Tolkien Gleanings #461
* This week’s Spectator magazine reviews The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J.R.R. Tolkien. ($ paywall)…
“Tolkien remains stubbornly outside the norms of literary criticism. As D.J. Taylor writes in his fresh, incisive but uneven new study of the man and his work: ‘He is too unlike anyone else, too detached from most of the discernible mainstreams and too opposed to most of the things they hold dear.’ […] ‘Tolkien… is the worst person in the world to tell us what his books are about,’ Taylor writes, and, given the gulf in quality between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and the 20-plus volumes of largely inert prose and poetry published posthumously under Tolkien’s name, one wonders whether even the man himself ever understood what had made those books successful.”
* The latest Christian Scholar’s Review, on “Wordy Professors, Woodland Elves, and the Wisdom of Tolkien”.
* The latest Humanist magazine considers “Tolkien on the Subject of Death”. Freely available online.
* From Padua, Italy, an English abstract for what sounds like a Masters dissertation, “Medievalismo. Dalla riscoperta della cultura medievale nel XIX secolo alle opere di J.R.R. Tolkien”. Compares William Morris and Tolkien to…
“show how Tolkien inherited and reworked medieval motifs, helping to consolidate the Middle Ages as an essential resource for the imagination of contemporary literature.”
* In the open-access Columbian journal Revista Albertus Magnus, “Tolkien y la superacion de la teodicea leibniziana: El Senor de los Anillos como teodicea poetica desde la Tierra Media”…
[The LoTR] “… articulates the concepts of fallibility, freedom, providence, and redemption in a manner consistent with Christian anthropology. It is concluded that Tolkien offers, through fantastic narrative, a poetic theodicy that surpasses Leibniz’s philosophical conformism and points to the salvific presence of Christ as the hermeneutical key to evil in human history.”
* Elfenomeno has a new long interview with Michael Drout, freely available online…
“I’d really love to see something with the depth, detail, and sophistication of John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War on Tolkien’s intellectual life after the First World War. […] in terms of the wider currents of art, music, literature, history, philosophy” that he would have encountered and heard discussed.
“… the proportion of [Tolkien Studies journal] submissions that come from full-time academics has slowly climbed compared to those from independent scholars. I am hoping that this is not a continuing trend [… In the past] the prejudice against Tolkien in academia meant that no one studied him simply for career-building, ‘publish-or-perish’ purposes, which meant that we didn’t have to deal with too much frivolous, hyper-trendy criticism. I worry that Tolkien scholarship having become more prestigious might encourage shallow, insincere work that would take up space that should be used for higher-quality research.”
* The journal Tolkien Studies Volume 22 (2025) is now online ($ paywall). No ‘Year’s Work’ survey is this issue, it appears.
– The Surveyor’s Eye: Tolkien, Hugh Lofting, and Creative Topography.
– The Day Rune, the Dawn of Language, and the Mark on the Hobbit’s Door.
– A Middle-Aged Boy: The Perpetual Childhood of Bilbo Baggins.
– Owen Barfield and the Poetic Diction of the Ents.
– Hidden in Plain Sight: A Norse-style Poem in The Lord of the Rings.
– Ioreth, the Wise-woman of Gondor: Heard but not Seen.
– Dunlendings and the Riders of Rohan: Revisiting the Forgoil and their Celtic Etymological Connections.
– Goblin Feet and “Honey-flies”.
– Reviews.
– Bibliography (in English) for 2023.
* On Youtube, the podcast Everyday Anarchism has “Making Sense of Tolkien’s Anarchism”, an audio recording of a September 2026 talk given at Oriel College, Oxford. The speaker defines anarchism as the belief that human flourishing and social progress is best achieved with minimal coercion, and that systems of coercion are counterproductive. The LoTR is fundamentally about the rejection of absolute power, and Tolkien’s stance implies a vision of an England free of the coercive machinery of government, where patriotism means loving the land and its people, not the state.
* Signum Thesis Theatre has the new “Movement Through Enchantment” audio recording, a talk which offers… “a study of the methods that Tolkien uses to move both his readers and his own characters into the Otherworld”.
* A new Inklings Quarterly 12 online newsletter from the Inklings Project.
* Students at the University of York appear to be eligible for free Tolkien Society Membership 2026/27. I wonder if this extends to students at other British universities? Might be worth asking, if you’ve just arrived as a full-time student on campus.
* At the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, A Call to Art: William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. The exhibition runs 23rd October 2026 – 3rd May 2027, and draws for the first time on…
“thousands of drawings, paintings, designs, letters, books and other objects acquired by his friend Sydney Cockerell … most of the objects never previously displayed”.
* New on the long-running British Fairies blog, “In Search of a British Mythology?”
* And finally, new at The Dwarrow Scholar is the Middle-earth Travel Calculator.
“Plan an overland journey between named places in Middle-earth. Terrain, local climate, the season on each day, your transport, what you carry and rest days all change how far a day takes you.”
