{"id":17568,"date":"2025-05-21T21:32:31","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T20:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=17568"},"modified":"2025-05-21T21:32:31","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T20:32:31","slug":"tolkien-gleanings-304","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2025\/05\/21\/tolkien-gleanings-304\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Gleanings #304"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings<\/a> #304<\/p>\n

* Due in the autumn of 2025, a new Tolkien book<\/a>. This will publish Tolkien’s previously unpublished The Bovadium Fragments<\/em>, a short satire on the growing car-and-lorry culture that was then destroying the old pre-war Oxford. Tolkien described it as “a sort of satirical fantasy”, and it was first offered to a publisher in 1960. The new book will present the Fragments<\/em> together with the new scholarly essay “The Origin of Bovadium” by Richard Ovenden. To be ordered alongside a copy of the long poem Autogeddon<\/em> (1991) by Heathcote Williams, I’d suggest. Though I see that Autogeddon<\/em> is now sadly out-of-print and the Jeremy Irons \/ BBC audio-reading of it is totally unavailable — a sad fate for “the most vigorous sustained flow of invective against car culture to date” (Jeremy Irons). There is however a “to borrow” ebook scan on Archive.org.<\/p>\n

* A few talks I missed on my first pass (in Tolkien Gleanings<\/em> #238) of the many now-online videos for the Mythcon 53: \u2018Fantasies of the Middle Lands\u2019<\/a> 2024 conference…<\/p>\n

    – The Middle People of Middle-earth: Dwarven Displacement and Reconciliation in Tolkien\u2019s Legendarium.
\n    – “Our Dear Charles Williams”: Tolkien\u2019s Feelings about the Oddest Inkling.
\n    – Boromir\u2019s Smile and Other Expressions of Wartime Joy in Tolkien.
\n    – Tolkien\u2019s Mechanical Dragons in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ (1916) and World War 1.<\/p>\n

* The Church Times<\/em> has a suitably short review<\/a> of the recent J.R.R. Tolkien: A very short introduction<\/em> pocket-book. The review is freely available online…<\/p>\n

“Townend misses important scriptural linkages in the examples he cites.” […] “Sam Gamgee\u2019s discovery that ‘his tongue was loosed and his voice cried in a language which he did not know’ is obviously a nod to Acts 2.4 [in the Bible]”. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* Criterion<\/em> is the annual English Studies journal of New England’s College of the Holy Cross. Their new 2025 edition has “Home, Exile, and Displacement in The Lord of the Rings<\/em> and The Hobbit”<\/em><\/a>. Freely available online.<\/p>\n

* In Paris, the College des Bernardins recently hosted a conference alongside their ‘Tolkien tapestries’ exhibition. It’s been and gone, and its Web page is now blocked by a noxious whole-page pop-up layer advertising other events. But here are the titles of some of the talks, in English translation…<\/p>\n

    – Purgatory in “Leaf by Niggle”.
\n    – Art and Salvation: the Christian quality of Tolkian work. (Tolkian = possibly about ‘Tolkien inspired’ projects?)
\n    – Allegiance to reality as a sign of redemption in Tolkien.
\n    – Light and Dust: Tolkien, his guardian angel, and the angels in Middle-earth. (Leo Carruthers)
\n    – J.R.R. Tolkien and the ‘Mass in Latin’.
\n    – Do Hobbits Believe in Eru? : Analogies of faith in Middle-earth.<\/p>\n

* The recently-updated faculty profile page for Christopher Jeansonne<\/a> at Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York state states…<\/p>\n

He is currently co-writing, with Maurice Suckling from the RPI games program, a monograph on the Tolkien-inspired board-game ‘War of the Ring’ for the Tabletop Gaming series from University of Michigan Press (forthcoming).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* Now online, the King Edwards School Old Edwardians Gazette<\/em><\/a> for Tolkien’s old school. Seemingly a complete set, freely available online without registration. A random sampling gives me the December 1919 issue in a PDF viewer. Has substantial obituaries for past teachers.<\/p>\n

* And finally… “Are Tom Bombadil and Beorn comparable in any tangible sense?”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tolkien Gleanings #304 * Due in the autumn of 2025, a new Tolkien book. This will publish Tolkien’s previously unpublished The Bovadium Fragments, a short satire on the growing car-and-lorry culture that was then destroying the old pre-war Oxford. Tolkien described it as “a sort of satirical fantasy”, and it was first offered to a […]<\/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-17568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tolkien-gleanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17568","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=17568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}