Tolkien Gleanings #390

* The Plough Quarterly magazine has a lengthy review of both The Lord of the Rings (in a first-time reading) and The Tower and the Ruin: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creation (2025), in “Reading Tolkien for the First Time”. Freely available online. In the same issue, note also “The Moral Beauty of Middlemarch”.

* Walking Tree publishers have a new short post with obituary links, “Remembering J.S. Ryan”. Ryan being the Tolkien scholar and author of Tolkien’s View: Windows into his World (2009) and In the Nameless Wood: Explorations in the Philological Hinterland of Tolkien’s Literary Creations (2013). Tolkien’s View is especially informative for those considering the younger Tolkien in the historical/academic context of his time.

* The Middle Page is spending a year with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Early Poetry and is blogging about it at length. (Substack. But not seemingly paywalled, at least not yet).

* TheTolkienist has a report on The second Tolkien Tagung in Zurich, Switzerland… “With close to a hundred visitors present, and about 200 participants online, this conference was another success”.

* Elfenomeno has a new Interview with Pieter Collier, from Tolkien Library. Freely available online.

* The comic-book Durin Issue 1, now freely available from the artist at DeviantArt, as a 52-page PDF.

“I started this project about ten years ago with my good friend Sergio Artigas, and from 2017-2020 we worked together on this book; the first of a planned seven-issue series about the life of Durin the Deathless, the first King of the Dwarves. Recently our friend and fellow fantasy artist Carlos Vera has joined our team, and we are looking forward to continuing Durin’s story in the issues to come.”

* On YouTube, Malcolm Guite sends forth The dwarves’ song (and some smoke rings).

* And finally, in England the daffodils are once again washed in spring sunlight. So this seems apt, as found in Tolkien’s own A Middle English Vocabulary (1922)…