Tolkien Gleanings #368
* The 3rd edition of Dragon de Brume’s A Bibliography of Tolkien studies in French and English (Winter 2025) is now freely available online. This edition tops 4,500 references. It’s open access, under permissive licenses.
* New in Spanish, Un Cuento de Arboles (October 2025), on forests in Tolkien. At a guess, possibly a (partial?) translation of the same editor’s Representations of Nature in Middle-earth (2015)?
* From Italy, the society journal Minas Tirith: Rivista della Societa Tolkieniana Italiana, Vol. 28. March 2025 edition, seemingly published September 2025 according to Amazon. Includes articles in Italian such as “On the origin of the name ‘hobbit'”, among others.
* The February 2026 edition of National Review magazine reviews The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 ($ paywall, but should become free in time).
* Tolkien scholar Michael D.C. Drout on “Why Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Endures” ($ paywall). He also offers some technical comments on the deep structures and surface patinas of The Lord of the Rings. The book…
“seems battered by time and change […] Its chapters group in a complex hierarchy with three large groupings and several outliers, a pattern of clustering not typical for a modern novel. It is closer in form to multiauthor composite texts from the Middle Ages. Not only do the clusters not match the point-of-view characters; they don’t seem to be related to volume, book, setting, type of action or pacing. […] Subtle variations in Tolkien’s writing style across its 62 chapters generate the impression that The Lord of the Rings is a compilation of other texts. This pattern is largely invisible even to careful readers, but new methods of computer-assisted analysis throw it into sharp relief.”
* The latest edition of Law & Liberty reviews Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (2025). Freely available online.
* The Culturist on “How to Live Through a Great Decline” with Tolkien. ($ partial paywall).
* Word on Fire on the “O Antiphons, Advent, and Tolkien”. Freely available online.
* Out now and available to sample on Spotify, Joy Shannon’s “Tolkien-inspired” new album In the Forest Singing Sorrowless (2025). A positive review suggests Celtic ‘dark folk’, paired with Tolkien’s poetry.
* The latest issue of the open-access journal The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale reviews the book Nordic Sagas as Children’s Literature: Victorian and Edwardian Retellings in Words and Pictures (2022). Freely available online.
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