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.