Tolkien Gleanings #306

* Newly published, the book Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (May 2025)…

A comprehensive reconstruction of Tolkien’s theoretical views on the nature of literary creation, systematised for the first time through a painstaking analysis of fragments spanning his vast output.

* Due in September 2025 from Routledge, the book The Ecological Imaginary in Literature and Other Media, a £145 academic book. The blurb makes the book sound contentiously political, but perhaps that’s just the publisher marketing it to buyers in academic libraries. Some chapters sound like interesting overviews, at least. Such as…

    – Early Fantasy – Green Knights and Faerie Queens.
    – Children’s Fantasy – The Mythopoeic Land-scapes of Childhood.
    – Epic Fantasy – Portals, Paradises, and Waste-lands.
    – Urban Fantasy – Edgelands, Polders, and Wain-scots.
    – Mapping the Fantastic: the ethics of placiality, ar-chitectonics, and speculative cartography.
    – Fantasy Sites – Fantasy texts and their real-world impact.

* Voluspa: A New Translation with Commentary (2025), an undergraduate final project, now freely available online.

* In the latest issue of the journal Arthuriana (spring 2025) a review of Local Place and the Arthurian Tradition in England and Wales, 1400–1700. Freely available online.

* Newly online at YouTube, Tom Shippey talking about the new book of Middle-earth paintings by Miriam Ellis.

* Also new at YouTube, a stage musical adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1994, Cobb Children’s Theatre). Terrible video quality, but at least the camera is stable and one can get a basic idea of staging and pacing.

* And finally… a flipbook of The Lord of the Rings. This is a new community project to make 100,000 drawings that will then be compiled into a three-hour ‘flipbook-style’ animation. Recruiting now, and 1,600 trace-artists are required.