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.”