Tolkien Gleanings #366
* Now available, the table-of-contents for the new book Tolkien’s Glee: A Reading of the Songs in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (2025).
* The Wall Street Journal reviews The Tower and the Ruin by Michael Drout ($ paywall).
* Mythmoot XIII, set for 25th-28th June 2026 in Virginia, USA. The theme is to be ‘unexpected company’ in fantasy and science-fiction, and the main guest of honour is Michael D.C. Drout. The call for papers closes on 28th February 2026.
* Signum University online short-courses for February 2026. Including among others “Adaptations of Middle-earth: From Deitch and Bakshi to Jackson” and “Exploring Tolkien’s Letter to Milton Waldman”.
* In the new Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, Volume 3 (2025), “Happily Ever After: Comparing Sentiment Arcs in Emotionally-Inflected Fanfiction Genres Across Fandoms”. Freely available online. The authors find that…
“each fandom has its own emotional ‘bandwidth’, with stories in The Lord of the Rings fandom consistently displaying the most positive sentiments”
* From the same field is a new paper from Italy, “Quantifying Emotional Tone in Tolkien’s The Hobbit: Dialogue Sentiment Analysis with RegEx, NRC-VAD, and Python” (2025). Freely available online. The study finds that…
“… the results show that the dialogue maintains a generally positive (high valence) and calm (low arousal) tone, with a gradually increasing sense of agency (dominance) as the story progresses. These patterns reflect the novel’s emotional rhythm: moments of danger and excitement are regularly balanced by humor, camaraderie, and relief. Visualizations — including emotional trajectory graphs and word clouds — highlight how Tolkien’s language cycles between tension and comfort.”
* The I Might Believe in Faeries podcast has “The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis”, talking with…
“medieval scholar and author, Jason Baxter. Dr. Baxter is the Director of the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College and the author of many books, including a new translation of Dante and ‘The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis’.”
* Talking of the medieval, the ‘chained library’ of Google Books is set to discard its trusty interface. Your curated “Bookshelves” will go into the skip with it, if you’re not quick.
* And finally, Tolkien’s desk (the ‘Merton desk’) has sold at auction for £330,200.
