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)”.