Tolkien Gleanings #332
* Tolkien Society members now have a new issue of Vingilot (Fall 2025, though the cover has “Summer 2025”) to download. Poems and artwork, plus the article “The Hunt for the Fellowship”, which with the aid of the text and various timelines… “attempts a plausible reconstruction of the actions carried out by the enemy factions” in Fellowship, who these are and why they act.
* The latest edition of the open-access journal Alambique has two reviews in Spanish (Review 1 and Review 2) of the book Resena de Fantasia epica Espanola (1842-1903) (2024). The book offers an introduction and an “anthology of representative texts” of early Spanish fantasy literature from 1842-1903.
* Talking of early continental fantasy novels, Maurice Sand’s epic fantasy / sword-and-sorcery novel Le Coq aux Cheveux D’or (1867, in French) now has a free English translation on Archive.org. This is the first translation, so far as I know.
* In English from Poland, “Delights of Dinners, Pleasures of Picnics in the ‘Make-believe’ Food Fantasies of the Edwardian Children’s Literature” (2024). The article surveys a handful of classic British works translated into Polish. Tolkien’s hungry hobbits and (later) cooks would seem to echo this tradition. Freely available online.
* Signum University now has a page for the short online courses proposed for November 2025. Note “The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Later Poems 2 (Volume 3: The Years 1931-1967)” and “She Watered It With her Tears: Grief, Mourning, and Death in Tolkien’s Legendarium”. And Anne-girls everywhere will also want to consider October’s now-confirmed online course “Reading Anne of Green Gables as Fantasy”.
* The Staffordshire Catholic History Society was formed in 1961, and to 1991 it produced twenty-four issues of a scholarly journal titled Staffordshire Catholic History. Thereafter the journal was issued as the journal of the Midlands Catholic History Society, an annual title which continues today. I’ve looked through the online tables-of-contents for both these journals, and the only item of possible Tolkien relevance appears to be the article “An English Spring: Newman’s Anglo-Saxonism” (2006). This sounds like it may have background relevance to Tolkien’s intellectual upbringing, though I can’t tell — because the journal runs are not online.
* This week on YouTube, “History in Flames with Robert Bartlett” offers a long podcast interview with the author of a new book on the destruction of mediaeval manuscripts over the centuries.
* And finally, London’s Curtis Brown agency, now owned by the Beverley Hills based UTA, has taken over the handling of rights requests on behalf of The Tolkien Estate.