Tolkien Gleanings #390

* The Plough Quarterly magazine has a lengthy review of both The Lord of the Rings (in a first-time reading) and The Tower and the Ruin: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creation (2025), in “Reading Tolkien for the First Time”. Freely available online. In the same issue, note also “The Moral Beauty of Middlemarch”.

* Walking Tree publishers have a new short post with obituary links, “Remembering J.S. Ryan”. Ryan being the Tolkien scholar and author of Tolkien’s View: Windows into his World (2009) and In the Nameless Wood: Explorations in the Philological Hinterland of Tolkien’s Literary Creations (2013). Tolkien’s View is especially informative for those considering the younger Tolkien in the historical/academic context of his time.

* The Middle Page is spending a year with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Early Poetry and is blogging about it at length. (Substack. But not seemingly paywalled, at least not yet).

* TheTolkienist has a report on The second Tolkien Tagung in Zurich, Switzerland… “With close to a hundred visitors present, and about 200 participants online, this conference was another success”.

* Elfenomeno has a new Interview with Pieter Collier, from Tolkien Library. Freely available online.

* The comic-book Durin Issue 1, now freely available from the artist at DeviantArt, as a 52-page PDF.

“I started this project about ten years ago with my good friend Sergio Artigas, and from 2017-2020 we worked together on this book; the first of a planned seven-issue series about the life of Durin the Deathless, the first King of the Dwarves. Recently our friend and fellow fantasy artist Carlos Vera has joined our team, and we are looking forward to continuing Durin’s story in the issues to come.”

* On YouTube, Malcolm Guite sends forth The dwarves’ song (and some smoke rings).

* And finally, in England the daffodils are once again washed in spring sunlight. So this seems apt, as found in Tolkien’s own A Middle English Vocabulary (1922)…

Tolkien Gleanings #389

* Available from today, a new ‘Collectors Edition’ of Unfinished Tales, retitled by the publisher on Amazon as Unfinished Tales: A Special Hardback Anthology of Epic Fantasy and Middle-earth Legendarium (2026). Though the cover keeps the usual title.

Frankly not appealing, with no additions (such as a folder of new maps), and a selling-point that’s simply ‘hey, it’s a hardcover with an embossed picture’. Although admittedly the price is right, at £14 for a chunky hardback inc. delivery. But really… a lurid orange picture, with unappealing typography that would barely merit a glance in a sixth-form art show? Look at the huge gap between the words Unfinished and Tales, for instance. Ugh. Surely HarperCollins could have done better than this, for the reissue of a key book by Tolkien?

* The U.S. Library of Congress blog has a long post that tells us exactly how readers can get their hands on a print copy of A Gateway to Sindarin: A Grammar of an Elvish Language from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (2007).

* On YouTube, a recording of Brad Birzer’s 90-minute Tolkien seminar on “Treebeard and Gandalf the White” (March 2026).

* In this week’s Church Times newspaper, Malcolm Guite reflects on “All the music of the spheres” in Tolkien.

* Are large online AI’s improving at the task of discussing Tolkien? Lingwe investigates with the aid of one of the best, Google’s Gemini. One of the tests was to provide a list of “hapax legomenon [i.e.] a word that occurs only once within a specific context”, in LoTR. Though without the AI being fed the LoTR text. As such, Google’s Gemini provided a mostly-invented list of words. Such hallucinations may matter, at a time when many YouTubers are using AI to help generate the scripts for their endless waves of ‘Tolkien explainer’ clickbait videos.

Anyway… inspired by Lingwe’s test, and with the help of the desktop freeware AntConc and Jan.ai+Qwen3.5 I then had a go at finding such one-time unique words in the actual provided text of LoTR. From there I whittled the list down to 15 one-use words that are not personal names or names that can only apply to just one place:

    – barrowfield (a field or open terrain of ancient burial barrows)
    – downlands (an “open and fairly level” landscape of turfy downs)
    – crowhaunted (dark ghost-like crows inhabiting shadowy cliffs of dark rock)
    – flammifer (one who carries a burning lamp aloft)
    – hell-hawks (foul flying beasts, large enough for a man to ride on)
    – jaw-cracker (unfamiliar language, very difficult to pronounce)
    – lithlad (a wide ashen plain, see also Tolkien’s “ash-ridden”)
    – moonset (the setting moon, casting a bright white light)
    – neekerbreekers (invented hobbit word for horrid marsh-crickets, named for the sound they make at night)
    – ninnyhammer (a hobbit who does a stupid ‘numbskull’ thing, mild insult)
    – shirriffing (activities involved in being a hobbit Sherrif in The Shire)
    – springle-ring (a pretty but vigorous hobbit dance for two people)
    – treegarth (arboretum of differing trees set in a wide circle around a central point, guarding and protective)
    – tussocky (area of thick long grass, starting to become many wind-raised tussocks, see also Tolkien’s “hummock”)
    – willow-wand (a thin stiff-but-pliable willow-tree withy or thin branch, partly dried, can be wielded in childish play).

Tussocky was once known to agriculturalists and farmers. Moonset was also once well-known to sailors / weathermen / soldiers. Willow-wand was known to Edwardian children’s play-culture and can be found in pre-Tolkien children’s literature (“The Willow Wand” is a chapter in the famous novel Ivanhoe, in which the wand provides a tricky target for an archery contest). Note also the annual British folk-practice in which boys participated in beating the bounds during wassail processions of a parish boundary, by ‘whipping’ the boundary trees with withies. Arguably, treegarth does refer only to one specific place in Middle-earth, though Treebeard needs to specify it by location when he calls it the “Treegarth of Orthanc”. Such specification implies there may be other treegarths elsewhere.

* Up for auction at Heritage Auctions towards the end of March 2026, the original of an early Adrian Smith painting to illustrate The Hobbit. Possibly 1980s or 90s for an RPG game company, and thus showing pre-movies orcs. My guess is that the scene illustrates the moments just after Bilbo has popped his waistcoat buttons and invisibly escaped down the mountain? Lots of space for words in the top half, so possibly it was painted for a game booklet? Perhaps a back-cover?

* And finally, artist Miriam Ellis has a fine new print available of her tender painting of “J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien, 1928”.

Tolkien Gleanings #388

* Who knew? There’s a Centre for Fantasy Literature Studies at the National Academy of Sciences in the Ukraine. The Centre was established in 2015, and they recently had a two-day online conference in January 2026 themed around “Music, Dance and Theatre in Fantasy Worlds”. Tolkien presentations included…

   – “As Above, So Below: As Music, So Magic (in Tolkien’s Legendarium)”.
   – “To Music of a Pipe Unseen: Music as Metaliterary Device in The Lord of the Rings”.
   – “Lyrical Lauding in The Lord of the Rings: Adapting Tolkien’s Songs”.
   – “Luthien’s Dance as Love Embodied”.

A book of free abstracts is available in English.

* The University Press of Mississippi is planning the academic chapter-book titled Returning to the Shelf: Memory, Reading, and the Afterlives of Childhood Books, on the topic of… “the enduring presence of childhood reading in adult life”. Either through “memories of early reading” and/or adult re-reading. Set for January 2029, with a submission of interest / abstract deadline of 31st March 2026.

* DoxaMoot: Orthodox Christian Tolkien Conference is set for 4th-6th September 2026, in North Carolina. Set to include a lecture on… “the theological and symbolic significance of Tolkien’s monsters”.

* New at the latest rolling edition of the Journal of Tolkien Research, book reviews of Numenor, The Mighty and Frail (2025) and Queer Approaches to Tolkien (2025).

* Sons of Wayland goes “Riding Through Tolkien Country” on a motorcycle. Though I have to say that we have no evidence that Tolkien visited Lydney Park in Gloucestershire. He wrote a paper related to the archaeology found there, but…

“there is no evidence that he participated in the dig at Lydney Park, stayed there as a guest of the Wheelers on a number of occasions, or even visited Lydney” (Hammond & Scull, Reader’s Guide, 2007 edition)

Which is not to say that he might not have stopped off to take in the site, perhaps while travelling to the south-west or Wales on holiday, at some later time. Anyway there’s a pleasing poster of the motorcycle route taken through Tolkien-like landscapes, and the route looks like a very fine sampling of the countryside to the west and south of Birmingham.

* Talking of long and beautiful journeys… I’ve now seen the seven-hour screen adaptation of Oxford writer Stephen R. Lawhead’s Arthurian Pendragon Cycle books (1987-1997), recently fully released. The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin turns out in its first two episodes to be a clever and rather beautiful prequel to the Arthur story, adapted with panache and filmed and costumed on location in Britain, Italy and Hungary. Set in the last days of the Roman Occupation, and the first years of early British Christianity, the first two episodes focus on the young Welsh bard Talesin and also introduce Morgan le Fay. Merlin is not yet born and these two episodes serve as a sort of prequel-to-Merlin movie, while sketching in the necessary worldbuilding. Sadly we only hear the ‘older Talesin of the gnomic poems’ once, and at other times he’s a magical singer with a curious mingling of mystic powers. The rest of the series, the five episodes in which we fast-forward 75 years to Merlin, I was not so enamoured by. These episodes look as fabulous as the first two, with superb acting (the actor playing Vortigern in the third episode surely deserves a TV Oscar), but in the end they were a bit of a slog and too Game of Thrones-ey for my tastes.

* MatejCadil has a new set of story-posters for The Hobbit, freely available on DeviantArt.

* And finally, here in the UK the Royal Mail has revealed their set of The Lord of the Rings postage-stamps. Turns out the set is just film-stills and marks the anniversary of the movie trilogy. Rather than marking the 100th anniversary of Tolkien beginning his many translations (Beowulf and Pearl in 1926, others later).

Tolkien Gleanings #387

* The Spanish Tolkien Society has released their Revista Estel No. 101 (dated 2024, but seemingly only released in 2026). Freely available, in PDF format. Among many other items, note the short Spanish article on “Beer in Middle-earth” (pp. 54-56).

* On YouTube, a recording of Joseph Loconte giving a talk at the Union League in Philadelphia, about his new book The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945.

* Tomorrow in Oxford, Thomas Honegger speaking in Corpus Christi College on “Habitatio est omen — or: like land, like people” in relation Tolkien’s work.

* A Sword & Sorcery historian reviews The Tower and the Ruin (2025), the new book by Michael D.C. Drout.

* On YouTube, a short video tour of a just-closed Pauline Baines exhibition which was staged in Italy. YouTube can auto-dub into English.

* The long-running British Fairies blog considers elvish & faery origins in a short review of Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (2023). This is found to be…

“an academic examination of the process by which the idea of the modern British faery might have evolved out of elements of belief in Roman nature deities, Anglo-Saxon elves, Norman French fay women and native British mythology; it covers the period from the Roman colonisation through to the late fifteenth century […] it treats the faeries as entirely socially constructed inventions — and ones that may not be of any great antiquity”.

* A new £100 academic book which touches on Sir Gawain and place, Arthur Between England and Wales: The Borderland, the Marches, and the Medieval Matter of Britain (2026). Among other things the book apparently offers… “novel reinterpretations of the historiographic record and the vibrant cultural networks and communities within the borderlands” of England and Wales, and has the concluding chapter “‘I-medled to gidres’: Borderline Arthurian Personalities in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Poetry of Iolo Goch”. (‘I-medled to gidres’ = mingled together).

* And finally, talking of the Welsh language travelling over the borderlands into England, “Welsh on Wagons”. This is a new and freely available…

“photo-essay exploring the history behind Tolkien’s discovery of the Welsh language on coal wagons in Birmingham. It displays typical wagons, and explains the meaning of the Welsh names.”

I can here add a couple more postcards from eBay, though the wagons shown below were carrying stone and silica rather than coal. Plus a newly-coloured evocative view of a typical small mixed-goods train puffing through the English countryside.

Tolkien Gleanings #386

* A new PhD thesis from Dalhousie University, “I do not desire healing”: Grief as Identity in Medieval (ist) Literatures (2026). This has chapters or sub-chapters on: melancholic pronouns in The Lord of the Rings; Eowyn disguising herself as Dernhelm; and grief/death in relation to Luthien and Arwen. Freely available online.

* Some more details about the coming screen series “Forge of Friendship”. Set to be… “five hour-long documentaries” with interviews, music and re-enactments, exploring the friendship of Lewis and Tolkien…

“There is no set release date, but we are moving into post-production.” When asked, the [filmmakers, after showing a one-hour preview cut] said “We are waiting on more funding, but it could potentially be released this year.”

* The Independent Review reviews Tolkien, Philosopher of War (2024).

* Apparently set for publication by De Gruyter in June 2026, according to Amazon UK, Tolkien Spirituality: Constructing Belief and Tradition in Fiction-based Religion. Possibly just a printing of this 2014 open-access Phd thesis, but I guess there’s a chance it could be an updated and expanded version for print? By the same author, “Religious uses of fantasy fiction”, an open-access chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief (2023).

* Midland History journal has a review of the book C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (2024) ($ paywall). As a Midlander I’ve never thought of Oxford as being in the English Midlands, but it squeezes in here.

* Seemingly popping out of embargo this week at a university repository, “Tolkien and Trees”, a book chapter from 2013.

* Tolkien artist Miriam Ellis is anticipating… “my forthcoming book, A Shire Walking-Party” and a new blog post gives a preview of her thoughts on the appearance of Woodhall.

* “Oxford, Physics, and the Day I Saw Tolkien Summon Henry”…

“In the fall of 1970, I arrived at Oxford University as a first-term undergraduate reading physics at Merton College. […] I would often see J.R.R. Tolkien wandering around the College in his half-cloak, walking stick in hand. He was already elderly, already legendary, yet physically present: a small, unmistakable figure moving through the same quads I crossed on my way to hall.”

“Small” probably indicates distance, rather than that he shrunk to hobbit-size in old age!

* And finally, a UK local newspaper reports Vintage recordings of The Hobbit unearthed on Metro line in Tyne and Wear.

Tolkien Gleanings #385

* A new book from Oxford University Press, Science and Religion in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis: The Quest for the Best Mental Model of the Universe. Due for publication in print on 14th March 2026, and available now as a Kindle ebook, the book is…

“the first comprehensive examination of C.S. Lewis’s views on the relationship between science and religion, authored by an internationally acclaimed writer recognized as an authority on both Lewis and the field of science and religion. […] While some continue to characterize Lewis as an anti-scientific Luddite entrenched in medieval fantasies, this analysis makes it clear that Lewis was well-acquainted with both the cultural perceptions of science and religion during the medieval and Renaissance eras, as well as the major philosophical and cultural debates concerning their relationship during the middle of the twentieth century.”

* On YouTube, Paolo Nardi usefully summarises and discusses Fulvio Ferrari’s recent Italian-language book Gli altri mondi dell’eroe: Beowulf e la letteratura fantasy, which has a chapter that… “explores the profound connection between the Anglo-Saxon poem and the work of Tolkien”. He also links to a review of the book from the Italian Tolkien Studies Association…

“Fulvio Ferrari is a retired professor of Germanic philology at the University of Trento [and his new book has] an entire chapter dedicated to Tolkien, or rather to the influence that the Anglo-Saxon poem in question has had on both the Oxford professor’s work as a scholar and as a storyteller.”

* In the new ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, “Of Him the Harpers Sadly Sing”: Fragmentary Ballad Diction and Transmission in The Lord of the Rings” ($ paywall).

* Elfenomeno begins a new series of blog articles on adaptation by considering From Middle-earth to the Cinema (I): Beren and Luthien…

“This article explores the possibilities — and the dangers — of adapting the story of Beren and Luthien to film, one of the Great Tales of the First Age.”

* A new essay on “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Vision of Just War”, being an expanded free chapter from the book The Hobbit Party (2014) which explored aspects of Tolkien’s politics.

* John Garth has a new article on “‘Going west’: How war in 1914 resurrected an ancient image for dying”. Freely available online.

“War changes language. In Tolkien and the Great War I put it this way: “English received an enormous jolt of electricity from the new technologies and experiences of the Great War. Old words received new meanings; new words were coined; foreign phrases were bastardized.””

* The latest British Fantasy Society Journal is a special on ‘War in Fantasy’, or perhaps just with a long lead article on the topic. Members only and no contents-list online, it seems, but there is an indicative cover available…

* A call for papers for a conference on ‘Children, Literature, and the Christian Imagination’, 23rd-24th October 2026 at the University of Toronto, Canada. Submission deadline: 31st March 2026.

* The latest Weird Studies podcast considers Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring as a work of weird fiction, re: the Old Forest and evil sentient trees, the cosmic ancientness of Bombadil, ring-wraiths, barrow wights, strange elves, warg attack (Gandalf: “these were no ordinary wolves”), the Watcher in the Water, and the eerie darkness of Moria.

* The Salon Futura (February 2026) online fanzine is a special issue on Welsh Fantasy. Freely available online.

* ‘Technologies of the Fantastic’ is an online conference set for 13th-15th May 2026. The title appears to be somewhat misleading, as the organisers state they intend to focus on… “the technologies of fantasy” in particular, such as… “carefully constructed runes and magical glyphs that operate as locks and keys; in the textile metaphors of spell weaving; in the taxonomy of the naming [of natural elemental forces]”. I’d hazard a guess that one might also consider magical maps, the forging of enchanted weapons, and even magical herb lore? Registration for the conference is required (not yet open) and will be via Eventbrite.

* And finally, Hammond and Scull’s latest Book Notes post draws my attention to The Salisbury Museum and Art Gallery’s heavily illustrated catalogue for their substantial show ‘British Art: Ancient Landscapes’ (2016). Being… “the first significant publication to range over the entire field” of artistic works depicting the very ancient sites of the British Isles such as stone circles, hill-figures, barrows and the like. Paperbacks appear to still be available, if the badly-scanned full preview interests, though Amazon UK suggests there are only five copies remaining.

From Blake’s Milton a Poem in 2 books, detail from plate 4. The subject on the right of the painting is a balanced rock, but at first glance could also very easily be read as a ship having just descended from sailing among the stars. Tolkien read Blake’s prophetic books in February 1919.