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.”