Tolkien Gleanings #124.

* The Knowing and Understanding C.S. Lewis podcast has posted part two of the Holly Ordway interview on the new book Tolkien’s Faith. I’d previously noted part one in Tolkien Gleanings, which is here.

* The De Limburger newspaper reports… “In the month of the fiftieth anniversary of J.R.R.’s death. Tolkien, the Dutch, Belgian and German Tolkien societies are holding an exhibition in the Gothic Sint Janskerk church, Maastricht”, which is in Holland. The article is paywalled, but I found a YouTube trailer video. The show was set to open, with accompanying readings and workshops, on 2nd September 2023. I’m uncertain if it then became a continuing exhibition. But the De Limburger article is dated 11th September, which suggests it may be continuing.

* New to me, Die Schweiz in Tolkiens Mittelerde (2021). A book with maps, in German, relating to Tolkien’s 1911 trek in Switzerland. I thought it might be a short pocket guide-book, since Amazon gives no page count on the paper edition. But Google Books has it as “296 pages” and gives the substantial-looking contents pages. The author seems keen to compare various areas to Mordor, Rohan etc.

* A new partial review of the book Meanings of Water in Early Medieval England (2021). “Partial” because paywalled, with a substantial free chunk. See also the new Creative Commons Masters dissertation “An Island Nation” (2023) on Middle English texts, in which “the second chapter turns to inland waters such as bogs, marshes, and mists” as they were understood by the English state.

* And finally, some readers may be interested in the new academic book The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman (2023), available now from the University of Iowa Press.