Tolkien Gleanings #287
* A 2025 Tolkien Colloquium, focusing on the poetry. 3rd to 5th April 2025 at Baylor University, Texas. Booking now.
* The long review of the book The Science of Middle-earth, which appears in the latest issue of the paywalled membership-journal Amon Hen #311, is now also freely available in open-access and under full Creative Commons Attribution. See also my correction of an erroneous statement given in the review, in Tolkien Gleanings #282.
* Paywalled in the first issue of the new journal Scrutiny2, “The Borders of War in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”, which examines how Tolkien uses the hobbits to gradually introduce the reader to the wider war-scape of Middle-earth past and present. Also suggests that “the homecoming of Tolkien’s own sons in the Second World War” influenced the tone of the return to Bree and the Scouring of the Shire.
* The catalogue for the Tolkien & Donald Swann Archive, now freely available as an online flip-book. In one of the unpublished letters, Tolkien advises Swann on singing elves… “let him trill his Rs. All elves did that”.
* Programming details and booking alerts for the huge Medieval Congress 2025 at the University of Leeds in the UK. The 15mb .PDF programme reveals treasure-hoards of Tolkien papers and roundtables, which I’ll examine for a later Tolkien Gleanings.
* Press coverage in Italian of the opening of the Tolkien exhibition in Catania, Sicily. The article also reveals the name of the forthcoming final stop for the national tour…
The exhibition has now opened at the Palazzo della Cultura [Catania, Sicily], and will run there until until 31st July 2025. The show premiered in Rome and then toured to Naples and Turin. It will end its tour with a visit to Trieste in the autumn of 2025.
* And finally, newly released software of interest to writers. The desktop creative-writing assistance software NovelForge 3.x, now with full AI assistance. Formerly called CQuill, a one-man software creation. Still standalone and affordable, at $60 for a perpetual licence and with no wallet-gouging extra charges. In the new 3.x version you can plug in either the native AI-like ‘style assistants’, and/or local / remote LLM (‘chatbot’) AIs. Fonts can be enlarged, and dark mode is not native but can be enabled via Windowtop Pro.