Weekly Tolkien Round-up: Shire Post and Ninimiel’s gossip – 17 June 2023

Shire Post: 17 June 2023 🖃 

With the Shire Post I hope to return to a more frequent, weekly potentially, round-up of Tolkien-related news from book announcements, upcoming events, game news and more. And with a (potentially) more irregular Ninimiel’s gossip, I aim to cover LOTRO (The Lord of the Rings Online) news.

📗 New Tolkien-related book!

A new book in the Bloomsbury Literary series “Perspectives on Fantasy” (co-edited by Dr Dimitra Fimi and Brian Attebery) has been announced:

“Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J. R. R. Tolkien's Cartographies” by Anahit Behrooz. Due 22 February 2024. Link.

🔖 You can discover more upcoming Tolkien-related book releases here.

 

📆 New Tolkien Society event announced!

The Tolkien Society and Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic (Glasgow) have announced a new online seminar for 26 November 2023 co-hosted by Will Sherwood and Tom Emanuel with the theme of “Secondary Believers, Secondary Worlds: Tolkien and Religion in the Twenty-First Century”.
Call for papers (cfp) ends 10 September 2023! The seminar is free but you will need to sign-up on the TS website when registration opens. Details here.

🎲 LOTR: Tales of Middle-earth on pre-release!

Magic: The Gathering’s “Universes Beyond” new set of “The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth” is held its pre-release on 16 June 2023, as tweeted by the MTG’s Twitter account here. Full release is 23 June 2023.

📆 Tolkien TEDx Talk

Martin Simonson has given a TEDxTalk about “Tolkien: Uncovering his Legacy” here. First tweeted by Findûriel (@Monigliani) here, you can watch it on YouTube here.

📆 Upcoming Tolkien Trewsdays

The next two #TolkienTrewsday themes are:

• Week 17: "Faërie" – Tuesday 20 June 2023
• Week 18: “Queer Readings” led by the Queer Lodgings Podcast – Tuesday 27 June 2023

More information here.

📆 Upcoming Tolkien-related Events

• 22-25 June 2023 - MythMoot X: “Homeward Bound”. Link.
  
• 2 July 2023 - Tolkien Society summer seminar: “The Mighty and Frail Númenor”. Link.
  
• 5-6 August 2023 - Mythopoeic Society Online Summer Seminar 2023: “Fantasy Goes to Hell: Depictions of Hell in Modern Fantasy Texts”. Link.
  
• 31 August – 3 September 2023 - Oxonmoot. Link

🔖 A list of upcoming events can be found here.

 

Ninimiel’s gossip: 17 June 2023 edition

Covering all things LOTRO.  

🎲 The Midsummer festival runs through 4 July 2023. More information and a guide to the event here.

🎲 LOTRO Store Sales for 15-22 June 2023 are here.

🎲 +Cord of the Rings talks River Hobbits (U37) and the Mariner class (U38)

SSG Community Manager Cordovan (Jerry Snook) and Executive Producer Severlin (Rob Ciccolini) spent time on the usual Friday +Cord of the Rings stream to discuss future releases for LOTRO including the addition of River Hobbits as a player race and an upcoming new class, the Mariner (and why it isn’t called a Corsair). You can view the recorded stream on Twitch or YouTube. You can find a great summary of the stream on the official forums by Weirdjedi here. You can find the River Hobbit concept art on player Druidsfire's Twitter post here.

🎲 Casual Stroll explores “The Strongholds of the North” on 21 June 2023

Senior World Designer Scenario (Matt Elliot) continues his “A Casual Stroll through…” series of livestreams on Wednesday 21 June 2023. He’ll be visiting the “The Strongholds of the North” area (Ironfold and Ered Mithrin). Twitter announcement here.

🔖 You can find all previous “A Casual strolls through…” streams here.

🎲 Magic the Gathering Online and LOTRO cross-platform promotion

MTGO has teamed up with SSG (both are owned by Daybreak) to give players a few cosmetic items with the theme of Sam Gamgee. The code is "LOTROMTGO2023" (redeemable in the LOTRO in-game store). More information about the promotion and redeemable items here. It is a one-off code (per character/account) and you have until the 5 July 2023 to redeem it.