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”.