Tolkien Gleanings #383
* Hammond and Scull have published their Addenda and Corrigenda, February 2026. Among other items, their update of the Chronology clarifies and updates various matters regarding dates and places. Freely available online. Additions include, among many others… “1913–1914. Tolkien purchases the collected Works of Francis Thompson.” This would have been the 1913 edition: Vol. 1: Poems, Vol 2: Poems, Vol. 3: Prose. In the latter, note Thompson’s glowing review of an accessible and vivid translation of The Nibelungenlied.
* In English in the latest edition of the open-access Japanese journal Shiron, the article “Something Queer in Bilbo’s Wanderings: Seeking Other Self and Feminine Power in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings”. Freely available online.
* Two French articles on Tolkien in the latest issue of the journal Communio. The titles in English translation are “Magico-technical thinking and the true essence of a Tolkienian fairy tale” and “Brief insights into marriage according to J.R.R. Tolkien”. (Both $ paywalled).
* Published a couple of weeks ago, the new edition of the open-access Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. It offers reviews of Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives of Tolkien’s Legendarium, and of The Songs of the Spheres: Lewis, Tolkien and the Overlapping Realms of their Imagination.
* The Thoughts on Tolkien blog appreciates “Merry the Magnificent” at length.
* A new Inklings Quarterly 10, with a lead article which considers the appeal of northern epic to the very young and very imaginative, and how later in life this can become reconciled with Christianity. Freely available online. Among other items, news of a new short book surveying Edwardian mysticism, Divine Representations: The Rise of the Mystical Novel in Twentieth-Century England (2026).
* The acclaimed scholarly German book Elfen und Feen (2024) has been translated for Yale University Press, and is now available as Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld (2025). The author… “Matthias Egeler is professor of Old Norse literature and culture at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, after years at Oxford, Cambridge, and Munich”.
* Online short-courses at Signum University for April 2026 include “Tolkien and Alchemy” and “Tolkien and the Old Testament”. Both are candidate courses, running only if enough students sign up for them.
* New this week, FandomPulse has a straightforward one-page survey aimed at those planning to venture Beyond Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Forgotten Works. A page that one might send to those who still hold to the uninformed view, once held by many, that Tolkien wasted all his time elucidating elves instead of Doing Proper Work.
* Finally, my newly colorised view of Bloemfontein seen from the south. Elevated at 4,500ft above sea-level, and thus relatively cool, it was the capital of the Orange Free State. Then a free independent country, a Dutch/Afrikaans speaking Boer republic which had been formed under its own Parliament and with a formal constitution similar to that of the USA.
Also Tolkien’s birthplace. In the central distance we see the Dutch Reformed Church at the centre of the city. This was not the ‘English Cathedral’ where Tolkien’s mother was baptised in May 1891. The young Tolkien left in 1895, long before Bloemfontein became part of the newly-formed Union of South Africa in 1910.
The picture is from the book South Africa and the Transvaal war (1900), and thus likely shows Bloemfontein circa 1897.