Tolkien Gleanings #109.

* There’s now an official Web page for Tolkien’s Words and Worlds at the University of Oxford. “The aim of the conference is to exhibit and reflect on the range of different approaches, methodologies, and backgrounds with which Tolkien has been studied in the past 50 years”. 2nd-3rd September 2023, with a 31st July registration deadline. The page also reveals details of topics, which among others include…

   – Tolkien’s Biographical Studies: a Long History.
   – Tolkien’s Anglo-Saxon Scholarship and Fiction.
   – Kipling’s Medievalism and Tolkien’s Book of Lost Tales.
   – C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Place of Philology in English Studies.

* The Italian Tolkien Association has an article on Charles Noad and his work. In Italian but easily auto-translated.

* Added to Archive.org to borrow, a year ago, the book Evocation of Virgil in Tolkien’s Art (1986). See also the blog post “Echoes of Vergil” in Tolkien and this week’s follow-on post which offers a note on “C.S. Lewis and William Shakespeare on Vergil”.

* In the German scholarly journal for Christian culture, Stimmen der Zeit 148 (August 2023), an article whose title translates as “Green Sun: J.R.R. Tolkien, Creation and Technology”… “The article first appeared in Etudes and was translated from French by Stefan Kiechle”. Not open-access in either case, by the look of it. But obviously felt to be important enough to translate, which makes the article notable.

* MIT ponders some of the political-philosophical implications of “Talking Trees”. Free online, adapted from the new book Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art (July 2023).

A somewhat Ent-like figure on a seal, Tepe Gawra, Upper Mesopotamia (c. 3,500 – 2,900 B.C.)

* And finally, A Tolkien Reading Chart v.2023-07b, giving an overview of Tolkien works published to 2023. It’s under CC Attribution so there’s an opportunity here for an artist and designer to give this a makeover, I’d suggest. I can also imagine a “by reading age” wall-chart with a similar approach.