{"id":17431,"date":"2025-04-17T17:55:24","date_gmt":"2025-04-17T16:55:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=17431"},"modified":"2025-04-17T17:55:24","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T16:55:24","slug":"tolkien-gleanings-298","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2025\/04\/17\/tolkien-gleanings-298\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Gleanings #298"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings<\/a> #298<\/p>\n

Happy Easter!<\/em><\/p>\n

* The Oxford Tolkien Network<\/a> has posted YouTube videos of several recent talks. Including, among others…<\/p>\n

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

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

    – “No Ragnarok, No Armageddon: Pagan and Christian interpretations of The Lord of the Rings”<\/em>.
\n    – “The Liberty to Bind Oneself: Chesterton and The Oath of Feanor”.
\n    – “The Bright Sword and its Sharpness: Swords, Symbolism, and Medievalism in The Lord of the Rings”<\/em>.
\n    – Review of Tolkien\u2019s Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle-earth<\/em> (a book on divine interventions, or seemingly so, in the Third Age).<\/p>\n

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

* 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’<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* Fellowship and Fairydust<\/em> has a new short post surveying Tolkien and His Friends<\/a>, on the various close friends made throughout his life.<\/p>\n

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

* The latest edition of Religion and Liberty<\/em> reviews The Last Romantic: C.S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology<\/em><\/a>. Freely available online…<\/p>\n

“Barbeau\u2019s meticulous, well-informed, and balanced analysis of Lewis provides a nuanced and scholarly exploration of Lewis\u2019 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\u2019 marginalia — his handwritten annotations of the editions of Wordsworth and Coleridge in his personal library”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* In Romanian in the March 2025<\/a> issue of the Romanian journal Orizont<\/em>, “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…<\/p>\n

“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\u2019s 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).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* As Birmingham, England, submerges under a great wave of trash<\/a>, muddy-booted volunteers are tracking the health of the city’s streams and rivers<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

* 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<\/em>. 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tolkien-gleanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}