Tolkien Gleanings #365
* Members of the Tolkien Society can now download the new Winter 2025 edition of the annual journal Mallorn as a PDF. The lead article offers some historical context for Tolkien’s reactions to well-known folklorists of his time (Frazer, Lang) and their theories.
* Tolkien Studies Volume 21 (2024) is now available, apparently published in November 2025. Currently available on Project Muse ($ paywall) in digital form, but not yet on Amazon UK in paper. Includes, among other items, “The Wanderer’s Return: New Findings on Tolkien in Oxford 1918–19”, and “The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2021”. Though note that this year the latter does not have the usual sections ‘General Criticism: The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s Work as a Whole’ and ‘General Criticism: Other Works’.
* The Year’s Work in English Studies (Oxford University Press, 2025) notes Tolkien’s The Battle of Maldon, together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth (2023). A short review is found in the section “Chapter II. Old English: 4. Other Secular Heroic Poems”…
“Tolkien’s translation of The Battle of Maldon, like Shippey’s translation of Beowulf (reviewed above), is lucid, exact, and accessible. His notes contain a good deal of linguistic and literary appreciation of the poem, and they show that Tolkien was both a thorough philologist and sensitive literary critic. In his essay on versification, Tolkien characterizes The Battle of Maldon as a poem composed in the popular (as opposed to the classical) style. This means that the metrical idiosyncrasies of Maldon are not to be understood as defective deviations from the Beowulfian norm (as they have all too often been seen), but as distinctive features of an alternative of mode of composition that was seldom recorded in writing. [The book] is useful from a pedagogical point of view and could easily be used in the classroom.”
* From Spain in English, the December 2025 issue of the journal Revista de Filologica has “Wonder and Its Vocabulary in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. Freely available online.
* New from the University of Potsdam, “Die Funktion der Atlantis: Rezeption in J.R.R. Tolkiens Numenor zwischen Empirie und Phantasie” (2025) (‘The Function of Atlantis: Reception in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Numenor, between empiricism and fantasy’). Being a Masters dissertation, in German. This has an extended English abstract available (only) at the repository record-page, hidden but fully revealed via the “More” button. Freely available online.
* A new academic podcast from a U.S. Catholic college, Christendom Conversations, last week discussed “Tolkien, Truth, and the Art of Story”. Freely available on YouTube.
* Vincent Ferre’s French Dictionnaire Tolkien appears to have had a new single-volume edition in late summer 2024. Also, the latest edition of Mallorn reveals a forthcoming Oxford Handbook of J.R.R. Tolkien.
* Now booking, a 2026 residential summer-school in Oxford with John Garth, Tolkien: The Great War and the Beginnings of Middle-earth. 19th to 25th July 2026, at Brasenose College. Also… “includes a walking tour of Exeter College, offering a chance to explore Tolkien’s undergraduate environment between 1911 and 1915.”
* And finally, new on YouTube is Paolo Nardi discussing “Ungoliant and Cosmic Horror”, ‘cosmic horror’ usually being the term reserved for Lovecraft’s work and thought. In Italian, but YouTube can now auto-dub into English.