Tolkien Gleanings #106.

* The recent book In the House of Tom Bombadil now has a Group Study Guide and bundle. The Journal of Inklings Studies had an open-access review of the book.

* The Tolkien Society posted 14 new YouTube videos last week. These are talks from their recent conference on Numenor and its fall, by the look of them.

* Freely online, a PhD thesis for Marquette University, The Fantastic and the First World War (2019). Argues that what we would now recognise as modern fantasy was “an essential means of representing and responding” to what had happened, and was an attempt by soldiers to communicate wartime experiences to a wider public.

* New to me, the University Press of Kentucky book Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien (2006). It places, in the words of the Foreword, strong emphasis on “the old-fashioned language of stewardship” and has a short Afterword by Tom Shippey. Both of which sound promising. I also see that one of the two authors has a substantial bookstore talk “The Medieval Roots of Tolkien’s Philosophical Ideas” (2012) in audio at Archive.org.

* A new blog-post considers The Battle of Maldon…

“[there is a] tendency of a certain kind of historian to doubt or dismiss any story that has even the rudiments of a literary shape. [They fear] the intrusion of fiction into reality, or perhaps some shadowy figure reshaping raw material to suit a literary design. At worst, it represents deliberate falsehood with a political purpose — that is, propaganda. Tolkien here correctly inverts that suspicion.”

* And finally… “Contribute to Tolkien Gateway this month [July 2023] and you will be entered to win one of multiple prizes courtesy of [publisher] HarperCollins.”