Tolkien Gleanings #317

* A substantial-looking scholarly slate of speakers, set to give talks at the Tolkien Fest 2025 in Malta. The page has details of the talks, and the dates are 22nd-24th August 2025.

* This week Word on Fire taps into Tolkien to find “Hope for the Humanities” in academia.

* Signum University now has listings for its September and October 2025 online short-courses. Including: The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Later Poems 1 (Volume 3: 1931-1967); Creative Quenya Translation; Exploring Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”; and The Poetry of The Lord of the Rings (Book I), among others.

* New on YouTube from the East Yorkshire tourist-board, “Walking in Tolkien’s footsteps: East Yorkshire’s latest tribute”. Three minutes and well-edited.

* New on CivitAI, a free plugin (LoRA) which guides the SDXL local AI image-generator towards a particular style. The Manuscript Drolleries LoRA allows you to make images from text prompts aimed at generating… “grotesques, drolleries, marginalia and doodles [as if] from illuminated manuscripts”. Note however that CivitAI, the main AI creative models hub, is now effectively banned in the UK. Brits can still reach it if we have a VPN but, given the size of the downloads involved in AI (7Gb is usual for a single SDXL model), a VPN is not ideal. Sadly, very few models or LoRAs are put on torrents.

* And finally, that rare edition of The Hobbit which was discovered near Bristol, as mentioned in a previous Gleanings? It has been sold for £43,000. Which is around $57,000 U.S.