Tolkien Gleanings #320
* The Tolkien Conference Switzerland, set for March 2026, now has a speakers list and abstracts. Topics include…
– Tolkien’s depiction of the tools of leadership and command.
– Leadership and lament in the person of Gandalf.
– Tolkien as an officer in the Great War.
– Types of governance in Middle-earth.
* A new long post from Oronzo Cilli on “British Communists: Michael H.R. Tolkien’s letters to the Evening Despatch (1944) and the Catholic Herald (1948)”. This reveals a new discovery, some of Tolkien’s son’s published anti-communist letters to publications. This then leads Cilli to an appendix in which he very plausibly asks if it may have been Michael Tolkien who subscribed to A.K. Chesterton’s ultra right-wing magazine Candour (1953-1973, League of Empire Loyalists), rather than his father. A 24-volume set of Candour allegedly “owned by Tolkien” was sold out of the Tolkien estate in 1973 on the senior Tolkien’s death, or so the current owner of the set would have it. The original ownership then seems fairly easy to prove or disprove: i) do we have the auction catalogue of the senior Tolkien’s house clearance from 1973; ii) are the alleged ‘red biro annotations’ in the set actually made in Tolkien’s very distinctive hand; and iii) does the set have any slips or envelopes relating to the subscription? Subscriber address-lists are not in the Candour papers and archives, now held at the University of Bath, but Bath does have a folder of 1965 letter(s?) from “TOLKIEN, Michael H. R.” to Chesterton. Which I guess may also have remarks which reveal his status as a subscriber or not.
* Sonja Virta is in the early stages of a PhD on… “revisions made to Finnish Tolkien translations after their original publication”.
* A Signum University online thesis defence, of a thesis on “Neutral and Evil Technology in Lewis and Tolkien”… “This thesis challenges the reductionistic narrative that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were anti-technology and anti-science.” Set for 13th August 2025.
* New in the current rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Romanticism in Tolkien’s The Hobbit”. Considers Tolkien’s uses of nature and domesticity, and suggests these themes parallel the concerns of the Romantic movement.
* The summer 2025 issue of the British Fantasy Society’s BFS Journal is a special on ‘Nature in Fantasy’. No Tolkien.
* And finally, the return of Birmingham Middle-earth Festival in September 2025 appears to have been cancelled. The website says…
“Unfortunately, we have had to cancel this year’s event, everything was all set up, but something has come up, and we sadly decided to cancel. Very sorry to all.”
And this is confirmed on their Facebook page.