Tolkien Gleanings #337
* The new Indiana University Press book Beasts of the Sky: Strange Sightings in the Stratosphere (2025) has a Tolkien chapter, “Fell Beasts and fell beasts: The Making of a Monster in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings“. These “fell beasts” being the winged mounts of the Nazgul. I can get a snippet of the book’s Introduction, which suggests the Nazgul chapter discusses (among other things) the ways their form is made uncertain or alluded to, until the final unveiling.
* The Spanish Tolkien Society blogs in Spanish on the new carved sculpture of Tolkien now sited at Roos on the Yorkshire coast, and shows two fine photos I’d not seen before. Large versions of the photos: 1 and 2.
* I had overlooked that the latest issue of SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature has a Tolkien article, “Imitative Translations of Beowulf: Tolkien, Lehmann, and McCully”. I’d previously only noted the issue’s review of the Spanish translation of Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Freely available online.
* In the quarterly Louisiana journal Joie de Vivre, and online since July 2025, an essay on “J.R.R. Tolkien as Model Christian Artist”. Freely available online.
* The second Tolkien Conference Switzerland is set for March 2026…
The 2026 topic is: ‘Leadership in Tolkien’s Middle-earth’. We have already confirmed several international high-profile speakers. Organized by the University of Zurich, the University of Lausanne and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, and once again to be held at the University of Zurich as a hybrid conference.
* A talk on “Tolkien and Technology” at Hope College in Minnesota, set for March 2026. No speaker named as yet, but it’s part of the advanced events programme of the Saint Benedict Institute of Catholic scholars at the College.
* In Germany, there’s to be a new edition of the German-language book Das Grobe Elbisch-buch. This being… “the standard German work on the Elvish languages, now revised and supplemented by the latest discoveries in Tolkien research”. Due for release on 31st October 2025.
* And finally, newly posted on eBay is a postcard of “The Dingle, Sarehole”. A local memoir from 2023 recalls… “the Dingle on Wake Green Road, one of my childhood haunts next to the River Cole near Sarehole Mill”. A chapter in the eco-history book The Greening of the Cities (1987) reveals it became part of what is now known as Moseley Bog.
