Tolkien Gleanings #449
* Congratulations to Crickhowell. The town has now successfully crowdfunded the purchase price of an important unpublished ‘Crickhollow / Ents’ Tolkien letter on GoFundMe. They took ent-strides past the winning-post thanks to two last minute donations.
* Words Do Things podcast has a new interview with Tolkien scholar and astronomer Kristine Larsen, “On the Naming of Stars”.
* The Library of Lewis and Tolkien blog considers the influence of “Songs of the Old North: Tolkien, Lewis, & the Wonders of The Kalevala” (Substack, but free).
* From Utrecht University in Holland, the Masters dissertation “You Shall Not Be Indoctrinated”: Information Dissemination and Propaganda in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (2025). Appears to view Gandalf as a propagandist, but more widely considers the various information flows in Middle-earth. Freely available online.
* Lingwe – Musings of a Fish blog celebrates fifteen years since the publication of his book Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays (2011).
* Kalimac’s corner blog has a Mythcon 2026 report. With added gopher guts for flavour.
* At Brighton, England, a public talk on “The Art of Pauline Baynes”, set for Sunday 23rd August 2026. Also, note that the Royal Pavilion at Brighton is currently transformed into a Palace of Dragons.
* I came across a good vintage eBay image of Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford. It doesn’t show the fancified chocolate-box frontage of today, and indeed there appears to be no signage at all here. Possibly the signage was removed during wartime as a security measure, and this may indicates the picture was made in either 1939 or 1945?
Tolkien had “a heavily overdue account at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford” in the 1940s, according to Carpenter’s biography.
* From Finland in English, the Masters dissertation “From Beast to Companion: The Function of Dragons in Contemporary Western Picture Books” (2026). Freely available online.
* In Germany, the major museum exhibition Dragons: Myth and Reality. At Darmstadt from 2nd October 2026 – 17th January 2027, where it opens. Then it transfers to Koln from 4th March to 6th June 2027. The exhibition… “shows dragons from both an art-historical and a scientific perspective [and is] complemented by digital content [aimed at children]”.
* And finally, not dragons but… snails. A newly-published fantastical illustrated book from the 20th century, Edward Bawden’s Snails for All. The book was made for his two children in 1945 and has never seen print until now. The new book is accompanied by a free exhibition in Bedford, England (until 13th June 2027), and it appears the book is only available from the museum shop. The snails featured are…
“fantastical beasts that share one thing in common; they can’t be found. There is The Giant Tortoise Snail of Borneo, so giant that it pushes down trees as it moves; the Lovelies Snail who frequents mausoleums and ‘crawls over the bones of girls who have died of love’; and the undiscovered Heartsease snail, whose shell is encrusted with precious stones.”
Which makes me imagine a hypothetical Samwise Gamgee’s Big Book of Oliphaunts, perhaps made for his grandchildren.