Tolkien Gleanings #397

* The forthcoming Leeds International Medieval Congress 2026, set for July 2026, now has paper abstracts freely available online. A wealth of Tolkien papers are to be presented. Including “Philological Play across Time: Humour and Language in Tolkien’s Lesser-Known Poetry”. The abstract for this paper names seven poems, so anyone with the Collected Poems can pick them out for reading.

* Elfenomeno has “The Equatorie of the Planetis: The Dual Investigation of Tolkien and Andoni Cossio into the ‘Holy Grail’ of Chaucer”. Many are familiar with Tolkien’s contribution as philological ‘consultant detective’ on the Nodens name, but in this article one learns about a similar 1952 job…

“For Price, Tolkien was not merely another consultant but the ultimate “detective”. He needed someone capable of conducting a forensic linguistic analysis, and Tolkien was exceptionally well qualified. […] if anyone could distinguish an authentic Chaucerian text from the work of a later scribe, it was Tolkien.”

* Heritage Auctions is auctioning off ‘The David Aronovitz Collection of Important Science Fiction and Fantasy’. First editions, along with Edith and Pricilla Tolkien: A collection of 41 letters, and an “apparently unpublished” 1955 letter by Tolkien. Although its key item of data is already known…

“the Index of Names […] proved impossible to include [in LoTR]. The labour of compiling one even as far as the middle of Vol II [was done but] was great, and largely responsible for the delay in the appearance of Vol III”.

* The American Spectator magazine has the new article “Tolkien and the Power of Fantasy”. Freely available online.

* The Reformed Journal has the new long article “Oft Hope is Born When All is Forlorn”, on Tolkien and despair/hope. Freely available online.

* Signum University now has its online-short-course listing for June 2026. Among others, “Many Voices, One Song: Leadership in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, and “The Dark Zone: Caves, Myths & Meaning in Medieval English Literature” (on “the rich subterranean imagination of Old and Middle English literature, tracing caves, hollows, and underground spaces from the tenth through the sixteenth century”.

* Trinity College (USA) has a new video of Joseph Loconte giving a talk about his new book, The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 (2025). I’ve now found time to read the book, and am about three-quarters through. I’m enjoying its unfolding story and vivid anecdotes, and I will likely review it. The book is made all the more enjoyable due to occasional hilarious Americanisms, such as having C.S. Lewis… “traveling by train across the English countryside through villages such as Perthshire, Shrewsbury, and Cumberland”.

* The Tolkien tapestries exhibition has travelled to Angers (a city about 200 miles SW of Paris), and will be on show there from 10th April – 8th November 2026. Also of note in France, Paris has a substantial exhibition on Imaginary Maps, 24th March – 19th July 2026.

* And finally, further to my earlier notion that the distinctive railway/road bridge at Tolkien’s Barnt Green could have for a moment seemed a sort of forbidding door to a dark underworld (when seen in the dark on the way to/from the railway station) and thus akin to the Moria gate in LoTR. It could have formed a key entrance to the village for Tolkien and his brother, when visiting their cousins. I’ve now found a card which suggests this arch was perhaps of some importance to the village, at least important enough to feature in its own right in a postcard.

Restoration:

Original eBay scan:

Wider context:

Tolkien Gleanings #396

* A new edition of VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. Volume 41 (2025) was released in February 2026, and has the theme of “intellectual friendship, understood as a kinship of thought, values, and mission”. The issue is online but partly paywalled ($20). Among the open-access contents are…

   – “More Things in Heaven and Earth: C.S. Lewis on Elementary Spirits”.
   – Book review of Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-1959.

* Three events at The Wade Center, Wheaton College, for spring 2026. Recordings will appear on YouTube after the events.

   – “Magic, Science, Poetry: C.S. Lewis and the Battle for the Modern Soul”.
   – “C.S. Lewis: A Mentor by Mail”.
   – “Under a Northern Sky: Early Medieval Influences on Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin”.

“This lecture will consider the ways in which Tolkien was inspired by different stories from what he calls the ‘nameless North’, suggesting that the legends of Sigurd and the Volsungs can deepen our appreciation of the tale of Turin and tell us something about Tolkien as a reader of early medieval literature.”

* Tolkien: Medieval and Modern has new essay-posts on “Great Tales Never End: The Reality of Tolkien’s Middle-earth”; “Death and Decline” (and its inevitability in LoTR); “What Remains: Language, Dreams, and the Fragmentary World of Tolkien”; and “The Same Tale Still: What We Gain From Imagining Tolkien as History”…

“Tolkien’s trick of linking the world of LoTR to our modern one means that LoTR is neither strictly Secondary World nor Primary/Real World history. We are both inside the story and outside of it, participants and spectators to this tale.”

* The Shortlist for the Tolkien Society Awards 2025, including previews of the candidate artworks. Sadly I can’t vote, as I’m having to skip membership for at least a year to save money. In the age of AI you might think that cleaning toilets in Stoke-on-Trent would be a secure job. But my hours have been trimmed back to make savings for the company due to the minimum wage-rise, which has left me significantly worse off (despite the slight rise in the hourly rate). Thus there’s a knock-on effect on my memberships and book-purchases.

* New to me, the book The Fairy Way of Writing: Shakespeare to Tolkien (2013, Johns Hopkins University Press). The last chapter is about Tolkien. The book…

“recovers a distinctive aspect of English literary culture from across the entire early modern era and beyond, one that has been studied in the context of individual periods and writers but is only now explored in relation to the history of European nationalism and the creation of the modern literary system. […] argues that the fairy way of writing not only sets the stage for the fairy tale, the Gothic novel, and children’s literature but also informs genres beyond the English canon, including painting, twentieth-century fantasy fiction, and French fairy tales.”

* Talking of fairy tales, I read that Owen Barfield’s children’s book The Silver Trumpet was republished last summer. Written in 1924, and first in the shops in Oct or Nov 1925 (according to the pre-Christmas book trade publications of the time, which vary). It can now be had as an affordable centenary paperback, with new illustrations. According to the Barfield Estate blog there was a free version, previously officially on their website, but this has been taken down with the advent of the paperback. Apparently that free version had a few OCR errors, which have been corrected for the new print edition. Note that, despite its publication date of 1925, it appears not to have been published in the USA in 1925. Therefore it is presumably not in the U.S. public domain. Barfield also lived a very long life, to age 99, and so there’s no copyright release there either.

* And finally, a picture of the front board of the first edition of Barfield’s The Silver Trumpet, without the paper dustjacket. The book was an instant favorite of the Tolkien children on publication, apparently having been lent to them by C.S. Lewis. In the firelight (Tolkien them told stories standing, with his back to the warm fireplace), I wonder if one might even mis-see the figure on the book’s boards as having… large furry feet? There is also a certain very vague resemblance to a rabbit in the stance and the huge behind. A proto-hobbit?

Tolkien Gleanings #395

* The Tolkien Society has released YouTube videos from Westmoot 2025 (9th-11th May 2025). Too many to list here, but among others they include…

    – Tolkien’s War from Cannock Chase to the Somme and Little Haywood.
    – The Tolkien Brothers in World War I.

    – Freedom From History in Tolkien (on little kingdoms, hidden kingdoms, and middle kingdoms in Middle-earth).
    – Hallowed Ground: Naturally Santified Earth in Tolkien’s Legendarium.

    – Tolkien’s Myth-making and Dreams of Earendil (chronological survey of various appearances of Earendil in Tolkien’s work).
    – Collecting Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Tolkien’s life-long passion (starts at 2:30 mins, the second half steps through the editions in detail).

* Miriam Ellis was asked to make the logo for the forthcoming Oxonmoot 2026.

* The Tolkien Society is to bring back the Sarehole Festival in 2026. Sarehole Mill is in south Birmingham, and its surroundings were a key childhood place for the young Tolkien brothers. Volunteers, traders and food vendors are all wanted for the event. I’m guessing they might consider sponsors offering little bags of dragon-gold, as well? The date is two months away, on 30th to 31st May 2026.

* Artist Matej Cadil’s new article on “Gardens in Middle‑earth”, accompanied by his painted illustrations. (Substack, but free).

* On YouTube, a quick broadcast TV interview about a new Italian film about Tolkien, titled From Middle-earth to Italy, an Unexpected Journey. This is a…

“documentary about Tolkien, directed by Nicola De Toma and Raffaele Rago, available on RaiPlay. In the TV studio, Oronzo Cilli, President of the Italian Tolkien Collectors, discusses the documentary, the connection between Tolkien and Dante, and how their works are similar.”

RaiPlay has the film for Italian subscribers…

“Exclusive […] A journey into the emotions and words of those who have read, loved and studied it: journalists, translators, art historians, essayists, Franciscan friars, songwriters, theologians and passionate readers. Directors: Nicola De Toma, Raffaele Rago.”

Other sources reveal it was partly funded by Italy’s Ministry of Culture, and that the finished film is 52 minutes and has been available online since 25th March on RaiPlay. It evidently attempts to cover a lot of ground, but visually it takes advantage of Tolkien’s 1955 visit to Venice and Assisi, and also the comparisons to Dante, being partly informed by Oronzo Cilli’s book Il mio viaggio in Italia. Tolkien e l’Italia (2016) (‘My trip to Italy: Tolkien and Italy’).

* Elfenomeno interviews Martin Simonson…

“I would like to continue transforming academic content into engaging essays for the average reader, presenting them in beautiful editions accompanied by artistic expressions such as illustrations, music, creative graphic design, cartographic works, etc. Making books in some way full of enchantment. Right now, I am working on several projects of this type: one linked to the forces of nature in The Hobbit, and another to the echoes of Norse mythology in Tolkien’s legendarium.”

* The Church Times newspaper concludes its Lent / Inklings series of articles, with “How fantasy can enrich reality”. Freely available online.

* And finally, Malcolm Guite on YouTube, on Sir Gawain and the Tolkien Fireplace.

Tolkien Gleanings #394

* The Tolkien, Medieval and Modern blog has a new Tolkien essay, “Faerie and the Edges of Possibility”.

* The Catholic Herald newspaper has the long new article “Sacramental imagination and the recovery of enchantment” via Tolkien. Freely available, at least for now.

* Another conference paper has been added to the new rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Tolkien’s Joyful Sorrow, the “Gift of Tears” of Medieval Mysticism, and John Donne’s Sermon “Jesus Wept”. Provides the primary-world historical/religious context for joyous weeping in The Lord of the Rings.

* Under active construction, HoMe Base, part of the Digital Tolkien Project…

“This site is intended to be the hub of the Digital Tolkien Project’s work on The History of Middle-earth series edited by Christopher Tolkien. We are at an early stage of development, working on The Book of Lost Tales (‘transversely’) and the Music of the Ainur / Ainulindalë (‘longitudinally’) although dipping into other volumes and chapters as research questions arise. Our goal is to provide a foundation for education and scholarship with an initial focus on metadata, search, data models, bibliography, and citation systems.”

* Who knew? The French editions of Barbara Strachey’s Frodo map-book, as L’atlas du Seigneur des Anneaux (2003, 2010), also had illustrations by BD artist Jerome Lereculey.

I also found that Lereculey produced limited-edition prints of the drawings (and perhaps others for LoTR?) circa 2003…

* And finally, on DeviantArt a new painting of Sam in “The Land of Shadow”.

Tolkien Gleanings #393

* The Western Front Association has an excellent and well-illustrated new article on “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Brother Officers in the 11th (Service) Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, June-October 1916”. Along with interesting information about the state of Army signalling, the long article finds that…

“Carpenter’s characterisation of the ‘older company commanders and adjutants’[sic] was hopelessly wide of the mark. [and] The battalion’s officers were very different from the ‘military types’ identified by Carpenter.”

* The Tolkien Society has posted recordings of their 2025 online seminar, held on 18th October 2025. Now on YouTube are eleven presentations + Q&As. Titles include, among the others, “The Lost Spirits of Arda: Eco-daemonology and New Animism in Tolkien’s Legendarium”. The presenter suggests that Tolkien’s early animist conceptions of nature spirits — to be traced today in Lost Tales, “The Creatures of the Earth”, and found in his work on the Kalevala — would later inform an important third strand that was woven alongside the pagan and Christian elements in The Lord of the Rings.

I’d suggest that the presenter might usefully have touched on the author’s biography, which would have offered him a grounded starting point for understanding pre-1930s British anthropology. Tolkien’s personal tutor at Exeter, Marett, was the world’s leading expert on the animist phases of pre-religion. Specifically his tutor had deeply considered animatism as an aspect of animism. Animatism being related to the specific veneration by early peoples of the animating life-force in all its natural varieties, and its potential ability to be harnessed or manipulated. I’d suggest that one might see, for instance, Tolkien’s elves and their attentive stewardship and nature-shaping creativity as a partial embodiment of this.

* The above talk referenced “The Creatures of the Earth”, a Tolkien item found in an early personal notebook and likely penned after 1917. It was made available in Parma Eldalamberon No. 14 (2003), which is out-of-print but freely available online at the Internet Archive.

* The Vatican translates the article “Tolkien’s hymn to humility and mercy”, originally published in Italian in yesterday’s edition of the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

* Elfenomeno has a new article considering “The multiple biographies of Galadriel”. Freely available online, in English.

* The Entmoot Podcast spends an hour “Exploring The Online Fandoms”. Specifically… “the main three Tolkien subreddits [on Reddit] and some (still kicking!) online forum sites.” Sadly, Reddit is reportedly set to introduce biometric age/identity verification for posting, which suggests its contributors will soon be migrating to alternative services.

* And finally, a report from a Florida convention on a talk by a WETA designer for the Lord of the Rings movies. Whatever one may think about screen adaptations, the ideas of the back-room artists, designers and costumiers involved are always interesting. Although sometimes they do go a bit far…

“Elrond has a telescope because his father is a star,” Falconer said. The telescope was a gorgeous and graceful fall of art nouveau lines, decorated with a small paean to Varda, or Elbereth, the Valar who created the stars.”

Tolkien Gleanings #392

* The chapter “Tolkien’s Influence and the World of The Wheel of Time”, from the book The Wheel of Time and Philosophy (2025) is currently officially freely available, in full. Maybe only a limited-time freebie, such as big academic publishers occasionally offer, so grab it quick if it interests you.

* The first peer-reviewed article has been added to the new issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Visualising Rhythm in The Lord of the Rings”. Computer analysis mapped alternations… “between negative and positive sentiment” in key sentences, and a graph of these then made visible the “prolonged troughs, sharp reversals, and extended recoveries” of sentiment in LoTR.

* In the new Spanish book on the digital humanities, Nuevas fronteras. El derecho y las Humanidades ante la revolucion tecnologica digital (2026), the chapter “La maquina: Tolkien y la tradicion perdida” (‘The Machine: Tolkien and the Lost Tradition’). In Spanish with English abstract…

“… for Tolkien the machine symbolizes the human urge to dominate the world and break away from tradition, a theme reflected in characters like Saruman and in the industrial devastation of Mordor, while the elves represent harmony with creation and the preservation of ancient memory. Tolkien viewed modernity as a loss of traditional roots and his legendarium seeks to restore them through myth and language.”

* I recently noted Matej Cadil’s new story-posters series for The Hobbit, free on DeviantArt. Now I see that his new Substack post “Walking Further Into Middle‑earth: A New Adventure” explains the series and how he plans to develop it. Another recent post fills in the background. His Substack subscribers will also receive posts on the “behind‑the‑scenes art process” involved in making future posters.

* And finally, Kentucky’s Brandywine Festival is travelling to central Staffordshire, England, in 2026…

“The expansion follows the success of the first annual Brandywine Festival in October 2025. Held in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, the 5-day, 4-night Live Action Roleplaying (LARP) event drew fans from across the country. Now, the festival will be within an hour’s drive of Birmingham, J.R.R. Tolkien’s childhood home”.

I see that the sleeping tents appear to have much the same design as used by Tolkien at Staffordshire camps (Whittington Heath, and Newcastle-under-Lyme) during the First World War. A nice touch.

The festival’s location is to be Weston Park at Weston-under-Lizard (on the old Roman road). Though, that’s not great for access by rail travel — summer music-festival goers to the site have to change at Wolverhampton station (ugh) for a hot shuttle-bus/coach (double-ugh). If I were getting hobbity for the Brandywine weekend, I might instead consider The Monarch’s Way long-distance footpath, which follows the route taken by King Charles II during his escape from the Puritans during the Civil Wars. The stretch of path adjacent to Weston Park, between Tong and Bishops Wood, was restored and made passable again in 2024. The path would allow one to walk off-road for around 30 miles, from Tolkien’s Lickey Hills (there is still a train station at Barnt Green, at the south end of the Lickeys) to within apple-lobbing distance of Weston Park.

Tolkien Gleanings #391

* A new rolling edition of the Journal of Tolkien Research has begun, with the first conference paper being Kristine Larsen’s “Deep Down Here by the Dark Water Lived Old Gollum”: The 1927 Public Opening of the Wookey Hole Show Caves and ‘The Hobbit'”. Freely available online.

Picture: “The Subterranean River” (aka, as a view in other photographic cards, ‘The Witch’s Kitchen, from the Sandbank’), Wookey Hole, 1931.

* A report on Bradley Birzer’s recent talk “Tolkien, Technology, and Magic” at the Saint Benedict Institute. The video recording is also on YouTube.

* The Everyday Life of Media Fans: living fannishly and the subjunctive mode in contemporary digital cultures (2026). An ethnographic PhD thesis from Belgium, in English… “The study presented in this book paints a detailed picture of what it means to live fannishly and gives insight into how imaginative modes and experiences are ingrained in contemporary digital life and cultures.” One of the areas of focus appears to be a “Tolkien-related Discord server” for fan-fiction writers. Freely available online.

* Details of a 2023 dissertation from a Philology dept. in Moscow, “The Evolution of the Ship as a Symbol and Worldbuilding Element in the Artistic Universe of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Not online, but there’s an informative English abstract. It sounds like something that, cut down a bit, might make an interesting article in the Journal of Tolkien Research.

* The final ‘farewell’ issue of the scholarly M.R. James journal Ghosts & Scholars has been published.

* Miriam Ellis offers a glimpse of Bilbo making his map of favorite walks, a picture which appears to be another taster for her… “forthcoming second book, A Shire Walking-Party”.

* And finally, samwise as found in a corner of Bosworth’s An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1898)…

Tolkien Gleanings #390

* The Plough Quarterly magazine has a lengthy review of both The Lord of the Rings (in a first-time reading) and The Tower and the Ruin: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creation (2025), in “Reading Tolkien for the First Time”. Freely available online. In the same issue, note also “The Moral Beauty of Middlemarch”.

* Walking Tree publishers have a new short post with obituary links, “Remembering J.S. Ryan”. Ryan being the Tolkien scholar and author of Tolkien’s View: Windows into his World (2009) and In the Nameless Wood: Explorations in the Philological Hinterland of Tolkien’s Literary Creations (2013). Tolkien’s View is especially informative for those considering the younger Tolkien in the historical/academic context of his time.

* The Middle Page is spending a year with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Early Poetry and is blogging about it at length. (Substack. But not seemingly paywalled, at least not yet).

* TheTolkienist has a report on The second Tolkien Tagung in Zurich, Switzerland… “With close to a hundred visitors present, and about 200 participants online, this conference was another success”.

* Elfenomeno has a new Interview with Pieter Collier, from Tolkien Library. Freely available online.

* The comic-book Durin Issue 1, now freely available from the artist at DeviantArt, as a 52-page PDF.

“I started this project about ten years ago with my good friend Sergio Artigas, and from 2017-2020 we worked together on this book; the first of a planned seven-issue series about the life of Durin the Deathless, the first King of the Dwarves. Recently our friend and fellow fantasy artist Carlos Vera has joined our team, and we are looking forward to continuing Durin’s story in the issues to come.”

* On YouTube, Malcolm Guite sends forth The dwarves’ song (and some smoke rings).

* And finally, in England the daffodils are once again washed in spring sunlight. So this seems apt, as found in Tolkien’s own A Middle English Vocabulary (1922)…

Tolkien Gleanings #389

* Available from today, a new ‘Collectors Edition’ of Unfinished Tales, retitled by the publisher on Amazon as Unfinished Tales: A Special Hardback Anthology of Epic Fantasy and Middle-earth Legendarium (2026). Though the cover keeps the usual title.

Frankly not appealing, with no additions (such as a folder of new maps), and a selling-point that’s simply ‘hey, it’s a hardcover with an embossed picture’. Although admittedly the price is right, at £14 for a chunky hardback inc. delivery. But really… a lurid orange picture, with unappealing typography that would barely merit a glance in a sixth-form art show? Look at the huge gap between the words Unfinished and Tales, for instance. Ugh. Surely HarperCollins could have done better than this, for the reissue of a key book by Tolkien?

* The U.S. Library of Congress blog has a long post that tells us exactly how readers can get their hands on a print copy of A Gateway to Sindarin: A Grammar of an Elvish Language from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (2007).

* On YouTube, a recording of Brad Birzer’s 90-minute Tolkien seminar on “Treebeard and Gandalf the White” (March 2026).

* In this week’s Church Times newspaper, Malcolm Guite reflects on “All the music of the spheres” in Tolkien.

* Are large online AI’s improving at the task of discussing Tolkien? Lingwe investigates with the aid of one of the best, Google’s Gemini. One of the tests was to provide a list of “hapax legomenon [i.e.] a word that occurs only once within a specific context”, in LoTR. Though without the AI being fed the LoTR text. As such, Google’s Gemini provided a mostly-invented list of words, along with eyot which occurs a gazillion times in the text. Such hallucinations may matter, at a time when many YouTubers are using AI to help generate the scripts for their endless waves of ‘Tolkien explainer’ clickbait videos.

Anyway… inspired by Lingwe’s test, and with the help of the desktop freeware AntConc and Jan.ai+Qwen3.5 I then had a go at finding such one-time unique words in the actual provided text of LoTR. From there I whittled the list down to 15 one-use words that are not personal names or names that can only apply to just one place:

    – barrowfield (a field or open terrain of ancient burial barrows)
    – downlands (an “open and fairly level” landscape of turfy downs)
    – crowhaunted (dark ghost-like crows inhabiting shadowy cliffs of dark rock)
    – flammifer (one who carries a burning lamp aloft)
    – hell-hawks (foul flying beasts, large enough for a man to ride on)
    – jaw-cracker (unfamiliar language, very difficult to pronounce)
    – lithlad (a wide ashen plain, see also Tolkien’s “ash-ridden”)
    – moonset (the setting moon, casting a bright white light)
    – neekerbreekers (invented hobbit word for horrid marsh-crickets, named for the sound they make at night)
    – ninnyhammer (a hobbit who does a stupid ‘numbskull’ thing, mild insult)
    – shirriffing (activities involved in being a hobbit Sherrif in The Shire)
    – springle-ring (a pretty but vigorous hobbit dance for two people)
    – treegarth (arboretum of differing trees set in a wide circle around a central point, guarding and protective)
    – tussocky (area of thick long grass, starting to become many wind-raised tussocks, see also Tolkien’s “hummock”)
    – willow-wand (a thin stiff-but-pliable willow-tree withy or thin branch, partly dried, can be wielded in childish play).

Tussocky was once known to agriculturalists and farmers. Moonset was also once well-known to sailors / weathermen / soldiers. Willow-wand was known to Edwardian children’s play-culture and can be found in pre-Tolkien children’s literature (“The Willow Wand” is a chapter in the famous novel Ivanhoe, in which the wand provides a tricky target for an archery contest). Note also the annual British folk-practice in which boys participated in beating the bounds during wassail processions of a parish boundary, by ‘whipping’ the boundary trees with withies. Arguably, treegarth does refer only to one specific place in Middle-earth, though Treebeard needs to specify it by location when he calls it the “Treegarth of Orthanc”. Such specification implies there may be other treegarths elsewhere.

* Up for auction at Heritage Auctions towards the end of March 2026, the original of an early Adrian Smith painting to illustrate The Hobbit. Possibly 1980s or 90s for an RPG game company, and thus showing pre-movies orcs. My guess is that the scene illustrates the moments just after Bilbo has popped his waistcoat buttons and invisibly escaped down the mountain? Lots of space for words in the top half, so possibly it was painted for a game booklet? Perhaps a back-cover?

* And finally, artist Miriam Ellis has a fine new print available of her tender painting of “J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien, 1928”.

Tolkien Gleanings #388

* Who knew? There’s a Centre for Fantasy Literature Studies at the National Academy of Sciences in the Ukraine. The Centre was established in 2015, and they recently had a two-day online conference in January 2026 themed around “Music, Dance and Theatre in Fantasy Worlds”. Tolkien presentations included…

   – “As Above, So Below: As Music, So Magic (in Tolkien’s Legendarium)”.
   – “To Music of a Pipe Unseen: Music as Metaliterary Device in The Lord of the Rings”.
   – “Lyrical Lauding in The Lord of the Rings: Adapting Tolkien’s Songs”.
   – “Luthien’s Dance as Love Embodied”.

A book of free abstracts is available in English.

* The University Press of Mississippi is planning the academic chapter-book titled Returning to the Shelf: Memory, Reading, and the Afterlives of Childhood Books, on the topic of… “the enduring presence of childhood reading in adult life”. Either through “memories of early reading” and/or adult re-reading. Set for January 2029, with a submission of interest / abstract deadline of 31st March 2026.

* DoxaMoot: Orthodox Christian Tolkien Conference is set for 4th-6th September 2026, in North Carolina. Set to include a lecture on… “the theological and symbolic significance of Tolkien’s monsters”.

* New at the latest rolling edition of the Journal of Tolkien Research, book reviews of Numenor, The Mighty and Frail (2025) and Queer Approaches to Tolkien (2025).

* Sons of Wayland goes “Riding Through Tolkien Country” on a motorcycle. Though I have to say that we have no evidence that Tolkien visited Lydney Park in Gloucestershire. He wrote a paper related to the archaeology found there, but…

“there is no evidence that he participated in the dig at Lydney Park, stayed there as a guest of the Wheelers on a number of occasions, or even visited Lydney” (Hammond & Scull, Reader’s Guide, 2007 edition)

Which is not to say that he might not have stopped off to take in the site, perhaps while travelling to the south-west or Wales on holiday, at some later time. Anyway there’s a pleasing poster of the motorcycle route taken through Tolkien-like landscapes, and the route looks like a very fine sampling of the countryside to the west and south of Birmingham.

* Talking of long and beautiful journeys… I’ve now seen the seven-hour screen adaptation of Oxford writer Stephen R. Lawhead’s Arthurian Pendragon Cycle books (1987-1997), recently fully released. The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin turns out in its first two episodes to be a clever and rather beautiful prequel to the Arthur story, adapted with panache and filmed and costumed on location in Britain, Italy and Hungary. Set in the last days of the Roman Occupation, and the first years of early British Christianity, the first two episodes focus on the young Welsh bard Talesin and also introduce Morgan le Fay. Merlin is not yet born and these two episodes serve as a sort of prequel-to-Merlin movie, while sketching in the necessary worldbuilding. Sadly we only hear the ‘older Talesin of the gnomic poems’ once, and at other times he’s a magical singer with a curious mingling of mystic powers. The rest of the series, the five episodes in which we fast-forward 75 years to Merlin, I was not so enamoured by. These episodes look as fabulous as the first two, with superb acting (the actor playing Vortigern in the third episode surely deserves a TV Oscar), but in the end they were a bit of a slog and too Game of Thrones-ey for my tastes.

* MatejCadil has a new set of story-posters for The Hobbit, freely available on DeviantArt.

* And finally, here in the UK the Royal Mail has revealed their set of The Lord of the Rings postage-stamps. Turns out the set is just film-stills and marks the anniversary of the movie trilogy. Rather than marking the 100th anniversary of Tolkien beginning his many translations (Beowulf and Pearl in 1926, others later).

Tolkien Gleanings #387

* The Spanish Tolkien Society has released their Revista Estel No. 101 (dated 2024, but seemingly only released in 2026). Freely available, in PDF format. Among many other items, note the short Spanish article on “Beer in Middle-earth” (pp. 54-56).

* On YouTube, a recording of Joseph Loconte giving a talk at the Union League in Philadelphia, about his new book The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945.

* Tomorrow in Oxford, Thomas Honegger speaking in Corpus Christi College on “Habitatio est omen — or: like land, like people” in relation Tolkien’s work.

* A Sword & Sorcery historian reviews The Tower and the Ruin (2025), the new book by Michael D.C. Drout.

* On YouTube, a short video tour of a just-closed Pauline Baines exhibition which was staged in Italy. YouTube can auto-dub into English.

* The long-running British Fairies blog considers elvish & faery origins in a short review of Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (2023). This is found to be…

“an academic examination of the process by which the idea of the modern British faery might have evolved out of elements of belief in Roman nature deities, Anglo-Saxon elves, Norman French fay women and native British mythology; it covers the period from the Roman colonisation through to the late fifteenth century […] it treats the faeries as entirely socially constructed inventions — and ones that may not be of any great antiquity”.

* A new £100 academic book which touches on Sir Gawain and place, Arthur Between England and Wales: The Borderland, the Marches, and the Medieval Matter of Britain (2026). Among other things the book apparently offers… “novel reinterpretations of the historiographic record and the vibrant cultural networks and communities within the borderlands” of England and Wales, and has the concluding chapter “‘I-medled to gidres’: Borderline Arthurian Personalities in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Poetry of Iolo Goch”. (‘I-medled to gidres’ = mingled together).

* And finally, talking of the Welsh language travelling over the borderlands into England, “Welsh on Wagons”. This is a new and freely available…

“photo-essay exploring the history behind Tolkien’s discovery of the Welsh language on coal wagons in Birmingham. It displays typical wagons, and explains the meaning of the Welsh names.”

I can here add a couple more postcards from eBay, though the wagons shown below were carrying stone and silica rather than coal. Plus a newly-coloured evocative view of a typical small mixed-goods train puffing through the English countryside.

Tolkien Gleanings #386

* A new PhD thesis from Dalhousie University, “I do not desire healing”: Grief as Identity in Medieval (ist) Literatures (2026). This has chapters or sub-chapters on: melancholic pronouns in The Lord of the Rings; Eowyn disguising herself as Dernhelm; and grief/death in relation to Luthien and Arwen. Freely available online.

* Some more details about the coming screen series “Forge of Friendship”. Set to be… “five hour-long documentaries” with interviews, music and re-enactments, exploring the friendship of Lewis and Tolkien…

“There is no set release date, but we are moving into post-production.” When asked, the [filmmakers, after showing a one-hour preview cut] said “We are waiting on more funding, but it could potentially be released this year.”

* The Independent Review reviews Tolkien, Philosopher of War (2024).

* Apparently set for publication by De Gruyter in June 2026, according to Amazon UK, Tolkien Spirituality: Constructing Belief and Tradition in Fiction-based Religion. Possibly just a printing of this 2014 open-access Phd thesis, but I guess there’s a chance it could be an updated and expanded version for print? By the same author, “Religious uses of fantasy fiction”, an open-access chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief (2023).

* Midland History journal has a review of the book C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (2024) ($ paywall). As a Midlander I’ve never thought of Oxford as being in the English Midlands, but it squeezes in here.

* Seemingly popping out of embargo this week at a university repository, “Tolkien and Trees”, a book chapter from 2013.

* Tolkien artist Miriam Ellis is anticipating… “my forthcoming book, A Shire Walking-Party” and a new blog post gives a preview of her thoughts on the appearance of Woodhall.

* “Oxford, Physics, and the Day I Saw Tolkien Summon Henry”…

“In the fall of 1970, I arrived at Oxford University as a first-term undergraduate reading physics at Merton College. […] I would often see J.R.R. Tolkien wandering around the College in his half-cloak, walking stick in hand. He was already elderly, already legendary, yet physically present: a small, unmistakable figure moving through the same quads I crossed on my way to hall.”

“Small” probably indicates distance, rather than that he shrunk to hobbit-size in old age!

* And finally, a UK local newspaper reports Vintage recordings of The Hobbit unearthed on Metro line in Tyne and Wear.