Tolkien Gleanings #340
* In the latest Antigone magazine, an article on two possible “Homeric Allusions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit”. Freely available online.
* From the Heart of Europe blog considers why Tolkien disliked the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, and along the way squishes the other wild notion that they had a ill-fated youthful affair (on the slim basis that they graduated from Oxford in the same year). The author might have added how immensely difficult it was for male and female undergraduates to be together in Oxford in those days. They even had to browse the libraries at different set times, so they wouldn’t meet. When they did meet, chaperones had to be present. The Tolkien movie scene of Tolkien and chums getting wildly drunk on a bus at night, in the company of bluestocking female first-years, could never have happened.
* December 2025 online courses at Signum University include Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas; and The Inklings: Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, and Williams; and the timely The Bovadium Fragments: Tolkien and Satire. These online short-courses require enough student sign-ups to run.
* John Garth in The Times on Tolkien’s forthcoming Bovadium Fragments book (to be published 9th October in the UK), “Lord of the ring road — J.R.R. Tolkien’s war against the motor car” ($ possible paywall). I see elsewhere that there is to be an audiobook version.
* The Telegraph has also had an advance copy of Bovadium Fragments and is rather less positive. Indeed, rather grumpy. “The endless ‘unearthing’ of Tolkien’s archive needs to stop”. ($ paywall). Oh dear.
“Of the 50-odd pages that are Tolkien’s writing, a good bit is in Latin. […] Tolkien himself would, I suspect, have been mystified to see this piece of ephemera so portentously published in hardback.”
* Omentielva Minquea, the 11th International Conference on Tolkien’s Invented Languages. Set for 30th July – 2nd August 2026 at Marquette University in the USA.
* Of use to historians and biographers, Whereisthisphoto.com. This uses a specially trained AI model to try to identify the spot on which a landscape picture was made. Free, no sign-up, and no blocking of VPN users or even any ‘captcha hassle’. I’ve read test-reviews of such AI models, and they have remarkable accuracy if enough landscape is visible.
* And finally, talking of landscapes… this week’s Malvern Gazette has “Malvern historian says neither The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia has anything to do with the town.” Oh dear.