Tolkien Gleanings #363

* The British auctioneer Sotheby’s has an August 1957 letter from Tolkien, set for sale by auction on 11th December 2025.

* Now available for pre-order, the University of Chichester’s Centre for Folklore journal Gramarye No. 28 (Winter 2025). Includes the article “Of Technology and Fantasy: Fairy Tales, Fables, and the Transformation of Illustration in the Long Nineteenth Century”, among others, plus several book reviews.

* The December 2025 special issue of the journal Imagination, Cognition, and Personality considers the theme of “fantasy and cognition”. Freely available online in open-access.

* The latest edition of Christianity Today has an excerpt (for subscribers) from the new book The War for Middle-earth, “You Know Them As Fantasy Writers. They Were Soldiers Too”. ($ paywall).

* Just published, the book Muses of a Fire: Essays on Faith, Film and Literature (2025). Fifteen essays including one on Tolkien, and one on “the theology of science-fiction films”.

* Some details of a feature-length Tolkien documentary, broadcast a few days ago on German broadcast TV…

On Friday 28th November 2025, the 2024 cultural documentary Tolkien: Die wahre Geschichte der Ringe (‘Tolkien: The True Story of the Rings’) was shown on German TV. Tolkien experienced both World Wars and served as a soldier on the Somme. The greatest journey of his life took the young Tolkien to Switzerland in 1911. The documentary shows how these experiences shaped Tolkien’s work and his myth. 95 minutes”.

* Now online, the November 2025 newsletter Inklings Quarterly 9. Includes a link to a recording of a lecture on “Form and Meaning in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, among other items. Freely available online.

* Miriam Ellis blogs on “Meeting Hobbits in the Elder Days and the Mystery of Untranslated Texts”.

* New on Archive.org, An interview with Phil Dragash about the recording of his full-cast + soundscape + music LoTR. His recollections of the somewhat shambolic recording process make his solo recording of one of the great audioworks of our time all the more remarkable. There’s also the full version of his “A Journey in the Dark” recording, with the missing section now found. This section covered the period from wading through the water on the way to the Moria Gate, up to the farewell to Bill the pony and a bit beyond. Also new on Archive.org is Dragash’s successor Bluefax’s Riddles in the Dark (2023 Edition) from The Hobbit. I only had his 2019 edition, so I’m glad to get this. Note that, in order to legally download these free fan-works, one needs to own the retail books, soundtracks and DVD movies.

* A brief update on the Middle-earth Hexcrawl project. This refers to a high-res map of Middle-earth divided into 12-mile hex-agon shapes, produced a few months ago as a base tool for role-playing gamers. The project in question is now filling each “hex” with details of what a role-player might encounter if they travel there.

* And finally, the best Black Friday “deal” was free… the amazing new Z-Image Turbo. I’ve been testing it and making, among other things, this portrait of Gandalf. I’ve released this under Creative Commons Attribution, so feel free to re-use.

Tolkien Gleanings #362

* Newly published, the book Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten Lands with the Inklings. One of the book’s creators is Malcolm Guite, former Chaplain at and now Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. The book is a multi-author Inklings “devotional” which aims to help Christians… “to rediscover Lent through the lens of imagination-infused faith”. Lent is the term used for the 40 days of Christian repentance prior to Easter — usually expressed through fasting, prayer, humility and sacrifice — and apparently meant to be a personal echo of Christ’s ’40 days in the wilderness’.

* The Reading Tolkien podcast talks with Michael Drout about his book The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation, due for release on 2nd December 2025. I see that The Prancing Pony Podcast also has an interview with Drout. For both links the .MP3 downloads are hidden under the “… More” button.

* In French, the new 800-page book Une lecture du Hobbit et du Seigneur des Anneaux de Tolkien. L’arborescence du cercle (November 2025) (‘A reading of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings: The Circle and the Tree’).

* The Tolkien Society’s latest book Numenor, The Mighty and Frail: Proceedings of The Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 (November 2025) has now been published. Among others, contents include…

   – Dealing with the Dead: Nuances of ancient Egypt and medieval theology in Numenor.
   – Ecology of Imperialism: Environmental History for Numenor.
   – “By the Waters of Anduin We Lay Down and Wept”: Exilic Theology in the ‘Akallabeth’.

* Newly posted online, the Spanish Tolkien Society this week offers a long interview in Spanish with John Garth, which originally appeared in their journal Estel No. 88 (2018). Back in September I see they also had a long blog post in Spanish celebrating 100 issues of Estel.

* The student article “The Great Wizarding Duel: Tolkien’s Possible Influence on Rowling”, in the new 2025 edition of the University of South Carolina’s annual open-access The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English.

* Now 99.8% uploaded and for sale, the picture library of the venerable magazine Country Life, from the magazine’s inception through to today. It’s something of a pain to filter and navigate the collection, and the lack of dating of images is very regrettable. Nor can individual images be linked in a blog via a simple URL link. Tagging is sometimes subject to glitches (e.g. searching for illustrator, seeking portraits of illustrators such as Quentin Blake or Ronald Searle, only gets endless illustrations). Overall, the site is far from ideal for the user. But… the determined Tolkienist may unearth a gem, especially among the many old b&w images of Oxford and Oxfordshire. Judging by my tests a high-res image licence for personal use appear to be £75, and one can also get licences for public display or publication. The state of AI colourisation of b&w is such that your chosen image could easily be nicely colourised.

* Full auctioneer details, with good photos, of the alleged Tolkien items due for sale in the forthcoming “Precious Things” auction in Bath. As with all auctions, ‘buyer beware’. Update: Auction now “postponed”.

* And finally, leading auctioneer Christies now has a page for the forthcoming item “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Merton College Desk, Late 19th Century”, and offers seven high-res pictures of the desk.

Tolkien Gleanings #361

* Lincolnshire’s rare bookseller Type & Forme has released a new free bookman’s PDF catalogue for “J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar: A Journey through the World of Middle English”. A good scan of the Middle English Vocabulary featured in the catalogue can be found on Archive.org for free.

* A book I missed noticing, back in April, Lembas Extra 2024: “Evil in Ea” – Proceedings of the Unquendor Tolkien Seminar 2024 (2025). The Unquendor website menus suggest Lembas Extra stopped in 2019. But (thanks to Yandex’s indexing of euro-sites neglected by other engines), search reveals there is a 2024 issue page on the site, and this usefully has purchase details. The Dutch Tolkien shop also appears to have copies still for sale. I can find no contents-list online, but it… “contains articles by Renee Vink and Claudio Testi, among others. With an introduction by Hamish Williams.”

* David Bratman reviews the new Tolkien book, The Bovadium Fragments (2025).

* In the first issue of the new open-access California Baptist University student journal Immersed: A Journal of Faith, Arts, and Letters, “The Lord of the Rings: Intersectionality between Theology and Ecocriticism in Middle-earth”. This… “argues that Tolkien’s mythos offers a model of ecocentric stewardship grounded in reverence and humility.”

* The Acton Institute has a long article on “Lewis and Tolkien’s War Against Grimdark”.

* Flagged as “new” on the Signum University site, they can now offer “mentorship and tutoring tailored to your academic plans”. They also have a new January 2026 page for online short-courses, set to include “The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Later Poems 3 (Volume 3: The Years 1931-1967)”, and they’ve posted dates for Mythmoot XIII 2026.

* And finally, Tumnus’ Bookshelf reviews the children’s 48-page storybook John Ronald’s Dragons: The Story of J.R.R. Tolkien (2017). I’d have been a little more critical: the book has Sarehole as a “town” and Birmingham is left unmentioned, for instance.

Tolkien Gleanings #360

* The Tolkien Guide website brings news of an auction at which one might bag Tolkien’s desk, as used at Merton College in Oxford during the 1940s and 1950s. The auction is to be held on 11th December 2026, should you want the desk and happen to find an old Bitcoin down the back of the sofa. The Tolkien Guide site also has a set of links into their new guide to Tolkien Calendars : By Year, 1969-2026.

* New at the YouTube channel for the Oxford Tolkien Seminars, a recording of Michael Drout speaking on “Tolkien’s Heterotextuality”. The recording is from 17th October, and Drout was the opening speaker for the autumn 2025 slate of Oxford Tolkien Seminars.

* The Spanish Elfenomeno.com has added a substantial new Languages section, with all licenses respected…

“We have integrated the entire [Eldamo: An Elvish Lexicon] database into our own system, linking it with the Fenopaedia of Elfenomeno.com, and we have also translated all of its contents into Spanish, including names, definitions, linguistic explanations, and etymologies. This is the first time that the complete Eldamo corpus is offered in Spanish [… via] a search tool that allows you to locate any word in Spanish, English, or any of Tolkien’s invented languages among the more than 30,000 entries available.”

* This week Catholic365.com considers “Grace in Tolkien’s The Return of the King”, identifying what are detected as subtly-woven Christian threads which non-Christians would not notice.

* Another podcast discussion with Joseph Laconte on his new book, “How the World Wars Shaped J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis”. The book officially launched last night (yes, it exists at last!) at the University of Texas at Austin.

* New on YouTube, another podcast discussion on “Tolkien’s Faith” with Dr. Holly Ordway.

* Also new on YouTube, a conference talk titled “Can C.S. Lewis and L.M. Montgomery be Kindred Spirits?”. Looking at his blog, I see the speaker usefully warns Anne-girls everywhere that the Megan Follows audiobook adaptation of Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon classic novel is very deeply abridged, with six hours missing(!) — seemingly due to being originally destined for cassette-tapes. I’d add that the unabridged audiobook which Amazon UK sells is a rather iffy recording, actually available free on Librivox. The Susan O’Malley reading from the reputable Blackstone Audio appears to be the proper unabridged retail audiobook — though it’s available only in the USA and Canada.

* A long way off yet, but Bradley J. Birzer has this week announced his book Tolkien and the Inklings: Men of the West. Set for Christmas 2026, but apparently he’ll add the finishing touches to it before Christmas 2025.

* Readers may be interested to know that Google Scholar now has an AI-powered Scholar search. Thankfully it’s just a possibly-useful second-opinion about the most relevant search results, rather than a bodged-together AI auto-summary of such. It failed on my initial query asking for papers on the total ice-mass of Greenland (2.7m gigatons, glad you asked), giving me instead the top papers for the total ice-loss into the sea (which is not the same thing). But it may be useful for literary-historical queries.

* And finally, what would have grown around Lake Evendim? The handy Middle-earth Biome Map has the answers for this and much else in Middle-earth. Also excellent representative pictures of each environment in the primary-world, as carefully selected by beardy eco-boffins.

Tolkien Gleanings #359

* Just published, the 2025 edition of the Italian Tolkien journal I Quaderni di Arda. It appears to be a comparative special-issue, with articles on Tolkien in relation to Moorcock, le Guin, Gaiman, China Mieville, A.S. Byatt (integrated a few references to Tolkien in her work, apparently), and even Stephen King. Plus reviews of Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring; Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation; and the Collected Poems. All in Italian, and freely available online.

* A long new interview by Graham Scheper with Michael Drout on “The Tower is Beowulf: Beowulf and the Lord of the Rings”. Freely available online. Drout’s book The Tower and the Ruin is out in early December 2025.

* The Green Notebook podcast interviews Joseph Loconte on “Fascism, Communism, and the War for Middle-earth”. The .MP3 download is under the “… More” button. Loconte’s book The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 is due in a few days.

* The Critic magazine reviews the new book Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (2025). Freely available online. Apparently the book is a thorough but also consequently revisionist history, in which Tolkien’s discipline of philology is relatively favourably treated…

“Even the Oxford philologists are seen as reasonable men, trying to preserve a bedrock of seriousness in a newfangled discipline that at all times had threatened to get out of hand.”

* New on Archive.org, a 1932-1963 run of the Leavisite journal Scrutiny. Has some pungent criticism of the Tolkien and Gordon edition of the Green Knight, among much else.

* I failed to spot a relevant academic book, last year. Fantasies of Music in Nostalgic Medievalism (2024), from Manchester University Press. The author surveys works from 1939 to the present day.

* And finally, new on YouTube is a three-minute video peep at The Brandywine Festival, a rustic Hobbit festival held in Kentucky, USA. Well made and with steady-cam, so no worries about sea-sickness from wobbly camera shots.

Tolkien Gleanings #358

* The contents-list is now available for the academic book Queer Approaches to Tolkien (2025). This offers 12 essays plus a bibliography. Amazon UK is saying ‘U.S. import only’ and Amazon USA is saying 25th November 2025, but publisher McFarland now flags it as “in stock” and I assume it’s shipping.

   – The Problematic Perimeters of Elrond ­Half-elven and Ronald ­English-Catholic.
   – I Dream of Gandalf: or, How I Was Raised by Wizards.
   – The End Is Queer: Cleanness and ­Tolkien’s Apocalyptic Landscape.
   – Mother or Other: ­Tolkien’s Shelob and the “­Monstrous-Feminine”.
   – Eowyn and/or Dernhelm: Reading Eowyn’s (Trans)Masculine Disguise.
   – “Something Mighty Queer”: Destabilizing Gender, Intimacy and Family in ­Tolkien’s Legendarium.
   – “For he would take no wife”: Surface Reading, Earnur and the Queering of the Unmarried Male in The Lord of the Rings.
   – “Bending over with naked blade”: The Erotics of Suffering and ­Male-Male Penetration in ­Tolkien’s Legendarium.
   – Frodo, Sam and the Ring of Power: A Queer Erotic Triangle.
   – “Saruman [?Pardoned]”: The Queerness of Sex in ­Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
   – “and stooping he raised Beleg and kissed his mouth”: Queering Canon with ­Tolkien Fanfiction.
   – “What care I for the hands of a king?”: ­Tolkien Fanfiction and Narratives of the Transgender Self.
­   – Tolkien and Alterity: A Bibliography.

* A review in English of the new German-language academic book “In Texten wildern: Slash oder die Erotisierung fiktiver Stoffe durch Fangemeinden” (2025) (‘Poaching texts: slash or the eroticization of fictional material by fan communities’). The review is freely available online. One of the book’s chapters focuses on an apparently very popular three-year pornographic fan-fiction which… “portrays a sexual power struggle between Aragorn and Boromir. Despite apparent non-consensual elements, the narrative emphasizes that both characters are equally strong and willingly engage in the power play” which is depicted in “explicit sex scenes”.

* New from Germany, in English, the article “Reimagining The Lord of the Rings Slash Fiction, Queer Interventions, and Their Limits” (2025). Freely available online. Centers around discussion of the comic-book Lord of the Cock Rings which depicts Sam and Frodo as gay lovers…

“Rejecting any impulse toward subtlety or restraint, the visual narrative refuses to sanitize queer desire, instead embracing graphic portrayals of erotic encounters, including self-pleasure, rimming, penetrative intercourse, and foot-based masturbation.”

* I read that the recent academic book Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity (2024) opens with an extended consideration of Tolkien cosplay (i.e. ‘fans dressing up as fictional characters’). A review notes… “Ethnic and gender identities are also discussed at length, as are psychological problems” among cos-players.

* Vivid Seats has details of the stage-show “Tolkien It Off – A Burlesque & Drag Tribute to Lord of the Rings”.

* I just now noticed a U.S. ‘celebrity news’ item, from last month. George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones author), reportedly bemoaned the “lack of explicit sexual scenes” in The Lord of the Rings, while being interviewed at The Kimo Theatre in Albuquerque. I would have responded that — even if a hypothetical ‘alternative-timeline Tolkien’ had felt the need for such scenes — Martin overlooks the historical and national context. Britain has no U.S. First Amendment to guarantee its citizens free speech, and effective de-censorship of the printed word only happened here some two decades after the publication of The Lord of the Rings.

* And finally, an unusual new academic journal. Epic Threads aims to… “weave together fact and fiction to breathe new life into the ancient world”. The journal is open-access and the first issue is now available. An interesting idea, which might be characterised as a sort of ‘fan fiction for historians’. It makes me wonder if Northern ancient history could benefit from a similar imaginative-scholarly journal, assuming appropriate editorial rigour?

Tolkien Gleanings #357

* Joseph Loconte draws “Lessons About ‘the Will to Power’ from Middle-earth”. Freely available online.

* For Remembrance Day, John Garth offered an article on Tolkien’s friend “Robert Quilter Gilson on the eve of war, 1914” ($ paywall).

* The 2026 C.S. Lewis conference will visit Amiens, France, to discuss “War, Fellowship, and Survival in the Lives and Works of C.S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits”. The dates are 11th-13th June 2026.

* Marquette has a page for public showings of the Tolkien manuscripts, 2026. I can’t give you dates, since Marquette University completely blocks anyone using a VPN. Which presumably includes their own students, using laptops + VPNs in their campus cafes? Durh. But I assume from the search-result snippet that the dates are indeed there.

* New in English, in the latest issue of Italian journal Ricognizioni, “Quenya is Practically a Main Character: Elvish-English Multilingualism in Tolkien-inspired Fan-Fictions”. Freely available online. The same issue also has an article on “Plant Names in Constructed Worlds”, which may interest some.

* The Tolkienist surveys some of the many recent Kickstarter offers. Judging by this, it appears to be becoming increasingly easy to obtain a licence to sell expensive branded ‘Tolkien tat’ on crowdfunding sites.

* Some of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy actors are going on an 11-city U.S. stage tour, January to September 2026, billed as ‘An Evening With the Hobbits: In Celebration of 25 Years’. Will there be hobbit songs sung, one wonders?

* New on Archive.org, an audiophile’s painstaking The Hobbit (1977) VHS Hi-Fi Audio Capture. This is the Rankin Bass cartoon release.

* And finally, as the usual November rains pour down here in Britain, a timely and beautifully illustrated post. Miriam Ellis on “The Glory of Goldberry’s Washing Day”.

Tolkien Gleanings #356

* From Germany and mostly in German, the $ paywall book Eine Kleine Geschichte der Orks: Der monstrose feind im wandel der zeit (2024) (‘A Little History of the Orcs: the monstrous enemy through the ages’). Eleven chapters including, in English, Thomas Honegger’s “From Old English orcneas to George MacDonald’s Goblins with Soft Feet: Sources of Inspiration and Models for Tolkien’s Orcs from English Literature”. A key example of the “Old English” of the title is found in Beowulf (c. 710 A.D), which talks of… “eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas” (‘thence awoke all evil offspring, ettins and elf and orcs, also giants’).

* In Portuguese, the book J.R.R. Tolkien: construtor de mundos. Personagens, lugares e adaptacoes. Vol 1. (2023). This is officially freely available online. Chapter titles in English translation…

   – Tolkien and the ring myth.
   – Sauron and his many names.
   – Beorn.
   – Boromir, an imperfect hero.
   – Aragorn and Anduril: The representation of the hero and the medieval sword.
   – Orcs and evil.
   – Dwarves and Elves: Between stones and Norse gods.
   – Through Rivers and Forests: Norse mythological geography.
   – The Mountains and Kingdoms Beneath Them.
   – Adaptations: recreating Tolkien for the cinema.

* A student paper from Marquette University, “Faramir’s Quality: how Faramir is influenced by and embodies the theme of hope in The Lord of the Rings” (2025). Freely available online.

* A new open Reddit attempt to track down all Silmarillion references and allusions in LoTR. Offhand I don’t recall any other attempt to do this. I’ve checked the Reader’s Companion book (i.e. the annotated LoTR) just now, but that only has the general index, offering about 30 page numbers under the heading of Silmarillion (book).

* The Angmar Archives podcast has a long interview with the maker of the new artbook Doomed To Die: An A-Z of Death in Tolkien. Freely available on YouTube.

* New to me, Tolkien’s hobbit poem “Oliphaunt” was issued as a standalone children’s picturebook in 1989, of the “stiff boards, for small kids who might tear normal paper” type of picturebook.

* And finally, talking of near-mythical animals… news of rare big-screen outings for the extended Director’s Cut of the LoTR movies. The “special one-night-only event will feature the remastered extended edition” of Fellowship, then Two Towers and Return of the King. All in early 2026.

Tolkien Gleanings #355

* The German/English journal Hither Shore 21, a themed issue on ‘Tolkien and his Editors’, is now available on Amazon. This “2024” issue is there dated as being published 4th November 2025. Here are the contents…

* First Things magazine has a new article on “The Inkling Who Fought Abortion”… “Owen Barfield, the philosopher, novelist, and a key influence on both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, was one of the fifteen founders of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.” The first such pressure group. The first third of the article is freely available online, and is then $ paywalled.

* Christianity Today reviews the stage play Lewis & Tolkien. Also has a partial interview with the makers, possibly drawn from the Q&A. Freely available online. The play’s theme of determined friendship is one that…

“feels especially relevant now. Two men reconciling over an unhurried, in-person conversation, nestled in a snug pub, defies everything about modern society’s bitter ideological divisions and disembodied digital distractions. Not a single iPhone in sight. No email notifications. No Slack messages interrupting the conversation. Prolonged eye contact, full attention, and a radical willingness to stay in the same room even when wounded by the other.”

* New in the latest issue of the rolling Journal of Tolkien Research “A Detestable Nation of Orcs: echoes of Eurasian nomads in early fantasy and the literary ecosystem behind them”. This seeks models for orcs in various groups of historical primary-world Eurasian nomads, such as the Huns and Mongols.

* The link on Lindefirion‘s site to the “Expanded Middle-earth poster map” is now “404”, but on DeviantArt Mairon666 has a new makeover of it, as “Northern Middle-Earth (3rd Age)”. With a free and un-watermarked 4.5Mb download. Though sadly this is still not big enough to read the smallest place-labels.

* Robert Plant talks at length about how the mystique of Wales and magic of Tolkien influenced his 1970s rock band Led Zeppelin. There’s a five-minute clip from the interview on YouTube, but the full interview doesn’t appear to be online — unless perhaps you subscribe to streaming services for U.S. TV channels.

* Free League has announced their forthcoming Hobbit Tales, a $46 role-playing game add-on book for the core One Ring game. The value of such books for non-gamers is in the sumptious production values and artwork, their maps and detailed descriptions of places and terrains, and their attention to everyday items and trading.

Though the only information in that regard is that the book will have “detailed descriptions of the four farthings” of the Shire. Gamer buyers should know that this new book is a one-volume collection for five “silly misadventures” of hobbits that were… “previously published in the starter set for The One Ring Second Edition and in the Shire Adventures compendium for The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying”. Thus avid tabletop gamers may already have it, since the current core game One Ring is now “the official tabletop roleplaying game” — and many will likely have the starter set in its second edition.

The Hobbit Tales promo is interesting in its own right, in that the makers claim a ‘TM’ trademark on the word “Hobbit”. Either that or they’ve acknowledging someone else’s trademark, which is perhaps why they use “hobbit” on the cover with no distinctively-obvious capital “H”? On the promo page it’s definitely capital “H”. Anyway, be aware that someone is trying to claim a trademark on a word which was in use prior to Tolkien.

* And finally and seasonally, Miriam Ellis savours the hobbit mushroom habit. Ellis makes the perceptive comment that… “I expect hobbits had a fund of stories and songs about their passionate love for this near-magical food.” And probably short sayings and little everyday rhymes too, I’d add. To help children learn and recall the differences between edible mushrooms and dangerous toadstools. “If ‘t has a frill, you’ll be ill”, “If ’tis red, you’ll be dead”, that sort of thing.