Tolkien Gleanings #99.

* In The Catholic Herald this week, “The untold tale of Tolkien’s faith”. The author has carefully read an advance access copy of the forthcoming Holly Ordway book…

“Holly Ordway, my colleague and friend, has written a fantastic new book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography […] it is a sober and factual treatment of his entire life from a religious point of view. It gave me a totally fresh impression of the man. And I am not alone. Tolkien expert John Garth has said of Ordway’s work that he “learned far more reading it than I even realised I needed to learn” [… this forthcoming book] is not hagiographical or triumphalist, but it is a triumph, a long overdue account of one of the last century’s most prominent and influential Catholics.”

The book is due in September 2023.

* Walking Tree yesterday posted eight new links to new Tolkien book reviews and another one today. Most have already been linked here at Tolkien Gleanings.

* New on Archive.org to borrow, a poor scan of Cor Blok’s A Tolkien tapestry: pictures to accompany The Lord of the Rings (2011). Imagine Tove Jansson’s Moomin book illustrations, crossed with the sort of stylised animals and people of the sort sometimes to found at the edges of early medieval illuminated manuscripts. Seems to be part of the 1960s/70s assumption that The Lord of the Rings was a children’s book like The Hobbit.

* And finally, a new survey article “Traditional Second-Hand Bookshops in Britain”… finds that “the idea that ‘traditional’ bookshops are disappearing is a tradition in itself.”