Tolkien Gleanings #236
* PRINTmag has a new and long interview with the creator of the new partly-a-comic-book book The Mythmakers, telling the story of Tolkien and Lewis for young readers. Many of the comic-strip interior pages are shown. Freely available online.
* A new issue of the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research has begun its rolling progress. Only one paper added so far, “Teaching Song and Holiness: An Exploration of the Mystic and Syncretic Elements of Tolkien’s Earliest Elvish Language Invention”.
* Digital Tolkien has a new Poems — Tolkien Poetry page, which appears to effectively serve as a useful interactive A-Z of what’s to come in the Collected Poems.
* In northern England, Leeds Central Library (the city’s public library) is to host a Tolkien Centenary Lecture on 23rd October 2024. Only 29 tickets left to hear Claire Rae Randall on what were apparently Tolkien’s local sources, and how these can still be…
found hidden in plain sight here in Leeds and more widely abroad in Yorkshire, from Treebeard the Ent in Headingley to Helm’s Deep in the glacial landscapes of the Dales.
Also related to Leeds, a reminder that one of the calls for 2025 Tolkien at IMC Leeds (7th-10th July 2025) was “J.R.R. Tolkien as Teacher and Mentor at Leeds and Beyond”. The deadline has just passed for IMC Leeds Tolkien proposals, but presumably this means a set of videos on the topic in the second half of 2025. I’d suggest we might also have a complementary set of papers on Tolkien’s own mentors and tutors, at some point in the future.
* Advance themes for the Annual UVM Tolkien Conference at the University of Vermont. 2025 will be “Tolkien and War”, and 2026 “Tolkien and the Medieval”.
* A stamp-collecting Tolkien Philatelic Society has been formed and hopes to grow… “So far we have just a handful of members and are looking for more.”
* More broadly related to the popular side of pre-LoTR fantasy culture, a call for scholars and collectors to contribute to The Pulpster #34, the annual of pulp history. In 2025 this will take the theme of ‘Masters of Blood and Thunder’. These being the writers Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter of Mars, Tarzan etc), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood), and Edgar Wallace (Sanders of the River, crime novels, King Kong script), who will also be the focus of the 2025 PulpFest. However the editors are open to other ‘blood and thunder’ writers who published in the pulps. The editors also seek articles which appreciate your favourite villain from the 1910s-1950s pulp magazines (or their later book reprints).
* And finally, a remarkable ‘Eye of Sauron’ ring has been newly unearthed by archaeologists here in the UK. No reports, as yet, that it makes the wearer invisible.