Tolkien Gleanings #350

* Now open, the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey 2025. No deadline, it seems. But the survey details were posted six days ago. A survey for readers as well as writers. It happens every five years, and this one seem especially relevant as now we have advanced creative-writing AIs in the mix of tools.

* The editor of the new book Tolkien’s Medievalism in Ruins: The Function of Relics and Ruins in Middle-earth is featured in a press article issued by his university. Freely available online.

* Vincent Ferre has a new conference paper in French on Fabula, “Peuples fictionnels et dynamique de la creation chez J.R.R. Tolkien: peuples, langues et geographie imaginaires” (‘The Dynamics of Creation in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fiction: Peoples, Languages, and Imaginary Geography’). Freely available online.

* A 2025 paper, “Comparing Tolkien’s Thieves To Beowulf and the Old English Context”. Freely available online.

* The journal Different Visions: New Perspectives on Mediaeval Art seeks essays on ‘recalcitrant’ works, for a future issue. Potential contributors are encouraged to think about…

“objects and images that they find confounding, have struggled to write about, have abandoned the study of, or have found resistant to art historical methodologies”

It strikes me that one might write about how Tolkien has influenced how students approach certain medieval imagery, and how this complicates teaching and student reading/writing.

* The poster for the Tolkien exhibition in Trieste, Italy, on now.

* And finally, the latest Brookston Beer Bulletin on Tolkien and beer.