Tolkien Gleanings #314
* The new book Crossing borders between countries, scholars, and genres: Commemorating the late Kathleen E. Dubs (2025) is now freely available online. Has several chapters on Tolkien, including…
– The Corruption of the Best is the Worst: Saruman as an Academic and a Priest.
– Tolkienesque Elements in Etelka Gorgey’s Mythopoetical Science Fiction.
– Personal Names in the Irish Gaelic Translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
* Oronzo Cilli has a new article on “The Wilton Diptych: a gift from Tolkien to the Convent of Santa Colette in Assisi”. I also see several others of more unknown date, new to me. Including “Tolkien and Nevbosh: A Tale of limericks, Nonsense, and Literary Echoes”. ‘Nevbosh’ being an early invented language. Freely available online.
* Now available, a slim book from what appears to be a husband and wife team, Tolkien: Roncevaux, Ethandune, and Middle-earth (2025)…
“The influences of works such as Beowulf and the Norse Eddas on Tolkien’s fiction have been widely discussed, but there are other texts that have not received as much attention. This book explores two of these stories, The Song of Roland and Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse, and their influence on Tolkien’s writing.”
* Sadly the forthcoming book The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 has slipped its publication date. Amazon UK had it set for July 2025, until very recently, and I was looking forward to reading and reviewing it. But now I see that all editions are due in November 2025. Or in the case of the paperback perhaps even later, presumably depending on how badly it collides with Christmas.
* Google Search suggests there is something new about Auden’s ‘copy of Tolkien’ on Instagram. But I can’t get to it because of the growing site-blocking regime — presumably the block is due to the new government regulations here in the UK. I hear these are also blocking Reddit’s RSS access now, as well as CivitAI.
* And finally… for the network-visualisation software tool ManyNet, a free LoTR dataset dated 2025…
“Lord of the Rings. A labelled, complex, undirected network of 36 characters and 66 interaction. The ties are unweighted and concern only interaction. Interaction can be cooperative or conflictual.”
Presumably it wouldn’t be too much trouble for some who knows the book well, to finesse this by colour-coding the interconnection wires by type of interaction?