Tolkien Gleanings #444

* Elfenomeno interviews Janet Brennan Croft, editor of Mythlore…

“the field is mature enough that we now need specialized bibliographies and histories of certain themes in the [Tolkien] scholarship.”

* The latest issue of the French journal Fantasy Art and Studies is issue 20, themed as Chronicles of Another Time: Fantasy Confronts Historical Writing. Includes…

   – “”I have a historical mind”: the First Age and Tolkien’s relationship to historicity through the evolution of the loremaster Pengolod in the 1950s” (in French)
   – “Beautiful Creatures in Motion: The Unsolvable Conundrum of Historicizing Moral Fables in Plato and Tolkien” (in English)

* Tolkien & Illustration summarises in English the new PhD thesis Illustrer Tolkien: la Terre du Milieu du texte a l’image (‘Illustrating Tolkien: Middle-earth from text to image’) (June 2026). There’s also a download link to the full thesis in French.

* New in the rolling open-access Journal of Tolkien Research, “He Had Named Himself the Stranger” which…

“examines the narrative functions of strangeness and hospitality in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Book of Lost Tales [and suggests that Tolkien] “transforms the guest from a [traditional Northern] hero whose deeds secure fame into a cultural mediator whose listening and inscription preserve a threatened mythic tradition.”

* Also new in the Journal of Tolkien Research, the conference paper “Getting Tolkien Right: Middle-earth in the National Review”. Surveys the discussion of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion by four writers in William F. Buckley’s U.S. conservative magazine National Review, from 1965-1981.

* The forthcoming new book Human* Being: On Otherkin Identity and Digital Community (August 2026) has a chapter which peers back to the brief U.S. Tolkien craze of the 1960s, and notes where some of those people went in the 1970s after the counterculture burned out. The chapter is seeking early cos-players who liked to pretend they really were other-than-human (dragons, elves, hobbits etc)…

“beginning with elven love letters; through zines, role-playing games, and early Web fora; and into contemporary social media ubiquity. And we will start back with those young Tolkien fans. Moving into the 1970s, many of them took up Neopaganism and began to more fully embrace the reenchantment of the world. Some of those did so in a way that hearkened back to Tolkien and began to identify with elves almost as a Rousseau-ian ideal. And a few began to identify as elves.”

* In the new issue of Postmedieval, the interview “Caroline Bynum is a child of the Sixties: A conversation”…

“When I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, my mother had a friend from her graduate school days who used to send us English books to thank my mother, who had sent food packages to her in England during the war. One year the first volume of Lord of the Rings arrived. My mother was too busy to read it. But I read it, fell in love with it, and saved up my money to buy volume two (which had to be ordered from England). Then, of course, volume three was not yet published. My mother told her friend about my enthusiasm, and she promised to send the book (copies were not yet available in the US in 1954–1955). I can remember long summer days of sitting on the front steps of my house in Atlanta waiting for the post to come. When volume three finally came, my mother’s friend had gotten a copy of volume three autographed for me by Tolkien. My daughter, who also loved the books, has that autographed first edition still.”

* The forthcoming book Proof-of-Concept: Visions of Peace and Nonviolence in Pop Culture (Amazon UK “knows nuurthing” about it, as yet, so no ETA) has a chapter which surveys “Nonviolent activism in The Lord of the Rings”…

“One major through-line of the book is the careful depiction of what war is actually like: how much time, energy, and effort it actually takes, and how the devastation it causes ranges from the immediate to the long-term, from direct to indirect impacts. Furthermore, LoTR does not present the logics of militarized political violence as inevitable – it shows readers again and again both the choice-laden nature of these activities and that alternatives are always available. This brings a criticality to Tolkien’s depiction of war that is important to recognize. That being said, LoTR is not a straightforwardly antiwar text – the free peoples of the world going to war against Sauron’s and Saruman’s armies is portrayed as a justified response [yet] it is also portrayed as deeply tragic, because the business of war is not only all-consuming, but also highly destructive in both immediate and more subtle ways. That much is lost in war, and that much of what is lost is not even clearly recognized as such, is a strong theme throughout LoTR.”

* A forthcoming academic book on Shakespeare’s Enemies, now underway though at an early stage…

“Shakespeare’s Enemies is a project that takes on, for the first time really as a book-length project, the history of Shakespearean animus — by which I mean those individuals, artists, creators, educators, students, popular public figures who just really don’t like Shakespeare. There’s actually been surprisingly little attention paid to this. But as it turns out, many of our most accomplished and famous writers really didn’t like Shakespeare — from Ben Jonson to Voltaire to Wittgenstein to Tolstoy, even to J.R.R. Tolkien, who, kind of surprisingly, wasn’t really a big fan of Shakespeare. […] Tolkien, as a fantasist, really took umbrage at Shakespeare’s treatment of fairies and elves.”

* The latest Weekend University podcast is “Owen Barfield, Imagination, & The Evolution of Consciousness”… “a conversation between Dr. Mark Vernon and Professor Peter Hawkins”. Free on Youtube.

* Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion (Volume 4, Issue 1) has Mark Valentine surveying “The Other Country: Numinous Landscape in English Supernatural Fiction”. ($ print only).

* Good to see that the town of Crickhowell has nearly raised enough to pay for Tolkien’s important and newly-discovered ‘Crickhollow letter’, which they recently won at auction. the GoFundMe fundraiser now stands as just over £18k of the £20k needed.

* And finally, the 26-part The Lord Of The Rings BBC Radio dramatisation (1981) is to be issued on vinyl and CD sets for Christmas 2026. I imagine we’ll also get the related Radio Times magazine spot-art and cover-art as a small artbook, in the bundle?

Tolkien Gleanings #443

* On now and running until November 2026, “Here Be Dragons: Anglo-Saxon Influence on Fantasy” is a substantial exhibition at Jarrow Hall (‘Anglo-Saxon Farm and Village and Bede Museum’) in Northumbria, England. On 1st August, as part of a Festival at the Hall, they will have… “a guided tour to discuss the influences of the Anglo-Saxons on author J.R.R. Tolkien and his work.” They have a reconstructed village/farm, and on the same day as the Tolkien talk the… “living history group Regia Anglorum will be bringing the Anglo-Saxon period to life” on the site. Sounds good, if you’re up that way.

* From Brazil in open-access, the student dissertation “Paisagem sonora e a musicalidade narrativa em O Hobbit, de J.R.R. Tolkien” (June 2026)…

“The analysis reveals a rich and integrated soundscape where nature sounds, voices, songs, musical instruments, bells, and silence perform symbolic and structural functions in the construction of Middle-earth [as found in The Hobbit].”

* The first issue of the new British Journal of Religious Education has “In search of Aquinas in Middle-earth: pedagogical potentials for Thomistic virtue ethics through The Lord of the Rings” ($ paywall). The article suggests using The Lord of the Rings can help students to understand “Aquinas’ moral anthropology”.

* Newly added to the latest rolling Journal of Tolkien Studies, the short article “Some notes on a Tolkien’s manuscript linked to “Leaf by Niggle””. This tries to determine the dating of the earliest version of the tale. Freely available online.

* The New Oxford Review has a long article on “Tolkien’s Insights into the Masculine Soul: The Call of Chivalry”. Freely available online.

* Wormwoodiana on an older wave of English ‘whimsical fantasy’ for adults, and the post names 11 books…

“[The novel] Flower Phantoms belongs to a curious and largely neglected British literary mode that flourished in the interwar and early WWII years. In Past Lives of Old Books, R.B. Russell calls this loose tradition “whimsical fantasy,” offering a handful of exemplars…”

* Saint Tolkien interviews artist Matej Cadil. Cadil’s latest Substack post and artwork is “The Dance in the Hemlock Glade That Shaped Tolkien’s Legendarium” (Substack, but free).

* New to me, Joshua Tabti’s finely-drawn and appealing Tolkien style maps for England, Wales, Cornwall, Oxfordshire, Northumberland, the British Isles etc.

* And finally, talking of hemlock glades and routes across a leafy shire… the new one-hour YouTube video “Can I walk across England’s most Tolkien-esque county using only footpaths?”. A south Staffordshire man tries to link up footpaths so that he only uses footpaths to go forty or so miles across Shropshire. No roads, no going through villages or towns. ‘Medieval’ style travelling without a map, and walking across country while picking up water from churchyard taps. He had tried to map such a route in south or mid Staffordshire, but couldn’t do it. So he popped over to neighbouring Shropshire.

Listen in audio-only, if you get sea-sick from a wobbly camera, though. Alternatively, you can make a converted video of it that is more of a slideshow. Use the desktop PC freeware FastFlix which is a modern 2026 GUI for the venerable ffmpeg. It will download the required ffmpeg (160Mb) when first launched. Then download your video from YouTube, load it into FastFlix, choose a good quality setting, and in the Custom ffmpeg options use…

-vf "select=not(mod(n\,375))"

The command inserts every 375th frame x 375 times in the resulting video, converting the video to a slideshow of static frames. At the frame-rate for a downloaded YouTube video, this command gives you static frames at a nice pace. Audio is unchanged, and still in sync. Works very nicely, and no sea-sickness. Five minutes to convert a one-hour 480px video, in this case. Obviously if you can get a better 720px video download with audio from YouTube, then it will take a bit longer.

Tolkien Gleanings #442

* The Oxford Tolkien Network has posted six YouTube videos from their latest series of public talks…

   – “Charting Faerie: Cartography as the Threshold of Enchantment”.
   – “Lexical Palimpsests: Old English and Old Norse Loan Words in Tolkien’s Gnomish Lexicon (1917)”.
   – “Downfalls and Ruins: Tolkien and the Lost World of Catholic England”.
   – “The Verbal System of Quenya: Structures, Functions, and Linguistic Models in Tolkien’s Linguistic Invention”.
   – “Genealogy of Smaug: draconic influences on Tolkien”.
   – “Tolkien the Parodist: Revisiting Songs for the Philologists”.

* Also new on YouTube, “Taking Tolkien’s 1920 Old English Exam”…

“In 1920, Tolkien sent a practice exam to a student at Somerville College, Oxford, to help her study. These questions, many of which were taken verbatim from previous exams, give us a fascinating insight into what Old English education at Oxford might have been like 100 years ago.”

* The Tolkienist has a new long and footnoted essay on “”The Man, O Muse, inform, that many a way / Wound”: On Aragorn and Odysseus as Wandering Men in Tolkien and Homer”.

* New on Archive.org from the author, the book of personal memoirs Meditations: Contemplations Straight Out Of Joburg (2024). This has the brief “Winter in Bloemfontein” (Tolkien’s birthplace and home for his early years), which modifies one’s assumption that the city was always very hot.

“Wintertime in Bloemfontein is not cold … it’s bitterly cold.” At best one could expect a “bitterly cold” morning, and a “bitter cold and unforgiving, razorblade breeze”, even when the winter sun was shining and promising some thawing later in the day.

* The latest edition of the Spanish open-access journal Razon y fe is a special issue on ‘Death: a limit, a truth and a promise’. It has the Spanish-language article “Death as a Gift and a Problem in Tolkien’s Writings”, with an English title and abstract.

“… it is argued that Tolkien presents death as an original gift of the one God, constitutive of human freedom and of his openness to a hope that transcends the world. [The] denial of finitude reappears symbolically in the One Ring, which offers a false overcoming of time at the price of dehumanization …”

* TheOneRing rounds up all the relevant panels and merchant tables for LoTR franchises at the San Diego Comic Con 2026. Panels at this huge event will include, among others…

   – Musical Worldbuilding.
   – Building Worlds like Tolkien.
   – Designing Games in Middle-earth.
   – LoTR: New Age of Adaptations.

* And finally, in Italian but auto-dubbed by YouTube, Paolo Nardi has the new short talk on “From Wade to Earendil: Tolkien’s Lost Tale”. Tolkien’s character of Earendil is discussed in the context of the primary-world lost tale of Wade.

I’d add that it is possible to get a ‘magical’ meaning out of a key primary-world reference to Wade found in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale. Chaucer has an old man determined to marry a young wife. The old man does not want to marry a woman over the age of 30, and says so thus:

I woll no woman of thirty Winter age / It nis but Beanestraw and great forage
And eke thise old widowes (God it wote) / They connen so much craft in Wades bote
So muchel broken harme whan hem list / That with hem should I neuer liue in rest.

I want no woman who has seen thirty winters.
She’ll be nothing but old stringy straw and dry weeds.
And if she’s one of those old widows, God help us!
Then — like Wade’s boat — she’ll know how to get so much out of her hole,
And will go on moaning even when she pleases [in bed],
That with her I should never live a restful life.

In other words an old window-woman would be adept at withholding sex until nagged-at chores were done by the husband. Then the old man comically imagines that even in bed she would still go on moaning out her complaints and demands. The implication could be that the hold of Wade’s boat magically concealed more inside than it appeared to on the outside: a sort of medieval TARDIS. Possibly there is then some relation here to the *weydh-, the ‘hunt’ and the implied ‘catch-bag of the hunt’ containing the day’s take of hunt-meat and/or fish. The hold of Wade’s boat might then be akin to a sort of magical bottomless ‘catch-bag of plenty’ — from which any treasure or weapons or tools or food might appear to serve the tale. Wade’s lost tale was apparently a “ridiculous romance” (or so said Chaucer), so such fanciful and magical notions might well have been present in it.

Note also that the six surviving lines of the lost Wade epic enigmatically mention ‘nixies’ and water, which may interest some readers of Gleanings.

Tolkien Gleanings #441

* Newly added to the latest rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, Kristine Larsen’s “Echoes of Medieval Timekeeping in Middle-earth and Valinor”. Freely available online.

“… investigates medieval resonances and echoes in a sample of his various schemes, demonstrating how Tolkien’s use of medievalist timekeeping is consistent with, and greatly adds to, his creation of a self-consistent invented world.”

* Details of the forthcoming programme for Omentielva Minquea 2026. Conference papers to be presented include, among others…

   – Surveying Christopher Tolkien’s Pronunciations.
   – Epigraphy, Philology, and the ‘Found Manuscript’ Topos in The Lord of the Rings.
   – “On Aelfwine’s Spelling”: An Analysis of Elvish Spelling in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Old English Manuscripts.

* The 3rd Swiss Tolkien Conference will take place in March 2027, on the theme of “Maps and Landscapes in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, with Thomas Honegger. A Walking Tree book of the conference proceedings will follow.

* Newly published, The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis (2026), from Oxford University Press. The ebook is available now, the print editions are delayed until August.

With the “upsidedownedness” of childlike wonder, Lewis reveals what Dickieson calls a “Theology of the Small,” filled with “sacred paradoxes” and offering a hopeful, transformative invitation to spiritual life.

* Just published, the book The Heaviest Ideas in the Universe: A Philosophy of Heavy Metal (2026). Includes the chapter “We Write Songs About Swords and Wizards from Space: Fantasy Metal and the Aspiration of Re‐enchantment”. The ebook is available now, the paperback is delayed until later in July.

* A call for papers for a one-day online conference from the Ukraine’s Centre for Fantasy Literature Studies, themed around the “Mysteries of Night in Fantasy Worlds”. Deadline: 31st October 2026.

* A new website from Middle-earth Enterprises, in the form of the newly-purchased lotr.com. It’s possible to join the waitlist there. After I joined I read… “the official club is taking shape in public beta”, and was told to wait for an email invite. It sounds like an ‘official’ fan-club, then, presumably to follow the various ventures planned by Enterprises?

* Talking of official LoTR franchises, some readers may recall that Gleanings recently stumbled on the abundant old-school Tolkien RPG output of Iron Crown Enterprises, issued under official licence in the 1980s. But there was more. I now find they also produced a series of solo-play paperbacks, starting in 1985. These were a cross between the simpler ‘choose your own adventure’ books of the time, and a more fully-fledged ‘rules and map’ boxed RPG. All packaged in a single self-contained paperback book at a pocket-money price.

* And finally, a new long “Introduction to Alliterative Verse for Readers and Writers of Speculative Fiction”. Freely available online. Tolkien had at least three notable contemporaries doing the same thing, the article notes, who beat him to publication…

“… by the mid-1950s, with the publication of The Lord of the Rings, we can already identify three examples of something that has since become almost commonplace: a piece of speculative fiction, featuring not only embedded poetry, but poetry in what general readers would surely consider a decidedly archaic mode.”

Tolkien Gleanings #440

* GoFundme fundraising for the “Crickhollow” Tolkien letter is now at £16.5k, of the £19k needed for the town to pay the auctioneer’s bill.

* Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien (2006) is now available in Italian translation. I see the English version also now has an affordable ebook version.

* “Phonaesthetics and the Music of Words”, a new podcast interview with Dr. John Holmes of the University of Steubenville. Free on Youtube.

* Quite understandably, your breath may not have been taken away on hearing of the new Handbook of Critical Respiratory Studies (2026). But note that (gasp!) it has the chapter “Breathing as Metaphor and Lived Experience in the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda: A Cultural Analysis”…

“Breath pervades the Old Norse imagination as both metaphor and lived reality. This chapter examines representations of breathing in the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, analyzing how Norse cosmology and myth make meaning of breath in cultural context […] Breath figures in the affective atmospheres of the sagas: sighs of grief, battle cries, and communal horn blasts at Ragnarok all illustrate breath’s relational and emotional dimensions. The analysis also shows how breath is ‘enacted’ through material and ritual contexts, from magical objects like Odin’s horn and the dwarves’ impossible ‘breath of a fish’, to the embodied practice of oath-swearing and prophecy.”

* A new PhD thesis from Italy, Anthropology of the Fantastic: Intangible Heritage, Community Engagement, and Socio-Cultural Innovation in Museum Practice (2026). Researched at museums in Italy and Canada. Freely available online, in English. The thesis appears trapped in an online page-viewer with no download button, but one can winkle out the PDF download link.

“… investigates the potential of the fantastic as a tool for socio-cultural innovation and community engagement, examined through an anthropological perspective and applied within museum practice. [Seeks to demonstrate] how the fantastic can be mobilized within cultural institutions to foster participation, strengthen territorial relationships, and support processes of socio-cultural innovation”

* Signum University’s adult education programme SPACE has been renamed ‘EverLearn’. Their new list of September 2026 online short-courses includes “Tolkien’s Great Tales: The Fall of Gondolin” and “Beginning Quenya 2”.

* The touring exhibition The Magic of Middle-earth has now reached Bewdley Museum in Worcestershire, where it has just opened. It runs until 27th September 2026. If you time it right, you could also combine it with the first Medieval Hereford Festival in August 2026.

* And finally, the National Folklore Survey’s Folklore Matters podcast has begun a second series.

Tolkien Gleanings #439

* Alas, Not Me digs into the LoTR drafts and excisions, to throw more light on the recent discovered “Crickhollow” letter, in “Treebeard on Tom Bombadil”. Yes, Tolkien excised a section where Treebeard discusses knowing Bombadil. Which is something the new letter refers to.

* John Garth tracks down the exact date that Tolkien had a £400 Leverhulme Fellowship award in the mid 1930s, and discusses the likely impact. (Substack, but free).

Industrialist and philanthropist Lord Leverhulme had died in 1925 leaving part of his legacy to scholarships for research. In May 1933, his trustees announced they would annually be handing out £12,000 in research fellowships.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of a 1952 printing of Gordon and Tolkien’s Sir Gawain & The Green Knight. This was… “the most widely used text of the poem for forty years”, in classrooms, until 1967.

* From Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, Eastern Europe, the undergraduate final dissertation “The Influence of Germanic Myths on J.R.R. Tolkien in Relation to the Character of Smaug” (2026). Freely available online, in English.

* The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has just published a new page on “Tolkien and the Somme”, with images, details on the duties of a signals officer, plus a FAQ.

* Thinking of visiting England this summer? Yes, for once we are having a rare real summer, complete with England in a World Cup and an inundation of iconic Red Admiral butterflies. Dorset’s Royal Signals Museum could be an interesting Tolkien-related stop for your tourist itinerary, if travelling over to Cornwall. Though be warned that it appears the First World War section is relatively small…

The museum’s First World War horse-drawn cable wagon (see image, lower right) is interesting, in relation to the possibility that Tolkien worked closely with horses at the battle-front. The new Commonwealth War Graves Commission page for Tolkien (see above) has… “Laying and repairing telephone wires across shell‑torn ground, often under bombardment” as a key duty of a Signals Officer.

* Need some suitable beach reading, this summer? There’s a new book from an Australian research centre, which has a matching theme. Whispers from Celtic Seas (June 2026) asks…

What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, showing how they preserve memories of dramatic environmental change — floods, land loss and shifting shorelines — carried forward through oral storytelling for generations. Drawing on cutting-edge geological and archaeological research, this book recasts these tales not as fantasy, but as historical testimony grounded in lived experience.

* Google Earth desktop is a useful tool for research on localities in the British Isles. I also find it far more reliable/faster than the Web version, especially for Streetview. But download it while you can, because Google will no longer be maintaining or distributing it from next year. They said last week…

“While you can continue using Google Earth Pro desktop, it will no longer be available for new downloads beginning on June 25, 2027”.

* Another useful tool was the British Library’s thesis database. This was attacked by a likely-Russian ransomware gang in 2023, and the records lost. Now after four years it’s back online, after much painstaking restoration. “EThOS records restored” reported the British Library last week…

“metadata records of over 650,000 theses from UK universities have been loaded onto the new platform. This includes around 14,000 additional theses that have been added to the service since the cyber-attack.”

The latest “Tolkien” search-result is now 2024. Records have hyperlinks to repositories and one interesting item was thus discovered, not already noted on Gleanings. The Illustrated Letter: A practice-based investigation of epistolary storytelling through illustration (2023), a PhD which used Tolkien as a case-study. Open access and freely available.

* And finally, The Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction has released the new issue of their annual print-only journal, Gramarye 29 (Summer 2026). Their website has the contents list.

Tolkien Gleanings #438

* The recently discovered ‘Crickhollow letter’ from Tolkien has sold for £19.5k [$26k, inc. auctioneer fees], to the Welsh town of Crickhowell. The local press report “It’s coming home: Welsh town wins bid to buy Tolkien letter”. The town’s GoFundme page has so far raised £14.5k, but a little more is still needed. The letter not only confirms that Crickhowell was the place-name inspiration for Crickhollow, but also reveals a previously unknown aspect of the LoTR plot.

* From Spain, more details about the recent discovery of the Tolkien translation “Soul’s Ward”, in an English article on the website of the University of Granada, “University of Granada project leads to the discovery of a previously unpublished document by J. R. R. Tolkien in an Oxford library”.

“In addition to this discovery, the TRANSMEL project has facilitated the first translation into Spanish of ‘The Figure of King Arthur’ […] the Arthurian essay by Charles Williams, a member of the Inklings literary group alongside J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.”

* Paolo Nardi has a long interview with Erica Martin on Fashion, Costumes, and Appearance in The Silmarillion and in related books such as HoME, History, Nature, and Peoples. They also discuss colour symbolism, and there’s a suggestion that the battle-masks of the dwarves in the Fifth Battle could be made of a material that gave some protection against dragon-fire. Free on YouTube.

* Catholic News considers “The Lord of the Rings and the Victory of Confession” in relation to the key scene with Boromir…

“This scene is often interpreted as a sort of confession because Boromir makes the three acts of the penitent which are required for the sacrament. These acts are first contrition (one must be sorry for one’s sins), secondly confession (you have to tell your sins to the priest), and finally satisfaction (you have to make up for your sins, usually through the penance assigned by the priest).”

* A new report discusses five notable results from the 2025 Survey of Tolkien Fanfiction Writers.

* New in the paid Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, “From Narnia to Neverland: A Guide for Developing and Teaching Popular Culture-Themed [‘PCT’] Courses” (2026) ($ paywall).

“this study gathered data-driven advice for instructors teaching PCT courses. Qualitative data were collected from 59 higher education instructors from across the United States, who represented a wide range of disciplines and were currently teaching or had formerly taught a PCT course.”

* It occurred to me that ageing eyes may find the tiny font and wide one-column layout of the Journal of Tolkien Research PDFs rather a burden. Freeware to the rescue! Willus’s K2pdfopt is genuine old-school freeware available for Windows and other desktop OS. There’s also a version that can run on PCs with older Intel CPUs. K2pdfopt is meant to convert two-column scientific papers for easier reading on old hardware ebook readers. But with its default settings (seen below) it works fine for simply converting PDFs to a more readable format. Works quickly, outputs to the same PDF format.

Tip: Skip along to page 3 or 4 before pressing “Preview”, to get past a PDF’s introductory boilerplate pages. The default “Max columns: 2” appears to refer to input, not output, and does not need to be changed.

* The Polytranslator now offers English to Tolkien Elvish, and other Tolkien-invented languages.

“Polytranslator offers specialized translators for rare, ancient, indigenous, and modern dialects, from Old English and Ancient Greek to living regional varieties.”

* And finally, an eBay snap of what’s said to be the Army cap-badge for Tolkien’s old school, King Edward’s in Birmingham. (But I should add ‘buyer beware’, as many supposedly ‘original’ Army cap-badges are cheaply restruck new strikes from the old moulds). The dragon and Arthurian sword makes me wonder… i) is this the cap-badge of the King Edward’s School Officers Training Corps, aka ‘cadets’? And ii) did it always have that design, even when Tolkien was a KES officer cadet in 1909-1911?

Tolkien Gleanings #437

* The latest Entmoot Podcast is a long interview with the editors of the recent ‘Asexuality’ special issue of the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research.

* A Tolkien-focused report from the Oxford English Graduate Conference 2026. Substack, but free.

* Personal Canon Formation on “Tolkien and the Myth of Decline”. Substack, but free.

* The Middle Ages in the Modern World conference calls for papers, for 22nd-24th June 2027 in Oxford. Note especially the suggestion for “Oxford and medievalism” as a possible theme. Deadline: 30th September 2026.

* Law & Liberty magazine considers “The Seeing Stones of Modern Warfare” in relation to Tolkien. Freely available online.

* The cover is now available for the forthcoming Tolkien comic biography I mentioned previously on Gleanings. The format is a ‘BD’ — a eurocomics format that usually takes the form of a relatively short high-quality graphic novel, printed oversized on good paper and in hardback, and usually with a self-contained story. The book is due in mid August 2026, in French from Futuropolis. There are also now a few more details about the approach taken…

“Alternating intimate biographical moments from his life and scenes from his novels, the authors show us how these personal events are at the source of the mythology that Tolkien created.”

* An Interactive Timeline of Middle-earth, newly online and free at Elfenomeno.

* I’m pleased to learn of Pavane: a Critical Companion (2024), via an excellent long review on the BSFA website. Freely available online.

“Pavane is a particularly British work, a book made up of a cycle of stories, and one imbued by religion, sense of place, and the mythical past of the English countryside. [In an alternative history where Catholic Spain triumphed over England, there is still] faery magic, a component of a specific form of British myth and fiction dating back to before Shakespeare, [which] features in [the sections] “The Signaller” and “Lady Margaret”. Roberts mines the English countryside, and often specifically Dorset, to explore a hidden faery world, creating an emotional resonance for the reader with the landscape itself.”

This classic fix-up novel of 1968 has had some terrible covers over the years, but the U.S. Doubleday first-edition hardback was quite pleasing. The edition’s blurb cannily managed to intrigue readers of both Lovecraft and Tolkien, while the art gave a very subtle nod towards the Sphinx and the Machine of The Time Machine…

* And finally, this week the Throwback Review reviews the book Middle-earth Role Playing (1984), and notes the large hinterland of expansion books it spawned in the 1980s. There was a second edition of the main gamebook, and…

“[the publisher ICE also] produced a huge body of regional sourcebooks, adventures, and campaign material, and that may be what many people remember most fondly. Even players who did not love every corner of the [main book of] rules often loved the books. MERP invited you to roam far beyond the most familiar corners of Tolkien’s fiction, turning Middle-earth into a place you could explore in layers. That sense of scope was one of the game’s great accomplishments. It helped teach a lot of players that a roleplaying setting could feel like a scholarly hobby in itself, something to read, collect, and immerse yourself in even when you were not actively playing.”

On Archive.org, one can find the Iron Crown Enterprises Consumer Catalog Spring ’87. This notes a Lords of Middle-earth Vol 1., the first in three part series, with the first profiling all “the great ones” of Middle-earth and beyond. The second book in this series focused on the Men and Mannish races, and the Third on Dwarves, Orcs, Trolls, Elves and Hobbits.

Also of interest as reference/inspiration for fan-fiction writers, though it seems that getting hold of a set in paper would cost a small fortune today.

Tolkien Gleanings #436

* A new rolling issue of the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research is underway, Volume 24, Issue 2. This currently includes, among others, a lead article on “Tolkien, Modernism, and Mass Art”, a review of Arda Notebooks: The Best of I Quaderni di Arda (2026), and the conference paper “”Then Daddy began a story”: Storytelling in Tolkien’s home and our own”.

* From Finland, the new Masters dissertation, “Miehia, jotka rakastavat miehia: Miesten valinen emotionaalinen laheisyys Taru sormusten herrasta” (2026) (‘Men Who Love Men: Emotional Intimacy Between Men in The Lord of the Rings’). Freely available online.

* The new book Lunar Gothic: The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination (2025) has the 16-page survey chapter “Illuminating the Darkness: Lunar Representation in Children’s Literature”.

* The latest edition of the journal Literary Imagination has the article “Leavis, Lewis, Eliot, and the Prospect of Disciplinary Renewal” ($ paywall), which surveys the battle over Eng. Lit. between C.S. Lewis and the Leavis-ites. The free introduction appears to serve as a fairly good abstract for the paywalled article.

* More Tolkien letters are up for auction at Sotheby’s. Tolkien’s 1960s correspondence with Eileen Elgar, a resident of Tolkien’s favourite Miramar Hotel in Bournemouth. An August 1966 letter to her remarks that Tolkien was set to embark on a Mediterranean cruise that would travel as far east as Smyrna.

Turkish Smyrna in 1966 held little of the old Greek magic and Ionian free-thought, since in 1922 the invading Turks had totally burned the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city along with most of their inhabitants. Tolkien’s fellow passengers likely went directly from the modern Turkish port-city, on the day-trip to ancient Ephesus which was an hour to the south. That would have been the attraction, not the city. By 1966 the Austrian excavations there were substantial and allowed tourists to walk down the grand marble Arcadian Way and sit in the vast ancient drama theatre which once held 25,000 spectators. But it was the Christian associations that would have been the draw for many.

This theatre was later a gladiator arena, and at that time also a key site for the apostle Paul and his followers. Ancient Ephesus also has a Marian association, in that Mary would appear to have lived there after the resurrection of Jesus (John 19:26–27: “the disciple [John] took her [Mary, mother of Jesus] to his own home”). Possibly the tourists would also have visited a reputed ‘House of Mary’, conveniently located in the hills just a little south of ancient Ephesus, a house which had been ‘discovered’ via a 19th century nun’s religious visions.

Did Tolkien see the place? Perhaps. Edith was with him on the cruise, but had fallen and badly injured herself on the first day of the cruise. They thus did “little sightseeing” in Tolkien’s own words. She was however well enough to be carried ashore at the port, but if Tolkien then left her to take the coach to visit ancient Ephesus and the reputed ‘home of Mary’ must remain a mystery. It would be a pity if he hadn’t done so before returning home, after sailing so many thousands of miles.

Mallorn 22 also notes in passing… “Parallels between the ‘Seven Sleepers’ of Ephesus and the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves”. The legend, said to have been very popular during the mediaeval period, is also somewhat similar to that of the ‘sleeping King Arthur and his knights’ belief in Britain. The legend in brief…

The Roman Emperor Decius was engaged in vicious personal persecution of Christians, visiting his provinces in person to see that it was done. At Ephesus he had seven pious lads brought before him, but they courageously and eloquently testified for Christ before the Emperor. Due to their courage they were given some time to repent, which they rather sensibly used to flee together to a wilderness cave. Soldiers eventually found the cave, but miraculously saw no-one there and then took away the supplies and tightly sealed the cave entrance with rocks. Two hundred and eight years later the sleeping lads awoke in the cave, thinking they had only slept the night. The rock wall was now easy to push away, and they went back to the city to find food. There the lads — having aged not a day — were amazed to find crosses above the gates and that the people had become Christians.

* And finally, Tolkien Oddments has “More on Madlener”. You’ll recall that Josef Madlener’s painting “Der Berggiest” was once said to be the inspiration for the appearance of Gandalf. In the new article, the complete postcard set is considered. My own thoughts on Madlener’s shepherd appeared in August 2025 in Gleanings #329, concluding that the outfit was the traditional one for shepherds from the high parts of Provencal (SE France, neighbouring the Swiss Alps). The traditional outfit worn by the Swiss shepherds, which Tolkien might have noticed in the Swiss Alps in 1911, was very different. Thus he would not have seen a real-life ‘Madlener outfit’ on his Swiss walking trip.

Tolkien Gleanings #435

* The latest edition of the French open-access journal Babel: Litteratures Plurielles has a review of the book Tolkien et la religion. Comme une lampe invisible (2024, Sorbonne University Press). A second edition, updated and expanded, of the 2016 first edition. The long review is in French, but sadly not easily auto-translated because the site blocks access with captchas. Thankfully Archive.org has no time for such blocking and happily archives it, from which one can then get an English translation done via Microsoft…

The review mistakenly places Birmingham in the “North” of England, but it has always been in the Midlands.

* New on YouTube from the University of Oxford, “A New-found Tolkien Translation”. Being their short official video on the newly-found and now published “Soul’s Ward”.

* The Spanish Tolkien Society has a new blog post which assembles an annotated links playlist, for the free YouTube podcast that reads and analyzes the letters of Tolkien in Spanish. This podcast has currently reached letter 181.

* The latest edition of the paywall book-journal Studies in Medievalism XXXV (2026) is a special issue with… “essays exploring the intersections of politics and theory through medievalism in film, literature, gaming, and political movements.” No Tolkien, but it may interest some.

* Fandom Pulse looks like it’s wrapping up its lengthy historical survey-series offering a “retrospective on Tolkien’s rise to superstardom”, seemingly with added attention to the various political lenses through which people have viewed his works over time. They now have a links-set for all 12 parts. (Substack and $ paywalled).

* Talking of the history of Tolkien fandom, Kalimac’s Corner was there, back in the day. This week he has a blog post recalling an aspect of “Tolkien in the old days”…

One feature of the early Tolkien fandom days of the 1960s whose import is hard to recapture today is the little cries of bliss that Tolkien fans would emit whenever a major publication dared to acknowledge that Tolkien existed, and maybe was important, by publishing an article about him.

And yet, as his example shows, the journalists and editors concerned were almost always utterly cynical about such things.

* The new book Fairies: A History has been published, to good reviews. It’s billed as a more wide-ranging survey than the author’s previous British Isles-focused book on the topic, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (2023). The author, an expert on both British and Baltic folklore, describes his new book as…

the most wide-ranging history of fairy belief attempted in modern times […] it is a history of fairies, written by a historian and seeking to apply historical methods to humanity’s centuries-long relationship with the fairy realm. [… It was written] in a post-religious, postmodern Europe [in which] the old prejudice against fairies as a serious object of study is breaking down. For the first time, it is possible to give fairies a proper history — and to share that history with a genuinely curious and open-minded reading public. [… as well as the British Isles, the new book] makes frequent excursions to Iceland, Scandinavia, and Central and Eastern Europe, in addition to the Americas and Australasia”.

Interviews about the new book can be found on the podcasts What Magic Is This? and I Might Believe in Faeries.

* And finally, talking of delightful and unexpected apparitions… a charity shop (U.S.: ‘thrift shop’) in Tolkien’s home city of Birmingham was given a “fairly ordinary” box of donated second-hand books. From which emerged… a £38k first edition of The Hobbit. Nice!

Tolkien Gleanings #434

* Inkings Quarterly newsletter brings news that The Inklings Project is offering teaching fellowships for classroom teachers of U.S. school grades 6–12 (translates as ages 11 to 18). Deadline: 1st August 2026.

* The Inklings Quarterly also notes the 2026 “Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference” at George Fox University in Sepember 2026. On pursuing the speaker list, I note a keynote talk from John Garth on “The Undiscovered J.R.R. Tolkien”.

* New to me, the open-access journal Fandom | Cultures | Research, from the University of Marburg in Germany. Four issues so far, with some German but mostly English items. No Tolkien fandom items as yet. But the latest issue has a review of the book The Politics of Fantasy: Magic, Children‘s Literature, and Fandom in Putin’s Russia, while earlier issues have a couple of conference reports on the topic of doing archival / historical research on fandoms. (The journal and its fellow Marburg journals were not on JURN, but I’ve now indexed them).

* Talking of archival materials… new on Archive.org is a scan of Computer Games magazine for January 2003. Which was a Lord of the Rings special-issue.

Has an informed article surveying the history of relevant fantasy RPG videogames, with a timeline. Plus a discussion across two articles on Tolkien’s influence on videogames to 2003. The second of these is from Daniel Greenberg, then “the Creative Director for the Tolkien Franchise”…

“Middle-earth has plenty of magic. Not the promiscuous magic-inflation of Dungeons & Dragons, but magic intertwines everything in Middle-earth [and it also offers] plenty of overt spells, cast not just by Wizards, but by Dwarves, Elves, Men, Wraiths, Dark Lords, etc. (Everyone but Hobbits). However, in order to tell a story about the little guy (literally) making a difference, the powerful magicians must be offstage most of the time. Some confuse this with a lack of magic in Middle-earth. Middle-earth also has lots of treasure hunts. The Hobbit is all about a treasure hunt. To a dungeon-like fortress. To kill a dragon. The Lord of the Rings is a treasure hunt, too, only in reverse. [And with plenty of RPG-like ‘valuable loot use’ as well]”.

* The annual conference of Germany’s Society for Fantasy Research will discuss the theme of ‘Violence and Fantasy’. Set to be held at the University of Cologne, 17th-19th September 2026.

* And finally… RAMzine reports that the band Hubris take on J.R.R. Tolkien for their White Shores album, and that the band will be touring the UK in October 2026…

“Swiss post-rock band Hubris are heading into Middle-earth. The instrumental quartet from Fribourg have built four albums on Greek mythology, but composer and founder Jonathan Hohl has turned to the source he keeps coming back to. […] More than a fantasy tribute, [their new studio album] White Shores sits with J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing on mortality and immortality.”

The album is not yet released, but the eight-minute lead track is free online, on Bandcamp.