Tolkien Gleanings #312
* The latest issue of Ex Fonte: Journal of Ecumenical Studies in Liturgy, reviews The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (2025). Freely available online.
* In the Polish journal Miedzy Oryginalem a Przekladem, an article in French with English abstract, “Des mots aux mondes: cartographies imaginaires en traduction”. An article on the translation of fantasy literature maps, and the various impacts this can have on the reader. Freely available online.
* There’s a new Oxford University Press history book for those interested in the deep background of Tolkien’s academic battles, Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (2025). Said to be… “the first full account of the discipline’s development from its late-eighteenth-century beginnings up to the early 1960s.” I’m not sure if it classes Philology as Eng. Lit. though.
* The Tolkien Library is moving from Belgium to Norway.
* September 2025’s Signum University online short-courses list is offering “The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Later Poems 1 (Volume 3: The Years 1931-1967)”, and the less-certain “Turin’s Bones: The Influences of Sigurd, Oedipus, and Kullervo on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Tale of Turin Turambar”. The latter will only run if enough people sign up for it.
* Artist Miriam Ellis discusses the skill of place-making displayed by Tolkien in his Withywindle valley, in her new blog post “Of Wild Woods, Wild Hobbits, and the Withywindle”. Illustrated as always with her fresh and delightful paintings.
* Not Tolkien related, but I see that Tolkien scholar Kristine Larsen has “The Literal and Literary Impact of Comets in 1870s Science Fiction”, in the latest issue of the Science Fiction Foundation’s journal Foundation.
* What appears to be a sort of Austrian Tolkien Day, Lasse Lanta 2025 is happening in September 2025. Looks more like large cos-play festival than conference. But this year’s theme is “The Return of the King” and so, given such a weighty title, I’m guessing there may also at least be some talks being given.
* A talk at the Malvern Theatre, in the town of Malvern, “The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien” with John Garth. 10th August 2025. Booking now.
* A talk on “Tolkien in the Cotswolds”, set for the Cotswolds on 3rd September 2025. Booking now.
* Last week I enjoyed a wonderful British wartime movie that I had no idea existed. If you want to taste the rural Cotswolds that Tolkien knew then The Tawny Pipit (1944) is a delight, a sort of Ealing comedy but a deeply rural one and full of superbly-played characters. I was also reminded of the sublime first series of The Detectorists, at times. Tawny Pipit was filmed on location near Stow-on-the-Wold in the Cotswolds, about 15 miles NW of Oxford. It’s now free on Archive.org and the download is thus on a handy .torrent file. So far as I can tell, the British Film Institute has never restored it, and the Archive.org quality appears to be about as good as it gets for now. Temporally-stable movie restoration AIs are not here yet, more’s the pity, but given the blistering pace of AI such things can’t be too far away. Not that we Brits may know much about that — since visiting the main AI-download hub CivitAI is about to be effectively banned in the UK from next week.
* And finally… YouTube is still available in the UK for now, although our dismal government is no doubt eyeing it nervously. Thus one can enjoy a new 17-hour quality audiobook of The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison, free on YouTube and from a good reader. There may be ads if you just start playing it on YouTube, but there won’t be if you download it as an .MP3 audio file. I never managed to worm my way past page 90 or so of Ouroboros, reading it as a youth. But perhaps now I’ll try again. Note that if one becomes the audiobook reader’s Patreon patron, one can then suggest future titles to be made into free audiobooks.