Tolkien Gleanings #117.
* Currently up for auction, with good pictures, a 1955 J.R.R. Tolkien autograph letter. On completing LoTR, Tolkien perhaps rather jokingly reveals he was being “bullied” by a fellow academic into not having a happy ending, but then asks with seeming anxiousness… “Would you call it a happy ending? Auden on the whole approves of Vol. III (seen in galley)”. Bidding ends 24th September 2023.
* The Franciscan University of Steubenville now has a partial speaker-list for their Tolkien conference “A Long Expected Party: A Semicentennial Celebration Of Tolkien’s Life, Works, And Afterlife”, set for 22nd-23rd September 2023. Holly Ordway and Carl F. Hostetter are the keynote speakers. Back in March 2023 the call-for-papers asked for new work on the “less studied elements of Tolkien’s legendarium and recently published works”. One hopes that the recordings will find their way online for free, after the event.
* I’ve only just spotted the long podcast “Lewis and Tolkien: Imagination and Sexuality” (March 2023), which paired Holly Ordway with the C.S. Lewis scholar Michael Ward. For the .mp3 download, click on ‘… More’, then right-click ‘Download Audio’ and then ‘Save Linked Content…’.
* New in Welsh, “Cymraeg egsotig J.R.R. Tolkien”, as an embargoed pre-print in a repository. The embargo locks pop on 22nd September 2023. The title translates as ‘The Exotic Welsh of J.R.R Tolkien’, and the article is otherwise in print in Bangor University’s stylish Welsh-language magazine O’r Pedwar Gwynt ($ paywall).
* New on Archive.org for the first time, Tolkien’s The Old English Exodus (1982). A poor and grainy scan, with no OCR… but free.
* And finally, the French newspaper La Vie interviews Vincent Ferre in French. Professor of Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne, and also overseer of the Tolkien Editions at the French publisher Christian Bourgeois. The interview has no news and is very much ‘potted Tolkien for the average newspaper reader who’s never encountered Tolkien’. But it looks like one of the better examples of the breed.
The Spyders of Burslem 
What news the Exodus!