Tolkien Gleanings #354
* New at Word on Fire, Holly Ordway looks into “Tolkien’s Newman Connections”. Freely available online.
* Alas, not me blog has a substantial new post “From a Gift in Death to the Gift of Death: Turin and the Doom of Men”.
* Upcoming Courses at Signum University for spring and summer 2026. Online courses, for which the sign-up deadline is 7th December 2025. Includes…
– Tolkien in Context
– Beowulf through Tolkien (if enough sign up for it)
– Tolkien & Medievalism
– Tolkien & Science
* I spotted a book I seem to have overlooked, though perhaps it appeared just before my Gleanings started in 2023. It’s David Bratman’s Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays on Tolkien, the Inklings, and Fantasy Literature (2023), published by Mythopoeic Press. I was alerted to it by encountering a used copy for sale. The book’s page at the Mythopoeic Press usefully gives the contents-list, and I see there’s now a budget-priced Kindle ebook edition. Potential buyers might usefully note that “The Condensed Silmarillion” section is apparently a parody, not a handy summary.
* Forthcoming from Ava Maria Press, the book Into the Heart of Middle-earth: Exploring Faith and Fellowship in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. From the author of the Tea with Tolkien blog. Due 20th February 2026.
* Currently being auctioned at Heritage Auctions, “Treebeard” by the Brothers Hildebrandt (1975).
* New on YouTube from the University of Oxford ‘Tolkien talks’, a recording of “Other Minds and Hands”: A conversation with Philippa Boyens. Boyens was one of three screenplay writers for the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.
* An excellent new Anglotopia podcast on Craftland: A Journey Through Britain’s Disappearing Crafts with author James Fox. One if the best podcasts I’ve heard for a while. It also made me think more about many craft elements in Middle-earth, from Sam’s rope-making to Aragorn’s supple and yet weather-resistant leather boots, and from humble hobbit wood-craft to seemingly-magical elf-craft. Freely available on YouTube. I wonder if a hypothetical Crafts of Middle-earth book might help a little with the survival of some critically endangered traditional British crafts, such as bell-making and bow-making for archery?
* And finally, a new AI-powered Tolkien’s Neo-Archaic English Translator. Free, and allowing the user to… “Translate from Normal Language into Tolkien’s Neo-Archaic English”. More interesting is that it translates the other way too, which means that William Morris now becomes somewhat more readable. It didn’t catch Morris’s “perchance” though, in this section I picked at random from his The Well at the World’s End…
