Tolkien Gleanings #182.

* Crowdfunding The Hobbit in Romanish… “Romanish is a unique and beautiful language and a direct linguistic heritage of the Celtic and Roman past”. Today it’s the fourth language of Switzerland, said to be the result of the long-ago influence of the spoken Latin had from the Ancient Romans.

* From the University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal… “Tolkien’s Erotic Lent”.

* Humanum Review reviews the new Holly Ordway book, in “Tolkien, Man of Faith”.

* In France, a one-day conference on “Tolkien and the creation of Middle-earth”, 25th March 2024.

* In America during September 2024, The Orthodox Christian Tolkien Conference… “The St. Basil Center for Orthodox Thought and Culture will present a conference on the relationship between Orthodoxy and J.R.R. Tolkien”.

* A critical video review of the new graphic novel Tolkien: Lighting Up the Darkness, reviewed by someone who knows how a good comic should work (art, layout, font choice and size, reader’s eye-flow, character expressions, panel scene-depth and focus, etc). Also has a flip-through.

* An online talk set for later in 2024, “The Dragon in the West”… “Professor Ogden’s book The Dragon in the West was published in 2021 — the first serious and substantial account in any language of the evolution of the modern dragon from its ancient forebears.”

* And finally, Archive.org now offers Lists to signed-in users. Make your own public or private list of items. Hopefully this isn’t just a ‘whim feature’ and the lists won’t go the same way of the late lamented ‘Amazon Listmania’, when millions of users put a lot of time into curating lists… only to hear the sudden click of Amazon’s corporate jackboots and find that every list had been deleted. At present, re-ordering items in your Archive.org list is not possible. You’re stuck with the usual labels for re-sorting. Thus presenting a publication-date sequence of a magazine is not possible.