Tolkien Gleanings #278
* In the new Our Sunday Visitor magazine, Father Michael Ward invites readers to “Wander the medieval streets that inspired C.S. Lewis and Tolkien”. Freely available online. Definitely not one of those worthless AI-generated ‘quickie’ tour-guide articles…
“… if it hadn’t been for their connection with Oxford, I would never have applied to this university, where I studied for a degree in English and now work in the Faculty of Theology and Religion. By a pleasing quirk of fate, the college I attended as a student was right next door to The Eagle and Child [pub …]. It has been my privilege to have lived almost all my adult life in the city they called home. For three years I even got to occupy Lewis’ own house, The Kilns…”
* The Oxford Tolkien Network’s public seminar talks continue, with ‘Tolkien and old English prosody’ set for 21st February 2025.
* YouTube channelist Brewing Books announces… “I’m doing a PhD on Tolkien”. He’s now a few months into the preliminary work on the topic of… “Conflict, longing and loss, in The Fall of Arthur” and he will also touch on some of Tolkien’s other poems.
* Amazon UK now has “24th April 2025” as the shipping date for the £100 boxed-set of Tolkien’s Myths and Legends (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, The Fall of Arthur, Beowulf). Pre-ordering now.
* Now online, Fantasy Art and Studies #17 (winter 2024) on the theme of ‘Fantasy Flora’. Includes (in French) the article “The Linguistic Roots of Middle-earth: Introduction to phytonymy in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Phytonymy = plant names. The previous issue Fantasy Art and Studies #16 (summer 2024) was on ‘Fantasy Clothing’ and had (again in French) an article on “The Hobbits and their Wardrobe”. Free to read online, as a Web flip-book — which sadly means the articles can’t be easily auto-translated.
* Freely available online, due to their new open-access policy, Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal. The latest 2024 issue of the scholarly journal reviews, among others, the books Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many, and Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography.
* Launched just before Christmas 2024, the Tolkien Linked Open Data Project…
“We are working on referencing, indexing, and linking between Tolkien-related texts, people, places, and events in both the primary and secondary world across online projects, scholarly works, archives, media, and more.”
* And finally, talking of tenuously intertwingled connections… in London this spring, the major show ‘Tarot — Origins & Afterlives’. This is the inaugural exhibition for the new £14.5m Kythera Gallery, at the Warburg Institute (London’s museum of cultural history). Runs until 30th April 2025. Free, but booking required. I’ve no idea if the finely-illustrated Lord of the Rings Tarot card deck is being shown, but if not then the curators will have missed a crowd-pleasing trick. Remarkably, I see that the deck is ‘official’. Whatever next, ‘Summoning Sauron — the Ouija Board’?