Tolkien Gleanings #302

* Other Minds #28, the new issue of the unofficial tabletop Tolkien RPG ‘zine. Freely available online. Several very full adventures for gamers, but the issue also includes the article “Musings on the Power of Elvish Minds”. This briefly discusses each apparent Elvish power in turn, as evidenced by Tolkien’s text, such as talking to trees… “Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learning their tree-talk” (Treebeard). Also of note is that the ‘zine is allowing AI illustrations for the first time, now that they’re becoming indistinguishable from human-made illustrations. Or, at least, they are indistinguishable when generated by capable creatives who know what they’re doing.

* Talking of waking things up, this week’s Spectator has the article “The Lord of the Rings gave me my moral compass”, stressing the ongoing importance of the book for receptive young males.

* In Italy, a special three-day ‘Tolkien and the fantastic’ conference will welcome the arrival in Sicily of the touring Tolkien exhibition, after its successes in Rome and Turin. The event runs 11th to 13th May 2025. Mostly Tolkien, but I also see a Lovecraft talk is in the mix. The exhibition itself runs on until 31st July 2025, then ends its national tour with a visit to Trieste in the autumn of 2025.

* Also in Italy, a two-day Tolkien Music Festival is set for August 2025.

* There’s now a full trailer on YouTube for Musical Chapters, an opera of The Lord of the Rings (Full title: Musical Chapters from The Lord of the Rings After the Mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien). By Tolkien (his words are used extensively, with permission), Paul Corfield Godfrey and the Volante Opera from Wales (along with many singers drawn from the Welsh National Opera). Personally I’d pay not to hear any opera. But if you enjoy the form, then a huge 15 x CD set of the opera is set for release in the early autumn of 2025.

* A new call for submissions to Gramarye, the journal of the UK’s venerable Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. Deadline: 21st September 2025.

* A conference report on the first day of the Tolkien sessions at the 2025 International Medieval Congress. Among others, mention of the author’s own paper on…

“Mago/Magol a partially Hungarian inspired Mannish language that Tolkien may have intended for the orcs or Hobbits and Dunlendish – the language of the Upland folk who were marginalized by the Eorlings.”

* New at the English-langage Culture Poland website, a long illustrated article on Countryside Myths of Zofia Stryjenska & J.R.R. Tolkien. Freely available online. Stryjenska managed to flee communism in 1947, and in Paris became a key painter of the Polish countyside and its relatively untouched-by-modernity folk and folk tales.

* Dimitra Fimi has a new blog post on Tolkien’s earliest ‘fairy’ poem: Wood-Sunshine. Freely available online.

* More online lectures from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, The Forge of Tolkien 41: Soup of Stories; 42: Refracted Light; and 43: The Riddle of the Ring. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted for free on YouTube.

* A new and fine full reading of the early fantasy The Sword of Welleran (1908) by Lord Dunsany, freely available online. Download with Mediahuman’s freeware Youtube to MP3, to avoid ad-breaks. This is early Dunsany (i.e. the best), and the book it was in was widely available in England when Tolkien was a schoolboy. Both style and subject-matter have been suggested as likely to have influenced Tolkien prior to LoTR. But the only Dunsany item that Tolkien mentioned in the Letters or the late interviews is one story in Dunsany’s later The Book of Wonder (1912).

* And finally… a new interview with Rene van Rossenberg, the owner and manager of a dedicated Tolkien bookshop in Holland.

Tolkien Gleanings #301

* The Art of Mercy in Middle-earth: Paintings Inspired by Tolkien’s Legendarium is a new Tolkien-inspired artbook from Miriam Ellis. Available now in paperback or hardback.

* Newly added to the current rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Slavic influences in the Soviet adaptation of Fellowship”. This relates to the Leningrad TV 1991 attempt at a TV adaptation…. “This paper aims to explore how what the Western viewers may find ridiculous about the depiction of the characters actually stems from the film-makers being inspired by traditional Slavic imagery and folklore.”

* In the new ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, “Inkling ‘Hint, Intimation, Suggestion’” ($ paywall, but first page free as a page-image). This examines the history of the word ‘inkling’ from its earliest surviving use in a tale of Alexander.

* “Fantasy and Faith: Lewis and Tolkien on Magic in Fantastical Literature” (2025), a final-year undergraduate dissertation for Liberty University. Freely available for download.

* A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog has a long essay on Magic in Middle-earth and the various forms it takes (or might take, since some of it is only hinted at).

* The book The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 is now seemingly set for publication on 17th July 2025, at least according to Amazon UK which is taking pre-orders for it.

* Tickets are now available for the 2025 J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture in Fantasy Literature in Oxford, on 19th May 2025. Also, a new series of Oxford University Tolkien lectures will start in Oxford in May 2025 and will include “Tolkien and Arthurian Romance: The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings”, among others.

* The Christian History Institute on “The Oxford Lewis Knew”, a new review of the sumptuous book C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (2024). The review is freely available online.

* And finally… new on Archive.org is a sampling of Wizards And Demons: Music Inspired By The Writings Of J.R.R. Tolkien, plus scans of the cover and booklet with its musicological essay. A highly curated collection of rare 1960s and 70s ‘progressive rock’ tracks inspired by Tolkien, the full CD is still available. ‘Prog rock’ is very much an acquired taste these days, so listen to the samples before ordering.

Tolkien Gleanings #300

Three hundred Gleanings! I welcome your support via Patreon.

* A new Journal of Inklings Studies is published, Vol. 15, No. 1 (April 2025). This includes “Tolkien’s ‘Sellic Spell’ and Beowulfian Sub-creation: the Artist and the Critic” ($ paywall). Plus a bumper crop of free book reviews for…

    – Mapping Middle-earth
    – Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913–1959
    – Friendship in The Lord of the Rings
    – The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation
    – Thomas Honegger’s Tweaking Things a Little
    – C.S. Lewis’s Oxford
    – The Songs of the Spheres (how Lewis and Tolkien overlapped)
    – Twenty-first Century Receptions of Tolkien
    – Translating and Illustrating Tolkien
    – The Battle of Maldon in two editions (one of which is Tolkien)

From the fine review of Lewis’s Oxford…

“Lewis’s attachment to the well-worn grooves of Oxford life could make a narrow focus for a biography, but the value of this book is the attention it pays to that very sameness, building up its picture from the many tiny details which gave shape to Lewis’s daily routine. The result is a grounded and satisfying account of Lewis’s life, with room for exploring matters which might go overlooked in a biography with a more conventional narrative structure.”

In my next PDF ‘zine edition of Tolkien Gleanings, I’ll have a “Tolkien’s Oxford” gallery section.

* The latest Christian Century magazine has a long article celebrating the increasingly apparent advent of what the headline-writer calls Tolkien 2.0…

“The fantasy writer’s vast theological and philosophical universe is unfolding in the hands of artists, scholars, and game designers.”

* New to me, Folkminner, the journal of the Norsk Folkeminnelag (Norwegian Folk-lore Society). It seems they’ve been posting it online since 2021, with the current online edition being April 2024. There is however an April 2025 edition, evidenced by The Carterhaugh School of Folklore kindly providing a free English translation of that issue’s article “Scandinavian Folklore and Fairy Tales in Modern English-Language Fantasy Literature”. Folkminner is now indexed in my JURN humanities search-engine.

* I came across a scan of the book English and Medieval Studies Presented To J.R.R. Tolkien (1962), on Archive.org ‘to borrow’. Here are the content pages…

* Miriam Ellis considers The Fire-works of Gandalf, and shows her painted illustrations of the scenes under discussion.

* Whitmore Rare Books has a new gallery of images of The Hobbit, as the tale appeared in its first American edition.

* Tickets are now on sale for another Oxford recreation of Tolkien’s lecture for children, ‘Tolkien on Dragons’.

* And finally, the annual Maytime Well-dressings at Malvern, which give thanks for the water bubbling out of the various local wells, fountains and springs around the famous hills. This year’s theme is to be ‘Folklore and Fairytales’, inspired by local folklore and Malvern’s literary connections with writers such as Tolkien. Running 3rd – 11th May 2025, the local water sources are decorated and there will be a 2025 trail map for visitors. The event doesn’t appear to take the same form as in the nearby Peak District, where the long-standing tradition is that boards surround the wells, are covered with clay, and then flat designs are made by pressing in the springtime flower-petals and new leaves. Malvern seems to be much more ad-hoc, with each little platoon of neighbours doing their own thing, at bubbling nooks with such delightful names as ‘Happy Donkey Spout’…

Tolkien Gleanings #299

* The publisher Walking Tree has just published Tolkien among the Theologians (2025) (Cormare volume 53). This collection of essays has a table of contents online and I see it includes two chapters which sound like they might be usefully biographical-theological, “Tolkien and Newman: Towards a Theology of History” (Cardinal Newman), and “Tolkien in His Contemporary Context: Among the Oratorians and the Jesuits”. Amazon UK has the paperback for £17.50.

* Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal reviews The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (2025) ($ partial paywall). The first page of the review is free, and that’s enough to read the reviewer’s succinct outline of the book’s chapters. It’s especially interesting to learn that…

“The final two chapters explore the impacts of the liturgical calendar on Tolkien’s works. [The first of these] focuses on themes of Advent and Christmas [which also necessarily touches on ‘earendel’ and the word’s sources]”

* Walking Tree has a free PDF of a review of the book Celebrating Tolkien’s Legacy (2024). The review is in English from Lembas Katern, which appears to be a supplement to the Dutch Tolkien Society’s main Lembas publication. Apparently this book has… “Several chapters [that] deal with Tolkien’s earliest childhood: a chapter about a tea in Kinver …”. I wasn’t aware there was evidence he was ever there, and the comprehensive Tolkien Chronology of his life has nothing for Kinver. The publisher’s blurb clarifies slightly with… “a likely 1904 excursion” (my emphasis), which would put Tolkien at around age 12 — if it ever happened. Not impossible I suppose, since Kinver was a popular summer day-trip from nearby Birmingham from Easter 1901 onwards. That was when the fast transport connection was first made. But it very soon became rather too popular. By 1904, on a public holiday in good weather, around 15,000 people a day could be making the day-trip from Birmingham.

* The Notion Club Papers blog offers a new short post on “Four approaches to understanding J.R.R. Tolkien: historical, philological, Roman Catholic, unique genius”. Useful, though the phrase a “man of his time and class” seemed to me to draw perhaps unconsciously on a Marxist framework. Of course, class was a vital structuring element of society during Tolkien’s working lifetime. But above class and subsuming it was the British ‘nation and landscape’, in which all classes had their place and played their parts and spoke English with their many tongues. Landscape and tongues and weather were equally important to him, I’d suggest. And in Tolkien’s formative years ‘nation and landscape’ was itself subject to the even higher framing of the British Empire. Not that Tolkien felt much allegiance to the Empire by all accounts, but only to England and especially to the West Midlands. Yet remember that the Empire would have been a constant presence, and was also in steep and obvious decline during the decades before the writing of LoTR. Could then the decline of the British Empire have fed into the ‘fallen remains of past glories’ landscapes seen in Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age? Not consciously, but via a steady ‘filtering in’ to the creative mind during those decades? But I guess such matters may be touched on in the forthcoming Garth book, which apparently relates LoTR to the events of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath.

* Another three 90-minute lectures have been scheduled on YouTube from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Spellsongs of Tinuviel (already online), Morgoth’s Revenge and Gondolin in that order. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted free on YouTube.

* Another Tolkien letter is up for auction, at Sotherby’s in the UK. A very late and short letter to a fan, but it mentions Bag-end. Sotherby’s has small scans.

* On YouTube, the latest Ben Shapiro podcast interviews “LoTR Expert Malcolm Guite” on why Tolkien matters today (two short adverts, and an all-to-short interview). Guite is also the former chaplain and a Life Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, and I see he has his own YouTube channel. Including the popular “A pint and a pipe!” in which he celebrates the long continuity of the English inn and pipe-smoking, both of which were dear to Tolkien’s heart. The wartime book English Inns (1943) is mentioned, and I see it is now online for free at Archive.org.

* Australia has ruled that trading as ‘Lord of the [Something]’ does not infringe the trademark of Middle-earth Enterprises. In this case it was ‘Lord of the Fries’, a chain of nine food shops, and the ruling sensibly deemed that…

“the absence of the ‘rings’ element meant that a total impression of dissimilarity emerges from a comparison of the signs”

* And finally, talking of trading… note that the new temporary U.S. international trade tariffs do not cover printed books or paper. The long-standing 7.5% U.S. tariff on books printed in China does however remain in place, exempting only religious books. But, as of today, it sounds like the U.S. has forced China into serious trade negotiations… thus it’s possible that even that 7.5% may change by the end of the summer.

Tolkien Gleanings #298

Happy Easter!

* The Oxford Tolkien Network has posted YouTube videos of several recent talks. Including, among others…

    – “Tolkien and old English prosody”.
    – “‘Alight here for Middle-earth!’: Tolkien, place, and the past” (suggests Meon Hill as a model for Weathertop).
    – “Riddles in the grass: the characterisation and narrative value of landscape over the fields of Rohan”.

* Newly published, Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature for Spring/Summer 2025. Freely available online. Including, among others…

    – “No Ragnarok, No Armageddon: Pagan and Christian interpretations of The Lord of the Rings”.
    – “The Liberty to Bind Oneself: Chesterton and The Oath of Feanor”.
    – “The Bright Sword and its Sharpness: Swords, Symbolism, and Medievalism in The Lord of the Rings”.
    – Review of Tolkien’s Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle-earth (a book on divine interventions, or seemingly so, in the Third Age).

* Newly added to the current rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Sounds of Battle: Belliphonic in Tolkien”. The word belliphonic = the acoustic dimensions of warfare, from bellicose. Freely available online.

* Dimitra Fimi has now posted the third part of her ongoing blog series… On Tolkien’s Letter 131: ‘Gods and Heroes out of the Sea’.

* Fellowship and Fairydust has a new short post surveying Tolkien and His Friends, on the various close friends made throughout his life.

* New to me, the undergraduate dissertation ‘From Marginalia to Middle-earth: sixteen philological books and their influence on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction’ (2015). Not online as a dissertation, but the gist of it appears to be in a freely available article at The Tolkien Library.

* The latest edition of Religion and Liberty reviews The Last Romantic: C.S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology. Freely available online…

“Barbeau’s meticulous, well-informed, and balanced analysis of Lewis provides a nuanced and scholarly exploration of Lewis’ connections to British Romantic writers, considering how he integrates the subjective with the objective and the imaginative with the rational. [Partly this is accomplished via an] extensive examination of Lewis’ marginalia — his handwritten annotations of the editions of Wordsworth and Coleridge in his personal library”.

* In Romanian in the March 2025 issue of the Romanian journal Orizont, “Raul: O necesitate literara” (‘Evil: A Literary Necessity’). Freely available online. An essay on Tolkien and his subtle avoidance of the literary traps of a tale of good vs. evil…

“His characters are not typologies of good and evil. The ending does not provide a resolution to all the conflicts and situations in the novel. The sadness and uncertainty that weigh down an otherwise ‘happy’ ending reverberate throughout The Lord of the Rings. The only ‘absolute’ in Tolkien’s creation is hope. A hope without guarantees, as the writer characterizes it in his letters. This hope, in turn, is supported by a faith that is not certain about a happy ending.” (Translation).

* As Birmingham, England, submerges under a great wave of trash, muddy-booted volunteers are tracking the health of the city’s streams and rivers, including the… “puddles and brooks of Moseley Bog” which Tolkien knew. The journalist uses “puddles” rather than pools, presumably because we’ve had an uncharacteristically dry three weeks in England.

* And finally, recall “…he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence” from the opening of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Then note that April 2026 will be more-or-less the 111th anniversary of the launch of his Legendarium (in its earliest manifestations) in 1915. Cue for “a party of special magnificence”, perhaps?

Tolkien Gleanings #297

* In issue number 21 of Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics (2021) ($ paywall), “Tolkien’s Dragons: Sources, Symbols, and Significance”…

“I examine some of the more neglected sources that may have inspired Tolkien’s conception of these creatures, focusing on classical mythology, the Bible, and medieval English literature.”

Originally listed as a talk for the strand ‘Tolkien and the Medieval Animal’ at the 2022 International Congress on Medieval Studies. But omitted from the Journal of Tolkien Research special-issue on Tolkien’s Animals (2023).

* From Italy, the book Miscellanea in onore di Dora Faraci (2025) (‘Miscellanea in honour of Dora Faraci’). Includes in English, among others, “Allusive name forms in Cynewulf’s poems”, “Starcraeft and the Interface Between Faith and Science in Anglo-Saxon England” (observation of stars and constellations), “English and Norse Dragons, Ancient and Modern” (inc. concise appendix on themes, listing of the distribution of tales in the British Isles), “Runick Antiquities in the European debate and Renaissance England” (on the rediscovery of runes in England). Freely available in open-access and under Creative Commons.

* The British Fantasy Society plans a themed BFS Journal issue on ‘War in Fantasy’, and is calling for proposals. They welcome biographical items on Tolkien and his wartime experiences and influences, among other suggestions. Deadline: 31st August 2025. The issue is pencilled in to appear around Christmas 2025.

* 2025 C.S. Lewis Summer Institute calls for 20 minute papers around the theme of “Returning Home: C.S. Lewis, Roots, and Transformation”. To be held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 24th-30th July 2025.

* Lingwe discovers that Wisconsin Public Radio profiled Karen Wynn Fonstad, the Middle-earth map maker…

“Along with the printed article, there’s a 15-minute public radio piece you can listen to with Fonstad’s son, Mark [who] is working on a new project to digitize all of Fonstad’s original maps of Middle-earth”

* The Parish Catechist blog briefly reviews the book J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (2002) and notes that…

“when Tolkien’s son Christopher enlisted [in the Second World War, on the RAF enlistment form] he listed his father’s occupation as ‘wizard’.”

* Exeter College’s magazine Exon (Winter 2024/25, download titled #24, but cover says #27) has “The clans will strive and gory writhe upon the field to-day”, a student analysis of Tolkien’s early poem “The Battle of the Eastern Field”. Freely available online.

* Here in the UK, Wormwoodania considers the question “Do Charity Bookshops Drive Out Other Second-Hand Bookshops?” Not the ubiquitous charity shops (their stock of books is almost always dreadfully naff), but specialist charity-run bookshops. I had no idea such things existed in the High Street, not living in “decent places where there is tea-time” (Sam Gamgee). But, as the article states…

Charity bookshops have continued to increase [in the UK]. The Book Guide now lists about 150 Oxfam Bookshops, together with a further 40 of its general shops with a book room or significant stock. It also lists 11 for Amnesty, 7 for the Red Cross, 6 for Age UK, and 17 named as ‘Community Bookshops’ (there are more of these, with a variety of names). There are many others for national or local good causes.

* And finally, from Denmark comes the statistical article “‘I only read it for the plot!’ Maturity Ratings Affect Fanfiction Style and Community Engagement” (2025). This crunches the numbers on three large sets of fan fictions available at a key website, one of which centres around the characters in The Lord of Rings. Coyly discovers (who knew?) that sexually… “explicit fanfiction is a genre of its own with a conventional focus on descriptions, actions, and here-and-now orientation”. Sounds like it’s straightforward porn fiction then, just dressed up in LoTR clothing.

Tolkien Gleanings #296

* “Middle-earth-on-Earth: How and Why People Use Fantasy Film and Literature to Give Meaning to Real World Places” (2025), a Phd thesis for Dalhousie University. Freely available online.

* “O verde e os acordes cromaticos em O Silmarillion” (2025) (‘Green and chromatic chords in The Silmarillion‘). A Phd thesis from Brazil, in Portuguese with long English abstract. Examines Tolkien’s use of colours, especially green and red, and how these act upon his imagined material world and the minds of the inhabitants. Freely available online.

* Also from Brazil this week, “Um demografo passou semanas resolvendo uma questao muito importante”….

“A demographer spent weeks solving a very important question: how many people lived in Middle-earth? He wondered if he could use the techniques of historical demography, and started working on it.”

He took a basic look at the landscapes of each region, weather and seasons and then found equivalent historical nations in the primary world. And then worked out the maximum ‘carrying capacity’ for a hypothetical pre-industrial population at the time of The Lord of the Rings. 34 million, give or take. But that’s the absolute maximum. After further refinements…

“The populations of humans, elves, dwarves and hobbits in Middle-earth total around 6.7 million. 200,000 would be hobbits, about 284,000 elves, about 121,000 dwarves, and the remainder would be men.”

With large numbers of orcs/goblins, much rarer trolls and ents, and ever rarer assorted werewolves and vampires.

* On YouTube, a new interview with Tolkien artist Ted Nasmith, on the Polish Pod Zielonym Smokiem podcast (‘At the Sign of the Green Dragon’).

* Spanish newspaper El Pais appears to have a new ‘Culture’ article on “John Howe, ilustrador de las obras de Tolkien” ($ paywall), dated 7th April 2025. Relates to his appearance at a comics convention and launch of the Spanish edition of his A Middle-earth Traveller artbook of sketches.

* Lurking on Vimeo for a decade (but new to me) is the film Durin’s Folk and the Hill of Sorcery (2015, one hour). It’s an unofficial fan-edit of The Hobbit movies, focussing only on the backstory of the dwarves, Gandalf’s investigations into the Necromancer in Mirkwood, and then the banishment of the Necromancer. There’s significant movie-fication of Bree, Azog, Mirkwood, Dol Goldur, Thrain, and especially Radagast (who now has a rabbit-drawn super-sled which enables rapid transport through dense woodland). Also general movie-fication of the plot, and Galadriel and Saruman are present and their attack on Dol Guldur is frankly rather cheesy. So, dear readers of the original work(s), ‘be warned’. Legal note: in many nations you will need to own the extended Hobbit movies on DVD before you can legally watch this free fan-work.

* Four more 90-minute lectures have been scheduled on YouTube from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, The White Lady (Galadriel), The Spellsongs of Tinuviel, Morgoth’s Revenge, and Gondolin, in that order. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted free on YouTube.

* Lingwe discovers that when Tolkien was welcomed back to Oxford in 1925, he was described as… “the singular and outstanding disciple of the most illustrious Arthur Napier”. This was Arthur Sampson Napier (1853–1916), author of the tree-ish History of the Holy Rood-tree (1894), a book of Old English glosses (1900), and what appears to be the first full description of the Franks Casket.

* And finally, currently on eBay UK with seven copies left to sell, Black & White Ogre Country: The Lost Tales of Hilary Tolkien. At a reasonable £14 inc. postage, from a UK seller in Chipping Norton. Only 88 pages, but the book is a very well-reviewed hardback of high-quality and has evocative memoir material relating to Tolkien’s middle-childhood and more. Buy your copy now before it goes out-of-print, I’d suggest.

Tolkien Gleanings #295

* Available to members of the Tolkien Society, a new issue of Amon Hen. Among the contents of the new #312…

    – A long lead article on Christopher Tolkien’s Lectures at Oxford
    – The Power of the Web (spiders in Middle-earth)
    – A short review of A Sense of Tales Untold.
    – A short profile of Cirdan the shipwright.
    – A long look at what was lost, and what survives or has been restored, at Sarehole.

I see that a regular Layout & Graphic Designer (Adobe) is still required.

* Lingwe on “A newly discovered primary account of Arthur Tolkien’s death”.

* John Garth on how Tolkien left the land of his birth 130 years ago today, and the sea voyage he took. Including some details of the weather the three year-old then encountered in England, after the burning veldt of the Orange Free State…

“Britain had endured a harsh winter, with the Thames nearly blocked by ice in mid-February and, on 24th March, central and East England enduring one of the worst storms on record, with factory chimneys and church steeples demolished and 14 lives lost. The summer to come was very wet indeed.”

* Fellowship & Fairydust dusts off the hand-trowel and goes Excavating the Inklings and Little-Known Authors: Interview with scholar Douglas A. Anderson.

* The second part of Dimitra Fimi’s new blog-post series is now online, On Tolkien’s Letter 131 (2): “Incarnate” good and evil.

* Three more 90-minute lectures from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, The Making of Feanor, The Marring of Feanor and The Fall of the Followers. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted free on YouTube.

* New on Archive.org to download, The Pre-Christian Religions of the North. Research and Reception, Vol. 2 – from c. 1830 to the Present (2019, out-of-print according to Amazon UK). Includes chapters on “Old Norse Mythology in Anglophone Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1940” and “Norse Medievalism in Children’s Literature in English”.

* “The Hobbit published in Scots Gaelic”, as A’ Hobat, no A-null’s Air Ais A-rithist (2025)…

“With the help of a grant from the Gaelic Books Council, the project took five years to complete and now features the original 1937 cover art.”

* A new double-album from the noted Norwegian neo-romantic composer Martin Romberg, Arts and Signs (2025), available now. The first of the two albums evokes Tolkien’s works.

Tolkien Gleanings #294

* Sotheby’s auction house has a new Books & Manuscripts article totting up the totals on “The Most Valuable Tolkien Works of All Time”.

* New at Archive.org, a good scan of the 1974 Village Press edition of Colin Wilson’s pioneering booklet of serious Tolkien criticism Tree by Tolkien. There’s no flip-book, since the page scans are unbundled .JPG files. Thus the quickest way to get the book is to download the .torrent for it.

This gives you a good scan of the British edition, which I think was expanded? If you want the U.S. edition (also on Archive.org) it was noted and linked by Gleanings back in 2023.

* New to me, a very completist annotated listing, in French, of “Panorama des cartographes de la Terre du Milieu” (2018) (‘Overview of the map makers of Middle-earth’). It’s a long single .HTML Web page, thus is easily auto-translated and then saved locally to an encapsulated .MHTML file. But might it be an idea to inquire about human-translating and updating, for publication in somewhere like Amon Hen? Now there’s an idea for Amon Hen, when they eventually find a new designer — perhaps a dedicated map-art page in each issue, mapping some little regarded nook of Middle-earth.

* Also in French, Tolkien’s Beowulf: Traduction et commentaire, plus the ‘Sellic Spell’. With a rather handsome cover design.

Despite the ‘Pocket’ brand, French readers will need a big pocket… since Amazon has it at a hefty 464 pages. The translation is to be released on 5th June 2025, according to Amazon UK.

* A new PhD from the University of Sussex in the UK, “Sound Symbolism in Character Names: A study of the representation of morality in J.R.R. Tolkien’s character names in The Lord of the Rings” (2025). Freely available online. Brings the latest ‘sound symbolism’ research to bear on the names, and then tests (via online questionnaire at Facebook and Twitter, 76 valid respondents) to see if… “people can determine the morality of a character based solely on the phonological properties of the character name”. An earlier conference paper by the same author is also freely available from the same repository, “Phonaesthetic shadows: the phonetic dichotomy of light and dark in The Lord of the Rings” (2023).

* What appears to be an advanced undergraduate paper from Marquette University, “Tolkien and Hume’s Problem of Evil” (2025). Freely available online.

* This week Cobalt Jade’s blog considers “The Russian Hobbit” of the 1970s, and shows some pleasing interior illustrations. Part one of a planned series of posts.

* Tolkien scholar Dimitri Fimi has begun a Substack blog, with the first post being on On Tolkien’s Letter 131 (1): Capturing “timeless Elvish enchantment”.

* Tolkien scholar John Garth has a new blog post musing on the growing power of AI tools, in Tolkien and the machine war against imagination.

* Theatrical Musings in Minnesota has a long review of the three-hour stage play “Tolkien” at Open Window Theatre (February 2025)…

“The set looks very much like how one would imagine Oxford in the mid 20th Century, with dark wood and rich greens and old books everywhere. The backdrop has 2-D paintings of bookshelves, along with some real shelves with glasses, bottles, and other props, and the space is populated with gorgeous period furniture. […] Completing the look are the period costumes – appropriately professorial with tweed jackets, sweater vests, elbow pads, and hats.”

* And finally, a new National Folklore Survey for England is planned for 2026. Likely to be highly skewed by post-1970s media influence, and also the modern confabulations of neo-pagans and ghost-hunters plus the blatherings of local tourist boards. But maybe the organisers will find a way.

Tolkien Gleanings #293

* The Bodleian Library shares a glimpse of Tolkien’s annotated fold-out map from the first-edition of The Lord of the Rings.

* Up for auction in 2014, with good photos still online, a 1961 Tolkien letter hand-written as a reply to a boy who had enjoyed The Hobbit. Tolkien writes back that he regrets… “there is not much fun in” The Lord of the Rings for the young boy, other than perhaps Bilbo’s birthday chapter.

* In the new academic book Vikings, Knights, Elves, and Ogres: Essays in Honor of Shaun F.D. Hughes (2025), the chapter “Thoughts on J.R.R. Tolkien’s and E.V. Gordon’s ‘Viking Club’ Songbook at Leeds, and Related Nordic Songbooks”.

* Fanac.org has newly added a PDF scan of Tim Kirk’s 1969 Tolkien Calendar, in their Calendars section. Pleasing pencil and wash work, though mostly with garish colour overlays added. They welcome donated scans of similar vintage rarities.

* And talking of entering the mighty gates… currently advertised is the position of Chief Executive Officer of The Tolkien Society, on a whopping £45-£55k. Deadline: 13th April 2025.

* A series of events centred around nature and imagination, running 1st April to 1st May 2025 on the Ile de Re. This being a tourist destination-island in France, half-way down the Atlantic coast and between the cities of Nantes and Bordeaux. Apparently free, and to include public talks, temporary land-art (they have many beaches), exhibitions, concerts and more. The island’s website is currently down, but check iledere.com when online again. As part of the events, note…

– Conferences and meetings
“Tolkien and the science of his imaginary creatures. Paleontologists, naturalists, and illustrators come together to discuss nature and the imaginary.”

* Mythmoot XII, 19th-22nd June 2025, Virginia, USA. The call-for-papers closes on 31st March 2025. The theme is “Drawn to the Edge” — edges, thresholds and edgelands of all sorts, and also the allure of such things.

* And finally, a new Tolkien sculpture in East Yorkshire in northern England, part of their Tolkien Triangle…

“One statue will show the young Tolkien standing in the woods and will be around eight-and-a-half feet high [in carved wood], while the second installation, beside it, will depict Edith dancing in silhouette etched into a thick oak slab.”

Due to be installed on-site and officially unveiled later in the spring of 2025. It sounds like they have ambitions to create a larger Tolkien sculpture-trail in future.