Tolkien Gleanings #232
* OzMoot 2025 is set for 24th-26th January 2025, in Australia and online ($35 ticket for online). The organisers now have a theme, ‘The Music of Words: Language, Poetry, and Music in Tolkien’s Works’. The deadline for proposals is 24th December 2024.
* The Welsh nationalist online publication Nation.Cymru has a book review of the new Yr Hobyd, the new Welsh translation of The Hobbit. The review is freely available online (in English), and the reviewer notes that various Welsh dialects are used to aid the characterisation.
* CNews has an interview in French with Vincent Ferre, about the huge new table-trembling edition of the Dictionnaire Tolkien. Freely available online.
* A new official free-sample for Drout’s Tolkien and the West five-hour audiobook (2012) which in the UK is currently £14 or free to Amazon’s Audible subscribers.
* A PDF with the full programme for ‘The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference’ in September 2024. The first day will offer some Tolkien-related papers and talks. The conference will also see a stage performance of The Baptized Imagination: Lewis & Tolkien, produced by George Fox University theatre lecturer Ben Tissell.
* Now recorded and online at YouTube, the latest FACTS podcast with guest Holly Ordway, discussing Tolkien’s Faith.
* The latest issue of Leicester University’s Luminary open-access undergraduate journal is Issue 6: ‘Locating Fantastika’. Among others, the article “Palimpsestic and Abject Faerie Spaces and Species” explores two pre-Tolkien British depictions of mortals who trespass into faerie places. Freely available online.
* The UK’s ImagineFX magazine (November 2024 issue) has a four-page ‘making of’ feature, showing the cover art for the new LoTR-based tabletop role-playing game. The game gives the popular Dungeons & Dragons 5e RPG playing system a thorough LoTR makeover. Clueless newbs such as myself would also need the key D&D Player’s Handbook, as there’s said to be a lot of basic D&D combat knowledge being assumed.
* The UK’s annual Heritage Open Days this year includes Exeter College, Oxford, with their date being Sunday 15th September 2024. No pre-booking required, but I imagine that getting in the queue early might be advisable. Note also that, around the corner, “The Bodleian’s letterpress printing workshop will be open for drop-in printing”. There may be even more open and free in Oxford on that day, if you look.
* And finally, the new free open-source AI image-generator Flux can generate images that use distinctive handwriting styles. Of course, someone quickly created a free ‘Flux Tolkien Handwriting’ style-guidance plug-in (a ‘LORA’) for it. This now appears to have been taken down, but some of the sample images are still available to prove that it can be done.