Tolkien Gleanings #171.

* New in Portuguese, the book A arte de encontrar Deus entre fantasias e versos: Dante Alighieri, C.S. Lewis e J.R.R. Tolkien (2024), (‘The art of finding God among fantasy and verse: Dante Alighieri, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’). Although it lists as being 88-pages long, so… perhaps more of a printed set of lectures or a dissertation?

* A call-for-papers for the conference ‘A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Arda’, to be held in Germany in June 2024. The organisers state that… “the possibilities for engaging with Tolkien’s legendarium are almost endless”. Which implies that a speculative future-oriented paper, surveying ‘what has not yet been done, but might be’, could be of interest.

* New on Archive.org, J.R.R. Tolkien: Life and Legend (1992). Being a fair scan of the illustrated catalogue for the 1992 exhibition at the Bodleian Library.

* Also new on Archive.org in PDF, a good scan of Tolkien’s edition of the Ancrene Wisse (1962) for The Early English Text Society.

* In open-access at Glasgow, “By the waters of Anduin we lay down and wept: Tolkien’s Akallabeth and the prophetic imagination”. This was the lead article in Mallorn #64 in late 2023, and is thus otherwise locked down for non-members.

* The latest edition of The Critic magazine has a short review of the new expanded Tolkien Letters, and feels… “There is a lushness to this expanded Letters“.

* On Etsy to buy, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers in Yiddish translation, in handmade editions. The Return of the King is yet to come, it seems.

* Some LORAs, for use with your PC’s local Stable Diffusion image generator. One for the clothing of the Regency Period in Britain, which means 1811-1820. Though the gentleman’s style lingered on in less fashionable places for another five years or so. Regency could be a useful addition to the arsenal of steampunk artists, but I’m thinking it might also be usefully mixed with some of the older RPGHobbit LORA, to try to generate a more ‘rural gentry’ type of hobbit?

Update: If this one doesn’t do what you want, a few days later there was also another called Regency Period SD1.5.

This week there’s also a new first attempt at a LORA for Gondor’s city architecture and streets, Minas Numenor. Not entirely convincing, judging by the samples, but it might give you a base for a manual over-painting.

* And finally, new on Archive.org, the Complete Tengwar Fonts Collection.