Tolkien Gleanings #88.

* An event on the visual adaptations of Tolkien’s works, to be held at the University of Gottingen, Germany. Billed as a “seminar”, but looks rather substantial and taking place over three days on 27th-29th October 2023. I’m thus guessing that “seminar” has a very different meaning to Germans-using-English, compared to its use in the English-speaking world. Good to know, if that’s the case.

* “Les portes de la Terre du Milieu : La notion du seuil dans l’univers de Tolkien” (‘The Doors of Middle-earth: the idea of the threshold in the worlds of Tolkien’). A paywalled book chapter in French, but with an English abstract. Examines… “the symbolism and the role of the door in […] The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings [using three] approaches, namely the symbolic, the mythocritical, and the actancial”. The latter method is unfamiliar in English but arises from linguistic semiotics (of the early ‘sender-receiver’ type), and was influenced by attempts to systematise European folk-tales. The approach tried to boil down a quest story to its simplest parts. In plain English these might be: archetype/hero/actor, the quest, the helper, the enemy, the intermediary, the gift-giver or ‘receiver’ of the hero — all examined in a quasi-scientific manner in relation to the motivated actions they take in the expected narrative.

* In Ad Fontes: A Journal of Protestant Letters, and freely available online, the long “Tolkien: Naive Storyteller or Political Realist?” (November 2022).

* In the VoegelinView, and freely available online, thoughts on “Gardening and Nobility in Tolkien” (September 2018).

* A Lewis/Tolkien religious retreat-course in America, Poets for the Kingdom: The Sacramental Stories of Lewis and Tolkien. Booking now for November 2023.

* And finally, new on Archive.org to borrow is The Study of Names in Literature: A Bibliography (1978).