Tolkien Gleanings #191.
* The latest Touchstone magazine reviews Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology ($ paywall).
* As part of the one-day Leiden University symposium on Religion and Fantasy, a short talk on “Tië eldaliéva (The Elven Path): The First Legally Recognised Tolkien Church in the World”. There’s a long abstract available… “To distinguish itself more clearly from the movement of self-identified Elves, Tië eldaliéva recently decided to rebrand itself as The Way of Arda’s Lore (WAL).”
* At Leeds, “Uncovering a C.S. Lewis poem in Special Collections”. The poem is now published with commentary in the latest Journal of Inklings Studies: Vol. 14, No. 1 ($ paywall).
* I’m reading back through more than 300 issues of The Tolkien Society’s Amon Hen. I was pleased to reach #232 (Nov 2011) and there learn of a kindly gift to Birmingham. In 2011 the Tolkien Trust gave substantial funds for free scholarships at Tolkien’s old school in the city, restoring these to the level they were in 1911. In #231 it was further noted, in an Amon Hen conference report, that… “Tolkien’s family had been extremely generous to King Edward’s in the past, in grateful recognition of Tolkien’s time there”.
* Amon Hen #232 also had interesting details of… “his mother Mabel’s family […] Mabel and her sisters Edith May and Jane, and a younger sister, Rose, who died in the mid 1880s.” I don’t think I was aware of this before, and it throws a poigniant light on Tolkien’s choice of ‘Rose’ for Sam in LoTR.
* At the University of Glasgow online repository, the scholarly article “Tolkien, Shakespeare, trees, and the Lord of the Rings” is to be released… “on 9th October 2025 … under Creative Commons Attribution”. It appears to be a survey of Tolkien’s changing attitudes to Shakespeare, leading into a special focus on Hamlet as a source for walking trees and then a discussion of Shakespeare’s Warwickshire-bred “arboreal sensibility” as a unconscious influence on LoTR.
* My speculative article musing on “A site for a new national Tolkien Centre?”.
* The venerable Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction now has a substantial part of the run of its Gramarye journal in e-book form. #16 has “In Search of Jenny Greenteeth” & “‘A Fairy, or Else an Insect’: Traditions at Fairy Wells”; #14 had “From Ogre to Woodlouse: A Journey through Names” [possibly on woodwose?]; while #13 had “Tolkien’s style”. Regrettably one needs to register before ordering, and there’s no indication if PayPal is a payment method or not.
* In the USA, Boise State University needs people who can lead discussions on constructed fictional languages, for a forthcoming course to be run by the Department of Linguistics.
* And finally, for those too young as yet to enjoy The Hobbit… I’m pleased to see that the Dragons Friendly Society now has the classic original Noggin the Nog on DVD and also a Pogles’ Wood four-DVD set including the 14 lost episodes. PayPal accepted.