Tolkien Gleanings #288
* My choice of interesting-sounding papers due to be given at the forthcoming Medieval Congress 2025 at the University of Leeds…
– ‘One of my chief encouragements’: Tolkien as Tutor, Mentor, and Friend to W.H. Auden and Mary Renault.
– Tolkien’s Interpretation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: From His Time in Leeds to His Late Years.
– The Light of Learning: Medieval Scholar-Kings and Loremasters in the Line of Earendil. (K. Larsen)
– The Thomist Legacy behind J.R.R. Tolkien’s Concept of Angelic Cognition.
– Creating a ‘Red Book’: Hobbits, Tolkien, and Irish Monks.
– Tolkien’s Early Work: Examining ‘Enȝlaȝesíþ’.
* In France, what is billed as a ‘conference-lecture’ on “Tolkien le mysterieux” (‘Tolkien and the Mysterious’), which seeks to peer into… “his most enigmatic texts”. Set for 8th April 2025 in Paris. Looks like there’s also a book launch at the same venue, and the book has an introduction by Leo Carruthers of the Sorbonne.
* A new conference paper in the growing current issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Modes of Sauron: Wizard-Demon-Cat”, argues that Sauron is a “shape-shifter”.
* Set for June 2025, the new Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters.
* New in Portuguese and open-access, the Masters dissertation “J.R.R. Tolkien e a criacao de uma fantasia politica” (2025) (‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the creation of a political fantasy’). Has a long and cogent abstract in English. Examines Tolkien in relation to the then-emerging modernity of the inter-war period, and the various political strands of the time, suggesting that parallel views can be found in The Two Towers. See also the recent Portuguese Elementos antimodernos na obra de J.R.R. Tolkien: uma analise da obra Sobre Contos de Fadas (2024) (‘Anti-modern elements in J.R.R. Tolkien’s work: an analysis of his work on fairy tales’).
* Another interview on YouTube with the creator of the The Mythmakers book, which depicted the friendship of Tolkien & Lewis.
* Amazon UK is currently newly listing a hardcover edition of The Hobbit: A Graphic Novel (Revised and Expanded), with the release timed to wow the ‘back-to-university, got my loan payment’ crowd on 16th September 2025. Official and apparently to be… “revised and expanded with new art by illustrator David Wenzel, together with previously unpublished sketches and notes.” Possibly just some extra picture-galleries at the end, rather than additional pages of story? But the current paperback is 132 pages, while the forthcoming hardback is 192 pages. So there does seem to be room for a few additional pages of the story.
* “Tolkien’s Tengwar writing system has been mapped to Unicode”. Tecendil lets you see it digitally scribed. I see there’s also a guide for webmasters on how to embed Tengwar in your website.
* In English in the current Brazilian Unicamp Journal (magazine of the State University of Campinas), “Tolkien and magic outside the timeline”. Freely available online. A short and dense article, resulting from an interview with the writer of a recently completed PhD thesis in political science. He worries about Tolkien’s integration of older…
“literary genres into his work in an attempt to make it pass itself off as a work belonging to these genres”, and suggests that in this Tolkien “failed to maintain [the] authenticity [of the older traditions] created over generations and [which often had no firm] authorship. There is the issue of [these earlier works] being linked to that culture and that society. Tolkien, no. He recreates this whole apparatus artificially. This is not something authentic”.
But Tolkien states his very valid reasons for doing so, and anyway… what was the alternative in a society so denuded of its tales and lore? One of the great English traditions is the invention of tradition, and a master bard and wordsmith is perfectly entitled to weave fading fragments into a bright new tapestry of words. One might also consider that Tolkien was not only expertly drawing on ancient texts, tales and words. This is the fallacy of those academics who see only words and books. He also drew on the many then authentically-lived traditions of Englishness and Christianity, on the realities and traditions of battle, on local physiognomy and dialects, and on our very ancient landscape along with its distinctively rapid weather-changes amid steady seasonality.