Tolkien Gleanings #220
* The Telegraph ($ paywall), gushes that…
“a newly unearthed document has revealed it was an ‘instrumental’ meeting with his friend, C.S. Lewis, in 1930 that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to begin sharing the imaginary languages and mythologies of Middle-earth with the world. The document, which was hidden away in the records of Magdalen College in Oxford, indicates that Tolkien spoke his secretly invented Elvish tongues and told stories about Middle-earth for the first time at a previously unknown meeting with Lewis and other members of Magdalen’s elite, intellectual Michaelmas Club”.
* The Italian press report that the Tolkien exhibition in Turin has now closed. This was the second venue and the show was again a great success, welcoming over 149,000 paying visitors in just over three months. The next venue will be the city of Turin at the Reggia di Venaria, said to be opening there “in a few months”.
* A 2023 article in the undergraduate Drover Review asks “Did Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Influence Tolkien While Writing The Lord of the Rings?”
* Looks like a new book will be ‘flying wingman’ alongside John Garth’s long-awaited next book on a very similar topic, The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945. The book is coming in June 2025 according to Amazon… “historian Joseph Loconte tells for the first time how the dark shadows cast by the Second World War utterly transformed the lives and literary imagination of Tolkien and Lewis.”
* New at Theology of Law, the article “Shire Justice: What hobbits can teach us”… “‘shire justice’ is akin to the Biblical idea of shalom, something that every society needs if it is to flourish.” Was in a 2013 collection of essays, but is here freely available as what looks like a pre-print PDF.
* The Thoughts on Tolkien blog considers “The Prayers of Sam Gamgee and Sir Gawain”.
* Now free on Archive.org, a basic scan of Ralph Elliott’s book The Gawain Country (1984). Long out-of-print and difficult to obtain as a personal reading-copy, until now. Here the scan is extended, by appending some of Elliott’s later work on the topic.
* The Church Times reviews the sumptuous new book C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (2024).
* And finally, University of Oxford Podcasts: A Walk around C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (2021). Which, in large part, was also Tolkien’s Oxford.