Tolkien Gleanings #292
* New to me, in the paywalled academic Journal of Fandom Studies I find the article “Tolkien fanzines, fandom and the literary tradition in the 1960s” (2024). A quick search also reveals the journal’s earlier special-issue on the professional archiving of fandom, which had “From the hobbit-hole: The Lord of the Rings fanzines of the 1960s and archival limitations” (2021). So far as I can tell, neither article is online elsewhere in open-access.
* On eBay, up popped an academic book that had passed me by. The Map of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections on Tolkien’s Myth of Wilderness (2022), from Kent State University Press. I must have noticed the review in Mallorn, when I ploughed through their back-issues last year. But looking back on that review I find it focussed heavily on the Beowulf discussion in the first chapter — which probably put me off. Anyway, I find that there’s more to the book than that and it’s now available as a £36 ebook via Amazon.
The eBay listing of the hardback revealed the contents-page, and this made the book sound rather interesting with — modern eco-politics aside — the core of the book… “tracing some of the ancient Celtic, Germanic, and English mythic roots of Tolkien’s work; examines how those roots influence Tolkien’s own depictions of the wild natural world”. Apparently also considers the landscapes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of my special interests.
* New on YouTube in Spanish, a 100-minute recording from a recent conference, discussing La filosofoa en la obra de J.R.R. Tolkien (‘Philosophy in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien’).
* From Turkey, in English and open-access, a 2025 journal article on the “Architectural Dynamics in Tolkien’s Novel, The Hobbit: A Literary and Cinematic Perspective”.
* From Indonesia, J.K. Rahma’s new Silmarillion illustrations.
* The Italian Tolkien Society notes that the crowd-funded fan-film Visions of Storm (February 2024) has just won the Best Film Award at the Magic Awards 2025 in St. Petersburg. A prequel to the three Hobbit movies, it sees an elf and man travel to Erebor carrying a warning… but on the way they are attacked by orcs near the Lonely Mountain. Only 14 minutes long but with huge group effort put into it, including intense 3D storyboarding, superb makeup, location shoots and over 90 VFX shots. There’s a trailer on YouTube.
* Likely to be of interest to some Gleanings readers, the documentary feature A Stranger Quest (2023). Being a film about David Rumsey, the outstanding and generous collector of historical maps and also of a few fantasy/imaginary maps of superb quality. Now freely available on Vimeo.
* Artist Miriam Ellis has a new illustrated blog post, musing on life at the Undertowers. This being the new Shire-expanding westward colony, established by Pippin and his family after the events of The Lord of the Rings.
* And finally, here in the UK we have a new set of Royal Mail picture postage stamps depicting some of our popular folk-lore. The Grindylow more commonly known as ‘Jenny Greenteeth’.