Tolkien Gleanings #352
* In France, an unusual multi-sensory Halloween event at Doullens Castle on the Somme. On 31st October and 1st November, an interactive performative event…
“combining investigation, history and imagination […] delve into the fascinating world of J.R.R. Tolkien, through a sensory and narrative investigation that revisits the torments of the famous author while he was fighting in the trenches of the First World War. Participants will ’embody’ fragments of memory, helping to guiding Tolkien himself through his trench nightmares and encounters with shards of legend. Each session lasts 1.5 hours and can accommodate up to 150 participants.”
* Signum University’s regional SoCal Moot has a date and a theme. 7th February 2026 in California, to hear papers on the theme of ‘Lux in Tenebris: The Dialectic of Light and Darkness in Tolkien’s Legendarium’. Submissions are now open.
* Another ‘religious biography’ of Tolkien, Inside a Very Great Story: The Life & Wonder of J.R.R. Tolkien. This is a forthcoming book, currently under contract for the Eerdmans Library of Religious Biography series. Apparently it will also seek to answer a follow-on question… “What did J.R.R. Tolkien mean for religion?”. Which may be interesting if it means a section which outlines the cultural history of the religious reactions to his works, both for and against (recall the fevered U.S. evangelical moral panic about fantasy in the 1970s and 80s, for instance).
* The latest Thomistic Institute podcast is titled Catholic Culture with Tolkien. Freely available online (.MP3 download is under the “More…” button) and offering in full a recording of…
“a lecture given on 18th January 2024, at the University of Washington. Prof. Patrick Callahan explores the living tradition of Catholic culture, using Tolkien’s life and imagination to demonstrate how the Mass, community, and cultivation of virtue form a unified Christian identity resilient amidst modern challenges.”
Be warned there’s a huge discursive introduction, inadvisable for a short 45 minute lecture, which goes all around the houses trying to define ‘culture’. Eventually the speaker gets to the meat of discussing Tolkien at 33 minutes.
* A new Italian screen documentary, Uma Odisseia: Em Busca de Tolkien (‘An Odyssey: In Search of Tolkien’). The makers are said to have completed filming in 20 places, for what appears to be a feature-length documentary that… “delves into the origins and inspirations of the universe created by J.R.R. Tolkien”. They recently screened an excerpt at the Imagineland festival in Italy, and discussed the film afterwards.
* ‘Ve have wayz of making you Tolk!’ “New travel guide takes Tolkien fans to German destinations”…
“The travel guide spans an impressive arc from the island of Sylt in the north to the majestic Watzmann in the Bavarian Alps. Between Rugen and the Palatinate, the author discovers places that bear a striking resemblance to the iconic locations from Tolkien’s epic.”
The book Deutschland fur ‘Herr der Ringe’ Fans (‘Germany for fans of The Lord of the Rings’) offers 192 magazine-style pages, from an experienced German travel-guide writer and publisher. Set for publication on 7th November 2025, in German only. It strikes me that the British Isles might offer a similar book, and without having to tread on the toes of Garth’s The Worlds of… book.
* And finally, in Tolkien’s home city the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery’s Pre-Raphaelite paintings are once again on public show, the Museum having been closed for five years. I’m uncertain if the whole collection is now on show again, or just a curated selection, because I read that the full re-opening of BMAG is still set for 2031 (and that’s if the bankrupt City Council can find the funding). The Anglo-Saxon ‘Staffordshire Hoard’ gallery has also re-opened to the public this week.
Picture: The Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery circa 1911, with the pre-Raphaelites seen on public display. “The Star of Bethlehem” by Burne-Jones, is a centerpiece painting. Tolkien at that time in his final year at school, a few hundred yards away down New Street. Newly colourised.