Tolkien Gleanings #377
* The Tolkien Society has announced their Annual Guest Speaker for 2026. Giuseppe Pezzini is the author of Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (2025). He will speak to the Society on 25th April in Manchester, England. The latest Journal of Tolkien Research has a review of his book.
* Hammond & Scull examine Tolkien’s new book The Bovadium Fragments (2025) and its historical context. Freely available online.
* The new history book The Oxford University Socratic Club, 1942–1972: A Life (2026) has a first chapter on C.S. Lewis, the first President of the Club. Publication is due 5th February 2026.
* The American Scholar reviews The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation (2025). Freely available online.
* Antigone journal reflects on “There and Back Again: the Motif of Nostos in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Novels”. The article… “draws parallels between Tolkien’s novels and the Argonautica, a Hellenistic epic poem”. Freely available online.
* New in the 2025 edition of the French open-access Nordic Studies journal Nordiques, the article “Humaniser le monstre: Le berserker scandinave dans la fantasy europeenne post-Tolkien” (‘Humanizing the monster: The Scandinavian berserker in post-Tolkien European fantasy’). Examines a novel, a videogame and a Franco-Belgian BD comic, in relation to Tolkien’s Beorn. Concludes that…
“it is the heritage of Tolkien’s Beorn which is everywhere perceptible here, precisely in this reflection on the possibility of granting the berserker a form of sympathy which could lead the public to appreciate him, even to identify with him.”
* The new book The Horse in History: A Festschrift in Honour of John Clark (2026) has a chapter which may interest some Gleanings readers, “The Colt-Pixy: A British Horse Spirit?”.
* On YouTube Paolo Nardi considers Tolkien and comics, suggesting that the great comics adaptation is not yet begun. Along the way he notes that an… “unauthorized Bulgarian adaptation from the 1980s offered a free and original interpretation of Middle-earth”. Talking of comics, some scholars may care to note this week’s release of the mammoth Comics Research Bibliography 2025 & Addenda combined e-book edition (30th Anniversary Edition) which is free on Archive.org.
* The £245 Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination (2025) has the chapter “Time Travel Through Tolkien”…
“The primary focus of this chapter is Bo Hansson’s 1972 instrumental concept album, Music Inspired by Lord of the Rings, which replaces the trilogy’s complex narratives with simple, folkish atmospheres, swirls of the Swedish, a synthesized equivalent to Celtic mist.”
The original vinyl release of this best-seller is on Archive.org with a jumbled-up track sequence. A 1977 re-release, apparently remixed, had Rodney Matthews wraparound sleeve artwork and the sleeve shows the correct track sequence.
It’s fairly good synth music for its time. It’s not Ralf and Florian or Departure from the Northern Wastelands, but I revisited it and it’s still very listenable.
* And finally, talking of sonic atmospheres, here is the entry for ‘meaning number three’ of ‘Helm’, found in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary — a man and work well known to Tolkien. The Helm Wind is the ancient name for a real and unique local ‘blasting and roaring’ wind in Cumbria, England.
The link with the blasts of the horn of Helm Hammerhand seems obvious…
“… then, sudden and terrible, from the [Helm’s Deep] tower above, the sound of the great horn of Helm rang out. All that heard that sound trembled. Many of the Orcs cast themselves on their faces and covered their ears with their claws. Back from the Deep the echoes came, blast upon blast, as if on every cliff and hill a mighty herald stood.” (The Two Towers).