Tolkien Gleanings #329

* Inklings-Jahrbuch 41 (2025), containing the proceedings of 2023 conference ‘Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic’. Freely available online. Among other items the journal has the German articles…

    – “Death and Immortality in Old English setting: Life and after life in Tolkien’s Rohan”.
    – “Longevity, immortality and rebirth in Middle-earth”.

    – Plus reviews of:

    – Essays on the Epic Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien & G.R.R. Martin.
    – Tolkien Studies Volume XIX and its XIX Supplement.
    – J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics.

* A new rolling issue of Journal of Tolkien Research has begun, Vol. 22, Issue 2, 2025. First up is the article “Josef Madlener’s “Der Berggeist”: Not the “Origin of Gandalf””. Note also that there’s to be an article on the same topic by a different author in the forthcoming Tolkien Studies journal (2024, but not yet issued), “”The ‘Origin of Gandalf’: Josef Madlener’s Der Berggeist and the Transboundary Mountain Spirit Rubezahl as Purported Sources of Inspiration for Tolkien’s Wizard””.

It’s not mentioned in the article, but I’d add that I can easily find evidence on eBay of the same Josef Madlener’s interest in a cloaked big-booted Gandalf-like shepherd figure, and of the publication of the resulting paintings as postcards.

In the lower two cards the shepherd is praying in the open fields.

The outfit here seems to be the traditional one from Provencal (SE France, neighbouring the Swiss Alps), and indeed it has been celebrated on one of their postage stamps (above). The traditional outfit worn by the Swiss shepherds, those Tolkien might have seen in the Alps in 1911, appears to have been different. Circa 1920, which is the earliest I can find snapshot photos of such men, high mountain Swiss summer shepherds appear to have instead worn long lederhosen, pointy clogs, short tunic, and the well-known ‘fedora + feathers’ Swiss man’s hat.

* Newly released from embargo, the Spanish PhD thesis From Taniquetil to Orodruin: the portrayal of mountains and caves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium (2021). In English, and now freely available online.

* The Russell Kirk Center’s University Bookman has a long new review of The Worlds of Dorothy L. Sayers: The Life and Works of the Crime Writer and Poet (2025). Sayer was friends with C.S. Lewis, and was on the fringes of the Inklings circle.

* The author Alan Garner (Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Owl Service) was also on ‘the fringes of the fringes’ of the Inklings, later. A Reddit comment today spurred me to look up an interview now online at the Robbins Library Digital Projects. In which he said…

“I happened to be [studying at the University of Oxford] just after Professor Tolkien had retired, but he still gave bravura demonstrations of Beowulf. He would walk up and down and declaim it, and I used to go to those performances. That’s when I first heard English, and I was thrilled by simply the drama and the music of it. […] I didn’t know [the Inkling] Charles Williams, but my tutor at Oxford was one of the Inklings. Thus I was on the fringe of all of that, and I’ve no doubt that my tutor talked about things that C.S. Lewis had said the night before.”

* Up for auction with Forum Auctions back in 2019, with the catalogue only now appearing on Archive.org, the signed playbill of a 1967 children’s theatre performance of The Hobbit.

* And finally, an item from the world of fan-fiction. In August 2025 it was reported that… “Faerie, a Tolkien fanfiction [online] archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3)”.

Tolkien Gleanings #328

** New site for Tolkien Gleanings, now at https://jurn.link/spyders/ — please update bookmarks, links and RSS feeds. The old free one is now unavailable, because WordPress abruptly closed all access to it without warning or explanation. The cause is unknown, but I guess the peril of having a 15-year blog is that someone can always find something to make a vexatious claim about. So far as I know, there’s nothing here that deserves such abrupt treatment. Anyway, it’s easier just to load up the local backups and port everything over to my paid webspace. As someone once said, “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”.

* Downloads of video transcripts are now available for sessions at the Mythopoeic Society’s Online Midsummer Seminar (OMS) #4 (August 2025). Titles include, among many others…

  – “”Her hair was held a marvel unmatched”: The Significance of Long, Blonde Hair in Tolkien’s Imagination”.

  – “”Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans”: Melian’s and Luthien’s Numinosity”.

  – “The Influence of the Pearl-Maiden on the Imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien”.

* Full details of the Mereth Aderthad 2025 conference sponsored by the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild in July 2025. The page now has links to, among others, the paper “Love, Grief, and Alliterative Verse in Tolkien’s Legendarium”, with transcript, and the same scholar also has a paper online on alliterative verse as an Elvish practice. All freely available online.

* The Mereth Aderthad 2025 conference also produced a free PDF ‘zine of Middle-earth fiction, poetry and art. Freely available online, but a print version can also be ordered. No non-fiction articles.

* The contents-list for the delayed Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review (2024) is now available online. To include, among others…

  – “Tolkien’s Elegiac Trees: Enta Geweorc and the Ents Across Time”.

  – “The Wanderer’s Return: New Findings on Tolkien in Oxford 1918-19”.

  – “Reconsidering the Early Critical Response to The Lord of the Rings“.

* The latest Liturgical Arts Journal reviews The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination. Freely available online.

* The Italian exhibition on Tolkien is to open in Trieste soon…

“After stops in Rome, Naples, Turin, and Catania, the traveling exhibition ‘Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author’ will conclude its run in Trieste. The show, dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien, the Oxford scholar and creator of Middle-earth, opens on 19th September 2025, at the Salone degli Incanti and runs through 11th January 2026.”

* The Oxfordshire town of Banbury has dates for its turn at hosting the travelling The Magic of Middle-earth memorabilia exhibition. 31st January – 28th June 2026, at the Museum. Not free, this time.

* And finally, new on YouTube is a 90 minute podcast in which Paul Corfield Godfrey and Simon Crosby Buttle talk operatic Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien Gleanings #327

* The latest edition of the UK’s History Today news-stand magazine (September 2025) has an opening print-only article on “This Middle Earth”…

“The article explores the historical and cultural significance of the term “middle earth,” tracing its origins from the Anglo-Saxon word middangeard, which referred to the human realm distinct from divine and monstrous realms. Initially associated with a cosmological understanding, the term evolved through medieval and early modern literature …”

* Details about what’s in the new French book Tolkien et la memoire de l’antiquite (‘Tolkien and the Memory of Antiquity’, published August 2025).

The first part appears to make a biographical survey of Tolkien’s schooling and training in relation to the Classics…

Chapter I. Antiquity in Tolkien’s literary and linguistic culture – A classic education – ancient readings and predilection for late antiquity – from ancient readings to literary creation – the taste of ancient languages ​​- from Latin to Quenya – ancient ludic etymologies.

Chapter II. Traces of ancient philosophy in the culture of Tolkien – an expensive investigation – a meeting of many ways – traces and testimonies in the work.

Chapter III. Antiquity in Tolkien’s historical vision – a broad vision of history – between Homer and classic historians: the basics of training – the medievalist and his historical sources – from knowledge to historical vision.

The second part appears to explore the “presence of the ancient world in the land” in the context of Middle-earth’s own antiquity. This includes a section intriguingly titled “Middle-earth as listening: limits, climates and landscapes”. Which is presumably on the sonic topography?

The third part appears to seek the usual classical sources in Orpheus, Plato (ring of Gyges), the Trojan wars, The Odyssey, mythic descents into the underworld, etc.

* New to me, a prize-winning undergraduate final dissertation from Brandeis University, “Invisible Enemy, Visible Harm: Unearthing Traces of the 1918 Flu Pandemic in Tolkien’s Middle-earth” (2020). Now freely available online.

* New at Pastor Theologians, “Twice-Told Tales: Tolkien’s Numenor, America, and the Church”.

* At Bandcamp Daily, a new long article and survey “Exploring the Mystical Realms of Fantasy Synth”, meaning ‘synthesizer-based electronic music’…

“The resurgence of dungeon synth over the past decade or so has been something to behold. From a sparse scene of solo creators toiling away in hermetic isolation to a global community of thriving [record] labels, sold-out festivals and international tours — truly, we are living in renaissance times. […] Survey the wider scene, though, and you’ll encounter dizzying variety [beyond the doomy gloominess of dungeon synth]. Think of a fantasy setting or a specific corner of mythology, and there’s almost certainly a one-person synth project out there taking its lore and turning it into music.”

* Some 50 years before The Clangers arrived on British TV, Tolkien was creating a wide range of strange flora and fauna on the Moon.

* And finally, in October 2025 the French are set to read a translation of Le Hobbit, illustre par Tove Jansson. Oddly listed on Amazon UK under “Paranormal & Urban”. But perhaps the publisher knows that’s where the young readers / moms are, those who are most likely to purchase?

Tolkien Gleanings #326

* The new August 2025 issue of the Brazilian open-access journal Abusoes is a special on ‘histories and theories of fantasy in the 21st century’, with one Tolkien essay. The back issues also offer various themed specials. Including on the Tales of Hoffmann, Brazilian fantasy 1980–2018, and a large issue dedicated to Lovecraft. All largely written in Portuguese.

* The Tea With Tolkien blog has a book set for 2026 release, Into the Heart of Middle-earth: Exploring Faith and Fellowship in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Pre-ordering now from Ave Maria Press.

* From the Brothers Grimm Society of North America, a forthcoming volume bringing together work from… “scholars who are working on nineteenth-century women fairy-tale writers, collectors, and storytellers across Europe”. “Nineteenth-century” here covers 1789-1914.

* The journal Messengers from the Stars plans a 2026 special issue on cityscapes in fantasy & science fiction. Tolkien’s Numenor is mentioned in the blurb. Deadline: 1st September 2025.

* An unofficial comic-book version of Tolkien’s unpublished epilogue for The Lord of the Rings. Freely available online.

* And finally, a new folk-metal album evoking Middle-earth, from Germany, with the bombastic lead-track celebrating “Sam the Brave”. This track now has an animated official video on YouTube.

Tolkien Gleanings #325

* From the Philology degree of a Moscow University, the new undergraduate dissertation “Real and Fictional Geography in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Minor Works” (2025). Not online, but there is an abstract in English…

“The second chapter explores the connections between real geography and fictional geography, which also shows the importance of researching the writer’s geography, since the results of the analysis lead to new and more complete interpretations of the text.”

* Whatever one may think of the various screen and videogame adaptations of Tolkien, one can’t fault the musicians and concept designers/illustrators who worked on them. From an Irish undergraduate degree in Design for Film (Production), a new dissertation looks at the latter in “Architects of Arda: The Design of the Elvish Realms in The Rings of Power” (2025). Has no copyright-censorship of the images, thankfully. Freely available online, and one can also find more dissertations of a similar nature from recent years.

* From Stockholm University in Sweden, the new undergraduate dissertation
“The Lord of the Rings: The Verisimilitude and Immersive Depth of Tolkien’s Middle-earth” (2025). Not online, but with an English abstract.

* The latest July 2025 issue of the open-access SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature reviews Supernatural Speakers in Old English Verse (2023), a book on…

“supernatural speech and speakers in Old English poetry. Coker’s monograph will be of huge interest to the field, not only for its extended treatment of an enthralling theme but for the remarkable insights that it generates along the way.”

* New from Cambridge University Press, what appears to be an introductory book in their Cambridge Elements series, Natural and Supernatural in Early Medieval England (2025). Apparently only 78 pages long despite its price, so… perhaps more of a pocket-book for students with deep pockets?

* I hear that the new book Fantasy: A Short History (April 2025), has a long chapter “on Tolkien and Wagner”. The book was issued in the Bloomsbury ‘Short Histories’ series, yet apparently it is neither short (“296 pages” says Amazon) nor a popular read (“this is Adam Roberts in professorial mode. He doesn’t make it too easy for the reader” says one reviewer). As such, Gleanings readers may be more interested in the Tolkien chapter than otherwise.

* And finally, I spotted another ‘unknown quantity’ new book and this one had a discouraging AI-quickie cover image. But the size of this just-released book, A Culinary Journey Through Middle-earth: A Fantasy-Inspired Cookbook of Hobbit Meals, Elvish Delights & Dwarvish Feasts, intrigued me. 311 pages just for some recipes? Surely there must be more to it? So I had the ‘free sample’ Amazon supplies for Kindle ebooks, and it does appear to be a legitimate book from a LoTR-loving foodie who evidently also knows how to write. The sample offers short mini-essays on the different approaches to food among the different races of Middle-earth. Worth a look, it seems, if food/cooking is your thing. Though I can’t vouch for the final edibility on the plate!

Tolkien Gleanings #324

* The latest Christianity & Literature journal reviews the book Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology ($ partial paywall, ‘first page free’).

* An online course, “Reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings with Professor Michael D.C. Drout”, August-November 2025. It started a week ago, but it’s also $400… so I’m guessing you might get a seat if you nip in quickly and wildly wave the cash?

* Now freely available online, Good Thoughts on Folklore and Mythology, Vol. 1: Folklore and Vol. 2: Mythology. Together, these new books offer a huge “Festschrift in Honour of Terry Gunnell”, Professor of Folkloristics at the University of Iceland. Vol. 1 includes “Why Folklorists Should Read Saints’ Lives” and Vol. 2 includes “A Dragon Is No Idle Fancy: Loki’s Spawn and Thor’s Bane”, among many others.

* Forthcoming before Christmas, Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten Lands with the Inklings. Being a short help-book for Christians during Lent, presenting snippets drawn from the writings of the Inklings and their wider circles.

* An Italian podcast series is reading Tolkien’s letters in order, and doing so in Italian translation. Congratulations to the maker, as the podcast has now reached Lettere 40. Freely available online.

* Here in the UK, Stonyhurst College offers public days dedicated to “The Shire, Sherlock & Shakespeare at Stonyhurst”, with small exhibitions and in-person guided tours. Set for 22nd–23rd August 2025.

* And finally, a new map of Beleriand from the First Age, made by Starcave on DeviantArt. There’s a free printable version without watermark. Also a version without the labels.

Tolkien Gleanings #323

* “Tolkien, editor, reader and critic of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (2025). An advanced student work, it seems, but one checked over by Leo Carruthers of the Sorbonne. Freely available online.

* The Tolkien Society blog has “New edition of The Hobbit graphic novel coming this September”, with inner-page previews and the additional detail that the maker… “is speaking at the Society’s Oxonmoot event in September 2025. His talk will be available to both those in Oxford and those joining the event online.”

* Now on YouTube, a recording of the recent Signum University thesis defence for the PhD on “Neutral and Evil Technology in Lewis and Tolkien”.

* Also new on YouTube, a video tour Inside the C.S. Lewis and Tolkien Museum at Wheaton College in the USA.

* From the journal Religion & Literature and now in open-access at a repository, “The eschatological imagination in literature” (2025).

* At RealClear Books & Culture, the new article “C.S. Lewis in the Age of Bleakness: Awe, Wonder and the Power of Enchantment”.

* Massively Overpowered considers Lord of the Rings Online’s unreleased soundtrack, and embeds the YouTube fan-videos that showcase some of it. Just part, apparently, of…

“a huge repository of “unreleased” music for the game that either hasn’t gotten a formal release anywhere or hasn’t been used in the game yet.”

* And finally, a new 12-mile Middle Earth GIS Hexmap, meaning that each hex is 12 miles. Such things are used by tabletop gamers, if they have a big enough table or three. A high-res version is also freely available.

“I tried to only depict features appearing in Tolkien’s writings, for which I relied primarily on citations on Tolkeingateway.net. I have not (intentionally) included anything from the films, TV show, [multiplayer online videogames], or various [tabletop] RPGs.”

Tolkien Gleanings #322

* Newly listed on Amazon, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.B. Smith: With Wind in our Ears. A book from Palgrave Macmillan, set for release on 9th November 2025.

“The volume explores this relationship from biographical, literary, and philosophical perspectives, focusing on the content and style of Smith’s poetry, Tolkien’s editorial work, their shared intellectual world, and the lasting influence of Smith on Tolkien’s imagination.”

* Somehow escaping notice in Gleanings until now, I find that the new Smith of Wootton Major affordable 224-page paperback edition (March 2025) includes… “a facsimile of the illustrated first edition, a manuscript of Tolkien’s early draft of the story, notes and an alternate ending, and a lengthy essay on the nature of Faery.” This latter essay being, according to a review… “a condensed and more focused presentation of the ideas Tolkien explores in ‘On Fairy Stories’, benefiting from decades of continued thought after that essay was written, revised, revised again, and published.”

* Book trade bean-counter BookScan reports J.R.R. Tolkien’s 2024 book sales via British bookshops at £4.2m ($5.12m). This figure presumably relates to his own works (rather than scholarship etc) and sits within £82m of bookshop sales for science fiction and fantasy books in 2024. Bear in mind that BookScan is apparently only looking at point-of-sale retail data for new print books.

* Concatenation reviews The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition, with a focus on the development and afterlife of LoTR. The review is freely available online.

* From a Polish Tolkien site, a “Previously unknown letter by Tolkien’s son Michael on his ancestors”. Presumably Michael here conveys the family lore as his father also knew it…

“I will now present a [April 1963] letter from Michael H.R. Tolkien to Charles Woodrow Tolkien from California and his children. Following the letter, which presents the legendary history of the Tolkien family (almost 100 percent untrue), I will briefly reconstruct the family’s history based on documents from archives in Berlin, Gdansk, and London.”

Tolkien Gleanings #321

* Cardinal Vices in Middle-earth (2025, forthcoming). A monograph as a chunky book, being also Studies in Linguistics, Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Volume 43 (Peter Lang)…

“a complex comparative analysis of the role of the seven cardinal vices and their opposing virtues as recognised by the Catholic Church” [as found in the vices and virtues of Tolkien’s Middle-earth]

* Red Quills on “What Tolkien Teaches Us About Mapmaking”. One might add “Write the labels more neatly” to the list. Which is what the publisher requested when asking for re-drawn maps for use in The Hobbit.

* Joshse discusses “Poetic Diction by Owen Barfield”. His long commentary after having reading the book…

Poetic Diction by Owen Barfield, was beloved by Tolkien and Lewis. […] C.S. Lewis wrote to Barfield about the influence he had on Tolkien’s philosophy:

“You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said, apropos of something quite different, that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook.”

In Poetic Diction, Barfield puts forth the argument that over time language becomes less poetic because, as rational beings, we cannot help but separate all of the different meanings out of rich older words to increase their specificity.

* New from Spain, the PhD “Dishonoured Sun: adaptation, transmission and reception of Sir Gawain in Medieval Europe from 12th to 15th century” (2025). Sadly not yet online, but there is an abstract.

* Also on Gawain and survivals, in a recent paper I noted mention of some recent dialect work… “In a previous study (Markus 2021: 124–135), I investigated the dialectal survival of the specific lexis in the works of the Gawain poet.” This reference can be tracked specifically to Chapter 8.3, “Test Cases for Scholarly Work with EDD Online”, in English Dialect Dictionary Online: A New Departure in English Dialectology (2021, $ paywalled). This ten-page investigation into Gawain is otherwise unheralded by the blurb or contents-list.

* New from Villanova University, the Masters dissertation “”Warm Life, As Now It Coldly Stands”: Figuring Longing, Loss, and Memory Through the Mnemonics of Fantastical Art”. Part three is “”All the land is empty and forgetful”: Memories of Middle-earth”. Partly free online.

* And finally, The Bodleian Library blog has a new post on “The History of the English Faculty Library (1914-2025)” which has some details of the place as the young Tolkien might have known it…

The English Faculty Library was founded in 1914 by an endowment from the English Fund, largely set up by Joseph Wright. It was established in Acland House, 40 Broad Street (part of the land where the Weston Library now stands). […] This was a labyrinthine conglomeration of multiple 17th-century homes which had been renovated and added to over the centuries. Pantin notes that, in the 19th century, two libraries had been added to the property. [… At 1914 the new Library] owned 342 books, many gifted by delegates of the Clarendon Press or Joseph Wright. It had a budget of up to £25 per year. Percy Simpson was appointed as Librarian on a part-time basis. By 1915, the EFL owned 800 books. In 1916, Wright organised an appeal to buy A.S. Napier’s library upon his death for the EFL. This contribution and others meant that by 1917, the EFL owned 4,250 books.

Tolkien Gleanings #320

* The Tolkien Conference Switzerland, set for March 2026, now has a speakers list and abstracts. Topics include…

   – Tolkien’s depiction of the tools of leadership and command.
   – Leadership and lament in the person of Gandalf.
   – Tolkien as an officer in the Great War.
   – Types of governance in Middle-earth.

* A new long post from Oronzo Cilli on “British Communists: Michael H.R. Tolkien’s letters to the Evening Despatch (1944) and the Catholic Herald (1948)”. This reveals a new discovery, some of Tolkien’s son’s published anti-communist letters to publications. This then leads Cilli to an appendix in which he very plausibly asks if it may have been Michael Tolkien who subscribed to A.K. Chesterton’s ultra right-wing magazine Candour (1953-1973, League of Empire Loyalists), rather than his father. A 24-volume set of Candour allegedly “owned by Tolkien” was sold out of the Tolkien estate in 1973 on the senior Tolkien’s death, or so the current owner of the set would have it. The original ownership then seems fairly easy to prove or disprove: i) do we have the auction catalogue of the senior Tolkien’s house clearance from 1973; ii) are the alleged ‘red biro annotations’ in the set actually made in Tolkien’s very distinctive hand; and iii) does the set have any slips or envelopes relating to the subscription? Subscriber address-lists are not in the Candour papers and archives, now held at the University of Bath, but Bath does have a folder of 1965 letter(s?) from “TOLKIEN, Michael H. R.” to Chesterton. Which I guess may also have remarks which reveal his status as a subscriber or not.

* Sonja Virta is in the early stages of a PhD on… “revisions made to Finnish Tolkien translations after their original publication”.

* A Signum University online thesis defence, of a thesis on “Neutral and Evil Technology in Lewis and Tolkien”… “This thesis challenges the reductionistic narrative that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were anti-technology and anti-science.” Set for 13th August 2025.

* New in the current rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Romanticism in Tolkien’s The Hobbit”. Considers Tolkien’s uses of nature and domesticity, and suggests these themes parallel the concerns of the Romantic movement.

* The summer 2025 issue of the British Fantasy Society’s BFS Journal is a special on ‘Nature in Fantasy’. No Tolkien.

* And finally, the return of Birmingham Middle-earth Festival in September 2025 appears to have been cancelled. The website says…

“Unfortunately, we have had to cancel this year’s event, everything was all set up, but something has come up, and we sadly decided to cancel. Very sorry to all.”

And this is confirmed on their Facebook page.