Tolkien Gleanings #268

* The BBC archives appear to have dug up a new-to-2025 1962 Tolkien TV interview, which is now on YouTube. Worth seeing in video, rather than just downloading the audio, for Tolkien’s facial expressions.

* Yet another review for Tolkien and the Classical World, this time in German in the latest H-Soz-Kult: Kommunikation und Fachinformation fur die Geschichtswissenschaften.

* In The New York Times this week, a long retrospective obituary for “Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien’s Middle-earth” ($ possible paywall)…

“When she called Houghton Mifflin to pitch her idea [for a book of hand-drawn maps], Fonstad was connected with Tolkien’s U.S. editor, Anne Barrett, who was semi-retired but happened to be visiting the office that day. Barrett so loved the concept that she secured permission from the Tolkien estate within days.”

* The HOTA Gallery on Australia’s Gold Coast will host “Writers Revealed: Treasures from the British Library and National Portrait Gallery”, opening 12th April 2025. The exhibition will include a number of Tolkien letters…

“More than 100 rare, remarkable manuscripts, letters and first editions and 70 iconic portraits will be displayed together for the first time. […] including William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, William Blake, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, J.R.R. Tolkien […].”

* On Archive.org as a .PDF download, The Little City (1911) by Wilfred Rowland Childe (1890-1952), who was Tolkien’s friend and contemporary. Edwardian poems of faery, Oxford and the Cotswolds, evocations of nature and skyscapes, and ballads.

* And finally, ‘The Gawain Country’ as pictured in a great many old postcards. Many newly coloured.

A Wetton trackway in winter.