

The Roman Emperor Decius was engaged in vicious personal persecution of Christians, visiting his provinces in person to see that it was done. At Ephesus he had seven pious lads brought before him, but they courageously and eloquently testified for Christ before the Emperor. Due to their courage they were given some time to repent, which they rather sensibly used to flee together to a wilderness cave. Soldiers eventually found the cave, but miraculously saw no-one there and then took away the supplies and tightly sealed the cave entrance with rocks. Two hundred and eight years later the sleeping lads awoke in the cave, thinking they had only slept the night. The rock wall was now easy to push away, and they went back to the city to find food. There the lads — having aged not a day — were amazed to find crosses above the gates and that the people had become Christians.

* And finally, Tolkien Oddments has “More on Madlener”. You’ll recall that Josef Madlener’s painting “Der Berggiest” was once said to be the inspiration for the appearance of Gandalf. In the new article, the complete postcard set is considered. My own thoughts on Madlener’s shepherd appeared in August 2025 in Gleanings #329, concluding that the outfit was the traditional one for shepherds from the high parts of Provencal (SE France, neighbouring the Swiss Alps). The traditional outfit worn by the Swiss shepherds, which Tolkien might have noticed in the Swiss Alps in 1911, was very different. Thus he would not have seen a real-life ‘Madlener outfit’ on his Swiss walking trip.

Tolkien Gleanings #435

* The latest edition of the French open-access journal Babel: Litteratures Plurielles has a review of the book Tolkien et la religion. Comme une lampe invisible (2024, Sorbonne University Press). A second edition, updated and expanded, of the 2016 first edition. The long review is in French, but sadly not easily auto-translated because the site blocks access with captchas. Thankfully Archive.org has no time for such blocking and happily archives it, from which one can then get an English translation done via Microsoft…

The review mistakenly places Birmingham in the “North” of England, but it has always been in the Midlands.

* New on YouTube from the University of Oxford, “A New-found Tolkien Translation”. Being their short official video on the newly-found and now published “Soul’s Ward”.

* The Spanish Tolkien Society has a new blog post which assembles an annotated links playlist, for the free YouTube podcast that reads and analyzes the letters of Tolkien in Spanish. This podcast has currently reached letter 181.

* The latest edition of the paywall book-journal Studies in Medievalism XXXV (2026) is a special issue with… “essays exploring the intersections of politics and theory through medievalism in film, literature, gaming, and political movements.” No Tolkien, but it may interest some.

* Fandom Pulse looks like it’s wrapping up its lengthy historical survey-series offering a “retrospective on Tolkien’s rise to superstardom”, seemingly with added attention to the various political lenses through which people have viewed his works over time. They now have a links-set for all 12 parts. (Substack and $ paywalled).

* Talking of the history of Tolkien fandom, Kalimac’s Corner was there, back in the day. This week he has a blog post recalling an aspect of “Tolkien in the old days”…

One feature of the early Tolkien fandom days of the 1960s whose import is hard to recapture today is the little cries of bliss that Tolkien fans would emit whenever a major publication dared to acknowledge that Tolkien existed, and maybe was important, by publishing an article about him.

And yet, as his example shows, the journalists and editors concerned were almost always utterly cynical about such things.

* The new book Fairies: A History has been published, to good reviews. It’s billed as a more wide-ranging survey than the author’s previous British Isles-focused book on the topic, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (2023). The author, an expert on both British and Baltic folklore, describes his new book as…

the most wide-ranging history of fairy belief attempted in modern times […] it is a history of fairies, written by a historian and seeking to apply historical methods to humanity’s centuries-long relationship with the fairy realm. [… It was written] in a post-religious, postmodern Europe [in which] the old prejudice against fairies as a serious object of study is breaking down. For the first time, it is possible to give fairies a proper history — and to share that history with a genuinely curious and open-minded reading public. [… as well as the British Isles, the new book] makes frequent excursions to Iceland, Scandinavia, and Central and Eastern Europe, in addition to the Americas and Australasia”.

Interviews about the new book can be found on the podcasts What Magic Is This? and I Might Believe in Faeries.

* And finally, talking of delightful and unexpected apparitions… a charity shop (U.S.: ‘thrift shop’) in Tolkien’s home city of Birmingham was given a “fairly ordinary” box of donated second-hand books. From which emerged… a £38k first edition of The Hobbit. Nice!

Tolkien Gleanings #434

* Inkings Quarterly newsletter brings news that The Inklings Project is offering teaching fellowships for classroom teachers of U.S. school grades 6–12 (translates as ages 11 to 18). Deadline: 1st August 2026.

* The Inklings Quarterly also notes the 2026 “Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference” at George Fox University in Sepember 2026. On pursuing the speaker list, I note a keynote talk from John Garth on “The Undiscovered J.R.R. Tolkien”.

* New to me, the open-access journal Fandom | Cultures | Research, from the University of Marburg in Germany. Four issues so far, with some German but mostly English items. No Tolkien fandom items as yet. But the latest issue has a review of the book The Politics of Fantasy: Magic, Children‘s Literature, and Fandom in Putin’s Russia, while earlier issues have a couple of conference reports on the topic of doing archival / historical research on fandoms. (The journal and its fellow Marburg journals were not on JURN, but I’ve now indexed them).

* Talking of archival materials… new on Archive.org is a scan of Computer Games magazine for January 2003. Which was a Lord of the Rings special-issue.

Has an informed article surveying the history of relevant fantasy RPG videogames, with a timeline. Plus a discussion across two articles on Tolkien’s influence on videogames to 2003. The second of these is from Daniel Greenberg, then “the Creative Director for the Tolkien Franchise”…

“Middle-earth has plenty of magic. Not the promiscuous magic-inflation of Dungeons & Dragons, but magic intertwines everything in Middle-earth [and it also offers] plenty of overt spells, cast not just by Wizards, but by Dwarves, Elves, Men, Wraiths, Dark Lords, etc. (Everyone but Hobbits). However, in order to tell a story about the little guy (literally) making a difference, the powerful magicians must be offstage most of the time. Some confuse this with a lack of magic in Middle-earth. Middle-earth also has lots of treasure hunts. The Hobbit is all about a treasure hunt. To a dungeon-like fortress. To kill a dragon. The Lord of the Rings is a treasure hunt, too, only in reverse. [And with plenty of RPG-like ‘valuable loot use’ as well]”.

* The annual conference of Germany’s Society for Fantasy Research will discuss the theme of ‘Violence and Fantasy’. Set to be held at the University of Cologne, 17th-19th September 2026.

* And finally… RAMzine reports that the band Hubris take on J.R.R. Tolkien for their White Shores album, and that the band will be touring the UK in October 2026…

“Swiss post-rock band Hubris are heading into Middle-earth. The instrumental quartet from Fribourg have built four albums on Greek mythology, but composer and founder Jonathan Hohl has turned to the source he keeps coming back to. […] More than a fantasy tribute, [their new studio album] White Shores sits with J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing on mortality and immortality.”

The album is not yet released, but the eight-minute lead track is free online, on Bandcamp.

Tolkien Gleanings #433

* The latest edition of the German open-access journal Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven Mediavistischer Forschung (‘The Middle Ages: Perspectives In Mediaevalist Research’) is a special issue on ‘Medieval Patterns in Modern Fantasy’. Includes, among others (titles approximately translated)…

   — The neo-medieval grammar of fantasy worlds.
   — Color semantics and color symbolism in the Middle Ages.
   — Praise the art (how videogame players engage with religious art in games)
   — Runes on screen in The Last Kingdom and The Green Knight.
   — Audiovisual aesthetics of the medieval.
   — Druid? Magician? Teacher? Bard? On the reception of Merlin in analog games.
   — Elves and Fairies (short review by Thomas Honegger of Elfen und Feen, 2024).

* In the latest edition of the paywall journal Marvels & Tales, partially-free reviews of (among many others)…

   — ‘The Magical Forest’ exhibition at the Estonian Children’s Literature Centre.
   — The Exeter Companion to Fairies, Nereids, Trolls, and Other Social Supernatural Beings: European Traditions.
   — Giants and Dwarfs in European Art and Culture, ca. 1350–1750.

* Walking Tree Press have now published Tolkien: History Meets Legend (2026). The book aims to show some of the ways in which… “Tolkien excavated the mother lode of his own [biographical] history to create legends.”

* The Notion Club Papers argues that “The Sea Bell” is not autobiographical for J.R.R. Tolkien; but for Frodo. And that Tolkien’s “The Death of St Brendan” is autobiographical for himself.

* From the UK, the PhD thesis The Tale We’ve Fallen Into: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the post-Christian quest for meaning (2026). Explores the LoTR’s reception among a sample of twenty contemporary non-religious readers. Suggest that a truly enchanting fantasy can perform a ‘secondary’ religious function for some readers. Freely available online.

* New Renaissance Mindset reviews Tolkien’s translations of Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Orfeo.

* The University Bookman reviews the book The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (2025).

* Dimitra Fimi’s blog reveals a new book in the making. It will be..

“a new, deep and meticulous exploration of The Lord of the Rings, that will allow me to share fresh thoughts and ideas on this great book since my big monograph on Tolkien nearly 20 years ago. ‘The Slow LotR Re-read’ you’ve been following [on the blog] was not just an impromptu idea: it is the scaffolding of a second book, on Tolkien.”

Also of note…

“I have officially opened my entire historical [SubStack, usually part-paywalled] archive to everyone [for the summer, until 7th September]”

* And finally… new at the Sothebys auction house, a Lord of the Rings, 1961 edition with a taped-in note on the creation of the dwarves. Signed in biro. Tolkien liked biro pens as soon as they first appeared for the public (September 1946, ninepence each at Woolworths).

Tolkien Gleanings #432

* The Spanish Tolkien Society has launched the Aelfwine Essay Award 2026. Now in its 22nd year, the competition offers substantial cash prizes for the winners. Deadline: 9th August 2026. So far as I can tell, English is acceptable and those writing directly in English do not need to provide a translation. Those writing in languages other than Spanish (or Catalan, Basque, or Galician) or English must also provide a good translation of their essay into either English or Spanish.

* Elfenomeno has a new English text interview with Quenya specialist Helge K. Fauskanger…

“Through ‘Ardalambion’, his Quenya course, and now ‘Speak Elf Yourself’, he has helped make a complex and often fragmentary field accessible without losing sight of its philological demands. In this interview, we speak with him about Tolkien, Elvish, linguistic invention and the strange vitality of languages that were never quite meant to be ‘finished’.”

* John Garth looks at the Welsh claims for Crickhallow as a primary-world inspiration for Tolkien ($ Substack, article mostly paywalled). That Tolkien is talking only about the placename seems obvious in the letter, but I assume Garth’s paywalled article also evaluates the various local claims for the place and its surroundings (as the supposed inspiration for Buckland, Bucklebury, the Brandywine Bridge or even Erebor).

* A forthcoming paper I’d missed noting here, set to be presented at the forthcoming Leeds International Mediaeval Congress in July 2026. Kristine Larsen’s “Medieval Timekeeping in Middle-earth and Valinor”. I’d assume it’ll be in the Journal of Tolkien Research in due course.

* In the early 1960s the Finnish Moomintrolls artist Tove Jansson spent nearly two years working on illustration for The Hobbit. Twelve full-page black-and-white drawings, ten half-page illustrations, plus smaller chapter decorations. The result was the Finnish language edition in 1962. Now English readers will be able to enjoy these same illustrations, in a new English edition titled The Hobbit: Illustrated by Tove Jansson. The book is set for publication in September 2026.

* And finally, new on Archive.org is a scan of Pipes And Tobacco Magazine for Winter 2001, with a long article surveying instances of leaf-growing, pipe smoking and related small pyrotechnics (e.g. Sting is edged with “a blue flame”) in Middle-earth. It doesn’t discuss Tolkien’s own primary-world preferences in pipe brands and tobacco blends.