Tolkien Gleanings #422
* Now freely available online, “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Soul’s Ward: A critical edition of his unpublished translation of the early Middle English homily Sawles Warde”. The translation had been wrongly sorted into a box of his Sir Orfeo material, and was thus lost until now.
* John Garth has announced he is undertaking a part-time DPhil at Oxford (the Oxford equivalent of a PhD, 75,000-word thesis). He’s launched a crowdfunding appeal for it, aiming at £900 a month. His research is… “about how world war and other modern conflicts shaped Tolkien’s masterpiece”.
* Also crowdfunding now, a short film from New Zealand…
“When a grieving father joins a Lord of the Rings location tour, he unexpectedly discovers connection, healing, and hope. Set against the stunning landscapes of Queenstown, the film stars Bruce Hopkins (Gamling in The Lord of the Rings movies) in the lead role, bringing authenticity and emotional depth to our story.”
* I think I missed noting the listing for the Tolkien Seminars at Magdalen College, April – June 2026. Still, the last two are yet to come, and all the talks should be on YouTube in due course.
– Downfalls and ruins: Tolkien and the Lost World of Catholic England.
– Old English and Old Norse Loan Words in Tolkien’s Gnomish Lexicon (1917).
– Revisiting Songs for the Philologists.
– Tolkien and Sawles Warde.
– Genealogy of Smaug: draconic influences on Tolkien.
– Charting Faerie: Cartography as the Threshold of Enchantment.
– The Verbal System of Quenya.
* Signum University online short-courses for August 2026 include “Beginning Quenya 1”, “Tolkien and the Classical World”, and “Exploring Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-stories'”.
* The editor of Pop Culture Fandoms, apparently a paid-for book set for publication by Bloomsbury in 2028, has called for short contributions. Send 200-300 word abstracts of your topic(s) by 30th August 2026. Only 100 fandoms will be chosen, so it may be best to also briefly state why your fandom is a worthy one.
* Matej Cadil has a long article on “Mushrooms in Middle-earth”. I hadn’t before considered that Merry’s book Herblore of the Shire would also have discussed mushrooms and fungi. I’d add to Cadil’s article, that Tolkien once wrote that the Druedain had great knowledge of fungi… “those that were poisonous, or useful as medicaments, or good as food” (from The Nature of Middle-earth). As such, I imagine that some of their fungi-lore, gained in lands adjacent to the Shire and with similar weather, would probably have found its way into Merry’s Herblore. (Cadil’s long Substack article is nearly free, but six of his new illustrations at the foot of the article are behind a paywall).
* The official Tolkien Calendar 2027: The Hobbit 90th Anniversary is set for release in August 2026. 13 images and… “Published for the first time, this calendar also includes a sketch by Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are”.
* And finally, the “making-of ‘Ancalagon the Black’ for the 2027 Beyond Bree Tolkien calendar”…
