Tolkien Gleanings #315

Note: Due to growing censorship, I’m now 99% surfing with a VPN. I use Mullvad as the VPN and bounce out to the east coast of the USA. So when I say “freely available online” now, I mean for someone in the USA rather than here in the UK. Of various Tolkien sites, I find that only Walking Tree and the ‘Interactive Middle-earth Map’ sites are unreachable when using a VPN, with the map site giving a very obnoxious message to VPN users.

* A new Amon Hen No. 314 (August 2025) is available, for Tolkien Society members. The Editorial reveals they’ve finally found a new layout and design worker. Some Silmarillion focused lead articles, and among the other items are…

   – Christopher Tolkien’s Lectures at Oxford: Bibliography.
   – An all-too-short article on William, Tom and Bert (the trolls from The Hobbit), leading into a look at what can be known about trolls in general.
   – A DIY article on how to make a hobbit-hole door.

* A new issue of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (July 2025). Freely available online. Has a Finnish article which translates as “Spirituality in the fantasy fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien”, plus a clutch of book reviews…

   – Review of The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien.
   – Review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics.
   – Review of Celebrating Tolkien’s Legacy.
   – Review of Mapping Middle-earth.

* The new edition of the Spanish journal Selim: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature has a review of the Spanish translation of Tolkien’s Green Knight. Currently this open-access journal is down, unavailable either with or without a VPN.

* Signum University is to hold a three-day Moot here in the UK, Land of Dragons: How Myth Shapes Our Reality. Set for 3rd-5th October 2025, in Cardiff, South Wales. At present there’s a call for papers and session ideas. It will be possible to attend virtually, online, as well as in person.

* The regional U.S. news radio station TMJ4 has an article deriving from its ‘Milwaukee Tonight’ slot, “11,000 pages of Lord of the Rings drafts are in Marquette University’s archives”, profiling the archivist. Freely available online.

* The J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature 2025 is now… uploaded to Spotify. Rather an unfortunate choice, since Spotify is reportedly set to start deleting UK user accounts en masse. Doubly unfortunate since Zen Cho’s lecture was in part about censorship.

* New in the Protestant Christian magazine American Reformer, “Poetry and Monarchy in Tolkien”. Freely available online.

* New in The American Spectator “The Newest Doctor of the Church’s Influence on Catholic Literature”, focusing on Cardinal Newman’s influence on Tolkien.

* And finally, LOTRSilverCollections, a new Reddit sub-forum for those who collect LoTR merchandise and coins, if made with precious metals. Preciousss…

Tolkien Gleanings #314

* The new book Crossing borders between countries, scholars, and genres: Commemorating the late Kathleen E. Dubs (2025) is now freely available online. Has several chapters on Tolkien, including…

   – The Corruption of the Best is the Worst: Saruman as an Academic and a Priest.
   – Tolkienesque Elements in Etelka Gorgey’s Mythopoetical Science Fiction.
   – Personal Names in the Irish Gaelic Translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

* Oronzo Cilli has a new article on “The Wilton Diptych: a gift from Tolkien to the Convent of Santa Colette in Assisi”. I also see several others of more unknown date, new to me. Including “Tolkien and Nevbosh: A Tale of limericks, Nonsense, and Literary Echoes”. ‘Nevbosh’ being an early invented language. Freely available online.

* Now available, a slim book from what appears to be a husband and wife team, Tolkien: Roncevaux, Ethandune, and Middle-earth (2025)…

“The influences of works such as Beowulf and the Norse Eddas on Tolkien’s fiction have been widely discussed, but there are other texts that have not received as much attention. This book explores two of these stories, The Song of Roland and Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse, and their influence on Tolkien’s writing.”

* Sadly the forthcoming book The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 has slipped its publication date. Amazon UK had it set for July 2025, until very recently, and I was looking forward to reading and reviewing it. But now I see that all editions are due in November 2025. Or in the case of the paperback perhaps even later, presumably depending on how badly it collides with Christmas.

* Google Search suggests there is something new about Auden’s ‘copy of Tolkien’ on Instagram. But I can’t get to it because of the growing site-blocking regime — presumably the block is due to the new government regulations here in the UK. I hear these are also blocking Reddit’s RSS access now, as well as CivitAI.

* And finally… for the network-visualisation software tool ManyNet, a free LoTR dataset dated 2025…

“Lord of the Rings. A labelled, complex, undirected network of 36 characters and 66 interaction. The ties are unweighted and concern only interaction. Interaction can be cooperative or conflictual.”

Presumably it wouldn’t be too much trouble for some who knows the book well, to finesse this by colour-coding the interconnection wires by type of interaction?

Tolkien Gleanings #313

* The recent partial graphic-novel The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien has sold film-rights for a big screen adaptation…

Independent studio Burns & Co. secured the rights to produce an animated feature-film depicting the longtime friendship of classic Christian authors C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Animation magazine reveals a little more. While NarniaWeb cautions against too much rejoicing, noting the many announced-but-failed attempts at bringing a Tolkien/Lewis biopic to the screen.

* In a new book The Wheel of Time and Philosophy (2025), there is a chapter on “Tolkien’s Influence and the World of The Wheel of Time”.

* Yet another review of Tolkien and the Classical World. Put all the reviews together and they’d make their own chunky book, I should think. Mythprint Book Reviews 2025 also has a new review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics, along with a review of Sub-Creating Arda: World-building in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work.

* A 40-minute recording from an Italian conference in September 2024 and now newly on YouTube, of a discussion on Tolkien e Lovecraft (‘Tolkien and Lovecraft: origins of the modern fantastic’).

* New from Norway, “Imaginary Realms in Fantasy writing: Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and The Lord of the Rings” (2025). In English and freely available for download. Described as a final dissertation, but it is very short. Though it’s for a Teacher Education course, so perhaps they’re not expected to write a full 12,000 word dissertation. Explores how landscapes…

are narrated through the perspectives of their characters, who are defined as travelers [whose explorations are crucial to] the reader’s understanding of the worlds they traverse. Their journeys offer deeper insights into the nature of fantastical world-building. Additionally, this article provides content through the lens of Certeau’s philosophy on Spatial Stories, as well as Greimas and Courtes’ terminology of euphoria versus dysphoria.

* In the new issue of the Chesterton Review (Spring/Summer 2025), what appears to be a review of a book apparently titled The Messiah Comes to Middle-Earth: Images of Christ’s Threefold Office in The Lord of the Rings. I didn’t go further, since I was blocked by a captcha roadblock.

* The Mythprint newsletter Vol. 60, No. 2 (No. 405, Summer 2023) is now available for open download, after a two-year members-only embargo.

* Fellowship of Fans offers an account of “J.R.R. Tolkien: Professor of Anglo-Saxon”. Freely available online.

* From Gloucestershire, “An ‘unimaginably rare’ copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 The Hobbit has been discovered tucked deep into an old bookcase…

The book had come from the family library of Hubert Priestley, a famous botanist in the 1930s, and brother to Antarctic explorer and geologist Sir Raymond Edward Priestley. Priestley had strong connections to the University of Oxford where Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. […] it’s likely that the homeowner knew Tolkien personally.

Up for online auction by a Bristol auctioneer on 6th August 2025. Yours for a mere 10th of a Bitcoin, by the looks of it.

* And finally… also from Gloucestershire, at the Gloucester History Festival there will be a public talk on “Tolkien’s Gloucestershire: The Real Middle-earth”. Set for 18th September 2025.

Tolkien Gleanings #312

* The latest issue of Ex Fonte: Journal of Ecumenical Studies in Liturgy, reviews The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (2025). Freely available online.

* In the Polish journal Miedzy Oryginalem a Przekladem, an article in French with English abstract, “Des mots aux mondes: cartographies imaginaires en traduction”. An article on the translation of fantasy literature maps, and the various impacts this can have on the reader. Freely available online.

* There’s a new Oxford University Press history book for those interested in the deep background of Tolkien’s academic battles, Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (2025). Said to be… “the first full account of the discipline’s development from its late-eighteenth-century beginnings up to the early 1960s.” I’m not sure if it classes Philology as Eng. Lit. though.

* The Tolkien Library is moving from Belgium to Norway.

* September 2025’s Signum University online short-courses list is offering “The Poetic Corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Later Poems 1 (Volume 3: The Years 1931-1967)”, and the less-certain “Turin’s Bones: The Influences of Sigurd, Oedipus, and Kullervo on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Tale of Turin Turambar”. The latter will only run if enough people sign up for it.

* Artist Miriam Ellis discusses the skill of place-making displayed by Tolkien in his Withywindle valley, in her new blog post “Of Wild Woods, Wild Hobbits, and the Withywindle”. Illustrated as always with her fresh and delightful paintings.

* Not Tolkien related, but I see that Tolkien scholar Kristine Larsen has “The Literal and Literary Impact of Comets in 1870s Science Fiction”, in the latest issue of the Science Fiction Foundation’s journal Foundation.

* What appears to be a sort of Austrian Tolkien Day, Lasse Lanta 2025 is happening in September 2025. Looks more like large cos-play festival than conference. But this year’s theme is “The Return of the King” and so, given such a weighty title, I’m guessing there may also at least be some talks being given.

* A talk at the Malvern Theatre, in the town of Malvern, “The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien” with John Garth. 10th August 2025. Booking now.

* A talk on “Tolkien in the Cotswolds”, set for the Cotswolds on 3rd September 2025. Booking now.

* Last week I enjoyed a wonderful British wartime movie that I had no idea existed. If you want to taste the rural Cotswolds that Tolkien knew then The Tawny Pipit (1944) is a delight, a sort of Ealing comedy but a deeply rural one and full of superbly-played characters. I was also reminded of the sublime first series of The Detectorists, at times. Tawny Pipit was filmed on location near Stow-on-the-Wold in the Cotswolds, about 15 miles NW of Oxford. It’s now free on Archive.org and the download is thus on a handy .torrent file. So far as I can tell, the British Film Institute has never restored it, and the Archive.org quality appears to be about as good as it gets for now. Temporally-stable movie restoration AIs are not here yet, more’s the pity, but given the blistering pace of AI such things can’t be too far away. Not that we Brits may know much about that — since visiting the main AI-download hub CivitAI is about to be effectively banned in the UK from next week.

* And finally… YouTube is still available in the UK for now, although our dismal government is no doubt eyeing it nervously. Thus one can enjoy a new 17-hour quality audiobook of The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison, free on YouTube and from a good reader. There may be ads if you just start playing it on YouTube, but there won’t be if you download it as an .MP3 audio file. I never managed to worm my way past page 90 or so of Ouroboros, reading it as a youth. But perhaps now I’ll try again. Note that if one becomes the audiobook reader’s Patreon patron, one can then suggest future titles to be made into free audiobooks.

Tolkien Gleanings #311

* A new collection of 17 essays by Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger has been published, titled A Real Taste for Fairy-stories. Publisher Walking Tree has the table of contents for the book, though most of the essay titles are rather unrevealing.

* “Tolkien and the changes of times” is the title of a talk to be given by Prof. Giuseppe Pezzini, Fellow and Tutor at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. Sounds like it might be about how Tolkien responded to the jarring emergence of modernity during the 1915-1945 period. Happening 28th July 2025 in Southport which is a few miles north of the port city of Liverpool, in northern England. Part of the touring Magic Of Middle-earth exhibition, which runs in this coastal town until 27th September 2025.

* Original hand-drawn maps by Middle-earth map-maker Karen Wynn Fonstad are included in a Fantastic Worlds exhibition at Robinson Map Library, University of Wisconsin, USA. The free show includes other fantasy maps, and will open on 21st July 2025.

* The JIS Symposium 2025 — Lewis & Tolkien: The Promise of Christian Fairytales, to be held online on 18th October 2025.

* A new text interview on “Lewis and Tolkien, Philosophy and Creativity”, with the author of a book on C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing (2016).

* Details of the planned Tolkien strands at the 2026 International Congress on Medieval Studies are available. These will include, among others, a strand on “The Sea, the Shore, the Sky: Medieval Thresholds in Tolkien’s Legendarium”. This will present papers on… “physical and abstract thresholds, borders, and boundaries within his legendarium”.

* The Tolkien Society has sent an email calling for volunteers for what sounds like a major building project. People familiar with drawing up ground-plans, project fundraising, etc are required. Though one wonders if Birmingham City Council, still bankrupt the last time I looked, might sell them Sarehole Mill and save them the trouble of a new-build?

* Newly freely available on Archive.org, the scanned run of Dragon Magazine, 1976-2007… “one of the two official magazines for source material for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game”.

* The lost videotapes of the proceedings of the ‘Lewis Carroll and the Idea of Childhood’ conference (2006) have been found, and the set is now digitized and freely available on YouTube.

* New in the journal History of Education and Children’s Literature, “Lo Hobbit a fumetti: considerazioni su un fantasy illustrato tra il Novecento e gli anni Duemila” discusses the visual depiction of Gollum in the graphic-novel of The Hobbit. Freely available online.

* And finally… science has a new name for an old phenomenon, “The Gollum effect”. Defined as a researcher who refuses to share his ‘precious’ (datasets, computer models, methodologies, study sites, etc) with others, and who actively tries to throttle newcomers.

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.