Tolkien Gleanings #233
* A new Beyond Bree book review, hosted as an archived PDF at the publisher Walking Tree, reviewing The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024). Freely available online.
* The latest Journal of Tolkien Research has added a long and thorough review of Reading Tolkien in Chinese (2024).
* At the VoegelinView, a review of the book Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination (2023).
* The Catholic Theology Show podcast’s latest episode is “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Catechesis on Creation”. Free on YouTube.
* At The European Conservative, the new article “Tolkien’s Paradise”… “If we consider the characteristics of Paradise present in various religious traditions, we can easily compare and identify them with the features of the wondrous lands in Middle-earth.”
* Earth and Heaven blog has a new 2024 review of The Messiah Comes to Middle-earth (2017). Now a book of three printed lectures, but originally part of… “Wheaton College’s Hanson Lectureship Series, [in which] Wheaton College President Philip Ryken examines the thesis that various characters in [LoTR] represent different aspects of the nature of the Messiah”
* The Spanish open-access journal Helice: Critical Thinking on Speculative Fiction publishes in Spanish and some English. Of special note is the 2023 English article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe (1838-1938), and Beyond: A Historical Overview”. Freely available online.
* A scan at Archive.org of a late-1970s ‘blank pages notebook’, with sketchy illustrations as framing marginalia, titled A Hobbit’s Travels: being the hitherto unpublished travel sketches of Sam Gamgee (1978). Its companion A Hobbit’s Journal was also published in the same format and by the same artist, though Archive.org only has the cover freely available online. There appear to have been four such notebooks by the artist, the others being A Tolkien Journal (faces of the Fellowship and others), and A Walk Through the Shire (various scenes of hobbit life in the Shire).
* And finally, NewsThump hilariously reports “New power station to be powered by J.R.R. Tolkien spinning in his grave”.