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.
