Tolkien Gleanings #333

* Seemingly a new podcast on YouTube, There and Back Again: Interviews Podcast. Now with two long episodes available, Revolutionizing Tolkien Research: Interview with James Tauber from Digital Tolkien Project and Tolkien and Technology, Did We All Get It Wrong?: Interview with Dr. Holly Ordway.

* John Garth on the recent plausible claim about the connection between the view from Gedling church tower and key artwork in The Hobbit, “Tolkien’s hidden gift to his favourite aunt” ($ paywall).

* A call for papers for the Tolkien Studies Area of the Popular Culture Association meeting, to be held in Atlanta in April 2026. Deadline for proposals: 30th November 2025.

* The Daily Cardinal helps with the local promotion of the new Karen Wynn Fonstad exhibition, in the paper’s article “Middle-earth in Madison?” Freely available online.

* The Tolkien & Illustration blog has “A Princess Illustrates The Lord of the Rings: Ingahild Grathmer, Eric Fraser and the Folio Society”. This is newly online (without the pictures) at July 2025, a version of a 2022 conference paper… “In 2022, I presented this paper at the Tolkien’s Society convention Oxonmoot [but it] was neither published nor recorded”.

* Two public talks of interest on members of the Inklings, at the University of Oxford before Christmas. C.S. Lewis and the Atmospherics of Fantasy, and Fantasy & the Occult: Charles Williams, Dion Fortune and the Order of the Golden Dawn. Booking now.

* Rise Up Comus has committed to ‘keying’ one hex per day for the recent free hex-map of the whole of Middle-earth, with his facts kept straight via reference to the Atlas of Middle-earth. The ‘keying’ means writing a role-playing gamer’s text to accompany the map, in which he notes environment and plants, likely characters present in each hex, and also invents basic quests (‘hobbit fallen into bog, in need of rescue’, etc) to save the game master from inventing one every time.

* A new Masters dissertation from Oklahoma, “Chasing Chivalry Revival and Reinvention of Chivalric Knights Throughout Twentieth and Twenty-First Century America”. Freely available online.

* Frank Frazetta has just dinged the highest-ever bell for the sale of a fantasy artwork, reaching $13.5 million at an auction sale for one of his paintings. The painting depicts R.E. Howard’s Conan character battling a ‘man ape’, and it illustrated the tale “Rogues in the House” (1934).

* And finally, Rare Tolkien book signed in Elvish to auction for around £15,000. Though probably likely to fetch more.

Tolkien Gleanings #332

* Tolkien Society members now have a new issue of Vingilot (Fall 2025, though the cover has “Summer 2025”) to download. Poems and artwork, plus the article “The Hunt for the Fellowship”, which with the aid of the text and various timelines… “attempts a plausible reconstruction of the actions carried out by the enemy factions” in Fellowship, who these are and why they act.

* The latest edition of the open-access journal Alambique has two reviews in Spanish (Review 1 and Review 2) of the book Resena de Fantasia epica Espanola (1842-1903) (2024). The book offers an introduction and an “anthology of representative texts” of early Spanish fantasy literature from 1842-1903.

* Talking of early continental fantasy novels, Maurice Sand’s epic fantasy / sword-and-sorcery novel Le Coq aux Cheveux D’or (1867, in French) now has a free English translation on Archive.org. This is the first translation, so far as I know.

* In English from Poland, “Delights of Dinners, Pleasures of Picnics in the ‘Make-believe’ Food Fantasies of the Edwardian Children’s Literature” (2024). The article surveys a handful of classic British works translated into Polish. Tolkien’s hungry hobbits and (later) cooks would seem to echo this tradition. Freely available online.

* Signum University now has a page for the short online courses proposed for November 2025. Note “The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Later Poems 2 (Volume 3: The Years 1931-1967)” and “She Watered It With her Tears: Grief, Mourning, and Death in Tolkien’s Legendarium”. And Anne-girls everywhere will also want to consider October’s now-confirmed online course “Reading Anne of Green Gables as Fantasy”.

* The Staffordshire Catholic History Society was formed in 1961, and to 1991 it produced twenty-four issues of a scholarly journal titled Staffordshire Catholic History. Thereafter the journal was issued as the journal of the Midlands Catholic History Society, an annual title which continues today. I’ve looked through the online tables-of-contents for both these journals, and the only item of possible Tolkien relevance appears to be the article “An English Spring: Newman’s Anglo-Saxonism” (2006). This sounds like it may have background relevance to Tolkien’s intellectual upbringing, though I can’t tell — because the journal runs are not online.

* This week on YouTube, “History in Flames with Robert Bartlett” offers a long podcast interview with the author of a new book on the destruction of mediaeval manuscripts over the centuries.

* And finally, London’s Curtis Brown agency, now owned by the Beverley Hills based UTA, has taken over the handling of rights requests on behalf of The Tolkien Estate.

Tolkien Gleanings #331

* Tolkien Notes 22 (September 2025), new at the blog of Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull. They also have links to their current “addenda and corrigenda” PDFs for various books including the new Poems, and an “Index to The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981, 2023)”.

* Drout’s forthcoming The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation has a cover image, a seemingly firm date, and is now pre-ordering for the more affordable Kindle ebook.

* The UK’s annual Heritage Open Days happen each September. 2025 offers a number of free tours of Tolkien sites, including the Birmingham Oratory and in nearby Warwick the “beautiful church where J.R.R. Tolkien was married in 1916”. Nothing Tolkien-specific for the Lickeys, but visitors will be able to see “watercolours by Elijah Walton of the area in the 1850s” and the views, hills and lanes Tolkien knew as a boy were much the same fifty years later.

* The Spanish Tolkien Society has announced the 21st edition of its Essay Awards for unpublished essays. Open to all it seems, but you do also have to submit a Spanish version of your work. Deadline: 5th October 2025.

* There’s to be a Prancing Pony Podcast Moot, just before Christmas 2025. 18th – 21st December in Dallas, Texas and online. The theme will be “Creating Historical Depth within Fantastical Worlds”.

* I’m pleased to see that The Time Machine has been translated into Gaelic (Inneal na Time by H.G. Wells). It’s currently battling A’ Hobat by one J.R.R. Tolkien, for the annual Gaelic translation prize. Seems a little unfair that two great masterpieces should have to go head-to-head, but I guess it’s the quality and fluidity of the translation that counts.

* Recent lidar (ground penetrating radar) probing by archaeologists has discovered more about one of Sir Gawain’s two likely ancient Roman road routes, the routes which could have taken an armored knight up off the Cheshire Plain and into North Staffordshire.

* And finally, I note that Tolkien’s posthumous book Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo is now fifty years old. Having been published in September 1975.

Tolkien Gleanings #330

* The 3rd edition of A Bibliography of Tolkien Studies in French and English (summer 2025) is now available. The venture is nicely ‘filling up the corners’, with the current edition offering… “4,245 references […] classified and presented in several usual [scholarly] quotation formats.” Freely available online, under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike.

* The OxonMoot 2025 schedule (warning: VPN users are automatically blocked, with not even a captcha). Among others, these caught my eye…

   – “Ho! Ho! Ho! To the Bottle I Go: The Pub in Tolkien’s Life and Works”.
   – “Tolkien the Caveman: Poetry as a Cudgel” (Tolkien’s poetic ridicule of his colleague Percy Simpson).
   – “Belliphonic Tolkien: Sounds of War in The Lord of the Rings”.
   – “Tolkien and the Miniature” (his “sustained interest in the minuscule and in the interplay of different scales”).
   – “Tolkien’s Bicycle” (his bicycles and cycling life, amid the emerging and increasingly dangerous car-culture).

* In the August 2025 issue of the journal Themelios, “Angelic Fall Theodicy in Dialogue with Tolkien, Augustine, and Aquinas”. Freely available online.

* In Italy, Avvenire reviews Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (2025). Review freely available online, in Italian.

* New at the website of the venerable Catholic journal The Lamp, “Soaring Music”. A rather mis-titled article in which the author muses on the appeal of “the strangeness of Tolkien”, and compares The Lord of the Rings with Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Freely available online.

* Due in September 2025 and pre-ordering now, a new issue of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion. Includes the article “The Other Country: Numinous Landscape in English Supernatural Fiction” and “On Time Slips: Jack Finney, Charles de Lint and an old house in Chester” (which at a guess may be a survey of English ‘time-slip’ literature).

* Extended free access to a large medieval site is a rare thing in England today, other than castles. But there’s still the walkable circuit of ye olde city-walls at Chester, formerly a major port city. Clas Merdin has posted a new up-to-date descriptive photo-tour of the city-walls walk, on his blog: Part One and Part Two. Might be a good place for a Tolkien event, such as a promenade performance, I’d suggest?

* Lovely poster for the Hobbiton 2025 program in Italy. That’s how you do event posters.

* And finally, Tolkien pictures were bought for six eggs in wartime Hull…

“The pictures, which are of two stylishly dressed women and dated 1918, were handed down generations of the farmer’s family, along with the story of how he got them [from Tolkien].”

If genuine, then they show Tolkien experimenting with collage as a medium.

Tolkien Gleanings #329

* Inklings-Jahrbuch 41 (2025), containing the proceedings of 2023 conference ‘Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic’. Freely available online. Among other items the journal has the German articles…

    – “Death and Immortality in Old English setting: Life and after life in Tolkien’s Rohan”.
    – “Longevity, immortality and rebirth in Middle-earth”.

    – Plus reviews of:

    – Essays on the Epic Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien & G.R.R. Martin.
    – Tolkien Studies Volume XIX and its XIX Supplement.
    – J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics.

* A new rolling issue of Journal of Tolkien Research has begun, Vol. 22, Issue 2, 2025. First up is the article “Josef Madlener’s “Der Berggeist”: Not the “Origin of Gandalf””. Note also that there’s to be an article on the same topic by a different author in the forthcoming Tolkien Studies journal (2024, but not yet issued), “”The ‘Origin of Gandalf’: Josef Madlener’s Der Berggeist and the Transboundary Mountain Spirit Rubezahl as Purported Sources of Inspiration for Tolkien’s Wizard””.

It’s not mentioned in the article, but I’d add that I can easily find evidence on eBay of the same Josef Madlener’s interest in a cloaked big-booted Gandalf-like shepherd figure, and of the publication of the resulting paintings as postcards.

In the lower two cards the shepherd is praying in the open fields.

The outfit here seems to be the traditional one from Provencal (SE France, neighbouring the Swiss Alps), and indeed it has been celebrated on one of their postage stamps (above). The traditional outfit worn by the Swiss shepherds, those Tolkien might have seen in the Alps in 1911, appears to have been different. Circa 1920, which is the earliest I can find snapshot photos of such men, high mountain Swiss summer shepherds appear to have instead worn long lederhosen, pointy clogs, short tunic, and the well-known ‘fedora + feathers’ Swiss man’s hat.

* Newly released from embargo, the Spanish PhD thesis From Taniquetil to Orodruin: the portrayal of mountains and caves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium (2021). In English, and now freely available online.

* The Russell Kirk Center’s University Bookman has a long new review of The Worlds of Dorothy L. Sayers: The Life and Works of the Crime Writer and Poet (2025). Sayer was friends with C.S. Lewis, and was on the fringes of the Inklings circle.

* The author Alan Garner (Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Owl Service) was also on ‘the fringes of the fringes’ of the Inklings, later. A Reddit comment today spurred me to look up an interview now online at the Robbins Library Digital Projects. In which he said…

“I happened to be [studying at the University of Oxford] just after Professor Tolkien had retired, but he still gave bravura demonstrations of Beowulf. He would walk up and down and declaim it, and I used to go to those performances. That’s when I first heard English, and I was thrilled by simply the drama and the music of it. […] I didn’t know [the Inkling] Charles Williams, but my tutor at Oxford was one of the Inklings. Thus I was on the fringe of all of that, and I’ve no doubt that my tutor talked about things that C.S. Lewis had said the night before.”

* Up for auction with Forum Auctions back in 2019, with the catalogue only now appearing on Archive.org, the signed playbill of a 1967 children’s theatre performance of The Hobbit.

* And finally, an item from the world of fan-fiction. In August 2025 it was reported that… “Faerie, a Tolkien fanfiction [online] archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3)”.

Tolkien Gleanings #328

** New site for Tolkien Gleanings, now at https://jurn.link/spyders/ — please update bookmarks, links and RSS feeds. The old free one is now unavailable, because WordPress abruptly closed all access to it without warning or explanation. The cause is unknown, but I guess the peril of having a 15-year blog is that someone can always find something to make a vexatious claim about. So far as I know, there’s nothing here that deserves such abrupt treatment. Anyway, it’s easier just to load up the local backups and port everything over to my paid webspace. As someone once said, “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”.

* Downloads of video transcripts are now available for sessions at the Mythopoeic Society’s Online Midsummer Seminar (OMS) #4 (August 2025). Titles include, among many others…

  – “”Her hair was held a marvel unmatched”: The Significance of Long, Blonde Hair in Tolkien’s Imagination”.

  – “”Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans”: Melian’s and Luthien’s Numinosity”.

  – “The Influence of the Pearl-Maiden on the Imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien”.

* Full details of the Mereth Aderthad 2025 conference sponsored by the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild in July 2025. The page now has links to, among others, the paper “Love, Grief, and Alliterative Verse in Tolkien’s Legendarium”, with transcript, and the same scholar also has a paper online on alliterative verse as an Elvish practice. All freely available online.

* The Mereth Aderthad 2025 conference also produced a free PDF ‘zine of Middle-earth fiction, poetry and art. Freely available online, but a print version can also be ordered. No non-fiction articles.

* The contents-list for the delayed Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review (2024) is now available online. To include, among others…

  – “Tolkien’s Elegiac Trees: Enta Geweorc and the Ents Across Time”.

  – “The Wanderer’s Return: New Findings on Tolkien in Oxford 1918-19”.

  – “Reconsidering the Early Critical Response to The Lord of the Rings“.

* The latest Liturgical Arts Journal reviews The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination. Freely available online.

* The Italian exhibition on Tolkien is to open in Trieste soon…

“After stops in Rome, Naples, Turin, and Catania, the traveling exhibition ‘Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author’ will conclude its run in Trieste. The show, dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien, the Oxford scholar and creator of Middle-earth, opens on 19th September 2025, at the Salone degli Incanti and runs through 11th January 2026.”

* The Oxfordshire town of Banbury has dates for its turn at hosting the travelling The Magic of Middle-earth memorabilia exhibition. 31st January – 28th June 2026, at the Museum. Not free, this time.

* And finally, new on YouTube is a 90 minute podcast in which Paul Corfield Godfrey and Simon Crosby Buttle talk operatic Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien Gleanings #327

* The latest edition of the UK’s History Today news-stand magazine (September 2025) has an opening print-only article on “This Middle Earth”…

“The article explores the historical and cultural significance of the term “middle earth,” tracing its origins from the Anglo-Saxon word middangeard, which referred to the human realm distinct from divine and monstrous realms. Initially associated with a cosmological understanding, the term evolved through medieval and early modern literature …”

* Details about what’s in the new French book Tolkien et la memoire de l’antiquite (‘Tolkien and the Memory of Antiquity’, published August 2025).

The first part appears to make a biographical survey of Tolkien’s schooling and training in relation to the Classics…

Chapter I. Antiquity in Tolkien’s literary and linguistic culture – A classic education – ancient readings and predilection for late antiquity – from ancient readings to literary creation – the taste of ancient languages ​​- from Latin to Quenya – ancient ludic etymologies.

Chapter II. Traces of ancient philosophy in the culture of Tolkien – an expensive investigation – a meeting of many ways – traces and testimonies in the work.

Chapter III. Antiquity in Tolkien’s historical vision – a broad vision of history – between Homer and classic historians: the basics of training – the medievalist and his historical sources – from knowledge to historical vision.

The second part appears to explore the “presence of the ancient world in the land” in the context of Middle-earth’s own antiquity. This includes a section intriguingly titled “Middle-earth as listening: limits, climates and landscapes”. Which is presumably on the sonic topography?

The third part appears to seek the usual classical sources in Orpheus, Plato (ring of Gyges), the Trojan wars, The Odyssey, mythic descents into the underworld, etc.

* New to me, a prize-winning undergraduate final dissertation from Brandeis University, “Invisible Enemy, Visible Harm: Unearthing Traces of the 1918 Flu Pandemic in Tolkien’s Middle-earth” (2020). Now freely available online.

* New at Pastor Theologians, “Twice-Told Tales: Tolkien’s Numenor, America, and the Church”.

* At Bandcamp Daily, a new long article and survey “Exploring the Mystical Realms of Fantasy Synth”, meaning ‘synthesizer-based electronic music’…

“The resurgence of dungeon synth over the past decade or so has been something to behold. From a sparse scene of solo creators toiling away in hermetic isolation to a global community of thriving [record] labels, sold-out festivals and international tours — truly, we are living in renaissance times. […] Survey the wider scene, though, and you’ll encounter dizzying variety [beyond the doomy gloominess of dungeon synth]. Think of a fantasy setting or a specific corner of mythology, and there’s almost certainly a one-person synth project out there taking its lore and turning it into music.”

* Some 50 years before The Clangers arrived on British TV, Tolkien was creating a wide range of strange flora and fauna on the Moon.

* And finally, in October 2025 the French are set to read a translation of Le Hobbit, illustre par Tove Jansson. Oddly listed on Amazon UK under “Paranormal & Urban”. But perhaps the publisher knows that’s where the young readers / moms are, those who are most likely to purchase?

Tolkien Gleanings #326

* The new August 2025 issue of the Brazilian open-access journal Abusoes is a special on ‘histories and theories of fantasy in the 21st century’, with one Tolkien essay. The back issues also offer various themed specials. Including on the Tales of Hoffmann, Brazilian fantasy 1980–2018, and a large issue dedicated to Lovecraft. All largely written in Portuguese.

* The Tea With Tolkien blog has a book set for 2026 release, Into the Heart of Middle-earth: Exploring Faith and Fellowship in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Pre-ordering now from Ave Maria Press.

* From the Brothers Grimm Society of North America, a forthcoming volume bringing together work from… “scholars who are working on nineteenth-century women fairy-tale writers, collectors, and storytellers across Europe”. “Nineteenth-century” here covers 1789-1914.

* The journal Messengers from the Stars plans a 2026 special issue on cityscapes in fantasy & science fiction. Tolkien’s Numenor is mentioned in the blurb. Deadline: 1st September 2025.

* An unofficial comic-book version of Tolkien’s unpublished epilogue for The Lord of the Rings. Freely available online.

* And finally, a new folk-metal album evoking Middle-earth, from Germany, with the bombastic lead-track celebrating “Sam the Brave”. This track now has an animated official video on YouTube.

Tolkien Gleanings #325

* From the Philology degree of a Moscow University, the new undergraduate dissertation “Real and Fictional Geography in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Minor Works” (2025). Not online, but there is an abstract in English…

“The second chapter explores the connections between real geography and fictional geography, which also shows the importance of researching the writer’s geography, since the results of the analysis lead to new and more complete interpretations of the text.”

* Whatever one may think of the various screen and videogame adaptations of Tolkien, one can’t fault the musicians and concept designers/illustrators who worked on them. From an Irish undergraduate degree in Design for Film (Production), a new dissertation looks at the latter in “Architects of Arda: The Design of the Elvish Realms in The Rings of Power” (2025). Has no copyright-censorship of the images, thankfully. Freely available online, and one can also find more dissertations of a similar nature from recent years.

* From Stockholm University in Sweden, the new undergraduate dissertation
“The Lord of the Rings: The Verisimilitude and Immersive Depth of Tolkien’s Middle-earth” (2025). Not online, but with an English abstract.

* The latest July 2025 issue of the open-access SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature reviews Supernatural Speakers in Old English Verse (2023), a book on…

“supernatural speech and speakers in Old English poetry. Coker’s monograph will be of huge interest to the field, not only for its extended treatment of an enthralling theme but for the remarkable insights that it generates along the way.”

* New from Cambridge University Press, what appears to be an introductory book in their Cambridge Elements series, Natural and Supernatural in Early Medieval England (2025). Apparently only 78 pages long despite its price, so… perhaps more of a pocket-book for students with deep pockets?

* I hear that the new book Fantasy: A Short History (April 2025), has a long chapter “on Tolkien and Wagner”. The book was issued in the Bloomsbury ‘Short Histories’ series, yet apparently it is neither short (“296 pages” says Amazon) nor a popular read (“this is Adam Roberts in professorial mode. He doesn’t make it too easy for the reader” says one reviewer). As such, Gleanings readers may be more interested in the Tolkien chapter than otherwise.

* And finally, I spotted another ‘unknown quantity’ new book and this one had a discouraging AI-quickie cover image. But the size of this just-released book, A Culinary Journey Through Middle-earth: A Fantasy-Inspired Cookbook of Hobbit Meals, Elvish Delights & Dwarvish Feasts, intrigued me. 311 pages just for some recipes? Surely there must be more to it? So I had the ‘free sample’ Amazon supplies for Kindle ebooks, and it does appear to be a legitimate book from a LoTR-loving foodie who evidently also knows how to write. The sample offers short mini-essays on the different approaches to food among the different races of Middle-earth. Worth a look, it seems, if food/cooking is your thing. Though I can’t vouch for the final edibility on the plate!

Tolkien Gleanings #324

* The latest Christianity & Literature journal reviews the book Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology ($ partial paywall, ‘first page free’).

* An online course, “Reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings with Professor Michael D.C. Drout”, August-November 2025. It started a week ago, but it’s also $400… so I’m guessing you might get a seat if you nip in quickly and wildly wave the cash?

* Now freely available online, Good Thoughts on Folklore and Mythology, Vol. 1: Folklore and Vol. 2: Mythology. Together, these new books offer a huge “Festschrift in Honour of Terry Gunnell”, Professor of Folkloristics at the University of Iceland. Vol. 1 includes “Why Folklorists Should Read Saints’ Lives” and Vol. 2 includes “A Dragon Is No Idle Fancy: Loki’s Spawn and Thor’s Bane”, among many others.

* Forthcoming before Christmas, Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten Lands with the Inklings. Being a short help-book for Christians during Lent, presenting snippets drawn from the writings of the Inklings and their wider circles.

* An Italian podcast series is reading Tolkien’s letters in order, and doing so in Italian translation. Congratulations to the maker, as the podcast has now reached Lettere 40. Freely available online.

* Here in the UK, Stonyhurst College offers public days dedicated to “The Shire, Sherlock & Shakespeare at Stonyhurst”, with small exhibitions and in-person guided tours. Set for 22nd–23rd August 2025.

* And finally, a new map of Beleriand from the First Age, made by Starcave on DeviantArt. There’s a free printable version without watermark. Also a version without the labels.

Tolkien Gleanings #323

* “Tolkien, editor, reader and critic of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (2025). An advanced student work, it seems, but one checked over by Leo Carruthers of the Sorbonne. Freely available online.

* The Tolkien Society blog has “New edition of The Hobbit graphic novel coming this September”, with inner-page previews and the additional detail that the maker… “is speaking at the Society’s Oxonmoot event in September 2025. His talk will be available to both those in Oxford and those joining the event online.”

* Now on YouTube, a recording of the recent Signum University thesis defence for the PhD on “Neutral and Evil Technology in Lewis and Tolkien”.

* Also new on YouTube, a video tour Inside the C.S. Lewis and Tolkien Museum at Wheaton College in the USA.

* From the journal Religion & Literature and now in open-access at a repository, “The eschatological imagination in literature” (2025).

* At RealClear Books & Culture, the new article “C.S. Lewis in the Age of Bleakness: Awe, Wonder and the Power of Enchantment”.

* Massively Overpowered considers Lord of the Rings Online’s unreleased soundtrack, and embeds the YouTube fan-videos that showcase some of it. Just part, apparently, of…

“a huge repository of “unreleased” music for the game that either hasn’t gotten a formal release anywhere or hasn’t been used in the game yet.”

* And finally, a new 12-mile Middle Earth GIS Hexmap, meaning that each hex is 12 miles. Such things are used by tabletop gamers, if they have a big enough table or three. A high-res version is also freely available.

“I tried to only depict features appearing in Tolkien’s writings, for which I relied primarily on citations on Tolkeingateway.net. I have not (intentionally) included anything from the films, TV show, [multiplayer online videogames], or various [tabletop] RPGs.”