Tolkien Gleanings #299

* The publisher Walking Tree has just published Tolkien among the Theologians (2025) (Cormare volume 53). This collection of essays has a table of contents online and I see it includes two chapters which sound like they might be usefully biographical-theological, “Tolkien and Newman: Towards a Theology of History” (Cardinal Newman), and “Tolkien in His Contemporary Context: Among the Oratorians and the Jesuits”. Amazon UK has the paperback for £17.50.

* Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal reviews The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (2025) ($ partial paywall). The first page of the review is free, and that’s enough to read the reviewer’s succinct outline of the book’s chapters. It’s especially interesting to learn that…

“The final two chapters explore the impacts of the liturgical calendar on Tolkien’s works. [The first of these] focuses on themes of Advent and Christmas [which also necessarily touches on ‘earendel’ and the word’s sources]”

* Walking Tree has a free PDF of a review of the book Celebrating Tolkien’s Legacy (2024). The review is in English from Lembas Katern, which appears to be a supplement to the Dutch Tolkien Society’s main Lembas publication. Apparently this book has… “Several chapters [that] deal with Tolkien’s earliest childhood: a chapter about a tea in Kinver …”. I wasn’t aware there was evidence he was ever there, and the comprehensive Tolkien Chronology of his life has nothing for Kinver. The publisher’s blurb clarifies slightly with… “a likely 1904 excursion” (my emphasis), which would put Tolkien at around age 12 — if it ever happened. Not impossible I suppose, since Kinver was a popular summer day-trip from nearby Birmingham from Easter 1901 onwards. That was when the fast transport connection was first made. But it very soon became rather too popular. By 1904, on a public holiday in good weather, around 15,000 people a day could be making the day-trip from Birmingham.

* The Notion Club Papers blog offers a new short post on “Four approaches to understanding J.R.R. Tolkien: historical, philological, Roman Catholic, unique genius”. Useful, though the phrase a “man of his time and class” seemed to me to draw perhaps unconsciously on a Marxist framework. Of course, class was a vital structuring element of society during Tolkien’s working lifetime. But above class and subsuming it was the British ‘nation and landscape’, in which all classes had their place and played their parts and spoke English with their many tongues. Landscape and tongues and weather were equally important to him, I’d suggest. And in Tolkien’s formative years ‘nation and landscape’ was itself subject to the even higher framing of the British Empire. Not that Tolkien felt much allegiance to the Empire by all accounts, but only to England and especially to the West Midlands. Yet remember that the Empire would have been a constant presence, and was also in steep and obvious decline during the decades before the writing of LoTR. Could then the decline of the British Empire have fed into the ‘fallen remains of past glories’ landscapes seen in Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age? Not consciously, but via a steady ‘filtering in’ to the creative mind during those decades? But I guess such matters may be touched on in the forthcoming Garth book, which apparently relates LoTR to the events of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath.

* Another three 90-minute lectures have been scheduled on YouTube from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Spellsongs of Tinuviel (already online), Morgoth’s Revenge and Gondolin in that order. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted free on YouTube.

* Another Tolkien letter is up for auction, at Sotherby’s in the UK. A very late and short letter to a fan, but it mentions Bag-end. Sotherby’s has small scans.

* On YouTube, the latest Ben Shapiro podcast interviews “LoTR Expert Malcolm Guite” on why Tolkien matters today (two short adverts, and an all-to-short interview). Guite is also the former chaplain and a Life Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, and I see he has his own YouTube channel. Including the popular “A pint and a pipe!” in which he celebrates the long continuity of the English inn and pipe-smoking, both of which were dear to Tolkien’s heart. The wartime book English Inns (1943) is mentioned, and I see it is now online for free at Archive.org.

* Australia has ruled that trading as ‘Lord of the [Something]’ does not infringe the trademark of Middle-earth Enterprises. In this case it was ‘Lord of the Fries’, a chain of nine food shops, and the ruling sensibly deemed that…

“the absence of the ‘rings’ element meant that a total impression of dissimilarity emerges from a comparison of the signs”

* And finally, talking of trading… note that the new temporary U.S. international trade tariffs do not cover printed books or paper. The long-standing 7.5% U.S. tariff on books printed in China does however remain in place, exempting only religious books. But, as of today, it sounds like the U.S. has forced China into serious trade negotiations… thus it’s possible that even that 7.5% may change by the end of the summer.

Tolkien Gleanings #298

Happy Easter!

* The Oxford Tolkien Network has posted YouTube videos of several recent talks. Including, among others…

    – “Tolkien and old English prosody”.
    – “‘Alight here for Middle-earth!’: Tolkien, place, and the past” (suggests Meon Hill as a model for Weathertop).
    – “Riddles in the grass: the characterisation and narrative value of landscape over the fields of Rohan”.

* Newly published, Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature for Spring/Summer 2025. Freely available online. Including, among others…

    – “No Ragnarok, No Armageddon: Pagan and Christian interpretations of The Lord of the Rings”.
    – “The Liberty to Bind Oneself: Chesterton and The Oath of Feanor”.
    – “The Bright Sword and its Sharpness: Swords, Symbolism, and Medievalism in The Lord of the Rings”.
    – Review of Tolkien’s Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle-earth (a book on divine interventions, or seemingly so, in the Third Age).

* Newly added to the current rolling issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research, “Sounds of Battle: Belliphonic in Tolkien”. The word belliphonic = the acoustic dimensions of warfare, from bellicose. Freely available online.

* Dimitra Fimi has now posted the third part of her ongoing blog series… On Tolkien’s Letter 131: ‘Gods and Heroes out of the Sea’.

* Fellowship and Fairydust has a new short post surveying Tolkien and His Friends, on the various close friends made throughout his life.

* New to me, the undergraduate dissertation ‘From Marginalia to Middle-earth: sixteen philological books and their influence on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction’ (2015). Not online as a dissertation, but the gist of it appears to be in a freely available article at The Tolkien Library.

* The latest edition of Religion and Liberty reviews The Last Romantic: C.S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology. Freely available online…

“Barbeau’s meticulous, well-informed, and balanced analysis of Lewis provides a nuanced and scholarly exploration of Lewis’ connections to British Romantic writers, considering how he integrates the subjective with the objective and the imaginative with the rational. [Partly this is accomplished via an] extensive examination of Lewis’ marginalia — his handwritten annotations of the editions of Wordsworth and Coleridge in his personal library”.

* In Romanian in the March 2025 issue of the Romanian journal Orizont, “Raul: O necesitate literara” (‘Evil: A Literary Necessity’). Freely available online. An essay on Tolkien and his subtle avoidance of the literary traps of a tale of good vs. evil…

“His characters are not typologies of good and evil. The ending does not provide a resolution to all the conflicts and situations in the novel. The sadness and uncertainty that weigh down an otherwise ‘happy’ ending reverberate throughout The Lord of the Rings. The only ‘absolute’ in Tolkien’s creation is hope. A hope without guarantees, as the writer characterizes it in his letters. This hope, in turn, is supported by a faith that is not certain about a happy ending.” (Translation).

* As Birmingham, England, submerges under a great wave of trash, muddy-booted volunteers are tracking the health of the city’s streams and rivers, including the… “puddles and brooks of Moseley Bog” which Tolkien knew. The journalist uses “puddles” rather than pools, presumably because we’ve had an uncharacteristically dry three weeks in England.

* And finally, recall “…he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence” from the opening of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Then note that April 2026 will be more-or-less the 111th anniversary of the launch of his Legendarium (in its earliest manifestations) in 1915. Cue for “a party of special magnificence”, perhaps?

Tolkien Gleanings #297

* In issue number 21 of Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics (2021) ($ paywall), “Tolkien’s Dragons: Sources, Symbols, and Significance”…

“I examine some of the more neglected sources that may have inspired Tolkien’s conception of these creatures, focusing on classical mythology, the Bible, and medieval English literature.”

Originally listed as a talk for the strand ‘Tolkien and the Medieval Animal’ at the 2022 International Congress on Medieval Studies. But omitted from the Journal of Tolkien Research special-issue on Tolkien’s Animals (2023).

* From Italy, the book Miscellanea in onore di Dora Faraci (2025) (‘Miscellanea in honour of Dora Faraci’). Includes in English, among others, “Allusive name forms in Cynewulf’s poems”, “Starcraeft and the Interface Between Faith and Science in Anglo-Saxon England” (observation of stars and constellations), “English and Norse Dragons, Ancient and Modern” (inc. concise appendix on themes, listing of the distribution of tales in the British Isles), “Runick Antiquities in the European debate and Renaissance England” (on the rediscovery of runes in England). Freely available in open-access and under Creative Commons.

* The British Fantasy Society plans a themed BFS Journal issue on ‘War in Fantasy’, and is calling for proposals. They welcome biographical items on Tolkien and his wartime experiences and influences, among other suggestions. Deadline: 31st August 2025. The issue is pencilled in to appear around Christmas 2025.

* 2025 C.S. Lewis Summer Institute calls for 20 minute papers around the theme of “Returning Home: C.S. Lewis, Roots, and Transformation”. To be held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 24th-30th July 2025.

* Lingwe discovers that Wisconsin Public Radio profiled Karen Wynn Fonstad, the Middle-earth map maker…

“Along with the printed article, there’s a 15-minute public radio piece you can listen to with Fonstad’s son, Mark [who] is working on a new project to digitize all of Fonstad’s original maps of Middle-earth”

* The Parish Catechist blog briefly reviews the book J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (2002) and notes that…

“when Tolkien’s son Christopher enlisted [in the Second World War, on the RAF enlistment form] he listed his father’s occupation as ‘wizard’.”

* Exeter College’s magazine Exon (Winter 2024/25, download titled #24, but cover says #27) has “The clans will strive and gory writhe upon the field to-day”, a student analysis of Tolkien’s early poem “The Battle of the Eastern Field”. Freely available online.

* Here in the UK, Wormwoodania considers the question “Do Charity Bookshops Drive Out Other Second-Hand Bookshops?” Not the ubiquitous charity shops (their stock of books is almost always dreadfully naff), but specialist charity-run bookshops. I had no idea such things existed in the High Street, not living in “decent places where there is tea-time” (Sam Gamgee). But, as the article states…

Charity bookshops have continued to increase [in the UK]. The Book Guide now lists about 150 Oxfam Bookshops, together with a further 40 of its general shops with a book room or significant stock. It also lists 11 for Amnesty, 7 for the Red Cross, 6 for Age UK, and 17 named as ‘Community Bookshops’ (there are more of these, with a variety of names). There are many others for national or local good causes.

* And finally, from Denmark comes the statistical article “‘I only read it for the plot!’ Maturity Ratings Affect Fanfiction Style and Community Engagement” (2025). This crunches the numbers on three large sets of fan fictions available at a key website, one of which centres around the characters in The Lord of Rings. Coyly discovers (who knew?) that sexually… “explicit fanfiction is a genre of its own with a conventional focus on descriptions, actions, and here-and-now orientation”. Sounds like it’s straightforward porn fiction then, just dressed up in LoTR clothing.

Tolkien Gleanings #296

* “Middle-earth-on-Earth: How and Why People Use Fantasy Film and Literature to Give Meaning to Real World Places” (2025), a Phd thesis for Dalhousie University. Freely available online.

* “O verde e os acordes cromaticos em O Silmarillion” (2025) (‘Green and chromatic chords in The Silmarillion‘). A Phd thesis from Brazil, in Portuguese with long English abstract. Examines Tolkien’s use of colours, especially green and red, and how these act upon his imagined material world and the minds of the inhabitants. Freely available online.

* Also from Brazil this week, “Um demografo passou semanas resolvendo uma questao muito importante”….

“A demographer spent weeks solving a very important question: how many people lived in Middle-earth? He wondered if he could use the techniques of historical demography, and started working on it.”

He took a basic look at the landscapes of each region, weather and seasons and then found equivalent historical nations in the primary world. And then worked out the maximum ‘carrying capacity’ for a hypothetical pre-industrial population at the time of The Lord of the Rings. 34 million, give or take. But that’s the absolute maximum. After further refinements…

“The populations of humans, elves, dwarves and hobbits in Middle-earth total around 6.7 million. 200,000 would be hobbits, about 284,000 elves, about 121,000 dwarves, and the remainder would be men.”

With large numbers of orcs/goblins, much rarer trolls and ents, and ever rarer assorted werewolves and vampires.

* On YouTube, a new interview with Tolkien artist Ted Nasmith, on the Polish Pod Zielonym Smokiem podcast (‘At the Sign of the Green Dragon’).

* Spanish newspaper El Pais appears to have a new ‘Culture’ article on “John Howe, ilustrador de las obras de Tolkien” ($ paywall), dated 7th April 2025. Relates to his appearance at a comics convention and launch of the Spanish edition of his A Middle-earth Traveller artbook of sketches.

* Lurking on Vimeo for a decade (but new to me) is the film Durin’s Folk and the Hill of Sorcery (2015, one hour). It’s an unofficial fan-edit of The Hobbit movies, focussing only on the backstory of the dwarves, Gandalf’s investigations into the Necromancer in Mirkwood, and then the banishment of the Necromancer. There’s significant movie-fication of Bree, Azog, Mirkwood, Dol Goldur, Thrain, and especially Radagast (who now has a rabbit-drawn super-sled which enables rapid transport through dense woodland). Also general movie-fication of the plot, and Galadriel and Saruman are present and their attack on Dol Guldur is frankly rather cheesy. So, dear readers of the original work(s), ‘be warned’. Legal note: in many nations you will need to own the extended Hobbit movies on DVD before you can legally watch this free fan-work.

* Four more 90-minute lectures have been scheduled on YouTube from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, The White Lady (Galadriel), The Spellsongs of Tinuviel, Morgoth’s Revenge, and Gondolin, in that order. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted free on YouTube.

* Lingwe discovers that when Tolkien was welcomed back to Oxford in 1925, he was described as… “the singular and outstanding disciple of the most illustrious Arthur Napier”. This was Arthur Sampson Napier (1853–1916), author of the tree-ish History of the Holy Rood-tree (1894), a book of Old English glosses (1900), and what appears to be the first full description of the Franks Casket.

* And finally, currently on eBay UK with seven copies left to sell, Black & White Ogre Country: The Lost Tales of Hilary Tolkien. At a reasonable £14 inc. postage, from a UK seller in Chipping Norton. Only 88 pages, but the book is a very well-reviewed hardback of high-quality and has evocative memoir material relating to Tolkien’s middle-childhood and more. Buy your copy now before it goes out-of-print, I’d suggest.

Tolkien Gleanings #295

* Available to members of the Tolkien Society, a new issue of Amon Hen. Among the contents of the new #312…

    – A long lead article on Christopher Tolkien’s Lectures at Oxford
    – The Power of the Web (spiders in Middle-earth)
    – A short review of A Sense of Tales Untold.
    – A short profile of Cirdan the shipwright.
    – A long look at what was lost, and what survives or has been restored, at Sarehole.

I see that a regular Layout & Graphic Designer (Adobe) is still required.

* Lingwe on “A newly discovered primary account of Arthur Tolkien’s death”.

* John Garth on how Tolkien left the land of his birth 130 years ago today, and the sea voyage he took. Including some details of the weather the three year-old then encountered in England, after the burning veldt of the Orange Free State…

“Britain had endured a harsh winter, with the Thames nearly blocked by ice in mid-February and, on 24th March, central and East England enduring one of the worst storms on record, with factory chimneys and church steeples demolished and 14 lives lost. The summer to come was very wet indeed.”

* Fellowship & Fairydust dusts off the hand-trowel and goes Excavating the Inklings and Little-Known Authors: Interview with scholar Douglas A. Anderson.

* The second part of Dimitra Fimi’s new blog-post series is now online, On Tolkien’s Letter 131 (2): “Incarnate” good and evil.

* Three more 90-minute lectures from University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown, The Making of Feanor, The Marring of Feanor and The Fall of the Followers. Originally part of her paywalled series ‘The Forge of Tolkien’ (2021), but now being gradually posted free on YouTube.

* New on Archive.org to download, The Pre-Christian Religions of the North. Research and Reception, Vol. 2 – from c. 1830 to the Present (2019, out-of-print according to Amazon UK). Includes chapters on “Old Norse Mythology in Anglophone Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1940” and “Norse Medievalism in Children’s Literature in English”.

* “The Hobbit published in Scots Gaelic”, as A’ Hobat, no A-null’s Air Ais A-rithist (2025)…

“With the help of a grant from the Gaelic Books Council, the project took five years to complete and now features the original 1937 cover art.”

* A new double-album from the noted Norwegian neo-romantic composer Martin Romberg, Arts and Signs (2025), available now. The first of the two albums evokes Tolkien’s works.

Tolkien Gleanings #294

* Sotheby’s auction house has a new Books & Manuscripts article totting up the totals on “The Most Valuable Tolkien Works of All Time”.

* New at Archive.org, a good scan of the 1974 Village Press edition of Colin Wilson’s pioneering booklet of serious Tolkien criticism Tree by Tolkien. There’s no flip-book, since the page scans are unbundled .JPG files. Thus the quickest way to get the book is to download the .torrent for it.

This gives you a good scan of the British edition, which I think was expanded? If you want the U.S. edition (also on Archive.org) it was noted and linked by Gleanings back in 2023.

* New to me, a very completist annotated listing, in French, of “Panorama des cartographes de la Terre du Milieu” (2018) (‘Overview of the map makers of Middle-earth’). It’s a long single .HTML Web page, thus is easily auto-translated and then saved locally to an encapsulated .MHTML file. But might it be an idea to inquire about human-translating and updating, for publication in somewhere like Amon Hen? Now there’s an idea for Amon Hen, when they eventually find a new designer — perhaps a dedicated map-art page in each issue, mapping some little regarded nook of Middle-earth.

* Also in French, Tolkien’s Beowulf: Traduction et commentaire, plus the ‘Sellic Spell’. With a rather handsome cover design.

Despite the ‘Pocket’ brand, French readers will need a big pocket… since Amazon has it at a hefty 464 pages. The translation is to be released on 5th June 2025, according to Amazon UK.

* A new PhD from the University of Sussex in the UK, “Sound Symbolism in Character Names: A study of the representation of morality in J.R.R. Tolkien’s character names in The Lord of the Rings” (2025). Freely available online. Brings the latest ‘sound symbolism’ research to bear on the names, and then tests (via online questionnaire at Facebook and Twitter, 76 valid respondents) to see if… “people can determine the morality of a character based solely on the phonological properties of the character name”. An earlier conference paper by the same author is also freely available from the same repository, “Phonaesthetic shadows: the phonetic dichotomy of light and dark in The Lord of the Rings” (2023).

* What appears to be an advanced undergraduate paper from Marquette University, “Tolkien and Hume’s Problem of Evil” (2025). Freely available online.

* This week Cobalt Jade’s blog considers “The Russian Hobbit” of the 1970s, and shows some pleasing interior illustrations. Part one of a planned series of posts.

* Tolkien scholar Dimitri Fimi has begun a Substack blog, with the first post being on On Tolkien’s Letter 131 (1): Capturing “timeless Elvish enchantment”.

* Tolkien scholar John Garth has a new blog post musing on the growing power of AI tools, in Tolkien and the machine war against imagination.

* Theatrical Musings in Minnesota has a long review of the three-hour stage play “Tolkien” at Open Window Theatre (February 2025)…

“The set looks very much like how one would imagine Oxford in the mid 20th Century, with dark wood and rich greens and old books everywhere. The backdrop has 2-D paintings of bookshelves, along with some real shelves with glasses, bottles, and other props, and the space is populated with gorgeous period furniture. […] Completing the look are the period costumes – appropriately professorial with tweed jackets, sweater vests, elbow pads, and hats.”

* And finally, a new National Folklore Survey for England is planned for 2026. Likely to be highly skewed by post-1970s media influence, and also the modern confabulations of neo-pagans and ghost-hunters plus the blatherings of local tourist boards. But maybe the organisers will find a way.

Tolkien Gleanings #293

* The Bodleian Library shares a glimpse of Tolkien’s annotated fold-out map from the first-edition of The Lord of the Rings.

* Up for auction in 2014, with good photos still online, a 1961 Tolkien letter hand-written as a reply to a boy who had enjoyed The Hobbit. Tolkien writes back that he regrets… “there is not much fun in” The Lord of the Rings for the young boy, other than perhaps Bilbo’s birthday chapter.

* In the new academic book Vikings, Knights, Elves, and Ogres: Essays in Honor of Shaun F.D. Hughes (2025), the chapter “Thoughts on J.R.R. Tolkien’s and E.V. Gordon’s ‘Viking Club’ Songbook at Leeds, and Related Nordic Songbooks”.

* Fanac.org has newly added a PDF scan of Tim Kirk’s 1969 Tolkien Calendar, in their Calendars section. Pleasing pencil and wash work, though mostly with garish colour overlays added. They welcome donated scans of similar vintage rarities.

* And talking of entering the mighty gates… currently advertised is the position of Chief Executive Officer of The Tolkien Society, on a whopping £45-£55k. Deadline: 13th April 2025.

* A series of events centred around nature and imagination, running 1st April to 1st May 2025 on the Ile de Re. This being a tourist destination-island in France, half-way down the Atlantic coast and between the cities of Nantes and Bordeaux. Apparently free, and to include public talks, temporary land-art (they have many beaches), exhibitions, concerts and more. The island’s website is currently down, but check iledere.com when online again. As part of the events, note…

– Conferences and meetings
“Tolkien and the science of his imaginary creatures. Paleontologists, naturalists, and illustrators come together to discuss nature and the imaginary.”

* Mythmoot XII, 19th-22nd June 2025, Virginia, USA. The call-for-papers closes on 31st March 2025. The theme is “Drawn to the Edge” — edges, thresholds and edgelands of all sorts, and also the allure of such things.

* And finally, a new Tolkien sculpture in East Yorkshire in northern England, part of their Tolkien Triangle…

“One statue will show the young Tolkien standing in the woods and will be around eight-and-a-half feet high [in carved wood], while the second installation, beside it, will depict Edith dancing in silhouette etched into a thick oak slab.”

Due to be installed on-site and officially unveiled later in the spring of 2025. It sounds like they have ambitions to create a larger Tolkien sculpture-trail in future.

Tolkien Gleanings #292

* New to me, in the paywalled academic Journal of Fandom Studies I find the article “Tolkien fanzines, fandom and the literary tradition in the 1960s” (2024). A quick search also reveals the journal’s earlier special-issue on the professional archiving of fandom, which had “From the hobbit-hole: The Lord of the Rings fanzines of the 1960s and archival limitations” (2021). So far as I can tell, neither article is online elsewhere in open-access.

* On eBay, up popped an academic book that had passed me by. The Map of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections on Tolkien’s Myth of Wilderness (2022), from Kent State University Press. I must have noticed the review in Mallorn, when I ploughed through their back-issues last year. But looking back on that review I find it focussed heavily on the Beowulf discussion in the first chapter — which probably put me off. Anyway, I find that there’s more to the book than that and it’s now available as a £36 ebook via Amazon.

The eBay listing of the hardback revealed the contents-page, and this made the book sound rather interesting with — modern eco-politics aside — the core of the book… “tracing some of the ancient Celtic, Germanic, and English mythic roots of Tolkien’s work; examines how those roots influence Tolkien’s own depictions of the wild natural world”. Apparently also considers the landscapes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of my special interests.

* New on YouTube in Spanish, a 100-minute recording from a recent conference, discussing La filosofoa en la obra de J.R.R. Tolkien (‘Philosophy in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien’).

* From Turkey, in English and open-access, a 2025 journal article on the “Architectural Dynamics in Tolkien’s Novel, The Hobbit: A Literary and Cinematic Perspective”.

* From Indonesia, J.K. Rahma’s new Silmarillion illustrations.

* The Italian Tolkien Society notes that the crowd-funded fan-film Visions of Storm (February 2024) has just won the Best Film Award at the Magic Awards 2025 in St. Petersburg. A prequel to the three Hobbit movies, it sees an elf and man travel to Erebor carrying a warning… but on the way they are attacked by orcs near the Lonely Mountain. Only 14 minutes long but with huge group effort put into it, including intense 3D storyboarding, superb makeup, location shoots and over 90 VFX shots. There’s a trailer on YouTube.

* Likely to be of interest to some Gleanings readers, the documentary feature A Stranger Quest (2023). Being a film about David Rumsey, the outstanding and generous collector of historical maps and also of a few fantasy/imaginary maps of superb quality. Now freely available on Vimeo.

* Artist Miriam Ellis has a new illustrated blog post, musing on life at the Undertowers. This being the new Shire-expanding westward colony, established by Pippin and his family after the events of The Lord of the Rings.

* And finally, here in the UK we have a new set of Royal Mail picture postage stamps depicting some of our popular folk-lore. The Grindylow more commonly known as ‘Jenny Greenteeth’.

Tolkien Gleanings #291

* New in the Cormare series from Walking Tree, the £20 paperback book Tolkien Among the Theologians (March 2025). Being the proceedings of a Houston conference, held online in October 2022. There appears to be no table-of-contents available as yet, but one can easily find various titles from papers given at the conference. These undoubtedly give a flavour of the new book…

   – Tolkien among the Oratorians. (Holly Ordway, keynote)
   – Tolkien and Calvin (lead paper)
   – Tolkien and Chesterton: The Orthodoxy of Middle-earth.
   – The Self, Rationality and the Exterior World in the Work of J.R.R. Tolkien and Fr. Victor White.
   – ‘Tolkien and Balthasar’.
   – ‘Franciscan themes related to the character of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry’

* “It’s odd how the Langobards [Lombards] keep cropping up” (Tolkien in the semi-autobiographical “The Lost Road”, speaking through the character Markison). This week the Axis Mundi blog considers “Tolkien and the Lombards, between myth and legend”.

* Engelsberg Ideas has a new blog article on “England’s mystical inheritance: Tolkien and Powell”. Compares Tolkien to his fellow poet/scholar and Birmingham contemporary Enoch Powell (ten years younger than Tolkien), focusing on parallels between Tolkien’s Shire and Powell’s conception of England. A relatively brief article, and there is probably a lot more to be said on the topic.

* Due for release in hardcover in a week or so, the children’s picture-book Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the Worlds of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

* A notice of a free public lecture in Brisbane, Australia in May 2025, “Shakespeare & Tolkien: Literary Giants & The Great Books”.

* And finally, for a hefty $99, ‘A Long-Expected Soundscape’. New to me, but described as chapter-specific audio apparently providing, via musical “score, ambience, and sound FX”, an enhancement of the…

“journey through J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. You can also use it as an accompaniment for reading the books or sync it with the official audiobook to get an incredible immersive audio experience”.

Here “official audiobook” means the new Andy Serkis reading, not the Rob Inglis audiobook. (Update: there’s also said to now be a version for the Inglis audiobook).

Tolkien Gleanings #290

* Officially announced by the Faculty of English at Oxford, the death of Professor Vincent Gillespie, FBA who was… “the emeritus J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language”.

* Now online, the official announcement for the 2025 J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture in Fantasy Literature in Oxford. Booking details, plus the statement that… “For anyone who cannot make the event, it will be recorded and uploaded to our website and YouTube channel after the event.”

* New on YouTube, a Zoom recording of an online Tolkien colloquium: ‘Good and Evil in Middle-earth’ (March 2025). Part of the ‘Moral Values in Fantasy Literature’ project, University of Notra, Slovakia.

* Also new on YouTube, Holly Ordway for ‘The Great Thinkers’ introductory podcast series, on “Who was Tolkien? His Life and Ideas”.

* The Two Towers in Mongolian, a translation due to be published at the end of March 2025. The Hobbit and Fellowship have already been published in Mongolia, in the same series. I’d imagine that the horse-lords of the Rohirrim will resonate with many Mongolian readers.

* Tolkien in Dorset. Newly launched for summer 2025, a… “Writers’ Trail map: Follow in the footsteps of some of the UK’s best-loved writers and discover the landscapes that influenced them, including […] J.R.R. Tolkien …”. One would have thought Lyme Regis, the coastal resort where Tolkien spent three holidays as a boy, and where he later returned with his own family. But no, it’s “Bournemouth East Cliff”.

* At the Evesham Festival of Words this weekend… “a 20-mile bike ride learning about the area’s connections to writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and William Morris”.

* New online and free, at the Ordnance Survey Maps Six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952 website, ‘OS Maps 1900s Text Search’ of text on maps, and a set of ‘Town Plans, 1920-34’. The latter including Oxford and Leeds. Possibly useful for researchers.