Tolkien Gleanings #162.

* New on Archive.org, a long outline of the Critical Response to Tolkien’s Fiction over the decades. Such as it was, since many pre-2000s critics seem to have either not read LoTR at all, to have hardly read it, or to have misunderstood what little they did read.

* The Tea With Tolkien blog has a Live Q&A with Dr. Holly Ordway, author of the new book Tolkien’s Faith.

* In the USA, Ball State University announces…

“a new exhibit [to] showcase material from the Deborah and Fritz Dolak J.R.R. Tolkien Collection, which was donated to University Libraries Archives and Special Collections in 2013. [This will include the display of a] fantasy map project [undertaken by students] in the spring of 2023”

* The J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscripts: Public Showings 2024 at Marquette University in the USA. Two dates, booking now.

* The Imaginative Conservative examines “C.S. Lewis on the Existence of Fairies”…

“Lewis concludes his outline of the medieval theories about fairies: “Such were the efforts to find a socket into which the Fairies would fit. No agreement was achieved. As long as the Fairies remained at all they remained elusive.””

* Tolkien and Fantasy looks for Fairy-tale Versions of Beowulf and discovers two partial re-tellings of Beowulf in an unlikely place, Andrew Lang’s anthology The Red Book of Animal Stories (1899).

* A call-for-papers for a 2024 Canadian university conference on The Christian Legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien, which is set for 27th-28th September 2024.

* And finally, Hobbit vinyl unearthed in Malvern, which then sold at auction for an unearthly price.