Tolkien Gleanings #174.
* New and free on YouTube, “Newman, Tolkien, and the Perils of Beauty”, being the 2024 Annual Newman Lecture with Dr. David O’Connor. 40 minutes, with excellent clear delivery and audio.
* The book Tolkien and the Gothic: XXIV (Peter Roe Series) is set for publication on 26th March 2024, at least according to the wayward Amazon UK. The book has the proceedings of a 2022 Tolkien Society seminar, as seven papers in 134 pages. Also to be available as an affordable £5 Kindle ebook.
* In the new book The Spirit and the Screen: Pneumatological Reflections on Contemporary Cinema (2023), the chapter “Exegeting Samwise the Brave Advocate”. I see the whole chapter free, via Google Books.
* In this month’s edition of the UK’s The Critic magazine, the article “Campus Confidential” ($ paywall) recounts the joining of a secret student society at Cambridge University (UK). Necessarily secret because they discuss C.S. Lewis. And presumably, though left unsaid, their discussion sometimes also turns to Tolkien. The secrecy is said to be needed during term-time, due to the likelihood of baying mobs of ‘cancel cultists’ turning up outside the venue.
“Conservative-leaning university students now have to meet in secret to avoid the ‘cancel’ mob and risk derailing their careers for the crime of having unfashionable views. [In order to join, the student writer went through a 90 minute interview …] The lecturer wanted to know how an English student, theatre kid and barefoot pagan came to be excluded from liberal and tolerant society and to seek the company of Christians. After 90 minutes the professor sat back with a satisfied nod. “I wanted to be sure of you.”
* The Tolkien Society AGM and Springmoot 2024, will be held in mid April at Cambridge University. The dates are out of term-time, so presumably the university’s baying mobs will be absent.
* A new book on The Arts and the Bible (2024), being the proceedings of a 2017 U.S. conference. Tolkien is only briefly nodded to, if the table-of-contents is anything to go by.
* And finally, the worthy project Bookstore Chronicles is calling for recorded contributions for an oral history of bookselling in America, as told by the nation’s own booksellers. The call is open.
The Spyders of Burslem 