Tolkien Gleanings #322
* Newly listed on Amazon, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.B. Smith: With Wind in our Ears. A book from Palgrave Macmillan, set for release on 9th November 2025.
“The volume explores this relationship from biographical, literary, and philosophical perspectives, focusing on the content and style of Smith’s poetry, Tolkien’s editorial work, their shared intellectual world, and the lasting influence of Smith on Tolkien’s imagination.”
* Somehow escaping notice in Gleanings until now, I find that the new Smith of Wootton Major affordable 224-page paperback edition (March 2025) includes… “a facsimile of the illustrated first edition, a manuscript of Tolkien’s early draft of the story, notes and an alternate ending, and a lengthy essay on the nature of Faery.” This latter essay being, according to a review… “a condensed and more focused presentation of the ideas Tolkien explores in ‘On Fairy Stories’, benefiting from decades of continued thought after that essay was written, revised, revised again, and published.”
* Book trade bean-counter BookScan reports J.R.R. Tolkien’s 2024 book sales via British bookshops at £4.2m ($5.12m). This figure presumably relates to his own works (rather than scholarship etc) and sits within £82m of bookshop sales for science fiction and fantasy books in 2024. Bear in mind that BookScan is apparently only looking at point-of-sale retail data for new print books.
* Concatenation reviews The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition, with a focus on the development and afterlife of LoTR. The review is freely available online.
* From a Polish Tolkien site, a “Previously unknown letter by Tolkien’s son Michael on his ancestors”. Presumably Michael here conveys the family lore as his father also knew it…
“I will now present a [April 1963] letter from Michael H.R. Tolkien to Charles Woodrow Tolkien from California and his children. Following the letter, which presents the legendary history of the Tolkien family (almost 100 percent untrue), I will briefly reconstruct the family’s history based on documents from archives in Berlin, Gdansk, and London.”