Tolkien Gleanings #340

* In the latest Antigone magazine, an article on two possible “Homeric Allusions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit”. Freely available online.

* From the Heart of Europe blog considers why Tolkien disliked the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, and along the way squishes the other wild notion that they had a ill-fated youthful affair (on the slim basis that they graduated from Oxford in the same year). The author might have added how immensely difficult it was for male and female undergraduates to be together in Oxford in those days. They even had to browse the libraries at different set times, so they wouldn’t meet. When they did meet, chaperones had to be present. The Tolkien movie scene of Tolkien and chums getting wildly drunk on a bus at night, in the company of bluestocking female first-years, could never have happened.

* December 2025 online courses at Signum University include Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas; and The Inklings: Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, and Williams; and the timely The Bovadium Fragments: Tolkien and Satire. These online short-courses require enough student sign-ups to run.

* John Garth in The Times on Tolkien’s forthcoming Bovadium Fragments book (to be published 9th October in the UK), “Lord of the ring road — J.R.R. Tolkien’s war against the motor car” ($ possible paywall). I see elsewhere that there is to be an audiobook version.

* The Telegraph has also had an advance copy of Bovadium Fragments and is rather less positive. Indeed, rather grumpy. “The endless ‘unearthing’ of Tolkien’s archive needs to stop”. ($ paywall). Oh dear.

“Of the 50-odd pages that are Tolkien’s writing, a good bit is in Latin. […] Tolkien himself would, I suspect, have been mystified to see this piece of ephemera so portentously published in hardback.”

* Omentielva Minquea, the 11th International Conference on Tolkien’s Invented Languages. Set for 30th July – 2nd August 2026 at Marquette University in the USA.

* Of use to historians and biographers, Whereisthisphoto.com. This uses a specially trained AI model to try to identify the spot on which a landscape picture was made. Free, no sign-up, and no blocking of VPN users or even any ‘captcha hassle’. I’ve read test-reviews of such AI models, and they have remarkable accuracy if enough landscape is visible.

* And finally, talking of landscapes… this week’s Malvern Gazette has “Malvern historian says neither The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia has anything to do with the town.” Oh dear.

Tolkien Gleanings #339

* The latest Eric Metaxas Show ad-filled podcast is “Could England Fall?”, being an interview with Joseph Loconte about his forthcoming book on Tolkien, Lewis, and the Second World War. Which reassures that the much-delayed book does actually exist. Or will do soon — Amazon UK currently pegs the release-date at 18th November 2025.

* Now available to Tolkien Society members, the October 2025 issue of Amon Hen. Issue 315 has, among other contents: a short article on the sea-longing, Legolas and the Old English poem “The Seafarer”, paired with a fine full-page artwork; three pages on the new Tolkien carvings in Roos; an article on Ungoliant the spider; and a book review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Women of Middle-earth. There is also a production note that the forthcoming 2025 issue of Mallorn… “looks to be in a good place for publication this Christmas”.

Cover art: detail from “Barad-dur” by Miruna Lavinia.

* The Oxford Tolkien Network has details of two new public talks in Oxford. “Tolkien’s Heterotextuality” in mid October, and “Eden, Fall, Exile and Beyond in the History of Middle-earth” in early December 2025.

* From St. Petersburg in English, an abstract for a Masters dissertation “Transformation of Plots and Images from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Works in Russian-Language Music of the 1970s–2010s” (2025). Discusses fan-songs and also musical interpretations of Tolkien’s words in Russia. Not available online in full-text.

* From Sweden in English, an undergraduate’s final dissertation for a Secondary School Teaching Programme, “Using the Literature of J.R.R. Tolkien to Teach about Death in the Upper Secondary English Classroom”. Freely available online.

* Newly uploaded at Archive.org, Tolkien and Gordon’s first edition of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight (1925). This one is usefully downloadable, when Archive.org’s other scans are not. Bear in mind there was also a 1930 “corrected” reprint, which over the decades is said to have become… “the most widely used text of the poem for forty years” in classrooms and among scholars. That version is not on Archive.org.

Note the curious leap in the book’s “Notes” (by Gordon) regarding the journey. These leap from the Wirral to the castle, and a curious reader interested in the text’s detailing of the final parts of the journey must be satisfied with… “it is clear that a journey of some distance is here described, after Gawain has landed in Wirral.” Indeed, since there was surely much to be said about it. One wonders if Tolkien was supposed to provide notes for that part, but didn’t manage it?

* Also new on Archive.org, a run of the ‘zine Other Hands 1993-2001, devoted to fantasy role-playing set in Middle-earth. Even if one doesn’t care for RPGs, there are articles and maps of interest. For instance, a 1993 article on Umbar with maps, from someone who spent six years studying and developing an RPG for the region. The earlier RPG handbook referred to in the article is Umbar: Haven of the Corsairs (1982).

Other Hands is today continued by the free Other Minds magazine, which also maintains an archive of the old Other Hands. However, their archive is not keyword searchable as the new Archive.org run now is. One can also now download all the PDFs from Archive.org via a single time-saving .torrent file, and then index locally with freeware such as AnyTXT Searcher.

* Also new at Archive.org, a saved backup copy of Tuckborough.net, which was a large books-only Tolkien wiki…

“This was a Tolkien wiki from between 2003-2011. It got hit with a trojan [virus], then it it was revived as The Thain’s Book, and I decided to save a copy of it in 2016 … before it went back offline. I believe this is the latest copy of the site.”

* And finally, The Magic of Middle-earth touring exhibition has its first confirmed 2026 date. In the new year it will move to the Museum in the town of Banbury, Oxfordshire. Set to then run in Banbury from 31st January – 28th June 2026, with an entrance fee. No details yet of any extra activities around the show. Though, since the location is Oxfordshire, one might expect accompanying fringe talks on ‘Tolkien in rural Oxfordshire’ or suchlike.

Unknown artist: Ethel Go[…?]. Possibly the South Downs (Sussex), but equally the hills look very like the landscape seen in wide views of Rollright village, near the Rollright Stones.

Tolkien Gleanings #338

* First Things magazine has a new long audio interview with Douglas Estes on his recent books, these being Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology and Theology and Tolkien: Constructive Theology.

* From Germany, a call for papers for a conference on “Enmonsterisations in the Fantastic”. The text of the call refers to Tolkien a lot. Not surprising, since on reading further it turns out the event will be the 2026 conference of the German Inklings Society. Deadline for proposals: 10th January 2026.

* A short documentary film on YouTube, about a Marquette University project “Preserving 6,000 Fan Voices” (2025). A project in which… “each person has an open mic for three minutes, to share their thoughts on Tolkien”.

* Talking of Marquette, I see their repository has “The Inherent Goodness of Gardens and their Stewards” as depicted in Tolkien’s work. Freely available online.

* Free in open-access, the latest January 2024 edition of the venerable journal The Lion and the Unicorn. This is usually a paywalled journal, dedicated to scholarly discussion of literature for children. I’m unable to discover if this means all issues going forward will be open-access. However, the journal is supposed to have three issues a year, and yet there are none at all in the rest of 2024 or 2025. Which perhaps suggests it has ceased, and that only the final issue was made open-access? It doesn’t seem as if the editors have moved it away from the publisher and made it open-access there. Anyway, the latest (last?) issue is free.

* A local weekly public lecture series in North Carolina, “The Power of Story to Mend Division: Insights from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters”. Interesting theme, and also a pleasing poster. Every week through 23rd October 2025.

* And finally, John Garth on “The day Tolkien became an air raid warden” during the Second World War ($ paywall). He has pinned down the date…

“The day Tolkien enrolled as a Second World War air raid warden has been revealed in a previously unseen image from Oxford’s city archives. It was on Friday 19th September 1941 — much later than has been suggested.”

I recall Tolkien was also a volunteer as a member of the Fire-watching Service? Which in the darkness of ‘the blackout’ must have been a fine opportunity for star-watching on clear nights. The paywall means I don’t know if Garth has spotted the connection, but I might add that Tolkien was on ‘the blackout’ streets of Oxford just as Sauron’s Great Darkness was gathering in Middle-earth…

“I sat up ‘on duty’ till 1.30 this morn…. At this point [in the tale] I require to know how much later the moon gets up each night when nearing full, and how to stew a rabbit!” (Tolkien, ‘Letters’ 74, April 1944).

This must mean he was writing Sam stewing the brace of coneys, which in ‘Middle-earth time’ was three days before Sauron’s Great Darkness covered the lands.

Picture: Royal Mail postage stamp celebrating the role of the Air Raid Wardens on the Home Front during the Second World War. We see the “W” hat of a warden, and his sling-case which would have had a gas-mask, gas/fire rattle, whistle, binoculars, street-maps, notepads and more. It seems that volunteers wore civilian clothes and hat/badge/armband, while the leaders of each very-local warden’s hut/shelter wore Army uniform. Apparently pipe-smoking was allowed.

Tolkien Gleanings #337

* The new Indiana University Press book Beasts of the Sky: Strange Sightings in the Stratosphere (2025) has a Tolkien chapter, “Fell Beasts and fell beasts: The Making of a Monster in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings“. These “fell beasts” being the winged mounts of the Nazgul. I can get a snippet of the book’s Introduction, which suggests the Nazgul chapter discusses (among other things) the ways their form is made uncertain or alluded to, until the final unveiling.

* The Spanish Tolkien Society blogs in Spanish on the new carved sculpture of Tolkien now sited at Roos on the Yorkshire coast, and shows two fine photos I’d not seen before. Large versions of the photos: 1 and 2.

* I had overlooked that the latest issue of SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature has a Tolkien article, “Imitative Translations of Beowulf: Tolkien, Lehmann, and McCully”. I’d previously only noted the issue’s review of the Spanish translation of Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Freely available online.

* In the quarterly Louisiana journal Joie de Vivre, and online since July 2025, an essay on “J.R.R. Tolkien as Model Christian Artist”. Freely available online.

* The second Tolkien Conference Switzerland is set for March 2026…

The 2026 topic is: ‘Leadership in Tolkien’s Middle-earth’. We have already confirmed several international high-profile speakers. Organized by the University of Zurich, the University of Lausanne and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, and once again to be held at the University of Zurich as a hybrid conference.

* A talk on “Tolkien and Technology” at Hope College in Minnesota, set for March 2026. No speaker named as yet, but it’s part of the advanced events programme of the Saint Benedict Institute of Catholic scholars at the College.

* In Germany, there’s to be a new edition of the German-language book Das Grobe Elbisch-buch. This being… “the standard German work on the Elvish languages, now revised and supplemented by the latest discoveries in Tolkien research”. Due for release on 31st October 2025.

* And finally, newly posted on eBay is a postcard of “The Dingle, Sarehole”. A local memoir from 2023 recalls… “the Dingle on Wake Green Road, one of my childhood haunts next to the River Cole near Sarehole Mill”. A chapter in the eco-history book The Greening of the Cities (1987) reveals it became part of what is now known as Moseley Bog.

Tolkien Gleanings #336

* The Tolkien Society currently requires a Secretary and Trustee; Education Secretary and Trustee; Officers Without Portfolio and Trustee; Bookings Officers; and a Smials Co-ordinator. Deadlines in mid October 2025.

* A long Reddit report on “My impressions from the current Tolkien exhibition in Trieste, Italy”. A useful detailed overview, with photos.

* Socrates in the City has a new long Socrates Dialogues podcast, in which Louis Markos interviews Holly Ordway on Tolkien and Lewis: Myth as a Vehicle for Truth. Freely available on YouTube.

* In the latest issue of the Brazilian journal Revista Gilgamesh, a long interview in English with Adrian Maldonado of the National Museums of Scotland. He makes… “surprising connections between learning about archaeology and pop culture, in a trajectory that involves the analysis of emblematic works such as The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien”. Freely available online.

* From Italy in Italian, Wu Ming 4 has a new article whose title translates roughly as “The dilemmas of Tolkienian leftists and the political unconscious of Middle-earth”. Freely available online.

* From Turkey, The Daily Sabah on how “Tolkien was perfectly right” about allegory and especially its over-use. In English, freely available…

“Allegory does not belong everywhere. It belongs in literature, where it can be chosen, embraced or rejected. Outside of fiction, life should be allowed to remain literal, unburdened by symbolic agendas. Those who love allegory can find it in writers who wield it openly, like C.S. Lewis. Those who don’t should be free of it.”

* The latest issue of the open-access student journal UR: Das Journal: Studentische Forschung an der Universitat Wien is a special issue on fan-fiction. Includes (in German) an article whose titles roughly translates as ‘In defence of fanfiction: on the reputation of fan-fiction today, with some consideration of its literary history’.

* From Russia in Russian, a 2025 article disussing in detail one of Tolkien’s key journey-songs, “”Farewell We Call to Hearth and Home …”: At the intersection of cultures and traditions”. Freely available online under CC-BY, with an English abstract at the back… “the poem reveals a remarkable dissimilitude between these two journeys [Hobbit/LoTR], foreshadowing further events and even becoming prophetic.”

* Wisconsin’s What’s On Tap local/online radio show discusses Tolkien Fandom Oral History Documentary and MCHS’s Oral History Programs… “In hour two Sandy is joined by Marquette University manuscript archivist Bill Fliss and documentary filmmaker Andrew Coons to discuss their 10-minute documentary about Tolkien”.

* And finally, The Akron Beacon local newspaper reports Costume-designer crafts Smaug the dragon for the forthcoming Ohio Shakespeare festival… “The 26-foot-long dragon puppet is operated by three puppeteers”. (Article is free to me, using a U.S. VPN, but the top of the article has a “For Subscribers” flash. Thus I suspect it may only be a ‘first article free’ freebie, and only for U.S. visitors?)

Tolkien Gleanings #335

* More marvelous paintings of ents and hobbits by Miriam Ellis, and blog musings on the same.

* In Polish but easily auto-translated, Tolkniety has two new blog posts on Tolkien as a man of the north… but looking towards Rome.

* The latest issue of the Italian journal History of Education & Children’s Literature has an Italian-language article examining the portrayal of Gollum in The Hobbit: A Graphic Novel. The whole issue is under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, and freely available online.

* Just published, the academic book The Germanic Heroic Tradition in Video Games (2025). It’s unusual in that it’s a single-author book by a tenured philologist, rather than a multi-author book from the Game Studies crowd.

   Introduction: The Contemporary Middle Ages.
   The Medieval Legacy: From the Renaissance to Globalization.
   Half a Century of Evolution: The Shaping of Germanic Heroic Narratives in Mass Popular Culture.
   Video Games as Playable Explorations of the Past.
   Playing the Hero: The Germanic Archetype in the Digital World.
   Into the Virtual Lair: Defeating Evil and Claiming the Prize.
   Final Remarks: Germanic Heroism in the Digital Age.

* Tolkien scholar Dr. Lynn Forest-Hill announces… “my newly revised translation of the 14th century The Romance of Sir Bevis of Hampton has just been published by Witan Publishing, and is at last generally available in paperback from Amazon.”

* Fellowship & Fairydust has the moving new article “More Than a Thesis: Researching the Romance of Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis”.

* Bud Plant is ‘calling it a day’ and retiring. The Comics Journal has a profile and a long interview with the well-known book dealer. For four decades he has been curating a catalogue of quality one-volume comic collections and fantasy artbooks. The CJ article is freely available online, as are the catalogues.

* The new journal The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale has produced a third issue. No Tolkien, but it may now be of interest to readers as a potential publication venue. The “Nineteenth Century” is here considered to be the ‘long’ one, from 1789-1919.

* Stand Up for Southport previews the touring ‘Magic of Middle-earth’ exhibition, about to open in the coastal town of Southport (near Liverpool).

* An unusual new item from Denmark, Arda’s Herbarium: A Musical Guide to the Mystical Garden of Middle-earth and Stranger Places, being a collection of short synth-based musical pieces evoking the plants of Middle-earth.

“This fearless project was started in Spring 2022 to meticulously cover all known plants in Tolkien’s lore with a musical interpretation of each species in alphabetical order. The result is a growing versatile collection of archaic and atmospheric music covering somber synth tones and idyllic tunes as well as darker misty electronics, black metal and beyond.”

* And finally, Reddit asks (and of course, answers) “Is this The Full List of Gandalf’s Explicit Magic?” in The Hobbit and LoTR.

Tolkien Gleanings #334

* From Italy, “Una Compagnia all’interno della Compagnia: Frodo, Sam e lo spirito del comitatus” (2025) (‘A company within the company: Frodo, Sam and the spirit of the comitatus’). In Italian, with a very lengthy English summary at the back. Freely available online. Examines…

“the concept of comitatus – the bond of loyalty and protection between a leader and his followers, central to ancient Germanic society – and tries to trace its transformations through literary and historical tradition up to its modern reworking by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings.”

* Now listing on Amazon, the scholarly collection Tolkien’s Medievalism in Ruins: The Function of Relics and Ruins in Middle-earth. Shipping just before Christmas 2025, at a ruinous £90 (hardback only, as currently listed). Although the publisher’s page pegs the release at 16th October, and anticipates that a slightly cheaper ebook version will also be available.

* VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center (2024) has “The Historical Perspective: Gleanings from C.S. Lewis’s Personal Library”, plus reviews of What Barfield Thought, The Battle of Maldon Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Tolkien’s Faith, and book notes for “Something Has Gone Crack”: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War, and The Fall of Numenor. Freely available online.

* A Vintage Dutchman goes “Exploring Geoffrey Bache Smith’s Impact on Tolkien”.

* A Masters disseration from the University of Iceland, “Puck’s Medieval Ancestry: The Puck Figure in Medieval Evidence and Late Collected Folklore of North Atlantic Europe” (2024). Freely available online.

* Some readers may also be interested in the chapter “From Homer to John Eugenicus: The Long Journey of Riddles through Greek and Byzantine Literatures” (2024), freely available online…

“Another mysterious poet who is credited with the composition of seven riddles is a certain Theodorus Aulicalamus. […] The first riddle in [his] small collection still baffles the scholars, who are not sure about its real solution:

  Even if am not alive, I have two heads;
  my nature belongs both to the sea and to the land.
  If you cut my head, made up of a double sign,
  you change neither my name, nor my nature.

I’d suggest “the tide” fits well as an answer, if the Greek symbol of the tide(s) was Neptune’s trident. If one made a horizontal cut across the top of the head of a simple trident, it would still be a trident.

* And finally, “How to practice leisure like a hobbit”. To which one might add: invent activity-songs (for bath, walking, etc) and the occasional riddle.

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.