Here’s another of my occasional round-ups of interesting new-ish items of Tolkien scholarship. No-one else appears to be publicly tracking such material (I looked hard, including on Twitter). So I guess I had better do it. And I guess I can’t go on calling these posts “mega-tolks”, so Tolkien Gleanings seem apt and also mellifluous. I had also better number them. Thus… welcome to Tolkien Gleanings #2.

* “Shakespeare’s Faerie Art of Enchantment through Tolkien’s Lens: A Historiographical Introduction”. A new Masters dissertation for the University of Toronto, freely online.

* “Reconstruction Of Medieval Consciousness In The Constructed Middle Ages Of J.R.R. Tolkien”. No download, despite offering a PDF link. But has a long abstract in English. Tolkien’s work as… “the continuation of traditions of European medieval humanitarian thought and the framework of texts that reveal the way of consciousness of people of that epoch”. Possibly the PDF download, should it be enabled, will reveal the full-text to be in Russian?

* The new paid-for journal Hither Shore 17: Brucken und Grenzen – Bridges and Borders (September 2022). Amazon UK calls it a German edition, and indeed it is published by the German Tolkien Society. But so far as I can tell there’s not also a twin English edition, and the TOCs suggest a substantial part of the issue is in English. Indeed, the issue opens with an editorial which muses on what happens when a German journal becomes substantially English. The same shift is apparently true of their conferences.

Among other items in Hither Shore 17, I noted essays in English on…

~ “Explorations into the linguistic character of Westron”. You’ll recall this is the “common tongue” of Middle-earth. Said to be very sparsely documented by either Tolkien or Tolkeinists. Concludes that Westron was a language with several inputs, one heavily Elvish in the early period, and that by the time of the events of LoTR it had diverged somewhat into regional dialects (e.g. the Shire and the Mark) — and it is thus akin to English in its history and divergences.

~ “Reconsidering Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings“.

~ “”One Must Tread the Path that Need Chooses”: The Choice of Need in Tolkien’s Moria Sequence.”

* The paywall journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences has two new Tolkien articles, “Middle-earth wasn’t built in a day: How do we explain the costs of creating a world?” and ““Never Land”: Where do imaginary worlds come from?”. Somewhat related to this theme is Kristine Larsen’s new personal essay in the free journal Messengers from the Stars #6 (2022).

* Also behind a paywall, I note that the Catholic journal Touchstone carries occasional Tolkien articles, such as “Tom Bombadil’s Dominion: A Good Reason for the Appearance of Tolkien’s Obvious Misfit” and “Why Tolkien’s Middle-earth Table Manners Matter Today”.

* New scholarly book: Tolkien ja Kalevala.

* My own “On Merry and Marmaduke” and “Foxy Tolkien?”. Both freely online.

* My new book is also available, Tree & Star: Tolkien and the quest for Earendel.