Tolkien Gleanings #272

* From the Birmingham Oratory, the full text of the October 2024 Tolkien talk “Of the One Ring and the Nature of Good and Evil: The Moral Power of the Lord of the Rings“.

* A new post from Tolkien scholar John Garth, on “Tolkien’s ‘second father’, Francis Morgan” of the Birmingham Oratory. As the UK recovers from a recent storm, Garth also topically muses on “Storm Eowyn and the ghost gale in Tolkien’s ‘Notion Club Papers’”.

* From The Cambridge Companion to William Morris (2024), the short chapter “Morris’s prose romances and the origins of fantasy”. Now freely available for download from a university repository. Has some discussion of Tolkien, pointing out that their different politics didn’t prevent the fateful encounter. Adding dates might have rather finessed this point, I’d add. The young Tolkien enjoyed the man’s fantasy work more than 30 years after the revolutionary politics of London in the 1880s.

* Unexpectedly, the open-access Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research has sprung to life at the new URL of fafnir.journal.fi. The journal’s archives appear to have vanished if one only visits the new URL, but they are still available at the old journal.finfar.org site. A site which at present knows nothing about the new issue. Anyway… the new issue, just published has an article exploring “Ant Similes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” and reviews the book Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss, among other items.

* Details of the 2025 Staffordshire Moorlands Walking Festival here in the West Midlands of the UK, this year to run from 25th April to 5th May 2025. Includes a 2nd May ‘Gawain Country’ walk from Gradbach to-and-through Lud’s Church & then around The Roaches. A “leisurely” five miles, though reaching the starting-point without a car will be very difficult.

* In Belgium, the Athus Library is… “organizing an exhibition and a series of animations on Tolkien and Middle-earth”, plus movie screenings. 25th January to 15th March 2025. Athus appears to be a local city library rather than a national one.

* In the academic open-access journal Well Played, a detailed examination of “The Lord Of The Rings: The Card Game – A Machine That Generates Possible Worlds”…

“The literary inspiration governs the whole system of the game. Even the basic design choices are deeply influenced by the ideas presented in The Lord of the Rings books. […] The adventuring in The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is not only intellectual, but also a tactile experience.”

Sounds enticing. Though for a view of encountering the game as a first-time player, see
the tepid review at Board Game Quest. For a wider view of the expanding world of Tabletoppy Tolk^®, see this week’s podcast Lore of the Rings #197: Tolkien & Tabletop Role Playing Games. Yet another big-budget expensive RPG LoTR boardgame is due in 2025.

* And finally, the French city of Lyon is staging a real-world game in February 2025. The city is organising a treasure-hunt for an authorised Lord of the Rings movie-facsimile £8k gold ring. Plus a Grand Costume Parade, to encourage the hunters to dash around the city in Middle-earth costumes. Nice idea.

Tolkien Gleanings #271

* The Tolkien Society has announced Carl Phelpstead as the Annual Guest Speaker. A scholar best known for his book Tolkien and Wales (2011).

* Lingwe has posted the new article “J.A.W. Bennett on Tolkien”… “Jack Arthur Walter Bennett (1911–1981) was a younger and lesser-known member of the Inklings.”

* The OST Continuing Education podcast has a new interview with Dr. Austin Freeman on Tolkien’s imaginative apologetics. Freely available on YouTube.

* Omnes magazine briefly notes that Holly Ordway’s spiritual biography of Tolkien is now available in Spanish translation.

* The Oxford Mail local newspaper reports that the city council’s planning committee has finally approved the renovation and re-use of The Eagle and Child in Oxford. The pub will re-open as a pub after the extensive work, but will add a new restaurant and a new “study space” linked with a new science campus in Oxford.

* An Inklings Fellowship gathering in July 2025, An Inklings Week in Oxford, to be themed ‘Of Other Worlds: 75 Years of Narnia’.

* In the last Gleanings I mentioned the apparent lack of a repository of sewing-patterns for Middle-earth costumes. I’ve now found the Material Middle-Earth website. While I don’t immediately see a pattern repository there, it’s current and obviously the central hub for all things material. Their postings and blogroll may lead those interested in such things as printable pattern-sheets.

* And finally, in this week’s Country Life magazine, an unintended but magnificent evocation of The Shire. In the form of Samuel Palmer’s painting “The Weald” (c. 1833-34).

Tolkien Gleanings #270

* A new short post from The Catholic University of America, on “Robert T. Meyer: ‘Bespectacled Linguist’ and Friend of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Includes a link to the 22-box Robert T. Meyer Collection, which has the text of a past lecture reminiscing about Tolkien…

* The Tolkien Society has posted the contents-list for the forthcoming book Proceedings of the Tolkien 2019 Conference in Birmingham. Due to be published as an affordable £9 ebook on 28th February 2025. I spotted, among many others…

   — Tolkien’s Birmingham.
   — J.R.R. Tolkien and R.S.S. Baden-Powell.
   — On the Trail of the young Tolkien in Sussex.
   — The Dim Echo of the Catcher [presumably about Nuada?].
   — Knife, Sting, and Tooth: The Lasting Effects of Frodo’s Wounds.
   — Clothing in Tolkien’s World and What Can Be Seen through its Analysis.

* The Tolkien Society has released another batch of videos, free on YouTube. Among others, these include “Collecting, Reading and Studying Tolkien’s Letters” and “Where Tolkien is Remembered: Sites of Memory in the UK”.

* In Spanish, the YouTube recording of a 2023 Madrid conference on Geologia en la literatura fantastica y de terror (‘Geology in fantasy and horror literature’).

* The Silver Key finishes “Blogging the Silmarillion” and now has all the essays hyperlinked from one page.

* Lynn Forest-Hill blogs that… “my revised translation of the 14th century version of Sir Bevis of Hampton is approaching the galley-proof stage.” She sees the back-of-the-book indexing, which it seems the publisher is foisting on authors, as a sticking point. I might tell her that indexing can now be automated with the desktop PC software PDF Index Generator 3.4. Very useful, even if one only indexes places and names and adds less obvious items later. Use: search “capitalized phrases only”, then weed the results, then run the filter for a “surnames, forenames” switch-over. I see this worthy software is still $70 in early 2025, with a free perpetual ‘trial version’ available (limited to the first 10 pages of a PDF). Runs on Windows, Mac or Linux.

* “Ballantine Adult Fantasy: A Reading Series”, another part of an emerging… “essay series [that] will take years to complete”. This will involve reading and discussing all the works in the huge series.

* And finally, do you offer your students fantasy literature in the classroom? Then the “Teaching With Magic” online survey would like to hear from you.

Tolkien Gleanings #269

* In The Malvern Gazette newspaper, “Letters from Tolkien and Milne found in Malvern attic”. Postcards from Tolkien on marketing-related matters, by the sound of it, though perhaps they’re still important for being from a special moment in history. Since the discoverer says… “The Tolkien postcards must have been there since 1957, as my dad’s firm handled the launch of Lord of the Rings.” Apparently, all the items together fetched a total of £120,000 at auction. It just goes to show that original items can still be found still lurking in lofts, even today.

* I think I missed this one, back at the end of October 2024. On YouTube, “Reading Tolkien for 70 Years | Interview with Verlyn Flieger”, the venerable Tolkien scholar.

* Now available, the first article for the latest rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “The English and the Welsh: Tolkien’s Rewriting of History in the Legendarium”. The author finds “analogs of the Welsh” in Middle-earth, pointing most plausibly to the… “Rohirrim’s relations with the Dunlendings”. Also makes the interesting point in passing that in the mines of the Blue Mountains… “Tolkien put the[se] coal mines in the same direction [from the Shire] as the Welsh mines of his youth”. Birmingham in relation to North Wales, then. Yes, that also seems plausible.

* Forthcoming in French, a two-author academic book Tolkien et la memoire de l’antiquite (‘Tolkien and the memory of antiquity’). Set for 4th April 2025. No further details at present.

* New from Scriblus, an 8,000-word fan article on the “Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (1969-74): An Introduction”. This was a large series of affordable U.S. paperbacks. The titles were largely drawn from the wealth of out-of-print fantasy titles, with the addition of the Dunsanian ‘Dreamlands’ tales of H.P. Lovecraft. Freely available online.

* And finally, the announcement from Germany of new official commercial Lord of the Rings costumes…

“Burgschneider, the leading medieval and fantasy costume maker, is excited to announce a landmark partnership with Middle-earth Enterprises [to] create a range of meticulously crafted costumes [from Gondor, Rohan and the Shire]. The collaboration will also launch fully immersive LARP events set in Middle-earth […] The first collection of officially licensed costumes is slated to release Fall 2025”.

Germany appears to have an extremely healthy Middle-earth cos-play scene, including vast role-play festivals, and so (I’m guessing) presumably the LARP events will be run first in Germany? The announcement made me think there might be an unofficial fannish ‘Middle-earth Pattern Set’ for a full range of home-made costumes, but I don’t immediately see one via search. Perhaps there should be one, for those who want to DIY?

Tolkien Gleanings #268

* The BBC archives appear to have dug up a new-to-2025 1962 Tolkien TV interview, which is now on YouTube. Worth seeing in video, rather than just downloading the audio, for Tolkien’s facial expressions.

* Yet another review for Tolkien and the Classical World, this time in German in the latest H-Soz-Kult: Kommunikation und Fachinformation fur die Geschichtswissenschaften.

* In The New York Times this week, a long retrospective obituary for “Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien’s Middle-earth” ($ possible paywall)…

“When she called Houghton Mifflin to pitch her idea [for a book of hand-drawn maps], Fonstad was connected with Tolkien’s U.S. editor, Anne Barrett, who was semi-retired but happened to be visiting the office that day. Barrett so loved the concept that she secured permission from the Tolkien estate within days.”

* The HOTA Gallery on Australia’s Gold Coast will host “Writers Revealed: Treasures from the British Library and National Portrait Gallery”, opening 12th April 2025. The exhibition will include a number of Tolkien letters…

“More than 100 rare, remarkable manuscripts, letters and first editions and 70 iconic portraits will be displayed together for the first time. […] including William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, William Blake, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, J.R.R. Tolkien […].”

* On Archive.org as a .PDF download, The Little City (1911) by Wilfred Rowland Childe (1890-1952), who was Tolkien’s friend and contemporary. Edwardian poems of faery, Oxford and the Cotswolds, evocations of nature and skyscapes, and ballads.

* And finally, ‘The Gawain Country’ as pictured in a great many old postcards. Many newly coloured.

A Wetton trackway in winter.

Tolkien Gleanings #267

* Lingwe has a review of The Mythmakers, a new biographical book/comic about Tolkien and Lewis. The review has a short list of the most obvious errors and typos.

* Another batch of four long video-lectures from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown. These were formerly in her huge paid-for course ‘The Forge of Tolkien’, but are now slowly being posted for free on YouTube. Aule and the Nephelim is already available; while What did Tolkien read? (unusually halting-and-stumbling delivery makes it a difficult listen); The Two Trees; and The Mischief of Elves are all scheduled for January 2025.

* In the first issue of the new Taylor & Francis journal English Studies, “Eldarin Cosmotechnics: Posthumanism, Ecology and Techne in Tolkien’s Portrayal of Elven Paradises” ($ paywall)…

“Contrary to prevailing ecocritical beliefs that Elves depict a simplistic relationship with nature, this research posits that their profound bond stems from advanced technology, understood as either craftmanship or magic”

Yes, I’d agree (or probably would, if I could read the article rather than the abstract). Though I suggest it’s perhaps both at once, plus a sort of ‘infusion’ of the maker’s potent emotional visualisation (akin to an ‘Elves-to-object telepathy’). Recall… “we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make” — says ‘the leader of the Elves’ speaking to Pippin, in Fellowship. I’ve sometimes also wondered if some magic-infused things in Middle-earth are ‘charged’ or ‘activated’ by the emotions of the bearer. For instance would Merry’s spell-woven barrow-dagger have had such potency in the end, if it had not been first christened with orc-blood, then offered humbly with love and fealty to Theoden, then later wielded with a greater love?

* Italy gets Tolkien’s The Fall of Numenor for the first time in translation. First as a preview in the La Repubblica Sunday-supplement magazine Robinson, and then as a book on 15th January 2025.

* John Garth blogs at length about “2024: My year of Tolkien and tribulation”…

“Tolkien’s Mirror, my book-length study […] Here’s my underlying principle [for the book]: to fully understand why Tolkien invented something, you need to establish when he did so.”

Quite so. And exactly where, I’d add. There’s nothing like tracing the footsteps to start you on the right track. I did it with H.G Wells, ill and coughing blood and struggling up a very steep hill to Basford in Stoke-on-Trent… and this led me to his likely model for The Time Traveller (his then world-famous Physics examiner, who was living a few roads over); I did it with Sir Gawain and he led me along the Earlsway to Alton Castle, a site formerly completely overlooked by scholars, and… then a hundred or so facts and dates all fell into place; then I sort of did it again with Tolkien and the historical Earendel, by starting with the market-garden farm from which Tolkien made his fateful observation of a bright Venus being ‘hunted’ by the Moon. Many academics instead start with the texts and think that’s all there is and all there needs to be. Nope. If you have a mystery to solve, you go to exactly where and when the text stands in the biography and start from there. Of course, if one can afford it, also dig in the archives. Garth’s new blog post reports he’s done that, and he appears to have “the 1939 lecture text itself” (thought lost) for the later-revised “On Fairy Stories”.

* On Swedish TV channel AxessTV, the mini-series Fantastic Worlds – From Carroll to Tolkien, with the final 48-minute broadcast due on 18th January 2025…

“Part 4 of 4 – Tolkien and Childers. A four-part documentary series combining biography, quotes and film clips from a range of unforgettable British children’s book worlds.”

“Childers” must presumably be the author of The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service?

* And finally, a new YouTube video flip-through of the catalogue for the exhibition J.R.R. Tolkien – The Art of the Manuscript.

Tolkien Gleanings #266

* In English in the latest 2024 edition of the Transylvanian journal Revista Philobiblon, “‘We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I’: The Symbolism Of The Dragon in J.R.R. Tolkien’s and C.S. Lewis’s Fairy Stories”. Freely available online.

* The forthcoming academic collection Dragons in Fairy Tales has a 20th January 2025 deadline for chapter abstracts. There are still four or five slots available in the book.

* Set for 2025 from academic publisher Palgrave, the book J.R.R. Tolkien and G.B. Smith: A Special Relationship.

* Due in 2025, the book The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination which… “shows how the plots, themes, and characters of Tolkien’s beloved works can be traced to the patterns of the Church’s liturgical year.”

* Also due in 2025, from the University of Chicago Press, the book Chasing the Pearl-manuscript. This will draw… “on recent technological advances (such as spectroscopic analysis) to show the Pearl-manuscript to be a more complex piece of material, visual, and textual art than previously understood”.

* Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2025: ‘Rituals and Ceremonies’, which would appear to be relevant to topics related to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

* Taruithorn (the Oxford Tolkien Society, a student society at the University of Oxford since 1990) has announced plans to revive its journal Miruvor… “We are looking for contributions! If you would like to write or create anything inspired by Tolkien, please feel free to contact us!” I assume contributors will need to be a student or perhaps have some connection with the University. The last issue of the earlier run of Miruvor appeared in 2016. Back issues can be had here from 1990-2004, as PDFs for open download.

* Signum University now has the March 2025 online short-courses listed. Learn a language in ‘Beginning Quenya’ (two parts); or study ‘The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Mature Years 1 (Volume 2: The Years 1919-1931)’ (three parts); or dive into ‘Tolkien and the Sea’. Some are ‘candidate courses’, meaning they only run if enough people sign up for them.

* And finally, some Gleanings readers will have a number of Amazon WishLists with substantial user comments appended. But you’ll likely find that some useless tea-boy at Amazon has tinkered with your WishList comments, making them miniscule and also hiding more than the first line of text. So, here’s a useful free UserScript for your Web browser, ‘Amazon Wishlist item user-comments / user-notes – fix’. This should fix this new problem. Requires TamperMonkey or similar, to run UserScripts on Web pages. You’re welcome.

Tolkien Gleanings #265

* Mallorn #65 (Winter 2024) is now available for download by Tolkien Society members. Among other items there are long articles on “The Horror of the Unnarrated” in LoTR, and another try at “Cracking the Bombadil Enigma”. Plus a shorter essay on the ur-spider Ungoliant, followed by several book reviews (in one, the pithy complaint that “Christopher Tolkien gets as many mentions as Karl Marx”). Also has excellent colour illustrations.

* The Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination (2025) is a bumper collection of chapters which includes the long and dense chapter “Into The Storm”, on the band Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-earth and the reception of Tolkien in German metal music. This is followed by the chapter “Time Travel Through Tolkien”, which surveys Tolkien in classical (Swann etc), folk rock and psychedelia circa 1962-69.

* The exemplary and long-running localist publication The Hockley Flyer (for Hockley and the Jewellery Quarter, just to the north of the centre of Birmingham UK) lists an event on 12th January 2025, a walking tour of Key Hill Cemetery in Birmingham. Apparently “Tolkien used to visit” when living in Birmingham, when it may still have been marked on maps as the ‘General Cemetery’. The weather for the afternoon of Sunday 12th is currently looking crisply cold and dazzlingly sunny… take sunglasses.

* Canadian magazine Catholic Insight has the new article “Apostles of Joy: J.R.R. Tolkien and St. Philip Neri”. Freely available online.

* Contemplations on the Tree of Woe has a new long article on “Goethe and Faust for a New Age”, which considers the possibility that, like Goethe, Tolkien is to now be considered as… “a world-historical figure whose work is emblematic of an entire civilization”. Doomer Vox Populi responds, with the shorter blog post “We are the Elendilans”, which broadly agrees, but doomily suggests rather that we are a civilisation in inevitable decline.

* Note that Archive.org have just put a mass of 1930 books online “to borrow”. Technically, they will not be public domain in the U.S. until 1st January 2026. Not a very exciting bunch, judging by a ten-minute scroll through the titles. But I did spot the book Fairy tales from Baltic shores: folk-lore stories from Estonia.

* And finally, as ‘global boiling’ reaches new extremes of… erm… deep cold and ice… here’s a timely reminder that there is also a British summertime. Newly posted on YouTube, a simple video recording of the View from J.R.R. Tolkien Memorial Bench in Oxford Parks – June 2024.

Tolkien Gleanings #264

* From Italy, new on YouTube, Franco Manni interviews Tom Shippey on Tolkien, mainstream literature and providence. Telephone call-box sound, but it’s steady and clear and has no drop-outs. Shippey offers amusing observations on Ugluk (an orc in LoTR). Comparing Ugluk’s difficulties in managing and directing orc-rabble, aggravated by squabbling orc factions, to the task of managing a university department.

* The book Tolkien’s Faith (2023) is now also available in Spanish, and this week ReL published a freely-available profile interview and book outline in Spanish. I translate…

“an educated Spanish Catholic today will learn peculiar things about the Catholicism that Tolkien experienced 100 years ago in England. His peculiar time and context [i.e. Edwardian England, initially] had practices and devotions different from those many practising Catholics know today. […] The Spanish translation of Ordway’s book is careful and attentive; it was done by Monica Sanz, a great connoisseur of Tolkien’s work, who in recent years has collaborated in correcting new Spanish editions of the British author’s books.”

* Karen L. Kobylarz’s blog this week reviews Tolkien’s Faith (2023). Talking of this book, one wonders when there’s going to be an audiobook version. Surely there would be enough demand?

* TradKitty has posted a new annotated reading-list of ‘Tolkien-related Books Interesting to Catholics’.

* A new book review in the latest Journal of Tolkien Research examines The Songs of the Spheres: Lewis, Tolkien and the Overlapping Realms of their Imaginations (2024).

* I think I missed this one. Back in November, there was an online event for two new books from Tom Shippey’s Uppsala Books.

I see that one of these books, Easter: A Pagan Goddess, A Christian Holiday, and their Contested History is now available (it was still ‘forthcoming’, last time I looked) and it is now also now listed on Amazon UK. Following a lot of neo-pagan confusion and confabulation, this book aims to clearly state and examine…

“the principal claims and counter claims that now surround the goddess Eostre (recorded once by the Venerable Bede in 725 AD) and the origins of the Christian paschal festival. It critically examines the substance and history of these ideas from their earliest sources to the present day.”

* Forthcoming from Uppsala Books, I see the title Northern Lore: A Thematic Guide to the Proverbs of Medieval England, Germany, and Scandinavia.

* And finally, Michael Kurek’s third symphony, the English Symphony, is to be released 7th February 2025. YouTube has a long sample from his Symphony No. 2 – Tales from the Realm of Faerie (2022).

Tolkien Gleanings #263

* The Italian Tolkienists have identified Tolkien’s letter of 14th May 1955 as unpublished. The letter will shortly be auctioned. The Italian blog post quotes from the letter and also investigates the recipient, who lived in Italy.

* The Tolkien and Fantasy blog pins down the dates and places of Borges on Tolkien. Or on what Borges mistakenly thought was Tolkien. Since it seems the blind and ageing author only had “Concerning Hobbits” and the first chapter or so of Fellowship of the Ring read to him, before he became bored and asked his reader to abandon the reading. How much he missed.

* The latest Ancient History magazine has yet another review of Tolkien and the Classical World. There will soon be enough of these to fill another book with reviews-of-the-book! 🙂

* Four more long video-lectures from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown. These were formerly in her paid-for course ‘The Forge of Tolkien’, but are now slowly being posted for free on YouTube. The Music of Creation; Melkor and the Leviathan; The Breath of the Gods; and Melkor’s Fall.

* Newly officially free on the Poe Society website, the book Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (1986). Includes the chapter “In the Perilous Realm: The Fantastic Geographies of Tolkien and Poe”.

* Now free on Archive.org after being placed under Creative Commons, the book Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (2019). Examines the Gawain-poet (aka the poet of the Pearl c. 1378-79) in the context of the mediaeval plagues of the time.

* No Birmingham Oratory, no merry Christmas? First Things has a new article on “How the Oxford Movement Saved Christmas”. A movement led by Cardinal Newman, who was later a strong influence on the young Tolkien (and also via Tolkien’s guardian Fr. Francis Morgan, who had been Newman’s private secretary). His movement pushed back against dour puritanism and…

“they were instrumental in revitalizing old rituals and practices, and even renewing interest in celebrating lapsed Christmas festivities” [and] “succeeded in changing many facets of Anglican [i.e. mainstream British Christian] worship, even among those who did not entirely agree with the movement. To the extent that by the 1870s, ‘Christmas decorations in churches and special Christmas observances were no longer’ merely characteristic of the [Oxford Movement] Tractarians. These observances included the widespread implementation of musical services on Christmas [and other changes]”.

Tolkien Gleanings #262

* On YouTube, another apparently “rare audio … hidden for 50 years”, Tolkien sings “Chips the glasses” from The Hobbit.

* RR Auctions is shortly to sell a Tolkien letter dated 14th May 1955…

Tolkien reflects on the anticipated publication of The Return of the King [to] Mrs. L.C. Beckett Frost in Ravello, Italy. He expresses his hope that readers will not be disappointed, comparing his work to Homer’s epics and discussing the delays caused by his commitment to provide extensive appendices and information.”

* The J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscripts collection at Marquette University has posted their 2025 dates for free public showings.

* A new rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research has begun, with a review of Parma Eldalamberon #23 (2024). The PE issue under review contains Tolkien’s own texts, his three descriptions of the Feanorian Alphabet, and his five texts on Eldarin Pronouns.

* The latest issue of the open-access journal RUDN: Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism is a special issue on ‘The Magical and Horrible in Literature’. Has the Russian-language article “Rhythmic prose in The Lord of the Rings“.

* In The European Conservative this week, “Rediscovering Our Wordhoard”, being a review of the book Ōsweald Bera: An Introduction to Old English (2024). The reviewer finds it…

“an exceptional work deserving of swift adoption by universities and independent scholars alike. Gorrie ditches the dry and difficult approach of learning a language’s rules almost independently of its vocabulary.”

* From 2016 and still available to buy, a special edition of the long-running French intellectual journal Europe, No. 1044: Lovecraft – Tolkien.

Tolkien Gleanings #261

* On YouTube, apparently “Rare audio … hidden for 50 years”, in which Tolkien reads “Roast Mutton” and “Misty Mountains” from The Hobbit.

* A new podcast with Graham McAleer, author of the new book Tolkien, Philosopher of War.

* Colorado’s Mountain Moot, set for the end of May 2025, will take as its theme ‘Tolkien and the Green: The Environment of Middle-earth’. Proposals are invited, for what appears to be podium/microphone presentation rather than via streaming.

* New on Archive.org, Greenwood’s out-of-print reference book Fairy Lore: A Handbook (2006). With a downloadable .PDF file.

* This week Changing Lanes blog make an interesting observation. He sees Tolkien as being a prime influence in a long-term cultural shift. A shift away from heroes who actively seek out… “fortune and glory and great deeds”. Toward ‘Reluctant Heroes’, and cultural forms in which… “shying away from opportunity is now coded as the right thing to do, and [open] aspiration to greatness coded as villainous, or at least villain-adjacent”.

* The OnePeterFive blog has a new footnoted post on Ratzinger & Tolkien on the Novus Ordo and Organic Development. Specifically, Tolkien in relation to the idea of ‘the living tree’.

* Wormwoodania blog’s new “Second-Hand Bookshops in Britain: 2024 Report”. Here in the West Midlands, a shop I never even knew existed is reported closed…

Candle Lane Books of Shrewsbury, an archetypal story-book bookshop in an early 18th century house, with four floors, two creaking staircases, rooms at odd angles and a dusty attic.

A pity I missed the chance to visit, since the town’s only an hour away by train (and one can even get there via Crewe now, and thus avoid the nightmare stations of Wolverhampton and Telford). The good news is that, despite the occasional bargains on Amazon and eBay, Wormwoodania reports that… “there are more second-hand bookshops now [in the UK] than there were for most of the 20th century”.

* On the BBC 1 broadcast TV channel (yes, apparently broadcast TV still exists), the Antiques Roadshow‘s 5th January 2025 episode will have a short segment in which… “Clive Farahar finds a collection of signed Tolkien books, dedicated to a man whose relatives were neighbours of the author”.