Tolkien Gleanings #272
* From the Birmingham Oratory, the full text of the October 2024 Tolkien talk “Of the One Ring and the Nature of Good and Evil: The Moral Power of the Lord of the Rings“.
* A new post from Tolkien scholar John Garth, on “Tolkien’s ‘second father’, Francis Morgan” of the Birmingham Oratory. As the UK recovers from a recent storm, Garth also topically muses on “Storm Eowyn and the ghost gale in Tolkien’s ‘Notion Club Papers’”.
* From The Cambridge Companion to William Morris (2024), the short chapter “Morris’s prose romances and the origins of fantasy”. Now freely available for download from a university repository. Has some discussion of Tolkien, pointing out that their different politics didn’t prevent the fateful encounter. Adding dates might have rather finessed this point, I’d add. The young Tolkien enjoyed the man’s fantasy work more than 30 years after the revolutionary politics of London in the 1880s.
* Unexpectedly, the open-access Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research has sprung to life at the new URL of fafnir.journal.fi. The journal’s archives appear to have vanished if one only visits the new URL, but they are still available at the old journal.finfar.org site. A site which at present knows nothing about the new issue. Anyway… the new issue, just published has an article exploring “Ant Similes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” and reviews the book Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss, among other items.
* Details of the 2025 Staffordshire Moorlands Walking Festival here in the West Midlands of the UK, this year to run from 25th April to 5th May 2025. Includes a 2nd May ‘Gawain Country’ walk from Gradbach to-and-through Lud’s Church & then around The Roaches. A “leisurely” five miles, though reaching the starting-point without a car will be very difficult.
* In Belgium, the Athus Library is… “organizing an exhibition and a series of animations on Tolkien and Middle-earth”, plus movie screenings. 25th January to 15th March 2025. Athus appears to be a local city library rather than a national one.
* In the academic open-access journal Well Played, a detailed examination of “The Lord Of The Rings: The Card Game – A Machine That Generates Possible Worlds”…
“The literary inspiration governs the whole system of the game. Even the basic design choices are deeply influenced by the ideas presented in The Lord of the Rings books. […] The adventuring in The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is not only intellectual, but also a tactile experience.”
Sounds enticing. Though for a view of encountering the game as a first-time player, see
the tepid review at Board Game Quest. For a wider view of the expanding world of Tabletoppy Tolk®, see this week’s podcast Lore of the Rings #197: Tolkien & Tabletop Role Playing Games. Yet another big-budget expensive RPG LoTR boardgame is due in 2025.
* And finally, the French city of Lyon is staging a real-world game in February 2025. The city is organising a treasure-hunt for an authorised Lord of the Rings movie-facsimile £8k gold ring. Plus a Grand Costume Parade, to encourage the hunters to dash around the city in Middle-earth costumes. Nice idea.