Tolkien Gleanings #259
* The new C.S. Lewis Podcast #189, with Holly Ordway on ‘What did Christmas mean to J.R.R. Tolkien?’ Freely available to download (the link is under the ‘three-dots icon’). A good overview but omits mention of hobbits celebrating Yule (“there was a great deal better cheer that Yule than anyone had hoped for”), and there’s no time for the podcast to also discuss the Father Christmas Letters.
* Signum University short courses for February 2025. Including candidate modules on “Pre-Christian Religions of the North”, and “Turin’s Bones: The Influences of Sigurd, Oedipus, and Kullervo on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Tale of Turin Turambar”.
* Medievalists.net on “Searching for hidden medieval stories from the island of the Sagas”. Old parchment, used for the stiff covers of medieval Latin books from Iceland, is now being inspected for previously hidden texts in Old Norse. So far, the discoveries only amount to… “hymns, prayers, sermons, hagiographies and church music”. But there are many still to be inspected, and who knows… perhaps some snippets of unknown tales, one day?
* The latest online Elvish Lexicon, last updated 18th December 2024.
* A short talk by the Byron Society, “Byron’s Literary and Cultural Legacies in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”. Set for April 2025, with an online option.
* Set to be published at the end of December, the ebook of Theology, Religion, and Dungeons & Dragons: Explorations of the Sacred through Fantasy Worlds (2024). The paper edition is due in February 2025.
* Teen Fandom and Geek Programming (2018), a book for librarians seeking to bring young people’s fannish ‘clubs and collections’ into community and school/college libraries. Probably also useful for museum curators.
* And finally, Reviews from R’lyeh enjoys “A Hobbity Holiday” in a long review of a free pen-and-paper Yule-set RPG adventure set in The Shire. Note that this requires the One Ring Starter Set (2021) core game-book, which frames various Shire adventures… “set between the time Bilbo went on his journey [with the dwarves] and the events in The Lord of the Rings“. Not to be confused with the unrelated board-game with a very similar name. Even non-gamers may be interested to know the 2021 crowdfunded book has… “a full compendium covering the four Farthings of the Shire, all the way from Greenholm and the White Downs in the west to Buckland and the Old Forest in the east”. A review of the boxed 2021 edition states this 52-page Shire-description section has…
“a ton of lore for any RPG setting, let alone for a starter set. While I am a fan of Tolkien’s work, I’m no uber fan and I do have to admit that reading this took me the longest time. It can get quite dry at times and honestly reminded me of reading Tolkien’s books, complete with descriptions of various flower types. Big-time Lord of the Rings fans will probably eat this up.”
Sounds great. I see the boxed edition also has a rather pleasing fold-out colour wall-map in paper.