Tolkien Gleanings #333
* Seemingly a new podcast on YouTube, There and Back Again: Interviews Podcast. Now with two long episodes available, Revolutionizing Tolkien Research: Interview with James Tauber from Digital Tolkien Project and Tolkien and Technology, Did We All Get It Wrong?: Interview with Dr. Holly Ordway.
* John Garth on the recent plausible claim about the connection between the view from Gedling church tower and key artwork in The Hobbit, “Tolkien’s hidden gift to his favourite aunt” ($ paywall).
* A call for papers for the Tolkien Studies Area of the Popular Culture Association meeting, to be held in Atlanta in April 2026. Deadline for proposals: 30th November 2025.
* The Daily Cardinal helps with the local promotion of the new Karen Wynn Fonstad exhibition, in the paper’s article “Middle-earth in Madison?” Freely available online.
* The Tolkien & Illustration blog has “A Princess Illustrates The Lord of the Rings: Ingahild Grathmer, Eric Fraser and the Folio Society”. This is newly online (without the pictures) at July 2025, a version of a 2022 conference paper… “In 2022, I presented this paper at the Tolkien’s Society convention Oxonmoot [but it] was neither published nor recorded”.
* Two public talks of interest on members of the Inklings, at the University of Oxford before Christmas. C.S. Lewis and the Atmospherics of Fantasy, and Fantasy & the Occult: Charles Williams, Dion Fortune and the Order of the Golden Dawn. Booking now.
* Rise Up Comus has committed to ‘keying’ one hex per day for the recent free hex-map of the whole of Middle-earth, with his facts kept straight via reference to the Atlas of Middle-earth. The ‘keying’ means writing a role-playing gamer’s text to accompany the map, in which he notes environment and plants, likely characters present in each hex, and also invents basic quests (‘hobbit fallen into bog, in need of rescue’, etc) to save the game master from inventing one every time.
* A new Masters dissertation from Oklahoma, “Chasing Chivalry Revival and Reinvention of Chivalric Knights Throughout Twentieth and Twenty-First Century America”. Freely available online.
* Frank Frazetta has just dinged the highest-ever bell for the sale of a fantasy artwork, reaching $13.5 million at an auction sale for one of his paintings. The painting depicts R.E. Howard’s Conan character battling a ‘man ape’, and it illustrated the tale “Rogues in the House” (1934).
* And finally, Rare Tolkien book signed in Elvish to auction for around £15,000. Though probably likely to fetch more.
