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.
