Tolkien Gleanings #346
* Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull have a new long blog post on “Legacy and Faith”, which considers the recent Walking Tree book Celebrating Tolkien’s Legacy. And one finds that the second half moves on to consider Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography. Freely available online.
* John Garth has a new article on “‘Mounted on the monster’: Tolkien and the motor-car” ($ paywall), following the publication this week of The Bovadium Fragments.
* The pioneering eco-studies book Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien (University Press of Kentucky, 2006) has a release-date for the first Italian translation as Ent, Elfi ed Eriador. Due on 13th December 2025.
* At the University of Texas School of Civic Leadership, a talk on “The War for Middle-earth” on 19th November 2025. Joseph Loconte gives a talk on his forthcoming book The War for Middle-earth, which Amazon currently pegs to 18th November 2025 in hardcover and ebook.
* In Barcelona from 17th-19th October 2025, an international conference on Faith, Art and Myth…
“focuses on the literary, philosophical and spiritual legacy of three giants of Christian literature: G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Through conferences, round tables and cultural activities, the congress will offer an invaluable opportunity to explore the power of myth, beauty, and transcendence in their works”.
* In the latest Word on Fire, “Light and High Beauty: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Antidote to Despair”. Freely available online.
* Now freely available online, the Keble College PhD thesis “The Oxford School of Children’s Fantasy Literature: Medieval afterlives and the production of culture” (2011).
* New on YouTube, and well-timed for the falling of the leaves in England, Malcom Guite on trees, Tolkien & the meaning of things.
* And finally, Footnote remover, a new free online service to remove all footnotes and in-text superscript numbers from a PDF file. Perhaps useful if, for instance, you wanted to make a text-to-speech audiobook of an annotated text. Or ingest annotated letters or essays into an AI, without the annotations.