Tolkien Gleanings #445
* Dwight Longenecker compares Gollum with Caliban, in “A Pitiful Potentiality, Mini Monsters: Caliban, Gollum and Sub-humanity” (Substack, but free).
* Also examining Gollum, new in the journal Logos: Revista de Linguistica, Filosofia y Literatura, the article “De heroes salvajes y monstruos domesticados. Fundamentos de la relaciin entre el heroe y el monstruo de fantasia epica contemporanea” (‘Wild heroes and tamed monsters: fundamentals of the relationship between the hero and the monster of contemporary epic fantasy’). Gollum is one of the two case-studies. In Spanish, with English abstract. Freely available online.
* New on Reddit, the article “Eagles, arrows, harps, and some musings about mythological motifs in the Quenta Silmarillion”. Freely available online.
* From 2024 but new to me, the BMJ journal article “When I use a word… Fictional drugs from Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Aldous Huxley, and J.R.R. Tolkien”. Freely available online.
* Paolo Nardi’s new YouTube video talk “Sirens from Homer to Tolkien” discusses Tolkien’s poem “The Sirens Feast | The Sirens” (1910-?14), and also the seductive ‘call of the sea’ for the elves. One might also note the similarities in the initial meeting of Melian and Elwe (the luring song of Melian’s nightingales), the initial encounter between the young Goldberry and old Tom Bombadil (watery, but no luring song), or Old Man Willow luring in the hobbits in the Old Forest (luring song, by the water).
* A new open-access thesis in Spanish, Mas alla de los hobbits: dialogo fe-cultura a traves de la literatura de fantasia. Estudio de caso: Cartas de Papa Noel (Tolkien) (May 2026) (‘Beyond hobbits: faith-culture dialogue through fantasy literature. A case-study of Tolkien’s Letters from Santa Claus’). The use of…
“Letters from Father Christmas in the classroom confirms the relevance of using this fairy tale within an educational environment, and demonstrates how dialogue between faith and culture becomes possible within this framework.”
* Planned for the 2027 International Congress on Medieval Studies, a session on Faery Tales: At the Crossroads of Literature and Preternatural Belief. Deadline: 15th September 2026.
* And finally, an hour with Malcolm Guite on YouTube. “Old Stories Know Secrets That We Have Forgotten”.