Tolkien Gleanings #462
* Just published, a substantial new book on Tolkien’s friend Lewis, From Airmen to Aslan with C.S. Lewis: How His Work with the R.A.F. Influenced His Life and Writing (October 2026). The author is the General Editor of Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal.
* From Germany, the Tolkien Seminar now has a dedicated and elegant new website. Announced there is the 2027 Seminar (conference) on “Poetry in Tolkien’s Works”, set for October 2027. The call-for-papers for this event is pencilled in for “early 2027”.
* Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media has a call-for-papers for a special issue on “Immersion and Emergence in the Fantastic”.
* The Ethnocynology Podcast (science of dogs in prehistory) has a new special episode on Tolkien and Dogs, surveying dogs and hounds in the legendarium. Start listening after the first break, to avoid half an hour of nostalgia about the Peter Jackson movies.
* The Dwarrow Scholar has a new long post on “Dragons: From Ancient Serpents to the Great Worms of Middle-earth”. The substantial Tolkien section starts a third of the way in.
* In France, a local newspaper notes that the annual “ValJoly Imaginaire festival pays tribute to Tolkien this year”. The event has just ended tonight, though, and so… one has to fear that the weekend’s heavy rain and high winds may have dampened it somewhat.
* From Black Metal magazine this week, another post in their series Tolkien and Black Metal: Part 8…
“Something has shifted in the last five or six years. For most of its history, ‘Tolkien black metal’ was a description you’d apply retroactively to a scattered handful of bands — a lens critics used, not a box that bands checked for themselves. [But now we obviously have a] recognizable, reproducible scene in its own right.”
* A few posts ago I linked a hand-made mega-map of Middle-earth. This now has an updated version, expanded to show the northern and southern wastes and with a few small additions such as the Forsaken Inn.
* And finally, a free LoRA style plugin for the outstanding new model MOSS-Image, Moss Medieval Illuminations.
