Tolkien Gleanings #150.
* The Past Daily digs up “The Man Who Invented Hobbits”. A one-hour NPR radio show (the U.S. government-funded broadcaster, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting). Apparently broadcast on 1st January 1975. I can find no reference to a radio documentary on Tolkien under that exact name, in Tolkien material, but it was reviewed in the SFRA Newsletter #70, April 1979, when it was issued on cassette by the U.S. Center for Cassette Studies. Which is perhaps how it’s survived. The .MP3 download link is here. It’s a remarkably good documentary. Now it’s been released at last someone will no doubt put Ken Burns-style images to it and make it into a video. [Update: Zionus suggests it’s the same as a BBC Radio Oxford local-radio documentary of 1974].
* The Catholic Theology podcast has a new episode titled “On Tolkien and Myth”…
“Can myths and fairy stories help us to better understand reality? Today, Dr. Michael Dauphinais and Catholic academic Joseph Pearce discuss J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay ‘On Fairy Stories’.”
* Popping up on eBay, a rare and very Shire-like view of Etching Hill, two miles from Tolkien’s Great Haywood in Staffordshire and near the road to the town of Rugeley three miles from Great Haywood.
* A new article in The Dublin Review of Books, on “Dunsany’s Careless Abundance”. Dauntingly so, as it’s very difficult to know where to start on reading him. Interesting to learn in the article that this other, and far more prolific, fantasy writer also served on the Somme…
“When [the book] Fifty-one Tales appeared, Dunsany had just served as an Army captain ‘in the deserts of the Somme'”.
* “Lezant artists’ illustrations part of Tolkien exhibit in Rome”…
“The beautiful illustrations, which are currently on display in La Galleria Nationale, Rome, were created by the late Roger Garland and his wife Linda, who have a permanent Tolkien exhibition at Lakeside Gallery, Lezant. Lakeside Gallery was established in 1989 by Linda and Roger primarily to exhibit their own work, but also to promote book illustration as a serious art form.”
And the Lakeside Gallery website reveals their own gallery has on show… “over seventy paintings and drawings commissioned by the original publishers for many J.R.R Tolkien’s books”. It turns out that “Lezant” is not in Italy, but is about 25 miles west of Exeter and in the middle of Cornwall, England. Sounds like a suitable site for a biennial ‘Tolkien Art & Artists’ convention, I’d suggest?
* And finally, a large exhibition on Fairy Tales at the Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland, Australia.
The Spyders of Burslem 
I believe this radio is the same as the 1974 BBC one made by Humphrey Carpenter
and Ann Bonsor, which inspired Carpenter to write his Biography. The 1974 radio is quoted many, many times in Tolkien books: https://imgur.com/a/NUZik27.
You can hear Ann Bonsor’s name at the end. And most details entered Carpenter’s book.