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!