Tolkien Gleanings #157.

* New to me, details of the Mythcon 53: the Mythopoeic Society conference 2024, which is set for Minnesota in early August 2024. Appropriately enough for the middle America location, the theme is to be ‘Fantasies of the Middle Lands’, with suggested topics including middle America (Bradbury, the rural Simak, and Ardath Mayhar spring to mind) and also literary fantasies of… “the English Midlands, beloved by Tolkien”. Though I should note that Tolkien’s interest tended specifically toward the western parts of the Midlands. He would have understood the taken-for-granted division between the east and west Midlands, also the division between the Staffordshire and Derbyshire Peak, and would further have been well aware of ‘the Welsh Marches’ — the long liminal borderland that straddles the western Midlands and Wales. Note the conference’s careful use of “of the” in the title. This suggest that a writer simply being from the place will not be enough. A better chance of selection might be had if one’s chosen writer were not only from the chosen Midlands but also wrote about it. Sadly, there are a great many examples of great writers leaving their childhood place in the English Midlands just a soon as they were able, and never once looking back.

* Yet another review of the book Tolkien and the Classical World (2021), this time in the latest edition of the open-access Spanish journal Minerva. In Spanish.

* Shalom Tidings has a new article on “Tolkien’s Secrets to a Happy Marriage”.

* The Digital Tolkien Project has a new “2023 in Review and What’s Ahead in 2024” video, on YouTube.

* Newly added to Archive.org, the Amsterdam Wind Orchestra interpreting The Lord of Rings (1990). Five ‘free samples’ only. Created in 1984-87, the full version apparently takes the form of a suite in five parts and a total of 44 minutes. Each part interprets a key character in LoTR.

* Tolkien with a telescope? Mere Inkling Press amusingly muses on “Elven Inspiration from Space?”.

* And finally, another free LORA plugin for AI image generation. This one aims to generate images of Viking architecture. More or less, since LORA creation and AI image generation are both imprecise arts. Still, it looks good enough to then be the basis of a hand-painted paint-over, with the AI having ‘done the heavy lifting’ to establish the accurate lighting. That’s a key tell-tale of AI imagery — the lighting is always perfect.