Tolkien Gleanings #180.
* Coming soon from the Catholic University of America Press, The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation (May 2024)…
“This book is the first sustained attempt to show not only the centrality of recovery to Tolkien’s fantasy, but the way in which his fantasy affects that primal recovery in every reader. […] for Tolkien fantasy has within itself a healing power through which intellectual, moral and existential paradoxes are resolved and our intellectual and perceptual faculties are made whole again”.
* Free online under Creative Commons on Calameo, Dragon Verde #15 (September 2023), from the Colombia Orodruin Tolkien Society. With cover art by Thomas Orn Karlsson of Sweden.
Collects the best articles from the “eighth to the thirteenth editions of Dragon Verde.” Article titles in English translation:
– Echoes of Middle-earth.
– Dragon Fire and Wild Swords.
– From Linguistics to Metaphysics: interview with Carl F. Hostetter.
– The Rings of Power and their Influence in the Fate of Middle-earth.
– Tolkien and the Celts.
– Dwarven Chronicles.
– Meowing and Barking in the Hobbit Hole. (Seems to be about dogs and cats).
– The Spanish connection of J.R.R. Tolkien.
– Modernity as seen by Tolkien.
Since Dragon Verde #15 is under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, the articles are free to be translated. You’d screen-capture and then use either Microsoft OneNote or ABBYY Screenshot Reader to get the text out for translation. Both are good for use with smaller 72dpi type.
* Older issues of Dragon Verde used to be found as free flipbooks on Issuu, and are technically still there. But they’re blocked. My guess is the Society has thus moved to Calameo from the Issuu service. Issuu having now made itself toxic to publishers, due to their gangster-like behaviour. A year or two back now Issuu suddenly locked down their wealth of free magazine issues, then made extorting demands for payment to unlock them. Issuu also adds insult to injury, by misleadingly blaming the magazine’s publisher for the blocking…
That’s why it’s always a good idea to mirror your free flipbook PDF magazines at The Internet Archive (Archive.org).
* Newly added to the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, a long and detailed review in English of the substantial catalogue for the 2023 Italian exhibition ‘Tolkien: Uomo, Professore, Autore’. This medium-sized exhibition has now transferred from Rome to Naples, where it runs from 16th March to 2nd July 2024.
* Some notes on Berin’s Hill in Oxfordshire.
* And finally, look again at Amazon UK’s pre-order price for the three-volume dead tree edition of the Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. As I write, this has dropped from £90 to a more affordable £60. The drop is seemingly due to an avalanche of pre-orders, making it a ‘best-seller’ long before publication. (Update: Now back up to £90).