Tolkien Gleanings #300

Three hundred Gleanings! I welcome your support via Patreon.

* A new Journal of Inklings Studies is published, Vol. 15, No. 1 (April 2025). This includes “Tolkien’s ‘Sellic Spell’ and Beowulfian Sub-creation: the Artist and the Critic” ($ paywall). Plus a bumper crop of free book reviews for…

    – Mapping Middle-earth
    – Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913–1959
    – Friendship in The Lord of the Rings
    – The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation
    – Thomas Honegger’s Tweaking Things a Little
    – C.S. Lewis’s Oxford
    – The Songs of the Spheres (how Lewis and Tolkien overlapped)
    – Twenty-first Century Receptions of Tolkien
    – Translating and Illustrating Tolkien
    – The Battle of Maldon in two editions (one of which is Tolkien)

From the fine review of Lewis’s Oxford…

“Lewis’s attachment to the well-worn grooves of Oxford life could make a narrow focus for a biography, but the value of this book is the attention it pays to that very sameness, building up its picture from the many tiny details which gave shape to Lewis’s daily routine. The result is a grounded and satisfying account of Lewis’s life, with room for exploring matters which might go overlooked in a biography with a more conventional narrative structure.”

In my next PDF ‘zine edition of Tolkien Gleanings, I’ll have a “Tolkien’s Oxford” gallery section.

* The latest Christian Century magazine has a long article celebrating the increasingly apparent advent of what the headline-writer calls Tolkien 2.0…

“The fantasy writer’s vast theological and philosophical universe is unfolding in the hands of artists, scholars, and game designers.”

* New to me, Folkminner, the journal of the Norsk Folkeminnelag (Norwegian Folk-lore Society). It seems they’ve been posting it online since 2021, with the current online edition being April 2024. There is however an April 2025 edition, evidenced by The Carterhaugh School of Folklore kindly providing a free English translation of that issue’s article “Scandinavian Folklore and Fairy Tales in Modern English-Language Fantasy Literature”. Folkminner is now indexed in my JURN humanities search-engine.

* I came across a scan of the book English and Medieval Studies Presented To J.R.R. Tolkien (1962), on Archive.org ‘to borrow’. Here are the content pages…

* Miriam Ellis considers The Fire-works of Gandalf, and shows her painted illustrations of the scenes under discussion.

* Whitmore Rare Books has a new gallery of images of The Hobbit, as the tale appeared in its first American edition.

* Tickets are now on sale for another Oxford recreation of Tolkien’s lecture for children, ‘Tolkien on Dragons’.

* And finally, the annual Maytime Well-dressings at Malvern, which give thanks for the water bubbling out of the various local wells, fountains and springs around the famous hills. This year’s theme is to be ‘Folklore and Fairytales’, inspired by local folklore and Malvern’s literary connections with writers such as Tolkien. Running 3rd – 11th May 2025, the local water sources are decorated and there will be a 2025 trail map for visitors. The event doesn’t appear to take the same form as in the nearby Peak District, where the long-standing tradition is that boards surround the wells, are covered with clay, and then flat designs are made by pressing in the springtime flower-petals and new leaves. Malvern seems to be much more ad-hoc, with each little platoon of neighbours doing their own thing, at bubbling nooks with such delightful names as ‘Happy Donkey Spout’…

Tolkien Gleanings #299

* The publisher Walking Tree has just published Tolkien among the Theologians (2025) (Cormare volume 53). This collection of essays has a table of contents online and I see it includes two chapters which sound like they might be usefully biographical-theological, “Tolkien and Newman: Towards a Theology of History” (Cardinal Newman), and “Tolkien in His Contemporary Context: Among the Oratorians and the Jesuits”. Amazon UK has the paperback for £17.50.

* Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal reviews The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (2025) ($ partial paywall). The first page of the review is free, and that’s enough to read the reviewer’s succinct outline of the book’s chapters. It’s especially interesting to learn that…

“The final two chapters explore the impacts of the liturgical calendar on Tolkien’s works. [The first of these] focuses on themes of Advent and Christmas [which also necessarily touches on ‘earendel’ and the word’s sources]”

* Walking Tree has a free PDF of a review of the book Celebrating Tolkien’s Legacy (2024). The review is in English from Lembas Katern, which appears to be a supplement to the Dutch Tolkien Society’s main Lembas publication. Apparently this book has… “Several chapters [that] deal with Tolkien’s earliest childhood: a chapter about a tea in Kinver …”. I wasn’t aware there was evidence he was ever there, and the comprehensive Tolkien Chronology of his life has nothing for Kinver. The publisher’s blurb clarifies slightly with… “a likely 1904 excursion” (my emphasis), which would put Tolkien at around age 12 — if it ever happened. Not impossible I suppose, since Kinver was a popular summer day-trip from nearby Birmingham from Easter 1901 onwards. That was when the fast transport connection was first made. But it very soon became rather too popular. By 1904, on a public holiday in good weather, around 15,000 people a day could be making the day-trip from Birmingham.

* The Notion Club Papers blog offers a new short post on “Four approaches to understanding J.R.R. Tolkien: historical, philological, Roman Catholic, unique genius”. Useful, though the phrase a “man of his time and class” seemed to me to draw perhaps unconsciously on a Marxist framework. Of course, class was a vital structuring element of society during Tolkien’s working lifetime. But above class and subsuming it was the British ‘nation and landscape’, in which all classes had their place and played their parts and spoke English with their many tongues. Landscape and tongues and weather were equally important to him, I’d suggest. And in Tolkien’s formative years ‘nation and landscape’ was itself subject to the even higher framing of the British Empire. Not that Tolkien felt much allegiance to the Empire by all accounts, but only to England and especially to the West Midlands. Yet remember that the Empire would have been a constant presence, and was also in steep and obvious decline during the decades before the writing of LoTR. Could then the decline of the British Empire have fed into the ‘fallen remains of past glories’ landscapes seen in Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age? Not consciously, but via a steady ‘filtering in’ to the creative mind during those decades? But I guess such matters may be touched on in the forthcoming Garth book, which apparently relates LoTR to the events of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath.

* Another three 90-minute lectures have been scheduled on YouTube from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Spellsongs of Tinuviel (already online), Morgoth’s Revenge and Gondolin in that order. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted free on YouTube.

* Another Tolkien letter is up for auction, at Sotherby’s in the UK. A very late and short letter to a fan, but it mentions Bag-end. Sotherby’s has small scans.

* On YouTube, the latest Ben Shapiro podcast interviews “LoTR Expert Malcolm Guite” on why Tolkien matters today (two short adverts, and an all-to-short interview). Guite is also the former chaplain and a Life Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, and I see he has his own YouTube channel. Including the popular “A pint and a pipe!” in which he celebrates the long continuity of the English inn and pipe-smoking, both of which were dear to Tolkien’s heart. The wartime book English Inns (1943) is mentioned, and I see it is now online for free at Archive.org.

* Australia has ruled that trading as ‘Lord of the [Something]’ does not infringe the trademark of Middle-earth Enterprises. In this case it was ‘Lord of the Fries’, a chain of nine food shops, and the ruling sensibly deemed that…

“the absence of the ‘rings’ element meant that a total impression of dissimilarity emerges from a comparison of the signs”

* And finally, talking of trading… note that the new temporary U.S. international trade tariffs do not cover printed books or paper. The long-standing 7.5% U.S. tariff on books printed in China does however remain in place, exempting only religious books. But, as of today, it sounds like the U.S. has forced China into serious trade negotiations… thus it’s possible that even that 7.5% may change by the end of the summer.

Tolkien Gleanings #298

Happy Easter!

* The Oxford Tolkien Network has posted YouTube videos of several recent talks. Including, among others…

    – “Tolkien and old English prosody”.
    – “‘Alight here for Middle-earth!’: Tolkien, place, and the past” (suggests Meon Hill as a model for Weathertop).
    – “Riddles in the grass: the characterisation and narrative value of landscape over the fields of Rohan”.

* Newly published, Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature for Spring/Summer 2025. Freely available online. Including, among others…

    – “No Ragnarok, No Armageddon: Pagan and Christian interpretations of The Lord of the Rings”.
    – “The Liberty to Bind Oneself: Chesterton and The Oath of Feanor”.
    – “The Bright Sword and its Sharpness: Swords, Symbolism, and Medievalism in The Lord of the Rings”.
    – Review of Tolkien’s Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle-earth (a book on divine interventions, or seemingly so, in the Third Age).

* Newly added to the current rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Sounds of Battle: Belliphonic in Tolkien”. The word belliphonic = the acoustic dimensions of warfare, from bellicose. Freely available online.

* Dimitra Fimi has now posted the third part of her ongoing blog series… On Tolkien’s Letter 131: ‘Gods and Heroes out of the Sea’.

* Fellowship and Fairydust has a new short post surveying Tolkien and His Friends, on the various close friends made throughout his life.

* New to me, the undergraduate dissertation ‘From Marginalia to Middle-earth: sixteen philological books and their influence on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction’ (2015). Not online as a dissertation, but the gist of it appears to be in a freely available article at The Tolkien Library.

* The latest edition of Religion and Liberty reviews The Last Romantic: C.S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology. Freely available online…

“Barbeau’s meticulous, well-informed, and balanced analysis of Lewis provides a nuanced and scholarly exploration of Lewis’ connections to British Romantic writers, considering how he integrates the subjective with the objective and the imaginative with the rational. [Partly this is accomplished via an] extensive examination of Lewis’ marginalia — his handwritten annotations of the editions of Wordsworth and Coleridge in his personal library”.

* In Romanian in the March 2025 issue of the Romanian journal Orizont, “Raul: O necesitate literara” (‘Evil: A Literary Necessity’). Freely available online. An essay on Tolkien and his subtle avoidance of the literary traps of a tale of good vs. evil…

“His characters are not typologies of good and evil. The ending does not provide a resolution to all the conflicts and situations in the novel. The sadness and uncertainty that weigh down an otherwise ‘happy’ ending reverberate throughout The Lord of the Rings. The only ‘absolute’ in Tolkien’s creation is hope. A hope without guarantees, as the writer characterizes it in his letters. This hope, in turn, is supported by a faith that is not certain about a happy ending.” (Translation).

* As Birmingham, England, submerges under a great wave of trash, muddy-booted volunteers are tracking the health of the city’s streams and rivers, including the… “puddles and brooks of Moseley Bog” which Tolkien knew. The journalist uses “puddles” rather than pools, presumably because we’ve had an uncharacteristically dry three weeks in England.

* And finally, recall “…he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence” from the opening of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Then note that April 2026 will be more-or-less the 111th anniversary of the launch of his Legendarium (in its earliest manifestations) in 1915. Cue for “a party of special magnificence”, perhaps?

Tolkien Gleanings #297

* In issue number 21 of Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics (2021) ($ paywall), “Tolkien’s Dragons: Sources, Symbols, and Significance”…

“I examine some of the more neglected sources that may have inspired Tolkien’s conception of these creatures, focusing on classical mythology, the Bible, and medieval English literature.”

Originally listed as a talk for the strand ‘Tolkien and the Medieval Animal’ at the 2022 International Congress on Medieval Studies. But omitted from the Journal of Tolkien Research special-issue on Tolkien’s Animals (2023).

* From Italy, the book Miscellanea in onore di Dora Faraci (2025) (‘Miscellanea in honour of Dora Faraci’). Includes in English, among others, “Allusive name forms in Cynewulf’s poems”, “Starcraeft and the Interface Between Faith and Science in Anglo-Saxon England” (observation of stars and constellations), “English and Norse Dragons, Ancient and Modern” (inc. concise appendix on themes, listing of the distribution of tales in the British Isles), “Runick Antiquities in the European debate and Renaissance England” (on the rediscovery of runes in England). Freely available in open-access and under Creative Commons.

* The British Fantasy Society plans a themed BFS Journal issue on ‘War in Fantasy’, and is calling for proposals. They welcome biographical items on Tolkien and his wartime experiences and influences, among other suggestions. Deadline: 31st August 2025. The issue is pencilled in to appear around Christmas 2025.

* 2025 C.S. Lewis Summer Institute calls for 20 minute papers around the theme of “Returning Home: C.S. Lewis, Roots, and Transformation”. To be held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 24th-30th July 2025.

* Lingwe discovers that Wisconsin Public Radio profiled Karen Wynn Fonstad, the Middle-earth map maker…

“Along with the printed article, there’s a 15-minute public radio piece you can listen to with Fonstad’s son, Mark [who] is working on a new project to digitize all of Fonstad’s original maps of Middle-earth”

* The Parish Catechist blog briefly reviews the book J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (2002) and notes that…

“when Tolkien’s son Christopher enlisted [in the Second World War, on the RAF enlistment form] he listed his father’s occupation as ‘wizard’.”

* Exeter College’s magazine Exon (Winter 2024/25, download titled #24, but cover says #27) has “The clans will strive and gory writhe upon the field to-day”, a student analysis of Tolkien’s early poem “The Battle of the Eastern Field”. Freely available online.

* Here in the UK, Wormwoodania considers the question “Do Charity Bookshops Drive Out Other Second-Hand Bookshops?” Not the ubiquitous charity shops (their stock of books is almost always dreadfully naff), but specialist charity-run bookshops. I had no idea such things existed in the High Street, not living in “decent places where there is tea-time” (Sam Gamgee). But, as the article states…

Charity bookshops have continued to increase [in the UK]. The Book Guide now lists about 150 Oxfam Bookshops, together with a further 40 of its general shops with a book room or significant stock. It also lists 11 for Amnesty, 7 for the Red Cross, 6 for Age UK, and 17 named as ‘Community Bookshops’ (there are more of these, with a variety of names). There are many others for national or local good causes.

* And finally, from Denmark comes the statistical article “‘I only read it for the plot!’ Maturity Ratings Affect Fanfiction Style and Community Engagement” (2025). This crunches the numbers on three large sets of fan fictions available at a key website, one of which centres around the characters in The Lord of Rings. Coyly discovers (who knew?) that sexually… “explicit fanfiction is a genre of its own with a conventional focus on descriptions, actions, and here-and-now orientation”. Sounds like it’s straightforward porn fiction then, just dressed up in LoTR clothing.

Tolkien Gleanings #296

* “Middle-earth-on-Earth: How and Why People Use Fantasy Film and Literature to Give Meaning to Real World Places” (2025), a Phd thesis for Dalhousie University. Freely available online.

* “O verde e os acordes cromaticos em O Silmarillion” (2025) (‘Green and chromatic chords in The Silmarillion‘). A Phd thesis from Brazil, in Portuguese with long English abstract. Examines Tolkien’s use of colours, especially green and red, and how these act upon his imagined material world and the minds of the inhabitants. Freely available online.

* Also from Brazil this week, “Um demografo passou semanas resolvendo uma questao muito importante”….

“A demographer spent weeks solving a very important question: how many people lived in Middle-earth? He wondered if he could use the techniques of historical demography, and started working on it.”

He took a basic look at the landscapes of each region, weather and seasons and then found equivalent historical nations in the primary world. And then worked out the maximum ‘carrying capacity’ for a hypothetical pre-industrial population at the time of The Lord of the Rings. 34 million, give or take. But that’s the absolute maximum. After further refinements…

“The populations of humans, elves, dwarves and hobbits in Middle-earth total around 6.7 million. 200,000 would be hobbits, about 284,000 elves, about 121,000 dwarves, and the remainder would be men.”

With large numbers of orcs/goblins, much rarer trolls and ents, and ever rarer assorted werewolves and vampires.

* On YouTube, a new interview with Tolkien artist Ted Nasmith, on the Polish Pod Zielonym Smokiem podcast (‘At the Sign of the Green Dragon’).

* Spanish newspaper El Pais appears to have a new ‘Culture’ article on “John Howe, ilustrador de las obras de Tolkien” ($ paywall), dated 7th April 2025. Relates to his appearance at a comics convention and launch of the Spanish edition of his A Middle-earth Traveller artbook of sketches.

* Lurking on Vimeo for a decade (but new to me) is the film Durin’s Folk and the Hill of Sorcery (2015, one hour). It’s an unofficial fan-edit of The Hobbit movies, focussing only on the backstory of the dwarves, Gandalf’s investigations into the Necromancer in Mirkwood, and then the banishment of the Necromancer. There’s significant movie-fication of Bree, Azog, Mirkwood, Dol Goldur, Thrain, and especially Radagast (who now has a rabbit-drawn super-sled which enables rapid transport through dense woodland). Also general movie-fication of the plot, and Galadriel and Saruman are present and their attack on Dol Guldur is frankly rather cheesy. So, dear readers of the original work(s), ‘be warned’. Legal note: in many nations you will need to own the extended Hobbit movies on DVD before you can legally watch this free fan-work.

* Four more 90-minute lectures have been scheduled on YouTube from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, The White Lady (Galadriel), The Spellsongs of Tinuviel, Morgoth’s Revenge, and Gondolin, in that order. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted free on YouTube.

* Lingwe discovers that when Tolkien was welcomed back to Oxford in 1925, he was described as… “the singular and outstanding disciple of the most illustrious Arthur Napier”. This was Arthur Sampson Napier (1853–1916), author of the tree-ish History of the Holy Rood-tree (1894), a book of Old English glosses (1900), and what appears to be the first full description of the Franks Casket.

* And finally, currently on eBay UK with seven copies left to sell, Black & White Ogre Country: The Lost Tales of Hilary Tolkien. At a reasonable £14 inc. postage, from a UK seller in Chipping Norton. Only 88 pages, but the book is a very well-reviewed hardback of high-quality and has evocative memoir material relating to Tolkien’s middle-childhood and more. Buy your copy now before it goes out-of-print, I’d suggest.

Tolkien Gleanings #295

* Available to members of the Tolkien Society, a new issue of Amon Hen. Among the contents of the new #312…

    – A long lead article on Christopher Tolkien’s Lectures at Oxford
    – The Power of the Web (spiders in Middle-earth)
    – A short review of A Sense of Tales Untold.
    – A short profile of Cirdan the shipwright.
    – A long look at what was lost, and what survives or has been restored, at Sarehole.

I see that a regular Layout & Graphic Designer (Adobe) is still required.

* Lingwe on “A newly discovered primary account of Arthur Tolkien’s death”.

* John Garth on how Tolkien left the land of his birth 130 years ago today, and the sea voyage he took. Including some details of the weather the three year-old then encountered in England, after the burning veldt of the Orange Free State…

“Britain had endured a harsh winter, with the Thames nearly blocked by ice in mid-February and, on 24th March, central and East England enduring one of the worst storms on record, with factory chimneys and church steeples demolished and 14 lives lost. The summer to come was very wet indeed.”

* Fellowship & Fairydust dusts off the hand-trowel and goes Excavating the Inklings and Little-Known Authors: Interview with scholar Douglas A. Anderson.

* The second part of Dimitra Fimi’s new blog-post series is now online, On Tolkien’s Letter 131 (2): “Incarnate” good and evil.

* Three more 90-minute lectures from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, The Making of Feanor, The Marring of Feanor and The Fall of the Followers. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted free on YouTube.

* New on Archive.org to download, The Pre-Christian Religions of the North. Research and Reception, Vol. 2 – from c. 1830 to the Present (2019, out-of-print according to Amazon UK). Includes chapters on “Old Norse Mythology in Anglophone Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1940” and “Norse Medievalism in Children’s Literature in English”.

* “The Hobbit published in Scots Gaelic”, as A’ Hobat, no A-null’s Air Ais A-rithist (2025)…

“With the help of a grant from the Gaelic Books Council, the project took five years to complete and now features the original 1937 cover art.”

* A new double-album from the noted Norwegian neo-romantic composer Martin Romberg, Arts and Signs (2025), available now. The first of the two albums evokes Tolkien’s works.