Tolkien Gleanings #342
* New on YouTube, an interview about the forthcoming Tolkien book The Bovadium Fragments, with the director of the Bodleian Library’s ‘Centre for the Study of the Book’.
* Newly added to the current rolling issue of Journal of Tolkien Research, a long 19-page review of the new book Proceedings of the Tolkien 2019 Conference (2025). Freely available online.
* “Ex Occidente Lux: Tolkien’s New Mythology for the Western World”, a Web page giving some details of a forthcoming lecture to be given at the University of Norway on 29th October 2025, by… “Visiting scholar Jan Kozak from Charles University in Prague.”
* Airyyn is making Middle-earth maps and infographics about maps, on Deviantart. Including an infographic which offers a tree of the Middle-earth cartographers…
Her latest, published to Deviantart a few days ago, is The Maps of The Silmarillion… “This infographic shows the publishing history of the maps of The Silmarillion, from the first Silmarillion map in the 1930’s to the map in The Children of Hurin.”
* Australia’s OzMoot 2026 will discuss the themes of ‘Celebration, Ceremony, and Courtship’ in Tolkien. Canberra and online, from 24th-26th January 2026.
* “War, Fellowship, and Survival in the Lives and Works of C.S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits”, a three-day conference set for 11th-13th June 2026 in Amiens, France.
* And finally, I spotted an alternative view of the entrance to The Post Office, Rednal, which has popped up on eBay. Here I’ve newly enhanced and colorised the eBay scan. One can determine the location by comparing it with another postcard which named the Post Office, re: the same fence-sequence and sign-board. The new card looks in the opposite direction.
It’s not impossible that we see the Postmaster, in the man wearing the shopkeeper’s apron.
In 1904 the Tolkiens were staying with the postman and his wife very nearby at ‘Woodside Cottage’. Rednal Post Office was then only a stone’s throw from the start of the Oratory retreat’s driveway (a yard or two out of sight on the newly found view, at the end of the hedge on the right). The same driveway also led to the cottage. The lads had perfect weather in summer 1904 and went roaming, sketching, tree climbing, kite-flying and bilberry-picking. And presumably they visited the Post Office for fizzy-pop and crisps (U.S.: soda and potato-chips).