Tolkien Gleanings #355
* The German/English journal Hither Shore 21, a themed issue on ‘Tolkien and his Editors’, is now available on Amazon. This “2024” issue is there dated as being published 4th November 2025. Here are the contents…
* First Things magazine has a new article on “The Inkling Who Fought Abortion”… “Owen Barfield, the philosopher, novelist, and a key influence on both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, was one of the fifteen founders of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.” The first such pressure group. The first third of the article is freely available online, and is then $ paywalled.
* Christianity Today reviews the stage play Lewis & Tolkien. Also has a partial interview with the makers, possibly drawn from the Q&A. Freely available online. The play’s theme of determined friendship is one that…
“feels especially relevant now. Two men reconciling over an unhurried, in-person conversation, nestled in a snug pub, defies everything about modern society’s bitter ideological divisions and disembodied digital distractions. Not a single iPhone in sight. No email notifications. No Slack messages interrupting the conversation. Prolonged eye contact, full attention, and a radical willingness to stay in the same room even when wounded by the other.”
* New in the latest issue of the rolling Journal of Tolkien Research “A Detestable Nation of Orcs: echoes of Eurasian nomads in early fantasy and the literary ecosystem behind them”. This seeks models for orcs in various groups of historical primary-world Eurasian nomads, such as the Huns and Mongols.
* The link on Lindefirion‘s site to the “Expanded Middle-earth poster map” is now “404”, but on DeviantArt Mairon666 has a new makeover of it, as “Northern Middle-Earth (3rd Age)”. With a free and un-watermarked 4.5Mb download. Though sadly this is still not big enough to read the smallest place-labels.
* Robert Plant talks at length about how the mystique of Wales and magic of Tolkien influenced his 1970s rock band Led Zeppelin. There’s a five-minute clip from the interview on YouTube, but the full interview doesn’t appear to be online — unless perhaps you subscribe to streaming services for U.S. TV channels.
* Free League has announced their forthcoming Hobbit Tales, a $46 role-playing game add-on book for the core One Ring game. The value of such books for non-gamers is in the sumptious production values and artwork, their maps and detailed descriptions of places and terrains, and their attention to everyday items and trading.
Though the only information in that regard is that the book will have “detailed descriptions of the four farthings” of the Shire. Gamer buyers should know that this new book is a one-volume collection for five “silly misadventures” of hobbits that were… “previously published in the starter set for The One Ring Second Edition and in the Shire Adventures compendium for The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying”. Thus avid tabletop gamers may already have it, since the current core game One Ring is now “the official tabletop roleplaying game” — and many will likely have the starter set in its second edition.
The Hobbit Tales promo is interesting in its own right, in that the makers claim a ‘TM’ trademark on the word “Hobbit”. Either that or they’ve acknowledging someone else’s trademark, which is perhaps why they use “hobbit” on the cover with no distinctively-obvious capital “H”? On the promo page it’s definitely capital “H”. Anyway, be aware that someone is trying to claim a trademark on a word which was in use prior to Tolkien.
* And finally and seasonally, Miriam Ellis savours the hobbit mushroom habit. Ellis makes the perceptive comment that… “I expect hobbits had a fund of stories and songs about their passionate love for this near-magical food.” And probably short sayings and little everyday rhymes too, I’d add. To help children learn and recall the differences between edible mushrooms and dangerous toadstools. “If ‘t has a frill, you’ll be ill”, “If ’tis red, you’ll be dead”, that sort of thing.