Tolkien Gleanings #441
* Newly added to the latest rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, Kristine Larsen’s “Echoes of Medieval Timekeeping in Middle-earth and Valinor”. Freely available online.
“… investigates medieval resonances and echoes in a sample of his various schemes, demonstrating how Tolkien’s use of medievalist timekeeping is consistent with, and greatly adds to, his creation of a self-consistent invented world.”
* Details of the forthcoming programme for Omentielva Minquea 2026. Conference papers to be presented include, among others…
– Surveying Christopher Tolkien’s Pronunciations.
– Epigraphy, Philology, and the ‘Found Manuscript’ Topos in The Lord of the Rings.
– “On Aelfwine’s Spelling”: An Analysis of Elvish Spelling in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Old English Manuscripts.
* The 3rd Swiss Tolkien Conference will take place in March 2027, on the theme of “Maps and Landscapes in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, with Thomas Honegger. A Walking Tree book of the conference proceedings will follow.
* Newly published, The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis (2026), from Oxford University Press. The ebook is available now, the print editions are delayed until August.
With the “upsidedownedness” of childlike wonder, Lewis reveals what Dickieson calls a “Theology of the Small,” filled with “sacred paradoxes” and offering a hopeful, transformative invitation to spiritual life.
* Just published, the book The Heaviest Ideas in the Universe: A Philosophy of Heavy Metal (2026). Includes the chapter “We Write Songs About Swords and Wizards from Space: Fantasy Metal and the Aspiration of Re‐enchantment”. The ebook is available now, the paperback is delayed until later in July.
* A call for papers for a one-day online conference from the Ukraine’s Centre for Fantasy Literature Studies, themed around the “Mysteries of Night in Fantasy Worlds”. Deadline: 31st October 2026.
* A new website from Middle-earth Enterprises, in the form of the newly-purchased lotr.com. It’s possible to join the waitlist there. After I joined I read… “the official club is taking shape in public beta”, and was told to wait for an email invite. It sounds like an ‘official’ fan-club, then, presumably to follow the various ventures planned by Enterprises?
* Talking of official LoTR franchises, some readers may recall that Gleanings recently stumbled on the abundant old-school Tolkien RPG output of Iron Crown Enterprises, issued under official licence in the 1980s. But there was more. I now find they also produced a series of solo-play paperbacks, starting in 1985. These were a cross between the simpler ‘choose your own adventure’ books of the time, and a more fully-fledged ‘rules and map’ boxed RPG. All packaged in a single self-contained paperback book at a pocket-money price.
* And finally, a new long “Introduction to Alliterative Verse for Readers and Writers of Speculative Fiction”. Freely available online. Tolkien had at least three notable contemporaries doing the same thing, the article notes, who beat him to publication…
“… by the mid-1950s, with the publication of The Lord of the Rings, we can already identify three examples of something that has since become almost commonplace: a piece of speculative fiction, featuring not only embedded poetry, but poetry in what general readers would surely consider a decidedly archaic mode.”