Tolkien Gleanings #273

* Amazon UK lists a forthcoming book from eminent scholar Michael Drout The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation. Due from publisher W.W. Norton before Christmas 2025. No details at Amazon beyond that the book will be a hardcover with a chunky page-count. But an interview of some years ago revealed more…

“My forthcoming book, The Tower and the Ruin, tries to approach Tolkien alternately reading like a philologist and reading as an individual”

I’m guessing it will include a version of “The Tower and the Ruin: The Past in Tolkien’s Works”, a chapter first published in the £110 conference-papers collection Tolkien: The Forest and the City (2013).

* Amazon UK also lists the forthcoming book Illustrating The Lord of the Rings in the Soviet Bloc: Iconographies of Difference. Due in mid September 2025 and set to offer…

A comprehensive history and analysis of the Soviet illustrated editions of The Lord of the Rings published between 1981 and 1993, this book explores the production and reception of these works against a backdrop of oppressive state censorship, restrictive publishing practices and the logistical struggles of translating such long texts.

* Tolkien and his Medieval Sources, a six-week online short course. Starting 6th February 2025 and booking now.

* The Tolkienists.org blog brings news of a new “modern back-end for LR Citations“.

* At Bibliotecanatalie, “Democracy of the Dead”. This being a new guest-post which looks at Tolkien and modernity. The post makes the interesting historical point that…

“Tolkien grew up under a then-conservative Catholic Church hostile to modernity. […] Pope Pius X [Pope from 1903 – August 1914] commanded “all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries” to take an “oath against modernism.””

This was the The Oath Against Modernism of 1910, which followed the Pascendi (September 1907) and Lamentabili (July 1907) encyclicals against modernism. However, these addressed a theological ‘modernism’ within Catholicism. It is thus not to be confused with i) the birth of ‘modernism’ as a cultural moment/movement (then hardly born), or ii) with being wholly against the modern world as it existed in the mid 1900s — meaning the mass ‘machine modernity’ which had emerged strongly in many nations from the 1870s onwards. This new world was evidently here-to-stay by the mid 1900s in England, but was only then hitting Italy like a sledgehammer. Italy industrialised late and with extreme and jarring speed, whereas England had a far more gradual introduction over generations.

As far as I can gather from various long summaries — the book Tolkien’s Faith being silent on this ‘point of inflection’ in 1907-10 — this particular form of Catholic modernism was a truculent movement within the Catholic Church, and in summary sought to…

   – embrace a spirit of constant movement and change, always wanting to ‘do away with’ tradition and established ways
   – push the notion that the Catholic Church must always be radically remodelling, so as to follow and accord with the new ideas of the 20th century
   – would allow and encourage 20th century science to investigate everything, regardless of possible religious disapproval
   – would allow historians to dispassionately set aside faith, the better to investigate the historicity of sacred tradition
   – totally separate the church from the nation-state
   – engage in continual activity for interfaith ‘understanding’, reaching across different types of Christianity and perhaps beyond
   – (and, for good measure) allow a certain amount of freedom of personal conscience and morality to exist, alongside the strict and overarching decrees of the church

Thus the point made in the Bibliotecanatalie post about the “oath against modernism” of 1910 does not really tally with the idea of being against the modern world per se. The Pope, at a very formative time in Tolkien’s young life (just before he went to Oxford), was not saying ‘swear to be wholly against mass machine-modernity’. He did not intend his followers to stop buying railway-tickets or to cast their then new-fangled bicycles into the canals, nor to disdain the new flush-toilets or to forgo modern dentistry.

* And finally, what appears to be a large festival for Tolkien miniatures and scale-model making in Spain. With special emphasis this year on exploring Tolkien’s depiction of characters.

Tolkien Gleanings #272

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tolkien Gleanings #271

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tolkien Gleanings #270

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tolkien Gleanings #269

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tolkien Gleanings #268

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Wetton trackway in winter.

Tolkien Gleanings #267

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tolkien Gleanings #266

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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