Tolkien Gleanings #56.
* More news from France, which this summer seems to be seeing a lot of Tolkien activity. ‘Journees de Recherche et de Rencontres sur Tolkien’ is the name for the Tolkiendil ‘research days’ event in France, set for 6th-7th October 2023 in “the Paris region”. The call-for-papers currently has a date of 31st May 2023. No specific focus, but they’re broadly interested in translation and biography. Note that submitted papers can be in English, as well as French.
* Also in France, Tolkien: Voyage au coeur des forges, an exhibition seemingly centered around Tolkien and metal? Not guitar-gouging heavy-metal music, but the hard clinking and clanking variety. The museum seems to be devoted to metal and metal objects.
The summer 2023 exhibition will have “unique and rare pieces collected by a passionate collector”, augmented by 2D artworks, painted scale models and fun events (a dwarwish treasure hunt, hobbit banquet and rustic crafts market). The museum is in the hills just to the west of the central city of Lyon, and the show opens on 1st July 2023. Might make for an interesting stop-over, if you can afford to take the train to the south of France this summer? And if there aren’t the inevitable French strikes and blockades.
* Just published is a chunky new book on Tolkien from a traditional Christian perspective, The Road Goes Ever On and On (April 2023). Available in paper and in Kindle ebook, which means a free 10% sample can be sent to your e-reader device. The book appears to emerge from the author’s interest in the intersections between Tolkien’s old-school religion and his political views.
The new book is not to be confused with earlier similar titles, such as A.K. Frailey’s The Road Goes Ever On: A Christian Journey Through The Lord of the Rings (2017).
* My JURN arts & humanities search-engine has been tweaked. The Tolkien publication Mallorn is auto-generating a Web page for each and every citation given in every article, posting these at journals.tolkiensociety.org/mallorn/citationstylelanguage/.. These are being indexed and thus were getting into JURN. The problem has now been fixed at the JURN end, which means these ‘single citation pages’ should no longer appear in your JURN search results.
* And finally, after all this time doing Tolkien Gleanings I’ve only just discovered The Latest on C.S. Lewis (RSS Feed). This is a monthly blog post which does for Lewis what Gleanings does for his friend Tolkien. It just goes to show how deeply buried good material can be on the Web, under mountains of piffle and bot-generated ‘content’.