Tolkien Gleanings #303
* A new and fully-primed Journal of Tolkien Research, Vol. 21, Issue 2 (2025), being a special issue on ‘Tolkien and Psychology: Papers from the 2024 University of Vermont Tolkien Conference’. Freely available online. Includes, among others, Kristine Larsen on “The Mariner and his Astronomer Father: Victorian Masculinities in Numenor”. Also note the last-minute addition to the previous rolling edition, Vol 21, Issue 1, Janet Brennan Croft’s ““What Ship Will Bear Me Ever Back”: Woundedness and the Western Sea”.
* A Masters degree dissertation for the U.S. Catholic university Seton Hall, “The Atmosphere that Supports Life on Earth”: An Ecocritical Approach to Tolkien’s Arda (2025). Freely available for download. On perusing the abstract one finds it focuses down on…
“the interplay between mountains, trees, and humanity within Arda [which] has yet to be explored [in Tolkien studies, and thus the author] seeks to rectify this lack by coining a new term — the ecocritical trinity, based in medievalism …”
* Also at Seton Hall, I noted the university’s annual Arcadia: A Student Journal for Faith and Culture. There I discovered that their 2024 issue was a special on ‘Exploring Religion Through Fantasy Literature’. Freely available online and it has the following Tolkien essays…
– “Good and Evil in Fantasy: The Author and the Reader” (compares LoTR with Night Operation by Owen Barfield, and Gaiman’s American Gods).
– “The Love of God in This World and the Next” (on the manner of the deaths of two key characters in LoTR).
– “Afterlife: Life and Death in Narnia and Arda”.
– ““The Dominion of Men”: A Study of Masculinity in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings”.
– “Anglo-Saxon and Christian Themes of Bravery in Beowulf and Their Applications in The Hobbit”.
* At the online Signum University for June 2025, a one-month summer school course on ‘Tolkien and the Old Testament’. Booking now. And in July 2025, ‘Men Marrying Up: Marriage and Romance in Tolkien’, plus another three courses in the Collected Poems series. Related: Shalom Tidings has ‘Tolkien Speaks: The Secrets to a Happy Marriage’.
* The new Spanish podcast Tolkien in Lettere is persevering with reading Tolkien’s letters in order, and has now released a free audio reading of Tolkien’s ‘Lettera 25’ in Spanish translation.
* On YouTube, Malcolm Guite enjoys a dip into the new Collected Poems boxed-set.
* And finally….“Giant sculpture of Gandalf riding an eagle to be removed from Wellington Airport” in New Zealand. Might make a nice hood-ornament for President Trump’s new Air Force One?