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).
