Tolkien Gleanings #76.

* Signum University’s Mythmoot X conference, themed as “Homeward Bound”. 22nd-25th June 2023, in Virginia USA. $75 for an online ticket, booking now.

* Coming in August 2023, the new book Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination. An edited collection, for which Amazon UK doesn’t yet have the TOCs. But I tracked them down and the book has only one Tolkien chapter, titled “Between Tolkien and the Philosophers: Greek and Scholastic Theories of Phantasia“.

* An older article that some may have overlooked, to be found in the British open access journal Writing in Practice. This is “The Grounds of Tolkien: unmappable, unbookable” (2018)… “setting Tolkien in the context of other creative writers of his time and the present day, draws on documentation of his creative practices”. Interesting, and especially in the substantial section on maps and mapping. But it’s perhaps equally interesting for demonstrating what is lost, when the academy’s ‘theory’ is unable to even mention religion.

* A short but perceptive review of the book Tolkien Dogmatics (2022) in March 2023, for the English Churchman newspaper… “One of the most interesting excurses in the book is on the topic of whether Tolkien considered himself to be writing inspired [i.e. ‘by God’] literature. Alarming though this proposition may sound, the reality of what he actually meant by it is benign.”

* And finally, “J.R.R. Tolkien and Imre Makovecz: Those Who Wage War Against the Death of God”. A new article in English, comparing Tolkien and an architect well-known in Hungary… “Both figures knew that they could not resurrect the dead, or bring the long-lost past back to life, but they could reimagine it in a way particular to them and the unique talents they possessed”.