Tolkien Gleanings #251

* The latest issue of the rolling Journal of Tolkien Research is beginning to fill up, and now comes the first peer-reviewed article, “The Land of Fairies of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Freely available online.

* The major new book The Island: W.H. Auden and the Last of Englishness focuses on the poet’s biography prior to his departure for America. With special and newly-illuminating focus on his roots in south Birmingham and his time as a teacher at nearby Malvern, as the young Auden yearned for a “lyrical nationalism” and for recognition as a national poet. Given his similar roots, interests and trajectory — and also his later direct connection with Tolkien at a critical time in the birth of LoTR — this acclaimed new book may interest Gleanings readers.

* The blog jwwrightauthor has some new “Thoughts on Moorcock’s Criticism of Tolkien and Other Fantasists”. In another blog, SteadyHQ, we’re offered another reason why Moorcock got it so wrong. Like many other pungent leftist ‘critics’ of LoTR in the first 40 or so years after publication, it now appears that “Moorcock never really read LoTR”.

* Tolkien Notes 21 (end of October 2024) from the Tolkien scholars Hammond & Scull.

* The World Fantasy Convention 2025, to be held in Brighton on the south coast of the UK, has announced its two themes. ‘Lyrical Fantasy’ and ’50 Years of British Fantasy and Horror’. The latter presumably being 1975-2025.

* Shortly to be released to online streaming on Arte.tv, the feature-length TV documentary Tolkien: The True Story of the Rings (2024)… “This documentary explores the real places in England and elsewhere that provided inspiration for Tolkien”.

* For the real thing including muddy boots, Imagining Middle-earth: A Journey Through Tolkien’s England with Michael Drout, during October 2025. Start at Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire, and end in Oxford.

* The Walking Tree Publishers website has ejected its recent cyber-gremlins. The ‘Latest News’ page now has new links to three free PDF reviews of Germanic Heroes, Courage, and one for Fate: Northern Narratives of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium and Binding them all: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien and His Works.

* Tolkien’s old university college is celebrating 30 years of Exeter’s musical organ, with ‘An evening of organ music inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’. Set for 27th February 2025.

* Tolkien & Lewis’s “Eagle and Child pub in Oxford set to host public consultation”, reports This Is Oxfordshire. The consultation event has been and gone (21st November), but the article has interior and side-alley pictures, plus developer pictures of what the famous pub might look like after the roof-fixing and renovation.

* And finally, an illustration of the perils of not being on Twitter. I’ve published an interview with him, and read his biography, but until today I had no idea about Elon Musk and Tolkien.

Tolkien Gleanings #250

* Now online, four presentations from Doxamoot 2024. Freely downloadable in .MP3 format are…

   – “‘Like Rain on the Mountain’: Theodoric, Beowulf, Theoden, and Tolkien’s Elegy for Northern Courage”.

   – “Pentecost at the Stone of Erech: Oathbreakers and Covenant Keepers in the Legendarium”.

   – “‘We heard of the horns in the hills ringing’: Musical memory of the Rohirrim in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings“.

   – “Love’s Obligation: Deceit and Truth: The Divide Between Virtue and Vice in Tolkien”.

* A new podcast interview with Graham McAleer, author of Tolkien, Philosopher of War.

* Gleanings previously noted the latest issue of the open-access Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, with its lead article “Hautaamistavat J.R.R. Tolkienin fantasiafiktiossa” (‘Burial customs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy fiction’). Yet I overlooked the same issue’s review of Nole Hyarmenillo: An Anthology of Iberian Scholarship on Tolkien. Also note that Fafnir editors have a new call-for-papers for the June 2025 issue, published a month or so ago with a submission deadline of 31st December 2024.

* A call-for papers for the two-day conference “C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien: The Promise of Christian Fairytales”, set for California in August 2025. Deadline is 15th March 2025.

* A new 2024 issue of the open-access Journal of Gods and Monsters. No Tolkien, but it may interest some.

* The BARS Review has a call for contributors and can supply review copies of The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and Romanticism and Speculative Realism, among others.

* A call for book chapters, for From Desolation to Idyllic Habitations: Exploring the Landscapes of Dragons in Literature, Film, and Pop Culture. A deadline of 20th December 2024, for what looks like a 2026 book.

* A new review in Spanish of the book Tolkien revisitado: 50 anos despues de su viaje a Valinor (2024) (‘Tolkien Revisited: 50 years after his journey to Valinor’), in the latest edition of the open-access journal Doxa Comunicacion.

* And finally, The People Under the Hill is a series of alternative history novels. This month has seen the release of the second book, Tolkien and The Dangerous Truth. The covers have abysmal typography but the blurb makes it sound like a lot of erudite and contrarian fun, beginning with… “What if Tolkien’s Oxford Dictionary work during the summer of 1919 were only a cover story?” Anyway, it’s a substantial new ‘Tolkien as character’ novel and there’s a 10% free preview for Kindle ebooks. So have a look for yourself. [Update: I’ve now read and enjoyed the first novel in the series, and have high hopes for this second novel].

Tolkien Gleanings #249

* I see that a new issue of the rolling Journal of Tolkien Research is underway, with the first posted essay being “Some notes on Seth Kreeger’s “Metaphysical Considerations in Ea””. Freely available online.

* Alas, not me examines “The Repentance of Angels: a Curious Departure in Tolkien”. Freely available online.

* We now have On Tolkien and Theology: Part II in which… “Douglas Estes joins the podcast once again to discuss the second volume of a collection of essays he edited on theology in the works and worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien.” Part one of this podcast interview was posted back in February 2024. Freely available online.

* Forthcoming from Kent State University Press, the academic book Finding the Numinous: An Ecocritical Look at Dune and the Lord of the Rings, due at the end of February 2025. In 176-pages the author suggests that…

“these imagined worlds’ environments are sacred spaces fundamental to understanding these texts and their authors’ purposes. [The author] applies Tolkien’s three functions of fantasy — recovery, escape, and consolation — to demonstrate how both authors’ works are intrinsically connected to their ecocritical messages and overarching moral philosophies.”

* A review of the “first publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s collected poems”, with some additional advice on the book’s potential as a Christmas present…

“be forewarned: this book is not for the faint of heart. Its massive scope, and the academic presentation of the material, are better suited to the Tolkien scholar than the casual reader — certainly not the one who leapfrogs the songs in The Lord of the Rings.”

* Freely available on YouTube, “Lewis, Tolkien, and the Founding of the Inklings”… “In this charming conversation, host Eric Metaxas interviews philologist Simon Horobin on his new book C.S. Lewis’s Oxford.”

* Here in the UK the editors of our venerable Victoria County History series invite new original ghost stories, presumably related to the sort of precise British local history that the VCH volumes so ably supply. I can imagine a tale in which the shade of Tolkien appears, perhaps peeved by a mistake in explicating some tree-ish place-name.

* And finally, lucky University of Maryland students are able to take a two-week “Tolkien & Lewis in Oxford” study-and-visits course in England, in July 2025. Including visits to… “Birmingham, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution”… hmmm, well… I think Ironbridge and the Black Country might have something to say about that claim. Perhaps a short lecture for the students on “Gullible tourists, profitable places, and the invention of tradition in England” might be suitably enlightening, detailing the ways in which the invention of tradition has long been a popular English tradition.

Tolkien Gleanings #248

* Due in a few days from Cambridge University Press, the academic book Theology and the Mythic Sensibility: Human Myth-Making and Divine Creativity. The blurb is short and unhelpful, but a text found elsewhere reveals that Tolkien is discussed. The cover appears to use artwork by Ian Miller.

* New at The European Conservative magazine, the long essay “Swallowed by the Dragon: Monstrous Meanings in Tolkien’s Stories”.

* Another set of long online lectures in which Rachel Fulton-Brown sets about exploring Tolkien. Her ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ set was previously paywalled, but is now being slowly and freely posted to YouTube. This batch of releases includes ‘On Fairy Stories’, ‘Magic Words’, ‘The Olde Speech’, ‘The Voice of Saruman’, and several more.

* J.R.R. Jokien Essays Vol. I – 2023. A new ebook of essays from the “humorous, sometimes earnest” Jokien with Tolkien blog, previously paywalled at Substack/Patreon. Judging by the titles, I assume the essays are from the “earnest” side of the venture.

* In the USA, a travelling stage production I don’t think I’d noticed before. Christmas with C.S. Lewis is… “set during a 1962 visit to Lewis by holidaying Americans”. Judging by the blurb it also has flashbacks featuring Tolkien.

* The latest open-access Journal for Religion, Film and Media is themed around ‘Escaping the Moment: Time Travel as a Negotiation of Transcendence’ (November 2024). The issue also has a call-for-papers for a future issue on ‘Death, Loss and Mourning in Film and Media’.

* Seemingly newly ingested at The Free Library, a full-text run of the journal Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature (1997-2024). Has a couple of Tolkien and Lewis articles.

* And finally, a new and pleasing page of hobbit penmanship from MatejCadil, “Oliphaunt”.

Tolkien Gleanings #247

* The Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference now has the talks programme online. An all-star Tolkien event. Talks include, among others…

   – “It is dear to my heart”: An art-oriented recollection of a correspondence with Christopher Tolkien (1982-1988).
   – Christopher Tolkien as Medieval Scholar.
   – Christopher Tolkien and ‘the Goths and the Huns’.
   – Continuing Christopher Tolkien’s Work in a Digital Age.

* New at Atla blog, “Yielding New Perspectives on Tolkien: An Interview with Archivist Catherine McIlwaine”.

* Voyages dans les mondes de Tolkien (‘Voyages in the Worlds of Tolkien’), new from France. It appears to be a 144-page one-off book-a-zine from the glossy French travel magazine Geo. The quickie AI-generated cover doesn’t inspire confidence that it’s an authorised publication. One Amazon review states that there are a number of errors of biographical fact, and its interview with the French nation’s current Tolkien publisher somehow managed to overlook twenty years of work on Tolkien by Vincent Ferre.

* Addiction in The Lord of the Rings and the real world: insights for physicians. A short report in a medical journal, on a conference paper of note…

“At OMED24, this theme was brought to life as James H. Berry, DO, an addiction psychiatrist, and Tolkien scholar Lisa Coutras Terris, PhD, explored how the forces that ensnare characters in Tolkien’s work mirror the real-world grip of addiction.”

* Forthcoming in 2025, The Gospel of Gollum by Italian scholar Ivano Sassanelli. The book will consider…

“Gollum as a possible exemplification or personification of the passage from the Gospel of Luke: “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be” (Luke 12,34)? To answer this question, we will use an academic approach tasked with showing some of the most important aspects of Gollum’s life and [drawing on] Italian Tolkien scholarship.”

* An online continuing-education course at Harvard on “Tolkien’s Library”, set for spring 2025.

* An online seminar set for August 2025, More Perilous and Fair: Women and Gender in Mythopoeic Fantasy… “Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the publication of Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien”.

* New on YouTube, Tolkien, Lord, and Liturgy: An Interview with Dr. Ben Reinhard.

* New on Archive.org, the Greenwood guide A Century of Welsh Myth in Children’s Literature (1998). Now out-of-print and with a few paper copies available used at £50+.

* One of the many Black Friday sales is from publisher Harper Collins, the key publisher of official Tolkien books. Also, news of a forthcoming Tolkien ‘Myths and Legend’ Harper Collins box-set. Due in June 2025, it will include Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Though in what version I’m not yet sure.

* And finally, can Harper Collins and the Estate please consider J.R.R. Tolkien’s Complete Book of the Dwarves and Dwarven-lore. It doesn’t exist. It should and could, I suggest.

Tolkien Gleanings #246

* Several things happened in America this week. A sudden and unexpected national shortage of therapy-puppies, and the election of a new U.S. Vice-President who tells the enquiring media… “A lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien”.

* The forthcoming French book Les Mondes de Christopher Tolkien now has a page on Amazon UK, as a £14 ebook for pre-order. No table-of-contents, as yet.

* A short review of the young children’s picture-book Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the Worlds of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien…

“Baynes is presented as a relatable character whose quiet, dreamy perseverance with the art she loved enabled her to serve her country as well as herself. By emphasizing the roadblocks Baynes overcame to finally reach the pinnacle of her career as an illustrator, the story helps readers understand that it is okay if your path through life is not straight and simple.”

* A long review of the new book Oxford’s War 1939–1945…

“The vast New Bodleian Library building, not formally opened until 1946, became a vault for national valuables, an air-raid shelter and the headquarters of the remarkable British Red Cross Prisoner of War Postal Book Service, run by Ethel Herdman. The Service sent reading matter to the thousands of British and Commonwealth ‘kriegies’ languishing in Axis [Germany, Japan, Italy] prison camps, as well as exam papers. The English literature [exam] scripts were marked by Professor J.R.R. Tolkien.”

I imagine this will be a useful shelf-companion to Garth’s forthcoming book on the influence of the Second World War on The Lord of the Rings, when it appears.

* Some details of a recent October 2024 talk at Stanford University in the USA, “Fighting the Long Defeat: Tolkien and Ancient Narratives of Decline”….

“Narratives of decline [from a Golden Age] are also at the core of Tolkien’s mythology, and this is just another, neglected aspect of classical influence on Tolkien. The talk will discuss the reception of narratives of decline in Tolkien’s legendarium, pointing out similarities, but also contrasts and differences [with classical models from antiquity]”

* A curious scholarly item listed for pre-order on Amazon UK, The 1879 Theft of Royal Ms 16 E VIII From the British Museum: Wars and Tolkien’s Teacher’s Role. Not Tolkien himself, but one of the young Tolkien’s teachers in Birmingham. The book reconstructs the theft and also the lost 13th century manuscript itself, which contained the only copy of the oldest French poem ‘Le Voyage de Charlemagne a Jerusalem et a Constantinople’.

* Doubtful Sea watches the excellent 1978 Charles Darwin mini-series, and is prompted to consider “Paleo-Tolkien” and his possible dino-debt to Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. The pterodactyls were quite well known to the late Victorians, the first complete scientific description being in 1891. Presumably this ‘flying dragon’ aroused a certain interest among the Edwardian public, and among boys in particular. It took various uncertain forms in book illustrations, museum postcards, etc, until our modern conception of the beast solidified in the 1950s.

* MindMatters proposes a new test for AI, alongside the well-know Turing Test, “The Tolkien Test”…

“The Tolkien test for AI is whether it can ‘create’ genuinely original work that bears no correspondence to anything a human has ever sub-created, as an extension of the original creation act and ultimate expression of originality.”

Well, yes, but that rather ignores the deep debt Tolkien had to all sorts of sources. His work has all sorts of “correspondence” to past works.

* And finally, The Folio Society Unveils £600 Edition of The Hobbit. I suspect Tolkien would have been happier to see £500 go to some good tree charity (restoring Britain’s lost Elm trees springs to mind), and for the remaining £100 to be spent on a clean second-hand Hobbit from eBay.

Tolkien Gleanings #245

* A new French book, Les Mondes de Christopher Tolkien (‘The Worlds of Christopher Tolkien’), due to be published 21st November 2024.

“This book contains testimonies from loved ones and studies on the man who not only edited thousands of pages of J.R.R. Tolkien, and mapped his universe, but who appears here as a writer and artist in his own right.”

* The artist Greg Hildebrandt has passed away. With his brother, he became one of the first major artists (‘The Brothers Hildebrandt’) to illustrate Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

* A new edition of the journal Mythlore (Fall/Winter 2024). Including ‘The Inconsistencies of Galadriel: The Influence of Earlier Legendarium in The Lord of the Rings’, among many other articles and reviews. Freely available online.

* The Troubadour reports on a recent J.R.R. Tolkien and the Oratorians discussion…

The Tolkien Society and Jesters of YHWH (JOY) household hosted a discussion about J.R.R. Tolkien and the Oratorians on Tuesday 8th October, focusing on Tolkien’s history, his encounter with the Oratory of Birmingham and his connection to St. Phillip Neri.

* Another delve into the deep topic of ‘Tolkien and War’, in the form of the University of Vermont’s 2025 Tolkien conference. This is their 21st annual conference, and will be both in person and online. The call-for-papers deadline is 2nd February 2025.

* A free webinar “From Myth to Manuscript: Exploring Inklings Archival Collections”. Booking now, for 13th November 2024.

* A new Bedlam Book Club podcast on Madness in the World of Tolkien, with Janet Croft. Discussing with reference to… “how Tolkien’s work intersects with his early life and experiences” during the First World War. Freely available online.

* New on YouTube, Prof. Paul Gondreau offers a 45-minute overview of “The Catholic Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings“.

* The feature-film Fellowship: Tolkien & Lewis appears to have been delayed and is now billed on its official site as “Coming Winter 2025”. It was, if I recall the UK filming and VFX-ing correctly, once billed as a Web series.

* Slipping into the U.S. public domain in January 2025, Joseph Gaer’s Burning Bush (1929). A thick collection of Jewish fairy-tales and “folklore legends” translated and adapted to English, published by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Gaer went on to become a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1930-35.

* Archive.org has restored user log-ins, following the hack. Scholars can also once again search across the full-text of all the scanned books and magazines. Uploading is still unavailable though, with the last upload being dated 9th October 2024.

* And finally, a new Treasure Hoard style plug-in, which guides Stable Diffusion 1.5 toward generating AI images of fantasy-style treasure-hoards. Just add dragons.