Tolkien Gleanings #159.
* The New York Tolkien Conference will return in summer 2024, after a hiatus (the last event was before the lockdowns, in 2019). The conference will be held as a one-day event on 15th June 2024 at Baruch College, which is in the centre of Manhattan, New York City. Booking now, and I see that the call-for-papers is still open.
* Due toward the end of April 2024, a single-author study of War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, by Janet Brennan Croft. Amazon UK currently ‘knows nurthink’, but this book appears to be an affordable Bloomsbury reprint of her Preager 2004 hardcover of the same name. A comparison of the page-counts doesn’t suggest a new expanded edition.
* New to me, a useful website from a collector, dedicated to The Lord of the Rings Translations. The site seems to have appeared in late summer 2023, and has updated since.
* “Catholic Culture with Tolkien”, a public lecture at the University of Washington, with a speaker from the University of Nebraska. Set for 18th January 2024.
* The University of Leiden has an afternoon event for advanced students titled “Heroes of Old and New: A Symposium on Tolkien and Old English Philology”. Set for 19th January 2024. I know there are still a few outposts of rigorous philology in Europe, and I’m guessing that Leiden is a place where a philology course is still taught?
* A call for material for an edited book with a working title of Flights of the Imagination: Dragons in Mythology and Folklore. Deadline: 17th February 2024, with chapters to be delivered by 15th May 2024. “Please send abstracts and a brief bio to Rachel Carazo at rachel.carazo@snhu.edu”
* Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education is set to offer “The Making of Middle-earth: Tolkien and the First Age” and “Written in my life-blood”: J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings as 2024 summer school courses. Currently both Web pages state… “we are expecting to announce [booking] in the coming weeks.”
* And finally, the novelist John Buchan’s pamphlet The Novel and the Fairy Tale (1931) is now online for free as a scan at Archive.org, via the University of Kashmir. It seems the essay was read by Tolkien in the 1930s.