The Tolkien Society’s Oxonmoot is the world’s longest-running annual event dedicated to Tolkien. Taking place in an Oxford college over a long weekend close to Frodo and Bilbo’s birthday in September, it is rightly considered one of the most important events for lovers of Tolkien and his works.

Here are just 10 reasons why you should come to this year’s Oxonmoot, which takes place at St Antony’s College from 21^st to 24^th September 2017. And don’t forget to book your place right now! (more…)

May 2017

Things have been rather hectic again, so I have decided to mostly go about things the easy way and use the intro I get in my feed reader, just citing the first something characters of the post. Everywhere where the description is given as “<text> […]”, the <text> is from the blog post itself. In a very few cases, I have added something or done a comment myself, but these are the exceptions. If this works well, I might choose to use this feature a bit more often, though of course I do hope to find time to comment myself.

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Tolkien readers would have to be living under a stone not to be aware that Beren and Lúthien was published on 1 June 2017.

What follows is a round-up of some of the reviews, interviews, films, and media attention, which has appeared in the last week or so.  Most of it is about the new book, but some of it is about other aspects of Tolkien.

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It may not be long now ere you hear that the Entwives have at long last been found.  If you are a member of the Tolkien Society Facebook group then you may already know to what I refer.  A quora user named Pip Willis published a partial image of a map he says his father drew and shared with J.R.R. Tolkien in 1971.  Willis says that Tolkien wrote on the map, “Here may be Entwives”, which you can see in the picture he shared.   And now the debates will begin.  Is the map authentic?  Is the writing Tolkien’s?  Does it mean anything significant? (more…)

One hundred years ago Edith Tolkien sang and danced for her husband in a “hemlock glade” at or near Roos in East Yorkshire.  Unfortunately, unless some more information becomes available we cannot be sure of the precise date, but examination of the flora Tolkien mentions suggests a date in May or very early June 1917.  Tolkien refers to the understory in the glade as ‘hemlock’, but it is much more likely that the plant he was referring to is commonly known as Cow Parsley.  You may read more about the various members of the umbellifer family and their flowering times here.

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April 2017

Once all the reporting is done, there are always the finishing touches to put in – pictures, checking that there is no descriptions left merely as “description” (the default used in the macro I use), and not least writing up these opening comments, usually complaining about my lack of time ….

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