Tolkien Gleanings #302

* Other Minds #28, the new issue of the unofficial tabletop Tolkien RPG ‘zine. Freely available online. Several very full adventures for gamers, but the issue also includes the article “Musings on the Power of Elvish Minds”. This briefly discusses each apparent Elvish power in turn, as evidenced by Tolkien’s text, such as talking to trees… “Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learning their tree-talk” (Treebeard). Also of note is that the ‘zine is allowing AI illustrations for the first time, now that they’re becoming indistinguishable from human-made illustrations. Or, at least, they are indistinguishable when generated by capable creatives who know what they’re doing.

* Talking of waking things up, this week’s Spectator has the article “The Lord of the Rings gave me my moral compass”, stressing the ongoing importance of the book for receptive young males.

* In Italy, a special three-day ‘Tolkien and the fantastic’ conference will welcome the arrival in Sicily of the touring Tolkien exhibition, after its successes in Rome and Turin. The event runs 11th to 13th May 2025. Mostly Tolkien, but I also see a Lovecraft talk is in the mix. The exhibition itself runs on until 31st July 2025, then ends its national tour with a visit to Trieste in the autumn of 2025.

* Also in Italy, a two-day Tolkien Music Festival is set for August 2025.

* There’s now a full trailer on YouTube for Musical Chapters, an opera of The Lord of the Rings (Full title: Musical Chapters from The Lord of the Rings After the Mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien). By Tolkien (his words are used extensively, with permission), Paul Corfield Godfrey and the Volante Opera from Wales (along with many singers drawn from the Welsh National Opera). Personally I’d pay not to hear any opera. But if you enjoy the form, then a huge 15 x CD set of the opera is set for release in the early autumn of 2025.

* A new call for submissions to Gramarye, the journal of the UK’s venerable Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. Deadline: 21st September 2025.

* A conference report on the first day of the Tolkien sessions at the 2025 International Medieval Congress. Among others, mention of the author’s own paper on…

“Mago/Magol a partially Hungarian inspired Mannish language that Tolkien may have intended for the orcs or Hobbits and Dunlendish – the language of the Upland folk who were marginalized by the Eorlings.”

* New at the English-langage Culture Poland website, a long illustrated article on Countryside Myths of Zofia Stryjenska & J.R.R. Tolkien. Freely available online. Stryjenska managed to flee communism in 1947, and in Paris became a key painter of the Polish countyside and its relatively untouched-by-modernity folk and folk tales.

* Dimitra Fimi has a new blog post on Tolkien’s earliest ‘fairy’ poem: Wood-Sunshine. Freely available online.

* More online lectures from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, The Forge of Tolkien 41: Soup of Stories; 42: Refracted Light; and 43: The Riddle of the Ring. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted for free on YouTube.

* A new and fine full reading of the early fantasy The Sword of Welleran (1908) by Lord Dunsany, freely available online. Download with Mediahuman’s freeware Youtube to MP3, to avoid ad-breaks. This is early Dunsany (i.e. the best), and the book it was in was widely available in England when Tolkien was a schoolboy. Both style and subject-matter have been suggested as likely to have influenced Tolkien prior to LoTR. But the only Dunsany item that Tolkien mentioned in the Letters or the late interviews is one story in Dunsany’s later The Book of Wonder (1912).

* And finally… a new interview with Rene van Rossenberg, the owner and manager of a dedicated Tolkien bookshop in Holland.