Tolkien Gleanings #105.
* In Oxford, Tolkien’s Words and Worlds: An Academic Conference to Mark the 50th Anniversary of Tolkien’s Death. Set for 2nd–3rd September 2023, at Corpus Christi College, with exhibitions at Exeter and Merton College. Registering now. Looks like about £125 would get you an overnight room + lunch/refreshments, then your rail fare on top. Many people in the UK might do it for under £200.
Ugh, what a clash of unsuitable fonts. Pick better, next time.
* New on YouTube from the Thomistic Institute, “The Catholic Vision Of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings”. Professor Paul Gondreau’s… “talk was given on 14th March 2023 at Brown University” in Providence, New England. A bit slow to get going, and at the end de-railed by student questions about the screen adaptations (tip to lecturers: invite questions about the books only), but otherwise rather good.
* Tolkien scholar Charles E. Noad has passed away.
* On YouTube, Joseph Pearce newly interviewed on “How G.K. Chesterton Influenced Narnia & Middle-earth”.
* An International Congress on Chesterton, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in Buenos Aires, Argentina. 20th-23rd July 2023, seemingly with a large Mexican contingent flying in.
Interesting for the use of AI-gen portraits on the Congress flyer. AI tell-tales: sinister fantasy-painting like figures in the background of the Tolkien picture, and his nose is pointy/drooping; Chesterton’s glasses are not round and his neck-tie is not properly fitted under the collar; and the ear is too big on Lewis (unless he really did have huge ‘hobbit ears’).
* The Silmarillion Writers’ Guild — a leading Tolkien fan-fiction repository and forum — has just posted a call for an Assistant Art Editor (voluntary). Note that the site has a complete ban on AI assisted works.
* Descriptions for the Tolkien Collection at Marquette University in the USA. I hadn’t realised it was also effectively a Tolkien secondary research library, with fairly large sub-collections of choice “Secondary Material Relating to J.R.R. Tolkien, 1938-2015” and “Periodical Literature on Tolkien and Related Fantasy Writers, 1960-“, plus several large fandom collections. A library search of the Marquette Libraries catalogue will show you the titles of most published books there, via searches for ‘Tolkien’, ‘Middle-earth’, etc.
* And finally… a new Tolkien creature, the ‘bicycle-horse’, as found in part of a letter newly extracted from the book Wheelbarrows at Dawn. However Lovecraft did it first, as usual, when in middle-childhood he imagined himself a “bicycle-centaur”.