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.