Tolkien Gleanings #380
* The new 2025 issue of the Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, which Google Search and JSTOR suggest was released in January 2026. Freely available online. Book reviews of…
– C.S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty (3rd Edition)
– The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien
– C.S. Lewis’s Oxford.
* Details of the Tolkien Society’s Oxonmoot 2026. Set for Oxford, 3rd – 6th September 2026.
* The Notion Club Papers blog suggests that “The ‘Anxiety of Influence’ can be powerful and harmful – Alan Garner and J.R.R. Tolkien”.
* The Christian Scholar’s Review reviews The Theological Imagination: Perception and Interpretation in Life, Art, and Faith (2025)…
“This rich and concise account of the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the imagination will be of great interest to all scholars and laypeople interested in the intersection between art and faith.”
* Bevis expert Lynn Forest-Hill discovers a local historian also working on the history of Sir Bevis in its localities. Related is the December 2025 edition of the open-access journal Queeste, in which Ad Putter reviews in English the Dutch book Die historie van Buevijn van Austoen (2023)…
“Writing as someone who only knew the insular versions of Bevis, I consider myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity to read this Dutch version, which is much more interesting and artful than the Middle English and Anglo-Norman versions. One of the things that makes the Dutch romance so special is its form. Die historie van Buevijn van Austoen is neither a verse romance nor a prose romance but is both: it is a prosimetrum. Verse passages (which are numerous) are used very effectively for moments of heightened emotion and for direct speech, including at one point a story within a story.”
* In English from the Philology Dept. at the University of Seville, the undergraduate final dissertation “The Survival of Romance: A Comparative Study of Sir Bevis of Hampton and the Film Adaptations of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia” (2025). Freely available online.
* Newly and freely released in open-access, the book Beacons and Military Communication from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (2026). The new book may interest some readers of Gleanings, since The Lord of the Rings depicts a long chain of fire beacons, plus line-of-sight, various forms of far-seeing (Gandalf and Legolas), high towers, palantiri, visionary views of military activity from high peaks, etc.
* Miriam Ellis envisions Sitting with Sam beneath the Shire Mallorn.
* And finally, talking of sitting with a book… Rochester’s ‘Baggins Book Bazaar’. A local newspaper reports England’s largest rare and secondhand bookshop celebrates 40 years of trading. The current owner… “estimates there are now around 100,000 books across the shop, a labyrinth of shelves with about 10,000 in the front room alone.”