Tolkien Gleanings #216
* Leeds International Medieval Congress call-for-papers for the July 2025 conference. The 2025 Tolkien sessions are to be: “Tolkien: Medieval Roots and Modern Branches”; “Learning, Lore and Craft in Tolkien’s Medieval World”; “Oral Tradition and Medieval Transmission in Tolkien’s Works”; “Tolkien as Teacher and Mentor at Leeds and Beyond”; and “Teaching Tolkien”.
* Another two additions to the latest Journal of Tolkien Research, “A Medievalist Myth-making Crisis: Tolkien’s Tychonic Cosmology” (on Tolkien’s late attempts to reshape Middle-earth’s cosmology, to conform with 20th century science); and “From Ghitterns to Harps” (Tolkien’s personal musical sense, awareness of British ‘early music’ movement, preferences for song). Freely available online.
* The latest John Henry Westen Show on YouTube… “in this special episode, music theory expert Paul List explores how music’s complex language is central to Tolkien’s Catholic vision of Middle-earth”.
* “The Responsibilities of the Reader”… “This thesis will discuss Tolkien’s ‘applicability’ and how it differs from allegory. The main concern is how Tolkien’s view of allegory, and consequently applicability, has been misunderstood as wanting to control the reader’s interpretative freedom”.
* The July edition of The Critic magazine has an article responding at length to the sumptuous Bodleian Library book C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (May 2024), by relishing what are apparently new or up-to-date biographical details. Not a review of the book, as a book. Freely available online.
* The Priestly Fraternity of St Peter’s latest Dowry magazine No. 62 has a short article in which… “Tolkien scholar Prof. Robert Lazu Kmita explains how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, honouring chastity, influenced the author of The Lord of the Rings.” Freely available online.
* On Amazon I see a follow-up book to The Wisdom of Hobbits, Mimetic Theory & Middle-earth: Untangling Desire in Tolkien’s Legendarium (March 2024). Judging by the blurb it cleaves to the unconvincing explains-everything French social theory of Rene Girard. Thus the “desire” in focus is the desire to be like others who we admire and/or who have things we want to possess. No amorous hobbits.
* New on Archive.org and free to download in .PDF format, a good new scan of Lewis Spence’s A Dictionary of Medieval Romance and Romance Writers (1913). Handy to have in your pocket when hacking your way through thickets of passing mentions of obscure authors.
* And finally… Andrew West’s 2008 BabelStone Goblin, two .TTF fonts for Tolkien’s ‘Goblin’ alphabet, mapped to the modern keyboard. Also the Moon Runes from The Hobbit, again as a font. Still freely available online.
It strikes me that there’s a potential small art/museum show on “Tolkien’s Runes”. Paired with actual historical runic artefacts (from stones to Cynewulf’s runic signature), plus artistic interpretations of Tolkien’s invented runes by undergraduates on an illustration degree.