* A new and long YouTube video lecture in the Vermont Humanities Lecture Series, which surveys ideas about “Tolkien and Goddess Worship” in relation to the Virgin Mary, and with the final third becoming a rather unconvincing hunt for valkyries. The lecturer is a Tolkien scholar from the University of Vermont, and he’s also on the board of the journal Mythlore. Though I see that Vermont Humanities is wholly independent of his University, being funded by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities for public outreach. Sound quality is excellent for the main speaker, but the audience questions at the end can’t be heard and are not summarised by the speaker.
* Briefly appearing on the search engines in late February, a University of Oxford residential summer-school “The Making of Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and the First Age” (July 2023). The Merton College Web page for this vanished within a day or two. Despite the chunky four-figure ticket-price, I suspect all the tickets sold-out in ‘a bang and a flash’.
* Newly for sale by a rare book dealer, at a ridiculous price, 14 old Tolkien fanzines and three old journal issues.
The issues are: Entmoot #2 to #4 (now freely online); Niekas (an APA perzine, now freely online), #9 to #16, #19, #20; Palantir #4 (now freely online); and Tolkien Journal Vol. II, 3 & 4; Vol. III, No. 2 (1966, now freely online).
* A new academic book is being trailed by the International Balkans University, titled Reimagining the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Amazon and Google Books know nothing about it at present. The University page for it doesn’t offer a table-of-contents, and none can be found via search. Though the page does at least state… “seven critical essays and one personal account” plus a foreword by Thomas Honegger. The volume’s editor has an essay in the book and there’s a public abstract for this on ResearchGate, which reveals it to be Jungian in approach. I also found a note from the cover artist, which implies that the printed book is due soon. Honegger’s list of recent publications has it as “2022”, but it looks to me like the book has slipped to spring 2023.
* In German, a new open-access compilation of academic responses on the topic of the emerging paid profession of research into the fantastic. Sadly the licences are confused, which may inhibit translation or summary for publication in English. The front page has the permissive “Creative Commons Attribution”, but then the second page has the much more restrictive “Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike”.
* And finally, Tolkiety spots a curious syncronicity in Tolkien’s choice of his life-long wall-pictures.