Tolkien Gleanings #51.

* “The bees of Beorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional Middle-earth” (August 2022), a Bee Histories article by a bee specialist. Warning: the site pops up a page-blocking overlay. If you want more on Tolkien, bees and honey-cakes, then the Tea with Tolkien podcast had a guest episode “On Beorn & Beekeeping” (2019) with beekeeper Daniel Stewart.

* The Archdiocese of Madrid has launched a crowd-funder… “to create the world’s largest geo-location map along a walking trail based on The Lord of the Rings“. This being their… “79 mile ‘El Camino del Anillo’ in the Sierra Norte hills”, about 20 miles north of the Spanish capital city of Madrid.

Launched in 2020, this is an apparently “Tolkien-esque” and openly Catholic eight-day hill-walking trail. The idea seems to be to take a depopulating landscape and — over time, building on what’s already there — to make it a circular journey through varied landscapes evoking those of The Lord of the Rings.

* The Poetic Edda: A Dual-Language Edition (2023). In this new free Creative Commons PDF book of nearly 900 pages… “there are thirty-six texts, giving us one of the fullest translations of the work” into English. Not to be confused with the Prose Edda.

* And finally, The Hollywood Reporter has seen Amazon’s viewing figures for That Recent TV Series, and reports this week that “only 37 percent” of buyers actually finished watching the eight-episode series.