Tolkien Gleanings #359
* Just published, the 2025 edition of the Italian Tolkien journal I Quaderni di Arda. It appears to be a comparative special-issue, with articles on Tolkien in relation to Moorcock, le Guin, Gaiman, China Mieville, A.S. Byatt (integrated a few references to Tolkien in her work, apparently), and even Stephen King. Plus reviews of Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring; Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation; and the Collected Poems. All in Italian, and freely available online.
* A long new interview by Graham Scheper with Michael Drout on “The Tower is Beowulf: Beowulf and the Lord of the Rings”. Freely available online. Drout’s book The Tower and the Ruin is out in early December 2025.
* The Green Notebook podcast interviews Joseph Loconte on “Fascism, Communism, and the War for Middle-earth”. The .MP3 download is under the “… More” button. Loconte’s book The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 is due in a few days.
* The Critic magazine reviews the new book Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (2025). Freely available online. Apparently the book is a thorough but also consequently revisionist history, in which Tolkien’s discipline of philology is relatively favourably treated…
“Even the Oxford philologists are seen as reasonable men, trying to preserve a bedrock of seriousness in a newfangled discipline that at all times had threatened to get out of hand.”
* New on Archive.org, a 1932-1963 run of the Leavisite journal Scrutiny. Has some pungent criticism of the Tolkien and Gordon edition of the Green Knight, among much else.
* I failed to spot a relevant academic book, last year. Fantasies of Music in Nostalgic Medievalism (2024), from Manchester University Press. The author surveys works from 1939 to the present day.
* And finally, new on YouTube is a three-minute video peep at The Brandywine Festival, a rustic Hobbit festival held in Kentucky, USA. Well made and with steady-cam, so no worries about sea-sickness from wobbly camera shots.