* Dr. Wotan’s Musings has full details of the forthcoming Tolkien Sessions at the Leeds International Medieval Congress (July 2023). Talks include, among others: “Tolkien’s Development of the Elvish Languages at Leeds, 1920-1925”; “Travel and the Quest Motif in Tolkien’s Work”; and “Out of the Great Sea: Of Elendil and Legends Old and New”.
* In Spain, the launch of a new national Catholic Tolkien Association…
“In the heart of the new Association are the priest Antonio Izquierdo, parish priest in Mostoles (Madrid); Diego Blanco Albarova, popular author of the children’s books in the El Club del Fuego Secreto series; and Joaquin Ocana, a “passionate Tolkinian” with experience organizing groups.”
* New on Mere Orthodoxy, a long essay on “The Death and Immortality of Mortal Men in The Lord of the Rings“.
* I see there was an essay on “Image and the Tree in Middle-earth” in issue 23 of the BFS Journal (Autumn 2022)…
Tree-imagery “throughout Middle-earth, and how it reflects historical tree imagery in Europe”.
Are there more essays of interest in the journal? Difficult to know. Curiously the British Fantasy Society’s website has only one item on its ‘journal’ tag, and the Site Map knows nothing about any journal. A Google search reveals the staff list, on which… “BFS Journal Editor, currently vacant”. First job for the new editor, I’d suggest, is a complete public list of what’s in those 23 issues and in earlier incarnations.
* And finally, Tolkneity asks “What do you think, could the map for Beowulf from the edition by Frederik Klaeber (1922) have influenced the shape of the map of Middle-earth in the first edition of The Lord of the Rings?” The answer is “no”. It only took me a minute to find Klaeber’s rather poor map in his Beowulf and The fight at Finnsburg (1922), and to discover it looks nothing like its much later Tolkien-alike re-imagining (which was made in 1973).