Tolkien Gleanings #92.

* Sean Grundy’s 55-minute afternoon radio-play “Tolkien in Love” (2017), now newly on YouTube. I see that it’s also on Archive.org in .MP3, uploaded a year ago.

* New in The European Conservative, and freely available online, the long and learned article “Tolkien’s True Love”.

* Even more ruins! Tolkien’s Medievalism in Ruins II (yes, II) calls for papers on ruins in either the wider Legendarium or in movie adaptations. Amusingly, partly organised by the appropriately named “Slippery Rock University”. Deadline: 30th September 2023.

* Registration is still open for Franciscan University’s conference on Tolkien… titled “A Long-Expected Party: A Semicentennial Celebration of Tolkien’s Life, Works and Afterlife, the conference will focus on all aspects of Tolkien’s life and work, including his most recent posthumous publications”. 22nd-23rd September 2023, near the city of Pittsburgh, USA. Notes, with some justification, that… “2023 is a significant turning point in Tolkien studies because the generation of scholars that truly knew him is entering retirement”. But also wrongly assumes that there is therefore a dearth of scholarship. The organisers either haven’t been looking, or have only looked at certain pay-walled academic databases, or they need to be more specific and say that there should be more explicitly religious scholarship.

* And finally, some details of a film and stage play titled Tolkien and Lewis: An Unlikely Friendship, with both projects pencilled in for a “2026” release. Presumably not to be confused with the forthcoming five-part Web series that was filming and VFX-ing in the UK recently, The Forge of Friendship: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (shooting title ‘Fellowship: Tolkien & Lewis’).