Tolkien Gleanings #457
* New in the latest rolling Journal of Tolkien Research, the article “Ornamental Letters in Tolkien’s Manuscripts”, which makes comparisons with medieval lettering.
* A new book in Italian by Gianfranco de Turris, to be published as an ebook in a few days, Il Professore Che Amava i Draghi: Miti e simboli in J.R.R. Tolkien (2026) (‘The Professor Who Loved Dragons: Myths and Symbols in J.R.R. Tolkien’)…
“This book brings together 31 of his texts — including articles, prefaces, essays, miscellaneous writings, and, in the appendix, an ironic play aptly titled Teatrino Tolkieniano, all published between 1979 and 2026, along with a complete bibliography of his writings on Tolkien from 1968 to the present.”
* And forthcoming from France, with a November 2026 release date, Michael Devaux’s 640-page J.R.R. Tolkien et la foi: La consonance chretienne de la Terre du Milieu (‘J.R.R. Tolkien and Faith: The Christian Undertones of Middle-earth’). Not yet listed on the Editions Salvator website.
* From Russia, the journal article “Dreams In The Lost Road And The Notion Club Papers” (2025). English abstract and bibliography, Russian PDF. Freely available for download.
* From Ukraine, the short conference paper Inhabiting Middle-earth: The Evolution of Howard Shore’s Musical Worlds in The Two Towers (2026). In English, and freely available online.
* On Reddit, “I visited the birthplace of J.R.R. Tolkien in Bloemfontein. It is now a guesthouse called the Hobbit Hotel”.
* The Mythopoeic Society’s domain www.mythsoc.org appears to be gone, and the whole site is now “403 Forbidden”. Access through a VPN was also tried, with the same result.
* Of possible interest to Gleanings readers, an excellent local freeware Windows copy-editor and proof-reader, which can handle 60,000+ words easily. Tested by myself, and I find it checks a novel in about an hour and also interfaces very nicely with Microsoft Word. Forbidden to the anti-AI zealots, obviously, but many will welcome such tools.
* And finally, newly on eBay, a picture of the ford on the Green Lane (one of the entrances to Sarehole, Birmingham) as seen in winter. On a postcard postmarked February 1910, thus it was likely photographed 1909 or 1910 — and thus is seen much as the young Tolkien brothers would have known it in winter. Here restored and colourised.
