Tolkien Gleanings #458
* Local newspaper the Stroud Times has “‘Unique’ J.R.R. Tolkien book from Oxford university days up for auction in Stonehouse”.
“The copy of The Wanderings of Peoples by anthropologist A.C. Haddon contains Tolkien’s handwritten ownership inscription, dated June 1914, when he was a student at Exeter College, Oxford.”
The book is not listed in the second edition of Tolkien’s Library. The firm dating of acquisition suggests that he read the book over the 1914 holidays, most likely as background reading for coming exams. If purchased new then the book would have been the second edition, published by Cambridge University Press in 1912. Haddon provided a short authoritative overview of the world’s ancient migrations as they were known in 1911, prior to DNA technology and modern archaeology. “Europe” is treated in ten pages. One wonders why he felt the need to own a copy, when the university surely had several copies of it?
* Pre-ordering now, Signum University’s documentary The Stories That Come To Us – A Conversation with Verlyn Flieger. The film premiered at Oxonmoot 2026, and there’s now a trailer on YouTube. The $10 pre-order page is online, but can currently offer no shipping date.
* Leo Carruthers of the Sorbonne discussed “L’Histoire de Kullervo”: laboratoire de toute l’oeuvre de J.R.R. Tolkien ? on Radio France’s France Culture, a few days ago. The programme asked if Kullervo could have served as… “a laboratory for the entire work of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Freely available online, but possibly region-blocked — the ‘play it again’ audio doesn’t play for me.
* From South America’s DLN, in English, the long and thoughtful article “The Unexpected Miracle: Tolkien’s Eucatastrophe as a Philosophy of Resistance for Modern Man and Society”. Freely available online.
* “Tolkien’s Notion of Fantasy, Creation, and the Anthropocentric in Tarkovsky’s Solaris”. Freely available online, albeit in an MDPI journal.
* British auction house Sotheby’s have the page “A Guide to Identifying J.R.R. Tolkien First Editions”, dated 8th October 2026. I seem to recall something similar earlier this year, but perhaps that was from another auction house? This page appears to be new.
* The latest Journal of Folklore Research Reviews has a long and detailed review of Fairy Encounters in Medieval England: Landscape, Folklore, and the Supernatural (2024). The reviewer notes that the book also covers material from Wales and Scotland. Freely available online.
* The conference on Tolkien’s invented languages has a hint at a date for 2028… “close to the beginning of August” and in Chartres, France. I see that their Arda Philology 8 (2025) is available, the volume being the 2019 conference proceedings. Articles include “‘Unrecorded’ Germanic: An Art-language for England”, among others.
* “How Did Hobbits Dance? Reconstructing Tolkien’s springle-ring”.
* And finally, talking of vigorous springle-ringing… the British version of the Brandywine Festival now has 2027 dates. The festival will return to Shropshire from 9th-12th September 2027.