Tolkien Gleanings #225
* Sessions set for the 2025 International Congress on Medieval Studies, among others, include: “Fire, Dragons, and Jewels, O My: Medieval Poems and J.R.R. Tolkien”; “Tolkien and Old Norse”; and “Tolkien and Medieval Conceptions of the Sea”. The calls are now online.
* The Messengers from the Stars open-access journal seeks contributions for a special issue in 2025 to be themed “‘Getting Medieval’: Fantasy and the Middle Ages”. Deadline: 3rd February 2025.
* Found, another 10-year embargo dissertation for an Irish B.A. (Hons.) Design for Stage and Screen degree. But different from the one noted in Gleanings #224. “The Safe Haven: The depiction of salvation through sanctuary and scenography in The Lord of the Rings” (2014 undergraduate dissertation, released after embargo April 2024). A study of the visual aspects of the archetypal spaces of sanctuary with reference to LoTR. Identifies architectural methods that “creatively retain what threatens to disappear”, and considers the presentation of salvation “via ornamentation and embellishment”. Freely available online, and under Creative Commons.
* The Federalist magazine fisks a newspaper journalist who “Completely Botches Lord Of The Rings”… “It is untenable to equate the Ring simply with power. Tolkien did not write a story about why power is evil, but about why domination is evil. To understand Tolkien, it is essential to distinguish between the two.” Freely available online.
* On YouTube in Italian, “Fear leads to suffering”: myth and hope in the subcreation of J.R.R. Tolkien”. A May 2024 conference interview with Eduardo Segura at the University of Granada, Spain.
* In Brazil and in Brazilian, International Meeting for Mythopoetic Studies: The Lord of the Rings – 70 years of The Fellowship of the Ring, a three-day conference held in July 2024. The programme is still freely online as a PDF. The talks included, among others…
– From heavenly Jerusalem to Gondolin: hermeneutics of applicability: Tolkieniana as contemplation of celestial realities.
– Narrative solutions to editorial problems in The Fellowship of the Ring.
– Pseudotranslation as a creative principle of The Lord of the Rings.
– How medieval is Middle-earth? Understanding medievalism based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.
– What about second breakfast? Food and eating habits of the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings.
* A new set of Tolkien scene paintings by Miriam Ellis, posted in July 2024 on DeviantArt.
* And finally, an ‘Ink of Ages’ contest from the World History Encyclopedia with Oxford University Press. Submit your “historical or mythology-inspired short fiction”, telling a story in English in “under 2,000 words”, by 15th September 2024. Free to enter. No mention of AI assistance being allowed, or not.