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.