Tolkien Gleanings #304
* Due in the autumn of 2025, a new Tolkien book. This will publish Tolkien’s previously unpublished The Bovadium Fragments, a short satire on the growing car-and-lorry culture that was then destroying the old pre-war Oxford. Tolkien described it as “a sort of satirical fantasy”, and it was first offered to a publisher in 1960. The new book will present the Fragments together with the new scholarly essay “The Origin of Bovadium” by Richard Ovenden. To be ordered alongside a copy of the long poem Autogeddon (1991) by Heathcote Williams, I’d suggest. Though I see that Autogeddon is now sadly out-of-print and the Jeremy Irons / BBC audio-reading of it is totally unavailable — a sad fate for “the most vigorous sustained flow of invective against car culture to date” (Jeremy Irons). There is however a “to borrow” ebook scan on Archive.org.
* A few talks I missed on my first pass (in Tolkien Gleanings #238) of the many now-online videos for the Mythcon 53: ‘Fantasies of the Middle Lands’ 2024 conference…
– The Middle People of Middle-earth: Dwarven Displacement and Reconciliation in Tolkien’s Legendarium.
– “Our Dear Charles Williams”: Tolkien’s Feelings about the Oddest Inkling.
– Boromir’s Smile and Other Expressions of Wartime Joy in Tolkien.
– Tolkien’s Mechanical Dragons in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ (1916) and World War 1.
* The Church Times has a suitably short review of the recent J.R.R. Tolkien: A very short introduction pocket-book. The review is freely available online…
“Townend misses important scriptural linkages in the examples he cites.” […] “Sam Gamgee’s discovery that ‘his tongue was loosed and his voice cried in a language which he did not know’ is obviously a nod to Acts 2.4 [in the Bible]”.
* Criterion is the annual English Studies journal of New England’s College of the Holy Cross. Their new 2025 edition has “Home, Exile, and Displacement in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit”. Freely available online.
* In Paris, the College des Bernardins recently hosted a conference alongside their ‘Tolkien tapestries’ exhibition. It’s been and gone, and its Web page is now blocked by a noxious whole-page pop-up layer advertising other events. But here are the titles of some of the talks, in English translation…
– Purgatory in “Leaf by Niggle”.
– Art and Salvation: the Christian quality of Tolkian work. (Tolkian = possibly about ‘Tolkien inspired’ projects?)
– Allegiance to reality as a sign of redemption in Tolkien.
– Light and Dust: Tolkien, his guardian angel, and the angels in Middle-earth. (Leo Carruthers)
– J.R.R. Tolkien and the ‘Mass in Latin’.
– Do Hobbits Believe in Eru? : Analogies of faith in Middle-earth.
* The recently-updated faculty profile page for Christopher Jeansonne at Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York state states…
He is currently co-writing, with Maurice Suckling from the RPI games program, a monograph on the Tolkien-inspired board-game ‘War of the Ring’ for the Tabletop Gaming series from University of Michigan Press (forthcoming).
* Now online, the King Edwards School Old Edwardians Gazette for Tolkien’s old school. Seemingly a complete set, freely available online without registration. A random sampling gives me the December 1919 issue in a PDF viewer. Has substantial obituaries for past teachers.
* And finally… “Are Tom Bombadil and Beorn comparable in any tangible sense?”