Tolkien Gleanings #133.
* Freely available on YouTube, “Sixty Years of J.R.R. Tolkien: A Lecture by Professor Thomas Alan Shippey”. Given on 27th September 2023. The 90 minute recording is listenable, with Shippey in his home study on Zoom and with a reasonably good headset — rather than in an echoing lecture hall in Manila. It was a familiar personal talk, with nothing new for those familiar with his previous talks and interviews. Questions begin at 53:20, and regrettably they go straight into asking about the TV series. It really should be a given at events such as this that the presenters make it clear: “NO movie or TV questions, please”. Requiring the audience to write their questions succinctly on cards, which are then passed to the front, also saves a lot of time and prevents grand-standing.
* The latest issue of the Spanish language journal Peonza: Revista de literatura infantil y juvenil (‘Peonza: journal of literature for children and juveniles’) is themed ‘Fantastic Stories’. There’s an article on ‘Tolkien’s Infinite Stories’ along with articles on Alice, Pinnochio, Jules Verne, Peter and Wendy, and others. The ongoing Peonza appears to be a paper-only journal, which inhibits automatic translation, although the first 132 issues are freely online.
* Now freely available on Archive.org, Christian History magazine #121 (2017) was themed “Faith in the Foxholes”. The issue highlighted faith during front-line military combat.
* Apparently now under Creative Commons Attribution, the book The Sacred Tree: Ancient And Medieval Manifestations (2011) has appeared on Archive.org. The author is suitably wary of neo-pagan writing on the topic.
* “Showcasing lesser-known scholarship on Lewis”, the forthcoming inaugural Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference. To be held at George Fox University in Oregon, USA, from 5th-8th September 2024.
* And finally, 2024 seems to offer the possibility of weaving a series of ‘telling stories to small children’ events or publications around that fact that…
“According to Douglas Anderson’s introduction to ‘The Annotated Hobbit’, Tolkien began telling stories to his children around 1924”
2024 could thus be reasonably claimed as the 100th anniversary of Tolkien’s first oral tales.