Tolkien Gleanings #300

Three hundred Gleanings! I welcome your support via Patreon.

* A new Journal of Inklings Studies is published, Vol. 15, No. 1 (April 2025). This includes “Tolkien’s ‘Sellic Spell’ and Beowulfian Sub-creation: the Artist and the Critic” ($ paywall). Plus a bumper crop of free book reviews for…

    – Mapping Middle-earth
    – Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913–1959
    – Friendship in The Lord of the Rings
    – The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation
    – Thomas Honegger’s Tweaking Things a Little
    – C.S. Lewis’s Oxford
    – The Songs of the Spheres (how Lewis and Tolkien overlapped)
    – Twenty-first Century Receptions of Tolkien
    – Translating and Illustrating Tolkien
    – The Battle of Maldon in two editions (one of which is Tolkien)

From the fine review of Lewis’s Oxford…

“Lewis’s attachment to the well-worn grooves of Oxford life could make a narrow focus for a biography, but the value of this book is the attention it pays to that very sameness, building up its picture from the many tiny details which gave shape to Lewis’s daily routine. The result is a grounded and satisfying account of Lewis’s life, with room for exploring matters which might go overlooked in a biography with a more conventional narrative structure.”

In my next PDF ‘zine edition of Tolkien Gleanings, I’ll have a “Tolkien’s Oxford” gallery section.

* The latest Christian Century magazine has a long article celebrating the increasingly apparent advent of what the headline-writer calls Tolkien 2.0…

“The fantasy writer’s vast theological and philosophical universe is unfolding in the hands of artists, scholars, and game designers.”

* New to me, Folkminner, the journal of the Norsk Folkeminnelag (Norwegian Folk-lore Society). It seems they’ve been posting it online since 2021, with the current online edition being April 2024. There is however an April 2025 edition, evidenced by The Carterhaugh School of Folklore kindly providing a free English translation of that issue’s article “Scandinavian Folklore and Fairy Tales in Modern English-Language Fantasy Literature”. Folkminner is now indexed in my JURN humanities search-engine.

* I came across a scan of the book English and Medieval Studies Presented To J.R.R. Tolkien (1962), on Archive.org ‘to borrow’. Here are the content pages…

* Miriam Ellis considers The Fire-works of Gandalf, and shows her painted illustrations of the scenes under discussion.

* Whitmore Rare Books has a new gallery of images of The Hobbit, as the tale appeared in its first American edition.

* Tickets are now on sale for another Oxford recreation of Tolkien’s lecture for children, ‘Tolkien on Dragons’.

* And finally, the annual Maytime Well-dressings at Malvern, which give thanks for the water bubbling out of the various local wells, fountains and springs around the famous hills. This year’s theme is to be ‘Folklore and Fairytales’, inspired by local folklore and Malvern’s literary connections with writers such as Tolkien. Running 3rd – 11th May 2025, the local water sources are decorated and there will be a 2025 trail map for visitors. The event doesn’t appear to take the same form as in the nearby Peak District, where the long-standing tradition is that boards surround the wells, are covered with clay, and then flat designs are made by pressing in the springtime flower-petals and new leaves. Malvern seems to be much more ad-hoc, with each little platoon of neighbours doing their own thing, at bubbling nooks with such delightful names as ‘Happy Donkey Spout’…