Tolkien Gleanings #311
* A new collection of 17 essays by Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger has been published, titled A Real Taste for Fairy-stories. Publisher Walking Tree has the table of contents for the book, though most of the essay titles are rather unrevealing.
* “Tolkien and the changes of times” is the title of a talk to be given by Prof. Giuseppe Pezzini, Fellow and Tutor at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. Sounds like it might be about how Tolkien responded to the jarring emergence of modernity during the 1915-1945 period. Happening 28th July 2025 in Southport which is a few miles north of the port city of Liverpool, in northern England. Part of the touring Magic Of Middle-earth exhibition, which runs in this coastal town until 27th September 2025.
* Original hand-drawn maps by Middle-earth map-maker Karen Wynn Fonstad are included in a Fantastic Worlds exhibition at Robinson Map Library, University of Wisconsin, USA. The free show includes other fantasy maps, and will open on 21st July 2025.
* The JIS Symposium 2025 — Lewis & Tolkien: The Promise of Christian Fairytales, to be held online on 18th October 2025.
* A new text interview on “Lewis and Tolkien, Philosophy and Creativity”, with the author of a book on C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing (2016).
* Details of the planned Tolkien strands at the 2026 International Congress on Medieval Studies are available. These will include, among others, a strand on “The Sea, the Shore, the Sky: Medieval Thresholds in Tolkien’s Legendarium”. This will present papers on… “physical and abstract thresholds, borders, and boundaries within his legendarium”.
* The Tolkien Society has sent an email calling for volunteers for what sounds like a major building project. People familiar with drawing up ground-plans, project fundraising, etc are required. Though one wonders if Birmingham City Council, still bankrupt the last time I looked, might sell them Sarehole Mill and save them the trouble of a new-build?
* Newly freely available on Archive.org, the scanned run of Dragon Magazine, 1976-2007… “one of the two official magazines for source material for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game”.
* The lost videotapes of the proceedings of the ‘Lewis Carroll and the Idea of Childhood’ conference (2006) have been found, and the set is now digitized and freely available on YouTube.
* New in the journal History of Education and Children’s Literature, “Lo Hobbit a fumetti: considerazioni su un fantasy illustrato tra il Novecento e gli anni Duemila” discusses the visual depiction of Gollum in the graphic-novel of The Hobbit. Freely available online.
* And finally… science has a new name for an old phenomenon, “The Gollum effect”. Defined as a researcher who refuses to share his ‘precious’ (datasets, computer models, methodologies, study sites, etc) with others, and who actively tries to throttle newcomers.