Tolkien Gleanings #281
* The Italian Tolkien Society has a new Call for Papers for a summer conference on the topic of ‘Orality and Writing in Middle-earth: Traditions of the Voice, Manuscript Transmissions and Interpretations of Tolkien’s Legendarium’. The focus of the 11th-13th July 2025 conference will be on oral tradition and written manuscripts in Middle-earth, rather than in the primary world. Proposals deadline: 30th April 2025. It appears that participants must give their papers in person in Italy, though attendance is free for presenters and they will also benefit from subsidised accommodation in Castelli Romani (said to be… “a popular retreat from Rome’s summer heat”). I assume the papers need to be in Italian, though the call does not specify language. The conference proceedings will later be issued as a book.
* From Brazil, Ecological faerie: J.R.R. Tolkien’s supernatural poetics (2024). The credits mention the author’s funded “doctoral degree”, so this and the length mean it is likely a completed PhD thesis. In English and freely available online. The work…
“analyzes his poetry as an ‘artistic seed’ for aspects that would come to form his prose, as well as something wholly unique within his oeuvre. The close reading of his poetry is divided into four different environments, insular, forest, rocky and watery”
The author find these closely adhere to older medieval “Celtic and Germanic molds”, but he winkles out a few ways in which they may have departed from these molds.
* A new paper on “Antiphons of Iron and Blood” examines one of the newly released Tolkien poems “Ferrum et Sanguis” (Christmas, 1914). Freely available online. Suggests that the…
“source for the poem is very likely found in the Advent Vespers of the days surrounding Tolkien’s writing of the poem, rather than the Catholic Tenebrae service, as the [Collected Poems] editors posit. […] In taking inspiration from the O Antiphons, he was doing the same sort of thing that the poet of Crist was doing when he composed the lines “Eala Earendel engla beorhtast”: responding to the inspiration of the Vesper Antiphons by applying them to his own situation and seeing the truth of the verse in a new way from a different perspective.”
See also my recent book, Tree & Star: Tolkien and the quest for Earendel, for a chapter on the matter. This paper, linking the newly released poem with the O Antiphons, independently serves to support my book’s arguments.
* Springtime 2025 brings another chance to hear and see the recreation of the children’s lecture ‘Tolkien on Dragons’ in Oxford. To be presented at The Story Museum on 26th April 2025. Booking now. Free, so tickets are likely to go fast.
* The county of Dorset is the next to host the popular British touring exhibition The Magic of Middle-earth. The ‘mostly memorabilia, merchandise, posters, and models’ show will run at the Dorchester’s Shire Hall from 29th March to 14th June 2025. Some sources say free, others say very expensive. The Wordland blog has just posted some interior photos from the earlier Chichester stop for the show.
* And finally, talking of exhibitions… just closed in the Italian city of Turin, the substantial exhibition “Tolkien: Uomo, Professore, Autore”. No news, as yet, about where it might go next.