Tolkien Gleanings #279
* Just published, The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (February 2025).
* A new 144-page single-essay book in Spanish, Mitologia poetica: Tolkien y la verdad del arte (February 2025). The blurb translated and condensed…
Tolkien continues to appear in our modern world as if “lightning in a clear sky”. This essay considers his illuminating reflections on art and the artist, which occupy a central place in his theoretical and literary work and particularly consider the crafts of words, sub-creation and myth. His reflections arose from a deep worldview that encompasses God, man and the world, and endure in the form of ‘poetic doing’: that extraordinary use of language which gives us the original truth and touches the human heart.
Also of note from the same publisher, I see Las Vacaciones de un Hobbit (2022) (‘Holidays of a Hobbit’). This considers the young Tolkien’s various real journeys as formative encounters with unfamiliar landscapes. One would hope it might also muse on his exposure, during the trips rather than at the destinations, to the then-still-emerging world of modernity. But I’m not sure if it does or not. Possibly it’s just the destinations — Switzerland / Scotland / Paris / Brittany / Cornwall etc.
* Due sometime in “2025” according to the prolific publisher McFarland, Tolkien’s Glee: A Reading of the Songs in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In the past, McFarland’s sci-fi/horror/fantasy non-fiction books have been of variable quality. But here the presence of an introduction by Douglas A. Anderson reassures. The book will discuss all the songs and…
The study of these songs begins with the assumption that they were intended to delight through sound, and so a great deal of the analysis focuses on the ‘music’ of the songs, the sounds of the individual words, and the metrical patterns, and how they contribute to Tolkien’s story and his themes.
Note that Amazon UK has the book listed as arriving on a later date, in February 2026.
* A Pilgrim in Narnia feeds Tolkien’s new expanded Letters to the Voyant text analysis software.
* There’s what appears to be a French travelling exhibition, currently on the south coast of Brittany. L’Heritage de Tolkien shows the work of 15 French ‘BD’ comics creators influenced by Tolkien’s imagination. The ‘BD’ format is a unique Euro format, being a relatively short graphic-novel printed oversize and usually offered in hardback. Nice idea, and something that the British might replicate with our own comics creators.