Tolkien Gleanings #73.
* Tolkien, Christianity, and Art… “The Lumen Christi Institute has designed this two-day seminar to introduce major themes and debates from the Catholic Church’s history to a wide online audience” and in the context of Tolkien and his work. 18th-22nd July 2023, led by faculty lecturers. $95 with “a limited number of scholarships available”. Though it appears not be an actual online seminar? Probably face-to-face in Chicago, recorded and then to be placed online as a recording? Anyway, wherever it is… booking now.
* New to me, Not The Fellowship: Dragons Welcome! (2022), a Luna Press book intended… “to foreground Middle-earth characters, across ages and races, who may not be as familiar as the Fellowship.” Includes, among others, articles on “The Last Prince of Cardolan: memory and mediation in the mortuary archaeology of Middle-earth”, and “The Gaffer: between cabbages and potatoes”.
* Feeling peckish after reading some heavy Tolkien scholarship? Both of these are in open access, “‘What’s Taters, Precious?’: Food in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings“ (2010) and “Simple Pleasures in Tolkien’s Poetry: Eating and Drinking and the Depth of Things” (2011). The latter crunchable PDF can be had without an Academia.edu sign-up, by searching for the start of the title in Google Scholar. Academia.edu has a special arrangement with Scholar, to give direct PDF access from its search results.
* The book Environmental Humanities and Theologies (2018) reviewed…
“One of the strongest chapters, chapter 2, shows a clear lineage from scripture to literature, weaving together a critical reading of [the Bible’s] Genesis with the disparaging view of wetlands depicted by Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings.”
Of course it could be that the “disparaging” is simply due to swamps being nasty smelly things full of dangerous mires and biting insects.
* Publications of the annual FantaelX event in Spain. Including four free annual volumes of scholarly work on the fantastic, in PDF and in English. A keynote at the 2022 event was “Vampires and Werewolves in Middle-earth” which is not online and has no abstract, but one can be found elsewhere. In the changing landscape of Middle-earth the reader’s journey sometimes encounters…
“a liminal space within the text, blur[ring] the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, inviting the reader to confront the uncanny in an otherwise familiar-seeming subcreation. This includes those icons of the horror/fantasy genre and popular culture: werewolves and vampires.”
* And finally, fountains play a very subtle part in LoTR. Such as the contrasts that the attentive reader can find between those in Lorien, the overgrown ones in Ithilien (“land of many fountains”), and the top-most Court of the Fountain in Minas Tirith. One interesting point I hadn’t known — re: ‘the science of LoTR’ — is that in operation fountains are too fast for shadows.