Tolkien Gleanings #215
* Signum University’s fledgling Signum Press has a repeat of the call for papers for an edited volume to be titled Creative Philology: Studies in Speculative Fiction — Tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien. This new call is dated 1st July 2024. I guess the previous call didn’t yield enough contributors, or some have since dropped out, and they now need more? Just my guess.
* A pre-Christmas two-day seminar from the Tolkien Society, on Tolkien as Heritage. Set for 7th-8th December 2024, at the University of Belgrade and online. To be specifically focused on… “the idea of Tolkien’s work as heritage in and of itself”.
* New on YouTube, Word on Fire magazine interviews Holly Ordway on exploring Tolkien’s Catholic faith.
* From 2022 and 2023 but new to me, a long blog post on “How Tolkien Disguised Ice Age Europe as Middle-Earth”, followed by a part two. Presents the case, with maps, that… “Tolkien’s Middle-earth, when correctly scaled, perfectly matches the landscape of Ice Age Europe”. The outlines of the old coasts were indeed newly known by the time Tolkien was writing, in the 1930s. For instance what is now called ‘Doggerland’ off the east coast of England, long ago totally submerged by ongoing natural sea-level rise.
* Also from circa 2022, The Tree Of Tales — Virtual Tolkien Exhibition. Online and freely accessible. Including a one-hour video introduction to the Italian exhibition, which YouTube will auto-translate from Italian if you switch on subtitles.
* The travelling exhibition The Magic of Middle Earth is now at St. George’s Guildhall in King’s Lynn. This is a former port town in Norfolk, on the east coast of England. Free entry, for this stop, and the exhibition runs until 14th September 2024.
If you can’t get there, take a look at this new article on another Lord of the Rings collection, which with fine photographs gives a flavour of the high quality fan-items and merchandise that is being produced.
* A potential Tolkien art show / open studio in Brooklyn, New York City. Muddy Colors writes…
“This coming fall [autumn] I will host another Open Studio showcasing “The Bridge of Khazad-dum” among other works here in Brooklyn. The date is tentatively set for Saturday, 21st September 2024.”
* This autumn the Malvern Festival 2024 (Malvern Hills, England) will include a John Garth public talk on Tolkien, which I assume will reference the associations that Tolkien, Lewis and Auden had with Malvern. Bookings open on 1st August 2024.
* Now scanned and on Archive.org, the manuscript studies / palaeography review journal Scriptorum, as annual issues from the 1940s and 50s.
* The British Fantasy Society is currently seeking mentors…
“We’re recruiting mentors from around the publishing industry, which means we’re seeking not just writers, but also editors, publishers, agents, and anyone else involved in the world of publishing (not just tradpub, either; indie and self-pub are more than welcome!).”
* And finally… a forthcoming major exhibition in 2025 at the Musee d’Orsay museum in Paris, “Christian Krohg: The People of the North” (spring-summer 2025). Krohg was a Norwegian realist artist who recorded the folk life of the nation in his paintings, before modernity hit. The show will include, one hopes, the recently censored “Leif Erikson discovers America” (1872), which was removed from the walls of the National Gallery in Oslo due to its apparent political incorrectness. The Krogh painting was itself a replacement for a painting (originally on the museum’s grand staircase) banished from the walls because deemed even more politically incorrect, “The Ride of Asgard” (Asgardsreien) (1872) by Peter Nicolai Arbo.
Christian Krohg, “Leif Erikson discovers America” (1872)