Tolkien Gleanings #119.

* The Knowing and Understanding C.S. Lewis podcast interviews Holly Ordway on her new book Tolkien’s Faith. It’s a two-part interview, and only the first 25 minutes is currently available.

* A pleasing poster for the forthcoming German conference on visualising Tolkien’s work, to be held in Gottingen in Germany, 27th to 29th October 2023. No programme listing, as yet.

* A less pleasing cover for the September/October issue of the St. Austin Review, themed as ‘A Tolkien Jubilee’. Looks vaguely like an orange and elderly Ken Dodd, to me. It’s the teeth, I guess.

  – “On Fairy-Stories and Fantasy: 50 Years After the Father’s Farewell”.

  – “The Liturgy of the Mass Seen Through Tolkien’s Lens of Fairy-Story”.

  – “Good Love, Bad Love: From Tolkien to Denis de Rougemont and Back Again”.

  – A review of The Nature of Middle-Earth.

* Bitter Winter details a recently auctioned and (apparently) previously unknown 1969 letter from Tolkien.

* In The Critic this week, “Tolkien, 50 Years On: the true scale of his legacy is gradually becoming apparent”. One of the better and more thoughtful articles in the current wave of ‘Tolkien for the clueless’ articles appearing in newspapers and magazines.

* And finally, the long-running British Fairies blog this weekend surveys “Popular Views of Faeries in Victorian and Edwardian Times”, as seen on popular cards of the period. This post’s focus necessarily gives a one-sided view. But recall that a fairy-play, The Blue Bird, could win Maetlinck the 1911 Nobel Prize for Literature. And that Kipling, author of Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), had won the Nobel Prize in 1907. Such was the context in which Tolkien began writing.