Tolkien Gleanings #405

* The call for papers for Omentielva Minquea, the 11th International Conference on Tolkien’s Invented Languages. Set for 30th July – 2nd August 2026 at Marquette University in the USA…

“The proceedings of the conference will be published in the eleventh volume of Arda Philology, meant to appear in 2027 (although the publication still has a backlog).”

* Italy’s Fantasy Magazine has a brief review of Tolkien e l’Irlanda: Un viaggio tra miti e influenze (summer 2025) (‘Tolkien and Ireland: a journey through myths and influences’). Evidently a short book of 112 pages, which begins with inner-city Digbeth in 1900 where we find the newly-Catholic Tolkien family among the recent Irish immigrants who attended the Catholic church of St. Anne, Birmingham. Then on through his discovery of the Gaelic language and the ancient myths of Ireland. Finally, accounts of his visits to Ireland, and the publication of his fine 1955 poem on the life of Saint Brendan. I guess it’ll also mention things like Leaf by Niggle being published in The Dublin Review in 1945, but the blurb/review doesn’t mention that.

* Talking of St. Anne’s, I recently found this good scan of a Birmingham postcard of a humble church hall. The eBay seller specified no location other than Birmingham. I realised that the half-hidden map of Ireland on the wall (see the upper right) probably meant this was the hall of a Catholic church serving recent arrivals from rural Ireland. St. Anne’s had a low church hall of the same sort immediately adjacent (it’s still there today), but this is probably not the same. There would have been many halls like this in Digbeth. Still, the photograph is a rare interior photograph and it seems highly evocative of the Catholic Birmingham encountered by the Tolkien family in the spring/summer/autumn of 1900.

Here the photograph is also restored by Nano Banana v2 which, for once, copied almost all details from the source. Though it has added the mirror at the back, which one might whimsically imagine to have been for the priest, standing at the back, to keep an eye on the back benches. Though the ‘mirror’ was far more likely just another framed print.

* The Tolkien-friendly Word on Fire has a new imprint… “Word on Fire Luminor, a new publishing imprint dedicated to renewing the rich tradition of Catholic literature for today’s readers.” Only a few titles as yet, but they’re obviously open to non-fiction as well as fiction…

There’s an interview with the new imprint’s editor here with a pitch email.

* At the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in Birmingham city-centre, “The Music of The Lord of The Rings”, a tribute to Howard Shore. Set for 16th May 2026, and booking now. Children age 6+ are welcome. The Conservatoire is the main music-teaching centre for the West Midlands, located a short walk from Birmingham New St. train station.

* And finally, due for publication on 12th May 2026, The Franchise is a dystopian sci-fi novel which appears to offer a determined poke at the Tolkien franchise. Possibly the book is just a rehash of a rather tired old sci-fi idea, and is only playing on the Tolkien connection for book-boosting publicity? But we’ll know soon enough. The book’s idea is that in the 1940s the famous book The Malicarn re-defined fantasy with its land “filled with magic and dragons and wizards and warriors”. Then the author died after a lifetime of assiduously nurturing his creation, only for his commercially-minded son to quickly turn it into a money-spinner. The resulting franchise spawned dozens of lesser newly-written books, and a series of big-screen blockbusters. Now AI, theme-park and fan-fever have all converged to make a never-ending content-factory for the avid fans, a factory which is also a built physical place. There the cast are made up of actors and fans who believe themselves to be living in The Malicarn. But one of them begins to doubt…

Tolkien Gleanings #404

* Dimitra Fimi considers “Gandalf’s fireworks”, and specifically their terminology (“squibs, crackers, backarappers, sparklers, torches, dwarf-candles, elf-fountains, goblin-barkers and thunderclaps”) in historical context. (Substack, but free).

* The University of Iowa’s latest Iowa Magazine has a new faculty profile article, “Iowa Professor Explores J.R.R. Tolkien’s Influence on ’60s Counterculture”. Who knew that Stuart Hall studied under Tolkien?

“Sparked by this previously overlooked connection between two cultural giants [Hall and Tolkien], Lavezzo embarked on an academic adventure exploring Tolkien’s influence on 1960s counterculture — a topic Hall first touched on in his 1968 essay, “The Hippies: An American ‘Moment.’” Lavezzo’s research project has taken her around the world to interview sources, inspired an upcoming book titled ‘Hobbits and Hippies: Fantasy and the Long Sixties’. [Though this is] a book still in the research stage”.

* An article I missed noting, in the latest Mythlore, “Tolkien’s Thomist Triad: A High Medieval Response to Contemporary Jus Ad Bellum”. Freely available online. You wouldn’t know it from the title — unless you can read Latin — but this turns out to be about the timely matter of what justifies war. The essay outlines ‘just war theory’ from the…

“early medieval to early modern eras and compares its principles [to those found in Tolkien’s Middle-earth …] I conclude that Tolkien’s fictional works permit broader justifications for war than do most modern just war theorists.”

* Tolkien Medieval and Modern considers “Lost Identity and Found Myth in The Lost Road”.

* Just released in English, the short book Finnish Mythology: Introduction to Myths, Gods and Legends (2026).

* And finally, learn The Language of the Dwarves: A Beginner Course. Starts 24th May 2026…

“This is a fully structured course of nine lessons, designed to guide you from the very foundations of the language to practical use. It includes detailed documents, audio segments, and a wide range of exercises, with the option to receive personal feedback along the way.”

Tolkien Gleanings #403

* A new website, The Dwarrow Scholar: Your source for all things Dwarvish. With new long essays, including “How Geology Shaped the Great Dwarven Mansions” in Middle-earth.

* Tolkien: Medieval and Modern has a new essay on “The Binding of the Dwarves” and notes Biblical parallels.

* Signum University has a Helcaraxe Moot event set for August 2026, to be held in Alaska. The one-day conference has the interesting and location-specific theme of “The Long Winter and the Unending Light: Endurance in Tolkien’s World and the North” and papers and contributions on the topic are sought. “Presentations can be delivered in-person at the event or remotely from your location”, and the submission deadline is 1st July 2026.

* The official Jesuits.org website weighs in on the question “What We Can Learn From Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination”.

* A Damn Fine Cup considers the music composed for the old BBC Radio Lord Of The Rings adaptation…

“Shadowfax gets this delightful tune: capturing in music a fleet-footed horse both frolicking but then in an epic gallop across leagues of Middle-earth. It’s a tune I would love to see performed live one day.”

* And finally, a recent copy of the UK’s weekly Country Life magazine (1st April 2026, Easter special) had an item on church Easter traditions. The article unwittingly threw light on a key moment in The Lord of the Rings. re: Gandalf’s deep and unforced laughter at the Field of Cormallen, and also Sam’s laughter there, both of which take place on an Easter-ish day. As Gandalf says, “the eighth day of April”. Here’s the relevant bit of the article…

“For much of the mediaeval period, there was a well-established ritual for churches to invoke the risus paschalis or ‘Easter laughter’. Specifically the priest would seek to begin their Easter sermons by making the congreation laugh […] they viewed it as ncessary to provoke a real, deep and unfeighned laugh from the assembled company. The laughter was thought to be directed at no other target than Death itself. The joy of Christ’s resurrection and its consequences was thought to be so great and triumphant that only laughter would do by way of response. We know that the practice survived the Reformation, as comic actors in the time of Shakespeare would listen to Easter sermons to pick up gags and tips on delivery.”

Tolkien Gleanings #402

* The new Spring 2026 edition of Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature is now freely available online. Including, among many others, articles on…

    – Elwing and Earendil and the “Living Light” of Love.
    – The Significance of Ioreth, Wise Woman of Gondor.
    – The Enigma of Goldberry and the River-woman.

Also a wealth of reviews, including The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Women of Middle-earth.

* The April 2026 issue of Journal of Inklings Studies is now available ($ partly paywalled). Free access to the book reviews, which include long reviews of Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology and its companion Theology and Tolkien: Constructive Theology, Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation, The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination, and J.R.R. Tolkien: A Very Short Introduction. The latter is found to be…

“a must-read for all scholars, students, and readers of English literature who are willing to dive into the depths of Tolkien’s literary world – guided by lucid prose and an engaging style, all in just over 100 pages”

* Malcolm Guite gives a short interview about his major new book Galahad and the Grail…

“Malcolm Guite helps contemporary readers experience an authentic version of the Arthurian legends in modern language. Here at the height of his poetic power, Malcolm Guite delivers a tale of adventure in ballad form that plumbs the depths of the human soul, carries readers through the Wasteland, and sets them upon the numinous shores of Faerie.”

* Another restored view of the young Tolkien’s Birmingham. The Great Hall of Birmingham University, where Tolkien was brought from France. Still not a great picture, due to the uneven contrast and dark shadows. But now much crisper than others available online. An alternative view, without the upper half of the Hall, can also be found in Garth’s Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, page 173.

It strikes me that, should the Tolkien Society succeed in getting Sarehole Mill as their HQ, their success might trigger the formation of a new ‘Tolkien Scholarship Collection’ in the city? This could be housed nearby, and where better than at Birmingham University? All the Tolkien scholarship books (500+ and growing by the month) shelved in a one-room reference collection, alongside runs of journals, handily located in the middle of the nation.

* And finally, talking of the West Midlands, the touring Magic of Middle-earth exhibition is to return here. The exhibition opens at Bewdley Museum in July 2026. Their free opening-day events sound rather substantial. Viking reenactments and… “warriors [to] bring the spirit of the Northmen to life”, a performance of Beowulf, and… “you’ll be welcomed by two towering, friendly tree-giants”, among other attractions. The show runs 4th July – 27th September 2026. The opening event is obviously free, but the exhibition page says nothing on the matter of a charge.

Tolkien Gleanings #401

* The latest Antigone: An Open Forum For The Classics has an article musing at length on “Arbor fulgida: The Origins of Tolkien’s Shining Tree”. Freely available online.

* Newly announced by Tom Shippey’s growing Uppsala Books imprint, the book The Trees of Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Environmental Philosophy. No sign of it on Amazon UK as yet, so presumably due later in 2026.

* The Oxford Tolkien Network’s YouTube channel has posted six new videos. Including Thomas Honneger on “Habitatio est omen – or: Like land, like people”. He discusses how Tolkien skillfully matches character morality with place and language.

* The Wade Center’s interview podcast has a new YouTube episode “Filming the Lives of Lewis and Tolkien”, with Kirk Manton…

In this week’s episode, co-hosts Dr. Jim Beitler and Aaron Hill sit down with Kirk Manton, the producer of a forthcoming five-part documentary about the lives and friendship of Lewis and Tolkien titled, ‘The Forge of Friendship’ (Eastgate Creative)”.

* A new call for papers on “Tolkien, Barfield, and the Inklings: Questions of Influence”, for a Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference session. The call implies the influence of Owen Barfield may at times have been overstated, and asks…

“What about other connections between the individual Inklings, are there significant literary or philosophical influences? Shared methods, perhaps, or something else? Have Tolkien’s recently published works, or recent analyses and developments of Barfield’s “ancient semantic unity,” changed this judgment?”

* The Catholic World Report has a new article “Mythology and what it means to be human” which compares Tolkien with T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight.

* A student presentation Appreciating the role of the music in the movie of The Fellowship of the Ring (2026). The slides are freely available online, and one slide suggests that the key “The Shire” music has antecedants…

* And finally, a restored view of the ‘Four Arches’ bridge and ford at Sarehole, circa spring 1903 (source card posted March 1904).

Tolkien Gleanings #400

The 400th edition of Tolkien Gleanings! If you find my regular Gleanings useful, please consider a small monthly donation via Patreon.

* A new PhD thesis from New Zealand, “Echoes of music dim: Hard hope in J.R.R. Tolkien’s early heroic legends” (2026). Freely available online, the thesis…

“examines the presence and quality of difficult Hope in J.R.R. Tolkien’s early mythology, chiefly across the years c. 1913 to c. 1938. Approaching his work through the combined lenses of biography, mythological vision, linguistic pursuit, and religious conviction, it treats the ‘tower’ of Tolkien’s legendarium not as a structure to be dismantled, but as a work of remarkable craft still able to grant a meaningful view. At its centre lies Hope as a vital, often hidden bond-stone in Tolkien’s so-called Great Tales: not optimism, but a hard and costly longing for things to come right, somehow, grounded in an ultimately eschatological horizon. Because Tolkien was not a theologian working in systematic terms, this study follows Hope as he himself explored it”

* The new book Vikings, Knights, Elves, and Ogres: Essays in Honor of Shaun F.D. Hughes (2026) has the chapter “Thoughts on J.R.R. Tolkien’s and E.V. Gordon’s ‘Viking Club’ Songbook at Leeds, and Related Nordic Songbooks”.

* Tolkien: Medieval and Modern has the new long essay “On Darkness and Tongues”, musing on the ‘darkness’ of the… “words of the secret dwarf-tongue that they teach to none”. Freely available online.

* Thoughts on Tolkien plausibly considers “The Long Shadow of Bilbo”, re: his likely influence on the breaking of the Fellowship. Freely available online.

* At Reddit, a seemingly new “List of all aphorisms from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings”.

* Mythprint Vol 60, No. 4 (2023) is now released from its membership embargo and freely available for download. This issue has a review of the book Middle-earth, or There and Back Again (2020), this being Cormare Series No. 44 published by Walking Tree.

“In the tradition of source studies and those reception studies which undertake close readings, [the book’s authors] engage with material with which Tolkien was certainly familiar, and yet they are not afraid to move beyond an illustrative mode of correspondence, that is, treading the lines between ‘source’ and ‘target’”.

* And finally, a Tolkien weekend is planned for Great Haywood in mid Staffordshire, in July 2026. Free admission. With the event poster suggesting there will also be a showing of artworks relating to Tolkien and Edith in the locality during wartime. Some of these are glimpsed on the poster.

Tolkien Gleanings #399

* News of a forthcoming book, Joy Beyond All Worlds: Universal Salvation, George MacDonald, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Judging by the table-of-contents it looks like a deep dive into MacDonald’s Christianity and its historical context, followed by a shorter four chapter section relating these ideas and themes to Tolkien’s Ainulindale.

* News of a new book from Italy, from the author of Dentro i panni di Gandalf: Tra letteratura e spiritualita nella Terra di Mezzo di J.R.R. Tolkien (2024) (‘In Gandalf’s Shoes: Between Literature and Spirituality in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth’). He is giving a university talk on his new book due soon, which appears to be on the theme of ‘Tolkien today: between cinema and literature’.

* A short interview in Italian with the art historian who worked on the new Tolkien in Italia documentary film, which is now screening in Italy…

“His letters clearly show how much Tolkien was struck by the beauty of the places he visited in our splendid country. He stopped briefly in the city of Verona, but his most significant memories are associated with Venice and Assisi, in Umbria. He was fascinated by the mosaics of San Marco and the paintings of Tintoretto, but the pilgrimage to the lands of Saint Francis aroused very strong emotions in him. As a Catholic, he felt even more the spirituality that always fills those places. Oddly enough, he never went to Rome, the capital.”

* In German in the Swiss magazine HR Today, Thomas Honegger interviewed on leadership lessons from The Lord of the Rings. Freely available online.

* On Etsy, pre-orders are now open for the book Tolkien’s Tragedy: Concerning Numenor, the Rings of Power, and the Second Age. The third volume in his ‘The Mind of Tolkien’ series from a popular podcaster, the book seeks to unravel the “hidden narrative unity” of the Second Age. Hopefully, the title’s apparent reference to the TV series is just a marketing ploy.

* A new YouTube channel has two short clips in English, “Birmingham Oratory and J.R.R. Tolkien” and “Newman’s Library in Birmingham”. Filmed inside the Birmingham Oratory, but I’m uncertain where they’ve come from.

The presenter gives hesitant and passing credence to the hoary old claim about the ‘Two Towers of Edgbaston Waterworks’. He may be more correct on the claim that the Tolkien brothers were briefly housed in the rooms of the Oratory itself, since the Oratory website has…

“A brief stop at the Oratory [following their mother’s death] was could be no more than a temporary expedient, as the community was large and part of the building was used a dormitories for the boys of the adjacent Oratory Public School, leaving space almost non-existent.”

I daresay the Oratory could instantly crowd-fund a few million to make a high-quality feature-length Ken Burns-style documentary film about the young Tolkien in Birmingham, with a focus on his religious upbringing in the city, but… these clips don’t feel like they’ve come from something like that.

* And finally, Tolkien: Medieval and Modern has another fine long essay on how “Everyone Knows a Sam”…

“Sam speaks ‘sermo humilis’ (a description he’d not even know how to define). It’s humble speech, the style of the Gospels: the books in the Bible that talk about fisherman and tax collectors, those on par with Sam the gardener.”

Tolkien Gleanings #398

* The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly for summer 2025, is a Tolkien special issue. The lead articles are “Four Wizards, Six Hobbits, and One Poor, Obsolete Elm-tree: Tolkien and Childhood” and “The Fairy Tale Debate with Andrew Lang in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories”” ($ paywall).

* New in the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, Entiscum yrfe Ealdniflunga: Meter and Poetic Style in Tolkien’s Old English Attila. In which Tolkien recreated in Old English… “a ‘lost original’ poem of the Nibelung saga”. Freely available online.

* From Italy, an abstract for an embargoed 2026 book chapter in Italian, whose title translates as “The Return of a King: Models for Imperfect Sovereignty”…

“Aragorn […] could be defined as an example of imperfect kingship. Elrond’s teaching enriches his character by instilling complexity and originality, and thus Aragorn escapes the classical model of the king, instead asserting himself in his own way. To understand this, we will examine models of kingship to which Tolkien was certainly sensitive and which oriented his and his generation’s mental frameworks. It is not a question of tracing a precise collection of historical models, but of recognizing prejudices and expectations, rooted in the political culture of the times. These make the Professor’s approach to kingship — and, in particular, to the return of King Aragorn — truly original.”

* From Japan, a 2026 article in English on “Vengeance and Grace in Tolkien’s Sub-Creation”. Freely available online.

* Tolkien: Medieval and Modern has a new blog essay “On Tolkien’s Usage of Style”.

* Looks like the Brandywine Festival tickets are now on sale for Staffordshire in 2026. Note the £25 surcharge ticket for early arrival, and the requirement to bring your own food.

* The major fan-fiction website Archive of Our Own is at last leaving behind its long-running Open Beta status.

* On eBay, another chance to get a vintage postcard of the Birmingham Oratory Retreat, at Rednal in the north of the Lickey Hills.

Restored version via Nano Banana v2, which is very prone to inventing details that didn’t exist at the time. But in this case my prompt worked well: “Restore and colorize the image, as if photographed with a modern Hasselblad camera. Retain the exact layout, proportions, foliage massing, and the outline of the building against the sky.” Even then, the sundial needed manual Photoshop-ery to get it back to being a sundial rather than a blobby ‘sculpture’. And Banana has shut three of the open windows. Google’s Nano Banana v2 (online only) can be had for free with 400 free credits a month, at the Comfy Cloud, and with none of the proportions-jiggering and watermarking malarky that you get at Google Gemini (also free). Though you will need to know how to use ComfyUI, as this worthy local freeware’s user-interface is reproduced exactly in your Web browser. If you need two tries at generating a large 2k image, then you’ll consume around 40 credits. There’s no monthly rollover of credits.

* And finally, the Oxford Mail local newspaper reports that a local antique shop has unearthed a copy of Songs For The Philologists. The booklet has thirteen poems by Tolkien, and… “just 15 copies are thought to be in existence”. The copy, now for sale at a whopping £65,000, was once in the possession of…

“Professor Arthur Brown (1921-1979), who taught literature at University College London and was an associate of Tolkien. He shared the Oxford professor’s interests in Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic literature, and alongside his copy of Songs For The Philologists — probably obtained during his tenure at UCL — Prof. Brown also owned Tolkien’s original illustrated manuscript for Visio de Doworst.”

The Doworst mentioned here was Tolkien’s… “Humorous verse ‘report’, relating remarkable errors committed by nervous students in oral English examinations at the University of Oxford”, written in the style of Piers Plowman (Reader’s Guide, 2007).

Readers unable to find the requisite bitcoin down the back of the sofa, can find the text of Songs For The Philologists for free at the Internet Archive.