Tolkien Gleanings #336
* The Tolkien Society currently requires a Secretary and Trustee; Education Secretary and Trustee; Officers Without Portfolio and Trustee; Bookings Officers; and a Smials Co-ordinator. Deadlines in mid October 2025.
* A long Reddit report on “My impressions from the current Tolkien exhibition in Trieste, Italy”. A useful detailed overview, with photos.
* Socrates in the City has a new long Socrates Dialogues podcast, in which Louis Markos interviews Holly Ordway on Tolkien and Lewis: Myth as a Vehicle for Truth. Freely available on YouTube.
* In the latest issue of the Brazilian journal Revista Gilgamesh, a long interview in English with Adrian Maldonado of the National Museums of Scotland. He makes… “surprising connections between learning about archaeology and pop culture, in a trajectory that involves the analysis of emblematic works such as The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien”. Freely available online.
* From Italy in Italian, Wu Ming 4 has a new article whose title translates roughly as “The dilemmas of Tolkienian leftists and the political unconscious of Middle-earth”. Freely available online.
* From Turkey, The Daily Sabah on how “Tolkien was perfectly right” about allegory and especially its over-use. In English, freely available…
“Allegory does not belong everywhere. It belongs in literature, where it can be chosen, embraced or rejected. Outside of fiction, life should be allowed to remain literal, unburdened by symbolic agendas. Those who love allegory can find it in writers who wield it openly, like C.S. Lewis. Those who don’t should be free of it.”
* The latest issue of the open-access student journal UR: Das Journal: Studentische Forschung an der Universitat Wien is a special issue on fan-fiction. Includes (in German) an article whose titles roughly translates as ‘In defence of fanfiction: on the reputation of fan-fiction today, with some consideration of its literary history’.
* From Russia in Russian, a 2025 article disussing in detail one of Tolkien’s key journey-songs, “”Farewell We Call to Hearth and Home …”: At the intersection of cultures and traditions”. Freely available online under CC-BY, with an English abstract at the back… “the poem reveals a remarkable dissimilitude between these two journeys [Hobbit/LoTR], foreshadowing further events and even becoming prophetic.”
* Wisconsin’s What’s On Tap local/online radio show discusses Tolkien Fandom Oral History Documentary and MCHS’s Oral History Programs… “In hour two Sandy is joined by Marquette University manuscript archivist Bill Fliss and documentary filmmaker Andrew Coons to discuss their 10-minute documentary about Tolkien”.
* And finally, The Akron Beacon local newspaper reports Costume-designer crafts Smaug the dragon for the forthcoming Ohio Shakespeare festival… “The 26-foot-long dragon puppet is operated by three puppeteers”. (Article is free to me, using a U.S. VPN, but the top of the article has a “For Subscribers” flash. Thus I suspect it may only be a ‘first article free’ freebie, and only for U.S. visitors?)