Tolkien Gleanings #285
* At the Wade Center in the USA, “C.S. Lewis and the End of the World”, the 2025 Hansen Lecture series. Two of the lectures are now over, but freely available as video. The first was “Lewis and the Apocalyptic Imagination”, the second “Lewis and the Construction of the Monstrous”. The final lecture is due to be given on 10th April 2025, “C.S. Lewis, the End(s) of Desire, and the Construction of Hope”. Note also that the first event also saw a launch for the new book The Last Romantic: C.S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology (2025), this being “the eighth volume in the Hansen Lectureship series”. I see this book now has an audiobook.
* A new YouTube interview, part of a Philosophy for All’s growing ‘for beginners’ series, with Holly Ordway being interviewed on “The Philosophy and Faith of Tolkien”.
* Indiana University Library blog has an illustrated post on “Drawing Tolkien: Art Inspired by Tolkien’s Legendarium”. Specifically, the Library’s archives hold the Graham and Caitlin Mackintosh pen & ink illustrations for the book Tree by Tolkien (1974).
* My blog post on Sir Gawain and the Fellowship, in which I offer a few notes on the close similarities between the sequence of events in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and early events in The Lord of the Rings.
* A new short Old English Core Literary Vocabulary, currently being regularly updated and freely available.
aelfscyne, adj., beautiful as a fairy
* Staffordshire’s long-awaited new £8.7 million history study centre opened at the end of 2024 in the central county-town of Stafford, and is now fully up and running, and has just welcomed its 5,000th visitor. This free centre holds the County archives, and has new study-rooms and temporary exhibition spaces. This would be a useful archive and reference library if one were looking into Tolkien’s time(s) in Staffordshire. For North Staffordshire (Tolkien’s live-ammunition training camp near Keele, and later many retirement holidays with his son in Stoke) also note the large but little-known Local Studies collection at Keele University.
* Ablaze comics is to market a ‘J.R.R. Tolkien Genesis Collected Set’ in May 2025, this being a two-book bundle of graphic novels. One is the recent adaptation of the Kalevala (lovely painted pages, jarringly creaky dialogue), and the other is Tolkien: Lighting Up the Darkness which depicts some of Tolkien’s youth and battlefield experiences. Both books have already been released, and the comics-trade news of the forthcoming bundle doesn’t mention any special extras. Sounds to me like it’s just a marketing booster, to bring the titles back to the notice of trade journalists?
* And finally, the mooted big-budget movie of The Hunt for Gollum has now been pushed back to a December 2027 release slot, with the script reportedly yet to be written.