Tolkien Gleanings #310

* The Glasgow University Repository is back online. Turns out that the new “The creative uses of Irish literature in works by J.R.R. Tolkien” (2025) is indeed a PhD thesis. 300+ pages of… “the first book-length, systematic critical analysis of the role of Irish literature in Tolkien’s legendarium”. Freely available online.

* The New York City Tolkien Conference… ” will take place at Baruch College [central New York City] on Thursday, 31st July 2025.

   – Nicholas Birns on his new book The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien.
   – Donato Giancola, on visions of Middle-earth from an artist’s perspective.
   – Kristine Larsen on “Immeasurable Halls and Dreamlike Forms: Tracing the Caves of Cheddar Gorge Throughout Tolkien’s Legendarium”.

* IMC Leeds 2025 is happening next week in the UK. Among other papers to be presented are…

   – “Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s Interpretation of an Academic Teacher”.
   – Kristine Larsen on “The Light of Learning: Medieval Scholar-Kings and Loremasters in the Line of Earendil”.
   – “Portrayals of Learning in The Lord of the Rings versus Tolkien’s Other Work”.
   – “Creating a ‘Red Book’: Hobbits, Tolkien, and Irish Monks”.

* Holly Ordway has a long conference report on The Christian Consonance of Middle-earth, with pictures.

* Newly added to the current rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, the Kristine Larsen conference paper “A Time of Fire and Cataclysm: The Centrality of Cosmic War in Tolkien’s Round World Cosmologies”. With a specific focus here on the Sun and the Moon. Freely available online.

* A new undergraduate final-year dissertation “Manhood and War in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: A Hobbit’s Perspective” (2025). Freely available online.

* From Hungary, the new Hungarian book Prakticna primjena GIS alata: primijenjeni zadatci. 20 years of digital mapping and maps (‘GIS’) teaching materials, presented as a textbook and manual for beginners on a university course…

“To bring our reader closer to our tasks and examples, we used the terrains of ​​Tolkien’s Middle-earth, taking the reader through the cities, wetlands, mountains and volcanoes of Tolkien’s imaginary world and showing the preparation of maps and the importance of GIS. The idea of ​​our manual is to get acquainted with the benefits of GIS through the independent production of a Middle-earth map, and thus to overcome frustrations in the use of GIS tools. You can buy a book at the University Bookstore Citadeli and through a web shop for 15 euros.”

* Probing The Prophecy of Tolkien Revealed, this being a 2022 Catholic book that sought to position Tolkien as a prophet of doom, one who foresaw the coming dangers of artificial intelligence.

* Talking of radical technology that was supposed to change everything, if you’re in Oxford this summer then an exhibition may offer some deep historical context for ‘Tolkien in the 1920s-1940s’. “Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home” runs until 31st August 2025 at the Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries. There’s a related new book…

“The book explores how, over the first forty years of the twentieth century, a coldly utilitarian box of crude electronics became as much a part of the warm fabric of home as the parlour rug”.

* The Oxford Centre for Fantasy brings news of ‘Here Be Dragons’ events set for the autumn of 2025… “We are partnering with the Story Museum in a festival of dragons. Our emphasis will be on illustration”. The Story Museum will have several exhibitions on the theme, plus a puppetry day and… “three days of workshops for young people aged 8-12”. Booking now.

* Forthcoming is Doomed to Die: The Gift of Iluvatar — The A-Z of Death in Tolkien, suitably set for a Halloween 2025 release. Only 96 pages of what’s billed as a… “darkly satirical illustrated parody of the Tolkien universe”. But it’s apparently also an assiduous gleaning of the various deaths in Tolkien, and the handy A-Z format suggests it may still have some use as a quick look-up guide for scholars.

* The apparently substantial new book The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 lands in paperback on 17th July 2025, now less than two weeks away. Amazon UK seems unsure of the Kindle ebook release date, and the Amazobot can only suggest 2076.

* And finally… a very well written pitch-sheet for ten major Silmarillion projects, yet to be made as adaptations.

This week I encountered some heavy and slick promotion for a book from 2022. The publicity was immediately undermined by its flaky title of Mount Doom: The Prophecy of Tolkien Revealed, and further doomed for me by the off-putting blurb… “This complete reinterpretation of the Lord of the Rings mythology will forever change how the world understands J.R.R. Tolkien and his life’s work.” Oh, really?

The book’s final doom was sealed on reading the claim, in the blurb for a podcast author interview, that… “J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the Enigma code-cracking project with Alan Turing, father of Artificial Intelligence”. Erm, nope.

But, being interested in A.I. and its future I took a look at the book anyway.

Turns out it’s a chunky American and Catholic book from 2022, warning against the potential of A.I. In over 500 pages it apparently assiduously references Tolkien’s work in terms of pointing out how it might now be read as prophesy. Evidently the book is being pushed again, as A.I. develops at a blistering pace and as the new Pope strings A.I. onto his favourite set of worry-beads.

I can’t find any reviews of the book, other than a half-dozen Amazon five-star gushers which don’t feel very trustworthy. Another bad sign.

But the premise is intriguing: the authors drew on Tolkien’s focus on machinery in the service of overbearing ambition, which together necessitate idolatry, servitude and slavery. Such powers can create, but only as befouling machinery and distorted mimicry. But Tolkien presents this as merely a forerunner of a larger power which seeks total control of thought and free-will — and this power actually has the advanced all-seeing all-reaching mind-invading technology to achieve its ends. Yes, I can see the clear links there with A.I. as it currently stands. But the book’s grandiose claims and apparent casual invention of biographical details don’t inspire me to buy it and read it. Still, it’s of note — since it plays to a small-but-growing doomer crowd who want to see Tolkien as one of their prophets of doom. We may see more such in the future, possibly even researched and written mostly by an AI. 🙂

Tolkien Gleanings #309

Tolkien Gleanings has been in abeyance for three weeks, due to my installing Windows 11 and porting over all the software and settings. Don’t worry, it’s a ‘Superlite’ version of Windows 11, not Microsoft’s full-on nightmare blue-screen bloatware. I was going to move to Linux Mint, but then I discovered the Superlite version of Windows 11 — no bloat, no Microsoft account, no adverts, no privacy-invading telemetry, no ‘apps’, no ‘your hardware is too puny’, no forced updates. All of that actively ripped out, rather than just suppressed via a few tweaks in the settings. It can even look and feel like Windows 7 (install Open Shell + StartAllBack, and change the wallpaper). Lovely. It’s just as fast on a trusty old workstation, and it means I can get all the latest software and access various local open-source AI tools.

* Now published Arda Philology 8, which has…

– Almost Certainly Almaida: An Investigation of Numenor’s Lost City-name.
– “Unrecorded” Germanic: An Art-language for England.
– Rank-frequency Distributions of Aesthetic Units.
– Vocalization of Spirants in Sindarin and Noldorin.
– Shorthand Signalling: A New Source for the Tengwar?

The latter by John Garth, and presumably related to the wartime signalling methods known to Tolkien. Also of note, a new podcast interview with John Garth on Tolkien and war.

* New from Eastern Europe, “Tolkien and ‘The Fear of the Beautiful Fay’: Breton Folklore and Christian Imaginary in Fantasy Literature”, in the journal Limba Literatura Folclo. Freely available online, in Romanian with English abstract.

* New from Glasgow, what appears to be a dissertation or thesis on “The Creative Uses of Irish Literature in Works by J.R.R. Tolkien”. I can’t tell which it is at present, because the university repository server has crashed (possibly this is related to the major cyber-attack which has taken out Glasgow City Council, at a guess).

* New in Historioplus: The e-Journal of the History Department of the University of Salzburg, “‘What about side by side with a friend?’: Dissecting the ‘Elves versus Dwarves’-trope, which looks at the primary-world historical origins of the notion. Freely available in English.

* Newly added to the rolling current issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Bilbo’s Boethian Heroism”. Freely available online…

“… little scholarly attention has been paid to his development of Boethian ideals in The Hobbit, especially in regard to Bilbo’s heroic arc and the importance of luck on his journey. I argue that Tolkien develops Bilbo’s heroic identity and his famous “luck” as the actions of Fortune on behalf of Fate and divine Providence, interpreting the influential theology from Boethius’s ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ as a new kind of heroism that fulfils the teachings of Lady Philosophy.

* The National Catholic Register reviews the new book The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (2025), in “For Tolkien, the Mass Was Life’s Greatest Drama”.

* Kalimac’s Corner reveals, in a mid-June 2025 post, that…

“Tolkien Studies is alive and well. It’s just delayed. A combination of various personal difficulties, on top of never having quite recovered from the dent in our schedule caused by the 2022 supplement, are the cause. But the 2024 (tsk) issue should have gone to the publisher (more processing time) within a month from now.”

* Wormwoodiana brings news of the new book of essays Borderlands and Otherworlds (2025) which has, among others…

– Some Supernatural Fiction of the Early 1920s. [British literature survey]
– Charles Williams and His Circle: Four Vignettes.
– The Haunted ’Forties: Wrey Gardiner and Poetry Quarterly. [1940s British literature]
– Three Fantasias of the ’Forties. [“]
– Modernity and Tradition: The English Fantastic in the ’Forties and ’Fifties. [1940s and 50s]

* The Lingwe blog muses on “The Ulsterior Motive” and other unpublished writings of Tolkien.

* The Alas, not me blog has perceptive musings on “Dreamflowers and Lotus-eaters” in The Lord of the Rings.

* New on YouTube, a new batch of videos of the Oxford talks series, including, among others, “J.R.R. Tolkien at the BBC”. The BBC was the nation’s main broadcast network for the British Isles and Commonwealth.

* YouTube now has a recording of the 2025 Tolkien lecture, which this year was given by Birmingham’s historical-fantasy / romance novelist Zen Cho. Touches on the importance of fantasy for the reader’s inner-life, the evils of censorship and censorious peer-pressure, and the threat of AI as a quick-fix which may bypass “the effort of living in this world” (and the lessons that can teach us).

* Now online for free at Academia.edu, “Christmas Games and Paper Castles: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a Court Holiday Poem”, a chapter from Studies in the Literary Imagination (2023). I assume a two-year embargo has now expired, and hence the chapter is online for free. Get the PDF without signing up, by searching the title on Google Scholar. Excellent, but the author hasn’t read my book on Gawain and its setting. He usefully notes the appearance of ‘woodwoses’ as a fantastical addition to a court performance in 1348, citing a 1999 Yale University Press book…

“[For] the household of [King] Edward III, celebrating Christmas [in 1348] at Otford, there were masks for men, with heads of lions, elephants and phantoms (‘vespertiliones’) mounted on top, and separate masks of woodwoses and virgins. A few days later, at Epiphany, at Merton, there were 13 costumes for dragons and men with diadems.” — from The Great Household in Late Medieval England, 1999, p. 94.

* Five years in the making, and shipping this week, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters. Also includes surveys of modern “Monstrous Angels”, plus “Demons and Monsters of Mesopotamia”, and “Ghosts of Mesopotamia”, which means ancient Babylon and the Babylonian Empire.

* A new June 2025 version of the freeware Anytxt, the best full-text search tool for desktop PCs. Can now “filter search results by filename”, along with all the other features such as the ability to run regex and proximity queries. Very useful for scholars with large digital caches of papers and books.

* The Free Online Library has a wealth of freely-available long-ago local newspaper articles, which roll out to the public once their usefulness to publishers expires. New at the Library is “1905 Mill View Was Tolkien Inspiration”, which is a short gushy 2012 article from The Birmingham Mail. One item of note is on the sources of the mill-pool…

“[The Sarehole Mill] water wheel is powered not by the River Cole, which flows nearby, but an adjacent pond which is fed by a now built-over head race along the Wake Green Road and a stream from Moseley Bog.”

Also a Roy Edwards letter to the Mail editor from Christmas 2012…

“I lived at Fern Cottage 32 years ago. My late mother loved to visit a magical ‘glade’ sited near Cardinal Newman’s burial site, Rivendale, in the garden at the back. This led to a desire to research Tolkien which revealed that he walked via the Lickeys to Barnt Green station to catch the train to Birmingham. A born ‘Rednal-ite’, I recognised many of the scenes depicted in the Hobbit as those relating to his route to the train – the blacksmith next door to the cottage; the trees blowing all around his home; the river running by the Tea Rooms; the Rose & Crown where Strider was met; the large Beeches of Milkwood situated at the top of Rose Hill; the climb up a cliff-like sandstone hill where he could well have met Gollum; Bittell reservoir and the final stretch to the train which breathed fire and smoke – could this be the Dragon? Tolkien’s brother often met him at the station. They would have spent time exploring the Lickey Hills. Thus fact provides inspiration for fantasies. In later years he frequently visited the Oratory summer home next door and even spent many of his courting years walking the hills. Finally, enter the lookout at the top of Beacon hill and you will not only see the Two Towers, but you will survey the vast view across the Malverns to the land of Mordor in the distance – Tolkien country if ever there was.”

His “across the Malverns to the land of Mordor in the distance” would be looking SW towards rural Herefordshire/Gloucestershire, which is hardly Mordor. Possibly the glimpse of the distant Ross-on-Wye hill-country was meant? Though it would make more sense if “Malverns” = Midlands, and thus the viewer would be looking towards the heavily industrial Black Country. Possibly a mis-typing of a hand-written letter?

* And finally… “Best places for a Tolkien fan to visit in England?”, with answers.

Tolkien Gleanings #308

* Now available for download by members, the latest Amon Hen #313 (June 2025) from The Tolkien Society. Among other items, a long review of the new book The High Hallow, a long report from Westmoot, and a lengthy report on the ‘Three Farthing Stone’ Smial meet at the Burlington hotel in Birmingham. In which Shrewsbury is suggested as their next meet-up venue, later in 2025. One of the Three Farthing members is reportedly…

“working on a book derived from his Oxonmoot talks, a reference book of Tolkien audio material”

* A new rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research is now underway, opening with a review of the book The Map of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections on Tolkien’s Myth of Wilderness (2022). Freely available online.

* In the Christian journal the Kenarchy Journal 7.1 (2025), freely available online, the lead article is “The Great Music: Perfecting Love in Order and in Chaos”…

“The paper draws on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien to illuminate the way that this hope can be realised, pointing to a ‘higher harmony’ that is capable of including and transcending even the discord of the world.”

* Tomorrow (Saturday 7th June) in Dallas and on Zoom, a talk for the Lewis-Tolkien Society ‘Dr. James Patrick on Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford’, which examines…

“how the Oxford dons grappled with the challenge of defending Christian orthodoxy in the aftermath of Kant’s intellectual scepticism, Hegel’s metaphysics of World Spirit, and the reaction of British realism and Ayer’s positivism.”

This relates to (and perhaps updates?) his book Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901-1945 (1985). The book is well out-of-print, but I see there’s now an Archive.org scan to digitally ‘borrow’.

* Tantor (formerly Trantor, before trademark trolls) is set to release two recent scholarly books as audiobooks. The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation should appear in mid July, and Tolkien, Philosopher of War in mid August 2025.

* In Indiana, Ball State University Libraries has a Tolkien Exhibit, on show until the end of July 2025. This is a relatively small display in their Archives and Special Collections division…

“the exhibit features selections from the Deborah and Fritz Dolak J.R.R. Tolkien Collection, which was generously donated to Ball State in 2013 [and is being shown alongside new] student and staff interpretations of Tolkien’s world. Among the featured items are fantasy maps developed by Brendo Carvalho, a visiting cartography student from Brazil, and Rachel Cohn, assistant professor and foundations coordinator in the School of Art. Their work reflects the continuing inspiration Tolkien’s imagination provides to emerging artists and scholars.”

* On YouTube, First Timers considers Tolkien’s mastery of the art of foreshadowing and callback in LoTR.

* And finally… a Birmingham & Black Country Wildlife Trust Open Day at Moseley Bog in south Birmingham, 5th July 2025. Including two ‘Tolkien Tours’.

Tolkien Gleanings #307

* A Pilgrim in Narnia’s blog offers a summary of his soon-to-be-defenced thesis “Unveiling Hope: Do the Inhabitants of Arda Know How Their Own Story Ends?”…

“[…] the entire legendarium has been recorded and passed down from the Valar to the Elves and subsequently through the Hobbits. Therefore, all of Arda is revealed to be undergirded by the Music of the Ainur, which is more than a creation hymn – it is a sustaining breath, echoing through waters, songs, and the hearts of every individual. This Music is heard beside hearths, in dreams before perilous roads, and wherever water is found. Drawing from the legendarium, with modern scholarship simply providing context, this study argues that Arda is alive and looking forward to a final eucatastrophe where all sad things come untrue.”

* Anna Smol’s blog has a new post which offers “Some glimpses into Westmoot 2025”, including outlining the focus of her paper “Tolkien’s Myth-making and Dreams of Earendil” (on his early poetic uses of the character). There are also links to posted presentations from others at Westmoot.

* The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts has announced their 4th Virtual International Conference. This is to be themed ‘Embodied Spirits’ and is set for 17th-21st September 2025. The deadline for paper submission is 30th June 2025. Regrettably, their website is currently dead even to archive.is, but a search-snippet reveals that this year’s theme…

“invites engagement with how embodied spirits persist, haunt, and empower across both cultural and technological landscapes”.

* At The Imaginative Conservative, a new review of the book The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (2025).

* One I missed in January 2025, an episode of Princeton University’s Madison Notes podcast, “Tolkien, Philosopher of War: A Conversation with Graham McAleer”.

* The Oxford Mail local newspaper has a few more details about the forthcoming Tolkien book. A central figure is apparently…

“William Morris [who led the way in] mass-producing small cars at affordable prices and donated millions to worthy causes. [The Oxford] businessman is thought to be the inspiration for a character known as the ‘Daemon of Vaccipratum’ in the never-before published story, The Bovadium Fragments. [The work may reflect] a bid to alleviate traffic by building a dual carriageway across Christ Church Meadow, an ancient open space in the heart of Oxford, [which] sparked a lengthy public debate well into the 1960s, when the plan was eventually abandoned.”

* John Garth will be giving a talk on “Tolkien’s Elves: A journey through the realms of Middle-earth” in London on 15th July 2025. Booking now.

* The Australian Book Review has a scathing theatre review of the recent Australian attempt at a musical of The Lord of the Rings. Freely available online.

* On DeviantArt, a pleasing and easy-to-follow comic-book style map of a part of The Shire by AP-Cartography. Possibly of special interest to those reading the early parts of LoTR to children, after completing The Hobbit. Especially since there’s a 5.1Mb free download of the high-res 300dpi version, which makes it suitable for printing and colouring-in. Or perhaps table-top tracing of a large print, to create one’s own version.

* Also of note, in terms of walks in the Shire, is the French book Promenades au Pays Ses Hobbits: Itineraires a travers La Comte de J.R.R. Tolkien (2012) (‘Walks with Hobbits: some routes through the Shire of J.R.R. Tolkien’). New to me, discovered via an auto-translation of the 2018 French Web page which describes all the attempts at Middle-earth mapping. It turns out to be a short and well-reviewed 120-page book which describes seven Shire walks as if they were primary-world walks, reported in guidebook style. Has small maps, copious footnotes to all the sources drawn on, and old spot-engravings taken from public-domain clipart which serve as illustrations. Not yet translated, but one might still buy the £6.50 Kindle ebook. Which would then justify the obtaining of a digital copy from elsewhere… which you’d then make into a .PDF file and run through Google Translate’s free AI translation of long documents.

* And finally… new on YouTube is Malcolm Guite on Tolkien’s Dragon Poetry. Readings of three versions of the newly published poem on the dragon Scatha (you’ll recall his hoard was the source of Merry’s ‘raise the Shire’ horn).

Tolkien Gleanings #306

* Newly published, the book Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (May 2025)…

A comprehensive reconstruction of Tolkien’s theoretical views on the nature of literary creation, systematised for the first time through a painstaking analysis of fragments spanning his vast output.

* Due in September 2025 from Routledge, the book The Ecological Imaginary in Literature and Other Media, a £145 academic book. The blurb makes the book sound contentiously political, but perhaps that’s just the publisher marketing it to buyers in academic libraries. Some chapters sound like interesting overviews, at least. Such as…

    – Early Fantasy – Green Knights and Faerie Queens.
    – Children’s Fantasy – The Mythopoeic Land-scapes of Childhood.
    – Epic Fantasy – Portals, Paradises, and Waste-lands.
    – Urban Fantasy – Edgelands, Polders, and Wain-scots.
    – Mapping the Fantastic: the ethics of placiality, ar-chitectonics, and speculative cartography.
    – Fantasy Sites – Fantasy texts and their real-world impact.

* Voluspa: A New Translation with Commentary (2025), an undergraduate final project, now freely available online.

* In the latest issue of the journal Arthuriana (spring 2025) a review of Local Place and the Arthurian Tradition in England and Wales, 1400–1700. Freely available online.

* Newly online at YouTube, Tom Shippey talking about the new book of Middle-earth paintings by Miriam Ellis.

* Also new at YouTube, a stage musical adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1994, Cobb Children’s Theatre). Terrible video quality, but at least the camera is stable and one can get a basic idea of staging and pacing.

* And finally… a flipbook of The Lord of the Rings. This is a new community project to make 100,000 drawings that will then be compiled into a three-hour ‘flipbook-style’ animation. Recruiting now, and 1,600 trace-artists are required.

Tolkien Gleanings #305

* The YouTube channel for Uppsala Books has scheduled a number of Tom Shippey talks. Talking of Tom Shippey, I see a French translation ‘pocket-book’ edition of his J.R.R. Tolkien, auteur du siecle (‘Author of the Century’). This is due to ship on 20th August 2025, from Bragelonne.

* Sotheby’s Books & Manuscripts division has newly published a short “Guide to Identifying J.R.R. Tolkien First Editions”.

* In the latest Imaginative Conservative, Bradley J. Birzer on “Ascending to the Seven Virtues of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Not a reprint article, as they often are, but the text of a speech given at a 2025 graduation event. Freely available online.

* In the latest Lutheran Quarterly, a journal which appears to have newly switched to open-access, a review of The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation. Freely available online.

* A Masters dissertation for The University of British Columbia, “Death as a gift: a heroic celebration of life in The Lord of the Rings” (2024), which examines… “perceptions of death among Men” and “argues that Men’s contrasting attitudes toward Iluvatar’s Gift — acceptance exemplified by Theoden’s heroic death and rejection by Denethor’s despair — result in divergent outcomes of glory versus disgrace.” Freely available online.

* A new Masters dissertation for Liberty University, “Apologetics and Storytelling in The Lord of the Rings” (2025). Freely available online.

* Dimitra Fimi’s blog has posted her “Reflections on Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales”. This being the text of her… “talk at Oxonmoot 2021 … this is the first time I am sharing the full written text”.

* New on Archive.org, the German shareware collection CD Pegasus 4.0 (1993). Those were the days when you could fit hundreds of early computer games on one CD. Includes…

Lotrdemo.zip | 23-12-93 | A shareware demo of the adventure game based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Good graphics.

* New on the Renderosity store, and intended for use with the free DAZ Studio desktop software, the royalty-free 3D poseable figure Father Mushroom. I’d say this could provide a good starting-point for crafting a Tom Bombadil figure in 3D, given a bit of tweaking and new accessories. Though the figure separately has a pack of… “high boots, wide trousers, shirt and belt” included.

* A current call-for-papers…

“Are you working on any aspect of folklore and want to publish your research as a short book of 20-30k words? The new Cambridge University Press series ‘Elements in Folklore’ is now seeking proposals. [… Should be] briefer than a monograph but longer than an article, Elements will offer scholars the opportunity to explore subjects that might otherwise be neglected. […] Please email me if you’d like a proposal form.”

* And finally… the long-running British Fairies blog has a new article on “The Spirits of the Forest — faeries, dryads & sprites”.

Tolkien Gleanings #304

* Due in the autumn of 2025, a new Tolkien book. This will publish Tolkien’s previously unpublished The Bovadium Fragments, a short satire on the growing car-and-lorry culture that was then destroying the old pre-war Oxford. Tolkien described it as “a sort of satirical fantasy”, and it was first offered to a publisher in 1960. The new book will present the Fragments together with the new scholarly essay “The Origin of Bovadium” by Richard Ovenden. To be ordered alongside a copy of the long poem Autogeddon (1991) by Heathcote Williams, I’d suggest. Though I see that Autogeddon is now sadly out-of-print and the Jeremy Irons / BBC audio-reading of it is totally unavailable — a sad fate for “the most vigorous sustained flow of invective against car culture to date” (Jeremy Irons). There is however a “to borrow” ebook scan on Archive.org.

* A few talks I missed on my first pass (in Tolkien Gleanings #238) of the many now-online videos for the Mythcon 53: ‘Fantasies of the Middle Lands’ 2024 conference…

    – The Middle People of Middle-earth: Dwarven Displacement and Reconciliation in Tolkien’s Legendarium.
    – “Our Dear Charles Williams”: Tolkien’s Feelings about the Oddest Inkling.
    – Boromir’s Smile and Other Expressions of Wartime Joy in Tolkien.
    – Tolkien’s Mechanical Dragons in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ (1916) and World War 1.

* The Church Times has a suitably short review of the recent J.R.R. Tolkien: A very short introduction pocket-book. The review is freely available online…

“Townend misses important scriptural linkages in the examples he cites.” […] “Sam Gamgee’s discovery that ‘his tongue was loosed and his voice cried in a language which he did not know’ is obviously a nod to Acts 2.4 [in the Bible]”.

* Criterion is the annual English Studies journal of New England’s College of the Holy Cross. Their new 2025 edition has “Home, Exile, and Displacement in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit”. Freely available online.

* In Paris, the College des Bernardins recently hosted a conference alongside their ‘Tolkien tapestries’ exhibition. It’s been and gone, and its Web page is now blocked by a noxious whole-page pop-up layer advertising other events. But here are the titles of some of the talks, in English translation…

    – Purgatory in “Leaf by Niggle”.
    – Art and Salvation: the Christian quality of Tolkian work. (Tolkian = possibly about ‘Tolkien inspired’ projects?)
    – Allegiance to reality as a sign of redemption in Tolkien.
    – Light and Dust: Tolkien, his guardian angel, and the angels in Middle-earth. (Leo Carruthers)
    – J.R.R. Tolkien and the ‘Mass in Latin’.
    – Do Hobbits Believe in Eru? : Analogies of faith in Middle-earth.

* The recently-updated faculty profile page for Christopher Jeansonne at Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York state states…

He is currently co-writing, with Maurice Suckling from the RPI games program, a monograph on the Tolkien-inspired board-game ‘War of the Ring’ for the Tabletop Gaming series from University of Michigan Press (forthcoming).

* Now online, the King Edwards School Old Edwardians Gazette for Tolkien’s old school. Seemingly a complete set, freely available online without registration. A random sampling gives me the December 1919 issue in a PDF viewer. Has substantial obituaries for past teachers.

* And finally… “Are Tom Bombadil and Beorn comparable in any tangible sense?”

Tolkien Gleanings #303

* A new and fully-primed Journal of Tolkien Research, Vol. 21, Issue 2 (2025), being a special issue on ‘Tolkien and Psychology: Papers from the 2024 University of Vermont Tolkien Conference’. Freely available online. Includes, among others, Kristine Larsen on “The Mariner and his Astronomer Father: Victorian Masculinities in Numenor”. Also note the last-minute addition to the previous rolling edition, Vol 21, Issue 1, Janet Brennan Croft’s ““What Ship Will Bear Me Ever Back”: Woundedness and the Western Sea”.

* A Masters degree dissertation for the U.S. Catholic university Seton Hall, “The Atmosphere that Supports Life on Earth”: An Ecocritical Approach to Tolkien’s Arda (2025). Freely available for download. On perusing the abstract one finds it focuses down on…

“the interplay between mountains, trees, and humanity within Arda [which] has yet to be explored [in Tolkien studies, and thus the author] seeks to rectify this lack by coining a new term — the ecocritical trinity, based in medievalism …”

* Also at Seton Hall, I noted the university’s annual Arcadia: A Student Journal for Faith and Culture. There I discovered that their 2024 issue was a special on ‘Exploring Religion Through Fantasy Literature’. Freely available online and it has the following Tolkien essays…

    – “Good and Evil in Fantasy: The Author and the Reader” (compares LoTR with Night Operation by Owen Barfield, and Gaiman’s American Gods).
    – “The Love of God in This World and the Next” (on the manner of the deaths of two key characters in LoTR).
    – “Afterlife: Life and Death in Narnia and Arda”.
    – ““The Dominion of Men”: A Study of Masculinity in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings”.
    – “Anglo-Saxon and Christian Themes of Bravery in Beowulf and Their Applications in The Hobbit”.

* At the online Signum University for June 2025, a one-month summer school course on ‘Tolkien and the Old Testament’. Booking now. And in July 2025, ‘Men Marrying Up: Marriage and Romance in Tolkien’, plus another three courses in the Collected Poems series. Related: Shalom Tidings has ‘Tolkien Speaks: The Secrets to a Happy Marriage’.

* The new Spanish podcast Tolkien in Lettere is persevering with reading Tolkien’s letters in order, and has now released a free audio reading of Tolkien’s ‘Lettera 25’ in Spanish translation.

* On YouTube, Malcolm Guite enjoys a dip into the new Collected Poems boxed-set.

* And finally….“Giant sculpture of Gandalf riding an eagle to be removed from Wellington Airport” in New Zealand. Might make a nice hood-ornament for President Trump’s new Air Force One?

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’…