Tolkien Gleanings #330
* The 3rd edition of A Bibliography of Tolkien Studies in French and English (summer 2025) is now available. The venture is nicely ‘filling up the corners’, with the current edition offering… “4,245 references […] classified and presented in several usual [scholarly] quotation formats.” Freely available online, under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike.
* The OxonMoot 2025 schedule (warning: VPN users are automatically blocked, with not even a captcha). Among others, these caught my eye…
– “Ho! Ho! Ho! To the Bottle I Go: The Pub in Tolkien’s Life and Works”.
– “Tolkien the Caveman: Poetry as a Cudgel” (Tolkien’s poetic ridicule of his colleague Percy Simpson).
– “Belliphonic Tolkien: Sounds of War in The Lord of the Rings”.
– “Tolkien and the Miniature” (his “sustained interest in the minuscule and in the interplay of different scales”).
– “Tolkien’s Bicycle” (his bicycles and cycling life, amid the emerging and increasingly dangerous car-culture).
* In the August 2025 issue of the journal Themelios, “Angelic Fall Theodicy in Dialogue with Tolkien, Augustine, and Aquinas”. Freely available online.
* In Italy, Avvenire reviews Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (2025). Review freely available online, in Italian.
* New at the website of the venerable Catholic journal The Lamp, “Soaring Music”. A rather mis-titled article in which the author muses on the appeal of “the strangeness of Tolkien”, and compares The Lord of the Rings with Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Freely available online.
* Due in September 2025 and pre-ordering now, a new issue of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion. Includes the article “The Other Country: Numinous Landscape in English Supernatural Fiction” and “On Time Slips: Jack Finney, Charles de Lint and an old house in Chester” (which at a guess may be a survey of English ‘time-slip’ literature).
* Extended free access to a large medieval site is a rare thing in England today, other than castles. But there’s still the walkable circuit of ye olde city-walls at Chester, formerly a major port city. Clas Merdin has posted a new up-to-date descriptive photo-tour of the city-walls walk, on his blog: Part One and Part Two. Might be a good place for a Tolkien event, such as a promenade performance, I’d suggest?
* Lovely poster for the Hobbiton 2025 program in Italy. That’s how you do event posters.
* And finally, Tolkien pictures were bought for six eggs in wartime Hull…
“The pictures, which are of two stylishly dressed women and dated 1918, were handed down generations of the farmer’s family, along with the story of how he got them [from Tolkien].”
If genuine, then they show Tolkien experimenting with collage as a medium.