Tolkien Gleanings #266
* In English in the latest 2024 edition of the Transylvanian journal Revista Philobiblon, “‘We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I’: The Symbolism Of The Dragon in J.R.R. Tolkien’s and C.S. Lewis’s Fairy Stories”. Freely available online.
* The forthcoming academic collection Dragons in Fairy Tales has a 20th January 2025 deadline for chapter abstracts. There are still four or five slots available in the book.
* Set for 2025 from academic publisher Palgrave, the book J.R.R. Tolkien and G.B. Smith: A Special Relationship.
* Due in 2025, the book The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination which… “shows how the plots, themes, and characters of Tolkien’s beloved works can be traced to the patterns of the Church’s liturgical year.”
* Also due in 2025, from the University of Chicago Press, the book Chasing the Pearl-manuscript. This will draw… “on recent technological advances (such as spectroscopic analysis) to show the Pearl-manuscript to be a more complex piece of material, visual, and textual art than previously understood”.
* Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2025: ‘Rituals and Ceremonies’, which would appear to be relevant to topics related to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
* Taruithorn (the Oxford Tolkien Society, a student society at the University of Oxford since 1990) has announced plans to revive its journal Miruvor… “We are looking for contributions! If you would like to write or create anything inspired by Tolkien, please feel free to contact us!” I assume contributors will need to be a student or perhaps have some connection with the University. The last issue of the earlier run of Miruvor appeared in 2016. Back issues can be had here from 1990-2004, as PDFs for open download.
* Signum University now has the March 2025 online short-courses listed. Learn a language in ‘Beginning Quenya’ (two parts); or study ‘The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Mature Years 1 (Volume 2: The Years 1919-1931)’ (three parts); or dive into ‘Tolkien and the Sea’. Some are ‘candidate courses’, meaning they only run if enough people sign up for them.
* And finally, some Gleanings readers will have a number of Amazon WishLists with substantial user comments appended. But you’ll likely find that some useless tea-boy at Amazon has tinkered with your WishList comments, making them miniscule and also hiding more than the first line of text. So, here’s a useful free UserScript for your Web browser, ‘Amazon Wishlist item user-comments / user-notes – fix’. This should fix this new problem. Requires TamperMonkey or similar, to run UserScripts on Web pages. You’re welcome.