Recommended Readings
A host, perhaps a moot, of readings relating to or reminding me of Tolkien's Middle-earth
I had a wonderful time at the Popular Culture Association’s annual conference (last month! how did it end up halfway through May already!). It was my last year as the Chair of the Tolkien Studies Area which will be helmed in future by Janet Brennan Croft and Bianca Beronio, and the presentations, workshop, and roundtables were incredible!
I have more or less recovered from my conference hangover (I don’t drink alcohol but the aftermath of the all-out fun, travel, lack of sleep, and excitement of f2f conferences feels a lot like I remember hangovers feeling during my rowdy undergraduate days!), and am getting back to work.
This post pulls together a range of recommendations (some of which have, alas, been sitting in my “Drafts” folder for months!) all having to do to some extent with Tolkien’s Middle-earth, ranging from scholarly analysis of elements of his legendarium to Substacks and stories which remind me of Middle-earth (I guess in the way the kids these days call “vibes”!).
A special themed issue on Tolkien and Psychology (edited by Kristine Larsen, Sara Brown, and Christopher Vaccaro) is up on the open-access peer-reviewed Journal of Tolkien Research. The papers were all part of the 2024 University of Vermont Tolkien Conference, an annual hybrid conference organized by Christopher Vaccaro every spring. It’s a small (one-track) event, with a theme and a GOH, that welcome junior and early-career scholars.
The Spring/Summer 2025 issue of Mythlore (published by the Mythopoeic Society, edited by Janet Brennan Croft) is up. Mythlore is also open-access and peer-reviewed (and some years back, make all of their back issues available online, going back to the days when the journal was a fanzine, so an invaluable historical source as well); the focus is more broadly on Inklings studies and mythopoeic fantasy, but there’s always some good Tolkien work. In this issue, there are six Tolkien-related pieces:
Three peer-Reviewed Essays:
No Ragnarök, No Armageddon: Pagan and Christian interpretations of The Lord of the Rings
Matthew Thompson-Handell
An Aspirational Cultus? Tolkien Fandom at the Borders of Belief
Tom Emanuel
Divinity and the Void in Chinese and Thai Translations of the Ainulindalë
Eric Reinders
A Note/Response (a more informal, editor-reviewed, essay):
“Perilous and Fair” in “A Bleak, Barren Land”: A Feminist Responds to Dylan Lee Henderson’s Essay
Robin A. Reid
Two Book Reviews
J.R.R. Tolkien: A Very Short Introduction by Matthew Townend
Laura N. Van Dyke
Tolkien’s Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle-earth by Sam McBride
Phillip Fitzsimmons
Vidumavi of the Northmen by Secondborn
One of the “Characters of the Month” column at the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild, a regular feature that “presents a biography of a different Tolkien character each month.”
Vidumavi was a woman who lived, loved, and died in the mid-Third Age. She was a quintessential human—a daughter, a wife, and a mother, not imbued with any magical or fantastical characteristics, someone whose life was full but who achieved no epic deeds and conquered no legendary villains. And yet, she stands as a perfect representation of how a single individual exists in the broader flow of Arda’s history. She was affected deeply in her daily existence by events and dynamics from two ages before her birth, and she made a series of decisions that would compound over time to shake the very foundations of Middle-earth’s largest and most powerful empire. Along the way, she came to shed light on the development of some of Tolkien’s most significant themes, including fellowship, how the intervention of the divine came to divide the races and societies of Middle-earth, and the slow but inevitable fading of elements of “faerie” from the everyday world. In short, I love her.
Reading Sam and Frodo through Greek Loves by Mercury Natis
Mercury’s Substack, Partners in Making and Delight, is one of my favorites, and I enjoyed this piece which is a presentation Mercury gave
The Greek Loves are, very simply, a group of distinct and different words for Love based on ancient philosophy, which has, as said, expanded and developed over time. It’s much more expansive than our singular English word “Love”, and can be useful in looking at nuance, and in our case the nuances in Sam and Frodo’s relationship. This isn’t a be all end all, and we have to be careful when using the Greek Loves to not taxonomize Love. These are signifiers for concepts not taxonomies, and they often overlap and blur together. Relationships between people can include multiple forms of love in various degrees, and its not a mutually exclusive categorization system.
I’ve included here a list of the Greek Loves, and I will go through them more thoroughly in detail in this order.
Storge - familial love, kinship
Philia - affectional love between friends
Ludus - playful love, juvenile affection
Eros - passionate romantic/sexual love
Pragma - committed, married love
Agape - selfless love, empathy and compassion
Mania - obsessive, co-dependent love
Philautia - love and respect for one’s self
Reading The Lord of the Rings in the End Times (podcast + transcript)
The first episode in and “Arts and Culture” podcast by Lyta Gold, interviewing Talia Lavin on, YAY!, Tolkien!
I discovered Gold’s work through her brilliant book (Dangerous Fictions); she also has a Substack.
I read Lavin’s book (Culture Warlords) a while ago, and have just bought Wild Faith; she also has a Substack.
Lyta Gold Lyta’s List Dangerous Fictions by Lyta Gold
Talia Lavin The Sword and the Sandwich Culture Warlords and Wild Faith by Talia Lavin
So, I was all over this interview (which, erm, was apparently in 2021), and I cannot remember how I stumbled across it (because I simply cannot listen to podcasts!) but, well: here’s some background:
I do want to clarify a couple of things this podcast is not going to be about. I’m not really interested in looking at a piece of art and deciding if it has the good politics and is therefore good, or the bad politics and is therefore bad and stupid and nobody should talk about it. We’re always going to be looking at everything here from a leftist and from a political point of view, but if a work is entirely reducible to some kind of political allegory, then usually one of three things is happening: One, the work isn’t very good; two, the criticism isn’t very good; or three, the work actually is a rare example of a genuine allegory, but it’s not that common to find those these days. That’s just to make sure that we’re all clear on our terms and our approach.
Another thing besides allegory that you’re not going to find too much of on this show is contempt. I don’t have a lot of time or a lot of patience for a supposedly left analysis of popular culture that regards people who consume popular culture, which is literally all of us – I don’t like it when people like that are regarded as stupid sheep with bad taste. It’s mean, but I’m not really upset about it being mean. I just don’t think it’s really a left analysis.
The entire transcript is over 13,000 words long, so I just pulled out this short exchange to give a sense of it:
Lyta Gold: No, no, no. This is great because we’re sort of getting into… The story is universally popular, which is so unusual. It’s really unusual for something to really have this much of an impact, and the fact that the Soviets loved it, too, when Tolkien himself was kind of reactionary and there’s some weird shit going on there.
Talia Lavin: To quote your outline, how did two nice Jewish girls get so invested in these reactionary Catholic fantasy books? What’s your story?
Lyta Gold: I was really into fantasy when I was in elementary school, middle school. I can’t remember when I first read Lord of the Rings. I think I was eight or nine. But I remember I had these paperbacks, with these really corny covers, and I loved them. I literally loved them to death. They fell apart physically because I read them too much. I used to reread them every year, up until my early 20s. I stopped. I read The Silmarillion in high school. I was very popular and very cool for doing things like that.
It’s kind of a funny thing where something like this is, again, universally popular and everybody loves it, but there was, I think, a point especially when we were younger where you had to be kind of… Especially if you were a girl who liked fantasy, you had to be… People would be weird to you about it. Or like the way that you’re shy about practicing swords in the park. Why should that be weird? Everybody loves swords. Why is this a weird thing? Why do we have to be shy about it?
Talia Lavin: Yeah, I think high fantasy especially is such a masculine-dominated genre. The books themselves are all about men tenderly loving one another. I mean, the sort of fear image for me is Star Wars kid because I’m fat and I have a sword. You know that very early viral video of just a fat kid having a great time doing all kinds of sword moves, but that becomes the archetype you’re afraid of. I think when you add in being female to it, it’s just like that’s a whole mess of pottage, baggage, whatever.
I tried to learn Elvish in eighth grade. I would carry around my little Elvish packet that I printed from online. I definitely got teased for it, so that’s fine. I mean, I’m the archetypal nerd that should’ve been stuffed in a locker at some point, but I never did get stuffed in a locker, and so I’ve gone on to become the warped weirdo you see today.
My origin story, I mean it’s similar. My dad read us The Hobbit when we were kids. He was a big Lord of the Rings fan. I was really into more girl-oriented fantasy, big fan of Tamora Pierce.
Three Substacks that I subscribe to and love that are not, specifically, about Tolkien or even genre fantasy, but very much resonate with my “Tolkien” sensibility, in terms of their writing styles, their worlds (and descriptions of the world—Malchik lives in Montana, Cox and Hadden in England), and, well, just the sense I have as a reader that what I find important and moving in their work is similar to what I find in Tolkien’s. I have linked to their Substacks, and to one of my favorite posts of theirs.
Antonia Malchik, On the Commons
Some Interdimensional Portals I Have Come Across During Walks in the British Countryside
The last three recs are about trees and the sea (two of my—and Tolkien’s!—favorite things!).
Stumpy the Stubborn Little Cherry Tree in Washington, D.C.
Sea Otters Have Helped Bolster California’s Kelp Forest
