Tolkien Gleanings #431
* An unusual late Tolkien item is ‘on the block’ at Forum Auctions, as Lot 162. Teenager David Best had translated The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and other poems from The Lord of the Rings into English runes, in four school notebooks with illustrations. Then… “Best sent off these notebooks to Tolkien who wrote back thanking him for his efforts and supplied corrections.” The resulting bundle of notebooks and letters is now up for auction.
* New Renaissance Mindset reviews Roverandom, and Mr. Bliss and Farmer Giles of Ham in the latest book editions. All freely available online.
* In Italian on YouTube, Paolo Nardi considers Tolkien’s dragons, in relation to their distinctive effects on time and memory. Note that YouTube can auto-dub into English, these days.
* Luminous Libro podcast interviews C.S. Lewis expert Dr. Louis Markos on “Christology in Fantasy”.
* The C.S. Lewis Institute usefully outlines an important recent talk posted on YouTube under the easily-overlooked title of Dawn Chorus.
* Another new kind-of-a-biography of Tolkien is due soon. The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J.R.R. Tolkien is due in mid September 2026 from Constable, as a 320-page hardback and Kindle e-book. The paperback follows in summer 2027. The book is billed as…
“part biography, part critical study and part a fan’s notes […] D.J. Taylor unpicks the myths that Tolkien created around himself, as well as the social, political and cultural contexts that informed his work”
* New on Archive.org, a microfilm scan of the Library of Congress Bulletin for May 1986, which notes that the then-editor of the OED had studied Middle English under Tolkien.
* Artist Matej Cadil has a new illustrated post, “The Druedain: Who Are Tolkien’s Wild Men and What Forgotten Past Do They Reflect?” He also shows his fine 2022 illustration of “The Forbidden Pool” in Ithilien. ($ Substack, but with a large chunk of the article for free).
* Jake Weidmann celebrates pipe-smoking with his new fine-art print of Tolkien and Lewis. Pre-ordering now.
* And finally, two literary giants battle it out in “J.R.R. Tolkien vs H.P. Lovecraft”, fully animated as if a videogame.
