Tolkien Gleanings #151.

* A new keynote conference lecture on YouTube, “The ‘Modern’ Tolkien: The Keys to the Enduring Appeal of Middle-earth”. Start at 28:00 minutes in, to skip the very general ‘introduction to the impact of modernity and rural nostalgia in England’, and get to Tolkien. The lecture concluded the Seventh International Conference on Myth in the Arts (November 2023), held at The University of the Basque Country in the north of Spain. Tracking this event down led me to find the entire conference in video form. Includes, among others…

   – Glaurung, Heir of Fafnir: Tolkien’s Reading of Old Norse Dragon Myth (UBC website);
   – Faerie is a Dangerous Land: J.R.R. Tolkien and Fairy Tales (YouTube);
   – Gandalf: One of the Maiar in Tolkien’s Middle-earth (YouTube);
   – The Mythopoetic Value of the Tree of Gernika and its Impact in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (YouTube);
   – In the Beginning there was Music: The Interrelation between Music and Philology in Tolkien’s Work (YouTube);
   – The Sea as a Threshold in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium and Modern Media (YouTube).

* In the late summer I see that the Sarehole Mill pizzas were reviewed in the article “A Margherita in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”. The food reviewer also remarked that for food…

“Tolkien would normally visit the Eastgate Hotel on Merton Street, Oxford, a gloomy inn next to the college where he taught philology while writing The Lord of the Rings. There is [today] something insatiably unhappy about the Eastgate, as if the Boer War[s] were still ongoing. Even so, Tolkien liked it, and he ate there when he lived next door at No. 21.”

The Eastgate was also the site of a seminal debate that one would love to have had recorded on tape…

“[The] clash of ideas culminated in 1954, when Arthur C. Clarke met with [C.S.] Lewis at the Eastgate hotel in Oxford; the former brought with him fellow [British Interplanetary Society] member [and leading British rocket engineer] Val Cleaver, the latter was accompanied by another distinguished Oxford don and fellow writer, none other than J.R.R. Tolkien, and there the interplanetary debate was thrashed out over several hours”. (The British Interplanetary Society and Cultures of Outer Space, 1930-1970, citing From Imagination to Reality – An Audio History of the British Interplanetary Society, 2008).

2024 will be the 70th anniversary of that debate. One wonders if it might be recreated in 2024, patched together from the writings of the four men and presented in a promenade performance at the Eastgate?

* The latest Art of Manliness podcast discusses “The Hobbit Virtues” with the author of Hobbit Virtues: Rediscovering J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ethics from The Lord of the Rings (2020). The show-notes include a link to the interesting article “Against the Cult of Travel: or What Everyone Gets Wrong About The Hobbit” (2021).

* And finally, booking now is an expensive 2024 summer school at the University of Oxford, “An Introduction to Tolkien’s Mythology”.

Tolkien Gleanings #150.

* The Past Daily digs up “The Man Who Invented Hobbits”. A one-hour NPR radio show (the U.S. government-funded broadcaster, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting). Apparently broadcast on 1st January 1975. I can find no reference to a radio documentary on Tolkien under that exact name, in Tolkien material, but it was reviewed in the SFRA Newsletter #70, April 1979, when it was issued on cassette by the U.S. Center for Cassette Studies. Which is perhaps how it’s survived. The .MP3 download link is here. It’s a remarkably good documentary. Now it’s been released at last someone will no doubt put Ken Burns-style images to it and make it into a video. [Update: Zionus suggests it’s the same as a BBC Radio Oxford local-radio documentary of 1974].

* The Catholic Theology podcast has a new episode titled “On Tolkien and Myth”…

“Can myths and fairy stories help us to better understand reality? Today, Dr. Michael Dauphinais and Catholic academic Joseph Pearce discuss J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay ‘On Fairy Stories’.”

* Popping up on eBay, a rare and very Shire-like view of Etching Hill, two miles from Tolkien’s Great Haywood in Staffordshire and near the road to the town of Rugeley three miles from Great Haywood.

* A new article in The Dublin Review of Books, on “Dunsany’s Careless Abundance”. Dauntingly so, as it’s very difficult to know where to start on reading him. Interesting to learn in the article that this other, and far more prolific, fantasy writer also served on the Somme…

“When [the book] Fifty-one Tales appeared, Dunsany had just served as an Army captain ‘in the deserts of the Somme'”.

* “Lezant artists’ illustrations part of Tolkien exhibit in Rome”…

“The beautiful illustrations, which are currently on display in La Galleria Nationale, Rome, were created by the late Roger Garland and his wife Linda, who have a permanent Tolkien exhibition at Lakeside Gallery, Lezant. Lakeside Gallery was established in 1989 by Linda and Roger primarily to exhibit their own work, but also to promote book illustration as a serious art form.”

And the Lakeside Gallery website reveals their own gallery has on show… “over seventy paintings and drawings commissioned by the original publishers for many J.R.R Tolkien’s books”. It turns out that “Lezant” is not in Italy, but is about 25 miles west of Exeter and in the middle of Cornwall, England. Sounds like a suitable site for a biennial ‘Tolkien Art & Artists’ convention, I’d suggest?

* And finally, a large exhibition on Fairy Tales at the Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland, Australia.

New on eBay, an evocative ‘shire’ postcard of a site near to Tolkien’s Great Haywood. Located about two miles south-east.

The Google Maps search result is deceptive, unable to locate the hill it sends you instead to a road and a school, making it look like the hill has been built up as a housing estate. It hasn’t. Since a little searching finds that the hill is still there. With the help of the local M.P., in 2018 the Friends Of Etching Hill fought off an unwanted Forestry Commission plantation proposal and…

“established that the Hill is classed as common land / village green and that the management as such, should be left in the hands of the Charitable Trustees, who are supported by volunteers from the Friends Of Etching Hill.”

Other basic information…

“the hill itself rises steeply to 454 feet above sea level and is 100 feet above the houses of the village”.

“a well-known viewpoint on the north-eastern edge of Cannock Chase, with a distinctive, flat sandstone top”.

I’ve no idea if Tolkien knew it, but it would have made a pleasant stop on a three-mile road walk from Great Haywood – Little Haywood – Rugeley.

Tolkien Gleanings #149.

* The next issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research has its first content, this being a long review of Holly Ordway’s Tolkien’s Faith and an essay on “Echoes of the Spanish Civil War in Tolkien’s Legendarium”. Both are freely available.

* Posted a few days ago, the .MP3 for the Oxford talk “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Philologist”…

“A talk by Professor Simon Horobin on Tolkien’s long-standing career and interest in philology. Part of the series to mark the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death organised and hosted by Exeter College and the Faculty of English.”

Poor sound-quality, regrettably, and almost un-listenable. Reminder to public lecturers… always make a podium recording of your own lecture, even if the institution is also making one.

* A been-and-gone event at the University of Chichester’s venerable Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, on 11th December 2023. It was a public talk on “J.R.R Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Doctor Who: peculiarly British fairy tales”…

To mark the 50th anniversary of the death J.R.R. Tolkien, the 60th anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis, and the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who, Paul Quinn will be giving a lecture about fairy tales in the work of Tolkien and Lewis, demonstrating how the types of ‘fairy tales’ found in Middle-earth and Narnia, and fairy tales in general, impacted on Doctor Who.

* Gramarye, the journal of the UK’s Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, has a call for content for the next issue. Deadline: 24th March 2024. Note that potential contributors can bag a… “complimentary e-book of the most recent issue” by enquiring.

* Advance news of Signum University’s UK Moot. Set for 27th April 2024 in the ancient city of York, and there to discuss the twin themes of… “Death and Immortality: The Great Escapes”.

* Freely available online, the new article “La artificialidad temporal o magia en los reinos elficos en The Lord of the Rings”. Seeks to use the Confessions of Saint Augustine as a lens to examine Lothlorien, as an elven creation which appears to stand apart from time.

* The new book Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology ships tomorrow. Mostly the movement occurred in fantasy and science-fiction poetry, which meant it was almost unknown outside of those circles. The book has no Google Books preview, thus one can’t know if Tolkien is in it. There’s no mention of him in the blurb, and I’d suspect costly reproduction rights may have kept him out?

* And finally, Walking Tree has increased the prices of their books.

Tolkien Gleanings #148.

* Dimitra Fimi on “Tolkien and the Fairies: Faith and Folklore”. Seemingly newly published, the blog-post article is the text of her 2010 Oxonmoot presentation.

* Arriving in late February 2024 according to Amazon, a 144-page graphic-novel version of The Hobbit, published by Morrow. Which probably means about 120 pages of story, plus padding.

* Amazon currently has “10th January 2024” as the date for the ebook version of the English edition of the biographical graphic-novel Tolkien: Lighting Up The Darkness.

* New to me, the book Easter: A Pagan Goddess, A Christian Holiday, and their Contested History. Not on Amazon UK under that title, nor discover-able via Google. The publisher is Uppsala Books, Tom Shippey’s new imprint, which lists the title and dates its page as “2023”. Possibly still ‘forthcoming’, at a guess?

“The purpose of this book is to explore 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.”

* And finally, new on Archive.org is the Journal of Conchology (i.e. shells and their makers). Not a journal in which one might expect to find Tolkien considered. But its two-part 1991/92 “Mollusca in fiction” survey delighted in finding a snail as a key plot-point in The Hobbit…

“The works of J.R.R. Tolkien are much read and admired, but most readers have probably failed to notice the passive, fleeting, but crucial role played by a snail in The Hobbit. [Plot recap, then…] at the last moment as the sun sinks a thrush flies down and cracks a snail upon a large stone. The last rays shine upon the key-hole as they stand by the stone and they are thus able to [plot spoilers]. T.E. Crowley observed that it was impossible to anthropomorphise a snail. It has, however, now been done.”

Actually H.P. Lovecraft did it first, as with so much else. See the Lovecraft / Rimel collaboration on the Dreamlands tale “The Sorcery of Aphlar” (published in The Fantasy Fan, 1934).

Tolkien Gleanings #147.

* A student’s lengthy November 2023 summary-report of an “Oxford professor’s USC visit” and the lectures given there…

“USC’s Nova Forum for Catholic Thought invited Pezzini for a weeklong speaking series on Tolkien’s literary contributions from a Catholic perspective.”

* Advance notice of an Easter Tolkien talk in the UK, “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Hope of Easter”.

* Now on Archive.org, Colin Wilson’s Tree by Tolkien chapbook (1973), seen here in its 1974 U.S. edition…

Not to be confused with the notoriously-wrong critic Edmund Wilson. The only commentary on it that I can immediately dig up is in the Tolkien Encyclopedia…

“It could be said, fundamentally, that no ‘mainstream critic’ appreciated The Lord of the Rings or indeed was in a position to write criticism on it. […] The best possible exception would be Colin Wilson in his 1974 Capra Press pamphlet Tree by Tolkien, in which he compares Tolkien somewhat oddly (but in the end perhaps perceptively) with Jeffrey Farnol.”

Actually I find the comparison is short, and then a later passing comment suggests Wilson intended it to apply to the initial walking journey from the Shire to Rivendell. But the observation made me look into Farnol. He was one of the many accomplished Edwardian writers of popular adventure-romance novels. He was from Aston in the north of Birmingham, so not far from Tolkien. But at age 30 he married his 18 year-old love and they set off for America. There he became a successful writer, robust but with a strong dash of romance added so as to appeal to women readers. Also a strong taste for the old English rural highways and byways, Regency highwaymen and ‘country characters’ being then very much in demand. Four of his novels are on Archive.org…

As I sat of an early summer morning in the shade of a tree, eating fried bacon with a tinker, the thought came to me that I might some day write a book of my own: a book that should treat of the roads and by-roads, of trees, and wind in lonely places, of rapid brooks and lazy streams, of the glory of dawn, the glow of evening, and the purple solitude of night; a book of wayside inns and sequestered taverns; a book of country things and ways and people. And the thought pleased me much.” (Opening of The Broad Highway, 1911).

Update: I heard the first fifteen or so chapters via the LibriVox reading. No great resemblance to Tolkien, so far, other than the love of English landscape.

As for Colin Wilson, there are some perceptive moments. But he reveals that the first read of LoTR was a three-day gallop, and we later learn that he skipped large sections. The second was a read-aloud to his children which meant many “long speeches” skipped and the book’s reading also re-ordered so as to focus on Frodo and Sam. Partly, Wilson’s reading doesn’t appear to have been deep or complete enough. Nor does he have anything much of the biography to grasp, seemingly having to intuit the Catholicism rather than to know about it. Still, as possibly the first worthy criticism after Auden, it’s fairly creditable. Unlike many critics of the time, he had actually (mostly) read the book.

* A short new book from the University of Wales, Introducing the Medieval Fox (2023).

* And finally, advance news of a short summer 2024 exhibition at the Getty in the USA. “The Book of Marvels: Wonder and Fear in the Middle Ages” will run from 11th June – 25th August 2024.

Tolkien Gleanings #146.

* New at Word on Fire, Holly Ordway on “Tolkien, “Beloved Bernadette,” and the Immaculate Conception”. It appears to be a new essay, and not an extract from the new book Tolkien’s Faith.

* This week Ad Fontes has a review of Ordway’s Tolkien’s Faith.

* A YouTube interview I’m fairly sure I missed, back last January. The one-hour podcast “Tolkien as Philologist and Oxfordian Catholic” interviewed Dr. Yannick Imbert. Imbert is author of From Imagination to Faerie: Tolkien’s Thomist Fantasy (2022) and Professor of Apologetics at the Faculte Jean Calvin in France.

* The latest European Conservative has a long freely-available peice “Further In and Further Up: 50 Years with J.R.R. Tolkien” by Joseph Pearce. It appeared in the Fall 2023 print edition of the magazine, and has been newly released online.

* I see that the Weston Library, Oxford, recently held the event “Henry Bradley (1845-1923): A Celebration of his Life and Scholarship”. The date was 17th November 2023…

“It has been Henry Bradley’s fate to be remembered as ‘only’ the second Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, always overshadowed by James Murray. This event aims both to celebrate and recontextualize his achievements – not just as a lexicographer, but as a writer, historian, and scholar in a variety of contexts. When he died in 1923, his former OED assistant J.R.R. Tolkien paid tribute to him, in Old English, as a sméaþoncol mon (a ‘man of subtle thought’). One hundred years after his death we offer a long-overdue reappraisal of his life and scholarship in a series of papers.”

Somewhat Gandalf-ian? But I suppose many fellows had such an appearance around the turn of the century.

* ““What a tale we have been in”: Emplotment and the Exemplar Characters in The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter Series” is a new journal article coming from the jargon-filled field of educational theory. Freely readable, but not downloadable without paying. Putting the abstract into plain English, as much as possible, gives…

“[The] admiration [of the young reader for characters] involves wonder and distance, and is best evoked by mixed or flawed characters … [Through such admiration a child may come to understand that they themselves may be part of] larger narratives [in the real world]. [For the writers under discussion, the child’s admiration of virtue is aided by the writer’s uses of] moral realism.”

I’d add time-scales as well as “larger narratives” (by which most teachers would probably assume immediate things like family structures, the daily news, etc). The most intelligent child reader will over time learn to draw more deeply from the past, as well as anticipating further ahead into the future. The classics of fantasy and science-fiction literature will ably serve these rare text-readers in forming such habits of mind. The Lord of the Rings especially offers them deep lessons in “The Long Now” — with a number of characters operating and planning over far longer time-scales than the hobbits are aware of.

* And finally, a 50 minute video tour of a $4-million dollar home library, including Tolkien treasures…

Tolkien Gleanings #145.

* A Rome Reports two-minute TV-news style video takes cameras inside the Italian National Gallery for a peep at the successful new Tolkien exhibition there, and interviews Oronzo Cilli. Be sure to turn on YouTube’s auto-subtitles.

* The Athrabeth podcast interviews Thomas P. Hillman. His new book is due just before Christmas from Kent State University Press, titled Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many. The publisher’s blurb has…

“Instead of turning his interpretation [of LoTR] to allegory or [Christian] apologetics, Hillman demonstrates how the story works metaphorically, allowing Tolkien to embrace both Catholic views and pagan mythology.”

* Seemly newly up for auction, Tolkien’s hand-written 25th September 1954 letter to someone who had given The Lord of the Rings an attentive and positive review on publication of Fellowship. In the New Statesman magazine, of all places. Presumably British armchair leftists had no idea what was coming, given that only the first volume of LoTR had by then appeared, or they might have had a more hostile reviewer lined up. My guess would be that the editor simply nodded it through.

The item up for auction appears to be Letter 154 in the Letters.

* I found the site of L’Arco e la Corte, an Italian publisher offering Tolkien scholarship including a journal. This gave me the Italian journal’s Minas Tirith #23 (May 2023) contents in Italian, which includes among others…

    – Tolkien the philologist and Armand Berger’s Res germanica.
    – At the Origin of the Elvish Languages: Early Quendian and Proto-Indo-European.
    – Elvish language trees according to various later conceptions of J.R.R. Tolkien.
    – The French ‘Library’ of J.R.R. Tolkien.

A Tolkien page in their catalogue also revealed interesting items (though again, published in Italian). Among which are, here given in English title-translation…

Glimmers of things higher, deeper, or darker than its surface (conference proceedings); Travelling to Isengard: Tolkien and European traditions (multi-author, scholars from widely differing disciplines); J.R.R. Tolkien, philologist and poet between antiquity and the 20th century (a short primer for Italians on Tolkien’s Philology and his wider academic interests); and a two-volume The Languages ​​of the Elves of Middle-earth – History and development of the Elvish languages ​​of Arda.

* And finally, An Unexpected Journal has the new essay “Melchizedek, Bombadil, and the Numinous in The Lord of the Rings”. A new long and Bible-aware essay, which suggests a possible Biblical source / influence for Bombadil. One that’s new to me.

Tolkien Gleanings #144.

“Together we score one hundred and forty-four.” (Bilbo in LoTR).

* A starter list of errors found in the new book of Tolkien letters…

“most of them are OCR errors. Obviously the publishers didn’t have a native digital file for a decades-old book, so they used OCR. … Hundreds of similar typos can be found in [recently published OCR’d] Tolkien books.”

I’d guess that finding and flagging OCR errors is probably a good task for an AI, and I’d hope someone’s already working on that one — if it isn’t already built-in to the better professional OCR engines.

* “J.R.R. Tolkien Offers an Antidote Against New Forms of Paganism”… “This article is an adaptation of a lecture, “Tolkien, Heroic Christianity and the Dangers of Neo-Paganism”, delivered at the Sept. 17-19 EWTN Gotland Forum in Sweden.” The video version was previously noted here, but the heavily accented English of the speaker may mean that the text transcript is welcome.

* The Colorado Catholic Herald has a long and glowing review of Holly Ordway’s new book Tolkien’s Faith.

* The G.K. Chesterton Society has a new podcast interview with Holly Ordway.

* A thoughtful consideration of “Tolkien & [R.E.] Howard: similarities in literature & life”. R.E. Howard being the creator of Conan and progenitor of the commercial sword & sorcery sub-genre. To perhaps save some readers time after reading the article, note that my 2019 Tentaclii examination into the question ‘Did Tolkien read R.E. Howard?’ found…

“it all boils down to what L. Sprague de Camp remembered in 1983 of a snatch of conversation had with Tolkien in a garage in 1967, so it’s pretty slim as evidence goes.”

* A new review of the book Beowulf as Children’s Literature. Paywalled at Project MUSE, but the mention of a chapter on Tolkien is part of the free sample…

“Amber Dunai tackles the monumental and imposing figure of J.R.R. Tolkien and his relationship with Beowulf within the context of his theory of fairy stories, focusing on his use of Beowulfian themes and motifs in the two versions of The Lay of Beowulf, his effort to reconstruct the fairy tale ur-text of Beowulf in Sellic Spell, and his use of the skin-changer Beorn in The Hobbit as an analogue for Beowulf.”

* Call for Papers: Tolkien Society Seminar 2024 on “Tolkien’s Romantic Resonances”. By which they mean not the fluttering hearts and heaving bosoms of the fan-fiction, but the broad historical movement called Romanticism and its aesthetics and histories.

Tolkien Gleanings #143.

* Erm, about that new and expanded volume of Tolkien letters that recently arrived on your doormat? Perhaps not so complete, after “An Unexpected Discovery”…

“whilst checking the bundles of letters ahead of a researcher’s visit […] I came across an unpublished letter from the author J.R.R Tolkien to [the British folklorist] Katharine Briggs. [… The newly uncovered] letters from Katharine Briggs to J.R.R. Tolkien are part of the uncatalogued family archives and not currently available for research.”.

* New on Archive.org to borrow, a scan of the b&w book The Tolkien family album (1992). Early items I’d not seen: a picture of Birmingham’s Samson Gamgee; the frontage of Edith’s house in Warwick; the homes in Leeds at St. Mark’s Terrace and Darnley Road.

* My ideal book, being a scholar of both Tolkien and Lovecraft, but… it’s in Italian and I can’t read Italian. Urg. Tolkien e Lovecraft: Alle origini del fantastico is newly published in what appears to be series titled Historica Edizioni. There’s a listing page at Amazon Italy, which has a 28th November 2023 publication date — though Amazon thinks the book is not currently shipping.

J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft: the gods of fantastic writing. Co-founders of a genre that is both deeply ancestral and very modern. The conventional view would place them at opposite ends of the fantastic ecosystem: light and shadow, black and white, Tolkien synonymous with airy fantasy and Lovecraft with deep horror. Yet in the epic of Tolkien’s Middle-earth there is no shortage of flashes of darkness and terror, just as in the dark Lovecraftian cosmos, populated by unspeakable entities, fairy-tale horizons of enchantment and wonder are also found. By analysing their masterpieces, and the reading that inspired both men, this book aims to read the two great architects of the imagination from a more flexible perspective, one which attempts to frame and understand them within their authentic complexity.

* A new repository record-page suggests a new book in French, Tolkien et l’Antiquite. Passe et Antiquites en Terre du Milieu (2023). Probably the proceedings of the conference of the same name at the Sorbonne in 2022, on Tolkien and antiquity. Though at present Amazon France knows nothing about the book… perhaps expect it in 2024?

* Thoughts on “Hedgerows, coppices, and the economy of the Shire”.

* And finally, news that the National Gallery exhibition in Rome, “Tolkien. Man, professor, author”, has proved popular enough to spur a national tour…

“Rome will be the first stop on a journey that will continue in 2024 in other Italian cities. Conceived and promoted by the Ministry of Culture with the collaboration of the University of Oxford, under the curatorship of Tolkien scholar Oronzo Cilli and the co-curatorship and organization of Alessandro Nicosia.”

The National Gallery is said to have seen “numbers never seen before, and many young people” for the show. Even with a hefty entrance-fee. Collectors might also note that… “The catalog that accompanies the exhibition” is also said to be partly “composed of unpublished [Tolkien] materials”.

Tolkien Gleanings #142.

* Tolkienists.org returns to offer a new post, after a very long break. It sounds like editor Erik hopes to “de-mothball Tolkienists” sometime in 2024.

* Tolkien scholar John Garth has a title for his next book, Tolkien’s Mirror, and there’s a short podcast with him this week. The book is currently finished and seeking a publisher able to do justice to it (picture licencing for illustrations etc), and is pencilled in for 2025.

* From Germany, the new scholarly journal issue Hither Shore #19 – ‘Raum und Zeit in Tolkiens Werk’ (‘Space and time in Tolkien’s work’). Partly in English. The publisher’s ‘Look Inside’ link is ‘404 not found’, but Google Books obliges with the table-of-contents…

* It appears that Mythprint, quarterly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society is going online. Albeit with a very long open-access embargo. I assume it’s open-access. Since the new #405 will apparently be publicly available to non-members… “for download on Sunday, 15th June 2025”.

* A forthcoming book listed on Amazon UK, J.R.R. Tolkien: Christian Maker of Middle-Earth (December 2023, in paperback and Kindle ebook). “This biography is intended to show readers that Tolkien’s Christian faith was central to his life and work, personally, professionally, and — most importantly — creatively.” Does it say anything that Holly Ordway hasn’t already, in her accomplished and acclaimed new book? Possibly. The Canadian author is a contributor of essays to Barnabas magazine… and “a teacher of English and Classical Studies at Hillfeld Strathallan College and a professor of Communications at Mohawk College.” The book has a pleasing cover painting, which I assume is AI generated by the looks of it…

* Available now, the new book J.R.R. Tolkien: Tales for Our Times — Vol. 1: Art, Not Power. Weighing in at over 400 pages, this book is volume one of a…

two-volume study of the work and vision of J.R.R. Tolkien. Volume One, Art, Not Power, is an exploration of literary ecology, paying particular attention to Tolkien’s exploration of the imaginal realm. The companion volume Fellowship and Flourishing is a more philosophically detailed exposition of the moral ecology that underpins Tolkien’s writings. Premised on the recovery of ‘a clear view,’ both volumes address a number of key questions: power and its corrupting potentials; human creativity in the acceptance of boundaries; ‘the environment’ conceived in the sense of our inherited moral and social ecosystems as well as our natural ones. […] Tolkien’s ideal emerges as that of living artistically in tune with growing things.

A little digging finds that Vol. 2, Fellowship and Flourishing, is just as long and also available now. Though, due to Amazon’s abysmal search functionality, it didn’t show up on my search for new and forthcoming books.

Fellowship and Flourishing is about creating the habitus for the acquisition and exercise of the virtues, cultivating good character, and fostering ‘habits of the heart’ within communities of practice, all of which is essential to a free and self-governing society.

* And finally, local ‘citizen journalism’ online publication Yorkshire Bylines has a new article freely available online, “From trenches to treasures: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Yorkshire Odyssey”. Also mentioned is the nearby Tolkien exhibition in the former mill-town of Barnsley…

“Having been open to the public for over a month, the ‘Magic of Middle-earth’ has exceeded expectations, drawing 10,000 visitors to the museum.”

Tolkien Gleanings #141.

* Over 150 new Tolkien letters have now been published in the handsome expanded book of the Letters. There’s now a handy free guide to help the busy Tolkien scholar to quickly spot the new revelations.

* Word on Fire has the article “The Expanded and Revised Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: A First Look”.

* New at the Journal of Tolkien Research, the ‘Tolkien’s Animals’ special-issue is now available. Has “Tolkien’s Eagles: Aves ex machina” and “Foxes, dancing bears, and wolves”, plus “Tolkien’s Tevildo” (‘Prince of Cats’) among others, together with “Tolkien’s Animals: A Bibliography”.

* A special Tolkien issue of Brazilian journal Ipotesi, with a focus on landscapes, space and walking. Includes a number of Portuguese articles, and here are some of the titles in English…

    – “Martyrdom in Paradise: a symbolic representation of depression in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion.”
    – “From map to myth: the geography of Middle-earth.”
    – “Space as a secondary narrative in The Lord of the Rings.”
    – “About Hobbits and the Great War: The Journey of the Ordinary Hero.”
    – “Walking through elven and human spaces: an analysis of heterotopias and affective cartographies.”

* And finally, a new free Librivox audiobook reading of G.K. Chesterton’s non-fiction book William Blake (1910, 1920), which may interest some due to the 1920 re-issue and Tolkien’s interest in Chesterton.