* At Signum University, starting 1st May 2023, a live online course on “Tolkien Illustrated: Picturing the Legendarium”. Likely to be fully booked in ‘a bang and a flash’, so book early.
It’s also good to see that a live course, currently in development at Signum, is “Tolkien & Science, with Dr. Kristine Larsen”.
* Nominations are now open for the Mythopoeic Awards 2023. This is for recent new non-fiction books in ‘Myth and Fantasy Studies’ and ‘Inklings Studies’ (including Tolkien).
* “Religion along the Tolkienian Fantasy Tradition”, a panel session planned for the big International Congress on Medieval Studies, to be held in the USA in 2023. The word used is definitely “along” rather than “among”, so at a guess it’s perhaps looking at the neo-medieval religious movements and shifts that ran alongside and interacted with the post-1967 growth of the wider “Tolkienian Fantasy Tradition”? Sadly the call-for-papers is now “404”, wasn’t well distributed, and the Wayback Machine didn’t keep a copy of it.
* In the week’s Somerset County Gazette local newspaper “Queen’s College, Taunton, discovers links to J.R.R. Tolkien”…
Tolkien’s grandfather, John Suffield (1833-1930) was a pupil at the original Queen’s College when he started studying at the school September 1845, aged just 12. The school was then situated within the grounds of Taunton Castle. [He] studied at the school until he went to work in the family business. […] They also discovered that Tolkien himself was good friends with Christopher Wiseman, the headmaster of Queen’s between 1926-1953 after the pair met at King Edward’s School in Birmingham in 1905. Tolkien, Wiseman and others formed the semi-secret T.C.B.S social club centred on their mutual intellectual interests. Wiseman and Tolkien were so close at school that they called themselves the Great Twin Brethren. Of Tolkien’s close friends from the club, Wiseman was the only one to survive the First World War.
* And finally, a cosmic event on 23rd January 2023. Clouds permitting, shortly after sunset the crescent moon will rest next to the bright Venus. See Kristine Larsen’s 2021 paper for the Journal of Tolkien Research, for a special focus on this “occultation” (as it is called) of the Moon and Venus.
Above: a gold stater coin of the Iceni tribe, c. 40-50 BC. Icini territory was one of the first tribal territories that the Anglians would move through, before their settler-families moved west along the River Trent and into relatively unpopulated mid and north Staffordshire (as it would later become). Which then became the initial heartland of early Mercia on the upper reaches of the Trent.