Tolkien Gleanings #388
* Who knew? There’s a Centre for Fantasy Literature Studies at the National Academy of Sciences in the Ukraine. The Centre was established in 2015, and they recently had a two-day online conference in January 2026 themed around “Music, Dance and Theatre in Fantasy Worlds”. Tolkien presentations included…
– “As Above, So Below: As Music, So Magic (in Tolkien’s Legendarium)”.
– “To Music of a Pipe Unseen: Music as Metaliterary Device in The Lord of the Rings”.
– “Lyrical Lauding in The Lord of the Rings: Adapting Tolkien’s Songs”.
– “Luthien’s Dance as Love Embodied”.
A book of free abstracts is available in English.
* The University Press of Mississippi is planning the academic chapter-book titled Returning to the Shelf: Memory, Reading, and the Afterlives of Childhood Books, on the topic of… “the enduring presence of childhood reading in adult life”. Either through “memories of early reading” and/or adult re-reading. Set for January 2029, with a submission of interest / abstract deadline of 31st March 2026.
* DoxaMoot: Orthodox Christian Tolkien Conference is set for 4th-6th September 2026, in North Carolina. Set to include a lecture on… “the theological and symbolic significance of Tolkien’s monsters”.
* New at the latest rolling edition of the Journal of Tolkien Research, book reviews of Numenor, The Mighty and Frail (2025) and Queer Approaches to Tolkien (2025).
* Sons of Wayland goes “Riding Through Tolkien Country” on a motorcycle. Though I have to say that we have no evidence that Tolkien visited Lydney Park in Gloucestershire. He wrote a paper related to the archaeology found there, but…
“there is no evidence that he participated in the dig at Lydney Park, stayed there as a guest of the Wheelers on a number of occasions, or even visited Lydney” (Hammond & Scull, Reader’s Guide, 2007 edition)
Which is not to say that he might not have stopped off to take in the site, perhaps while travelling to the south-west or Wales on holiday, at some later time. Anyway there’s a pleasing poster of the motorcycle route taken through Tolkien-like landscapes, and the route looks like a very fine sampling of the countryside to the west and south of Birmingham.
* Talking of long and beautiful journeys… I’ve now seen the seven-hour screen adaptation of Oxford writer Stephen R. Lawhead’s Arthurian Pendragon Cycle books (1987-1997), recently fully released. The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin turns out in its first two episodes to be a clever and rather beautiful prequel to the Arthur story, adapted with panache and filmed and costumed on location in Britain, Italy and Hungary. Set in the last days of the Roman Occupation, and the first years of early British Christianity, the first two episodes focus on the young Welsh bard Talesin and also introduce Morgan le Fay. Merlin is not yet born and these two episodes serve as a sort of prequel-to-Merlin movie, while sketching in the necessary worldbuilding. Sadly we only hear the ‘older Talesin of the gnomic poems’ once, and at other times he’s a magical singer with a curious mingling of mystic powers. The rest of the series, the five episodes in which we fast-forward 75 years to Merlin, I was not so enamoured by. These episodes look as fabulous as the first two, with superb acting (the actor playing Vortigern in the third episode surely deserves a TV Oscar), but in the end they were a bit of a slog and too Game of Thrones-ey for my tastes.
* MatejCadil has a new set of story-posters for The Hobbit, freely available on DeviantArt.
* And finally, here in the UK the Royal Mail has revealed their set of The Lord of the Rings postage-stamps. Turns out the set is just film-stills and marks the anniversary of the movie trilogy. Rather than marking the 100th anniversary of Tolkien beginning his many translations (Beowulf and Pearl in 1926, others later).
