Latest publications
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Environmentalism in Tolkien's Middle-earth
20th August 2026: Environmentalism in Tolkien's Middle-earth published
Environmentalism in Tolkien's Middle-earth brings together ten essays exploring Tolkien as a proto-environmentalist and deep ecologist before the term existed. From the tree-herding Ents of Fangorn to the maternal nature goddesses of The Silmarillion, from the ethical mining of Erebor to the corrupted wasteland of Mordor, the contributors reveal how Tolkien's legendarium presents a morally charged vision of humanity's relationship with the natural world. Drawing on ecocriticism, Jungian psychology, postcolonial theory, and deep ecology, the volume traces an evolution in Tolkien's ecological imagination across his entire body of work.
table of contents | abstracts | cover | announcements | more
(to link to this announcement: http://www.walking-tree.org/news_archive.php?item=266 )
Tolkien - History Meets Legend
28th June 2026: Tolkien - History Meets Legend
Tolkien - History Meets Legend, essays by Nancy Bunting, is now published.
"Legend and History have met and fused" (OFS 156)
These essays deal with how Tolkien excavated the mother lode of his own history to create legends. This strategy can be seen in his use of S.R. Crockett's The Black Douglas and his late essay, "Aldarion and Erendis." This biographical approach appears at the start of The Lord of the Rings in the Bombadil chapters, and in his intimate portrait of Faramir, the character whom Tolkien wrote is "like me."
The main essay reviews the inferred traumatic events of March 1904, when food and water ran low and the isolated, housebound Mabel Tolkien was challenged by caring for two sick boys. Already in the late stages of diabetes, Mabel Tolkien faced only three possible medical outcomes: death, coma, or psychosis. In March 1904, the first two did not occur. The logically reconstructed events of March 1904 aim to reveal Tolkien's own History which "resembles 'Myth', because they are both ultimately of the same stuff ." Tolkien's story finds its eucatastrophe in "the sudden miraculous experience of Fr. Francis love and care and humour" which allowed an escape from "hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death," all parts of the trauma of 1904.
table of contents | cover | announcements | more
(to link to this announcement: http://www.walking-tree.org/news_archive.php?item=262 )
Arda Notebooks, The Best of I Quaderni di Arda
26th February 2026: New book - Arda Notebooks, The Best of I Quaderni di Arda
Arda Notebooks, The Best of I Quaderni di Arda edited by Roberto Arduini, Claudio A. Testi and Wu Ming, is now published.
This volume brings together a selection of articles published in the first three issues of Quaderni di Arda: Rivista di studi tolkieniani e mondi fantastici, edited by the Italian Association of Tolkienian Studies (AIST – Associazione Italiana Studi Tolkieniani). Its editorial board consists of independent and self-taught scholars from various professional backgrounds and the creation of Quaderni di Arda marks the culmination of nearly two decades of work that has revitalized Tolkien studies in Italy, positioning itself as a crossroads between the academic world and fandom.
table of contents | abstracts | cover | announcements | more
(to link to this announcement: http://www.walking-tree.org/news_archive.php?item=254 )
A Real Taste for Fairy-stories
14th July 2025: A Real Taste for Fairy-stories published
A Real Taste for Fairy-stories by Verlyn Flieger is now published.
This volume of essays comprises more than a dozen of essays by one of the leading Tolkien scholars in which she addresses central questions concerning the status, structure, and meaning of Tolkien’s work for a 21st century audience.
Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger is author of A Question of Time. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (1997), Splintered Light. Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (2002), and Interrupted Music. The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology (2005). She has published three collections of essays on Tolkien and was responsible for the publication of editions of Smith of Wootton Major, Aotrou and Itroun and The Story of Kullervo.
table of contents | cover | announcements | more
(to link to this announcement: http://www.walking-tree.org/news_archive.php?item=238 )
Tolkien among the Theologians
23rd April 2025: Tolkien among the Theologians published
Tolkien among the Theologians (edited Austin M. Freeman) is now published.
Can Tolkien be considered a theologian? In this collection of essays, scholars bring Tolkien into conversation with theologians from the patristic era to the 20th Century: Augustine, Boethius, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Paul II, and the Birmingham Oratorians. Far from siloing o his expertise into a single fi eld, Tolkien was an interdisciplinary thinker with a synthetic mind that drew from the full breadth of the Great Tradition to construct a compelling account of God and all things in relation to God.
about this book | table of contents | abstracts | cover | announcements | more
(to link to this announcement: http://www.walking-tree.org/news_archive.php?item=236 )
Celebrating Tolkien's Legacy
26th September 2024: Celebrating Tolkien's Legacy
Walking Tree Publishers are proud to announce the publication of Celebrating Tolkien's Legacy by Nancy Bunting, Seamus Hamill-Keays and Toby Widdicombe.
Fifty years after the death of J.R.R. Tolkien, these essays look at Tolkien's own history in relation to his fiction and where Tolkien studies may go in the next few decades and what issues it needs to address.
Celebrating Tolkien's Legacy
Nancy Bunting, Seamus Hamill-Keays and Toby Widdicombe
Cormarë Series No. 52
about the authors | about this book | table of contents | cover | announcements | more
(to link to this announcement: http://www.walking-tree.org/news_archive.php?item=227 )
The Songs of the Spheres: Lewis, Tolkien and the Overlapping Realms of their Imagination
30th April 2024: The Songs of the Spheres now published
The Songs of the Spheres: Lewis, Tolkien and the Overlapping Realms of their Imagination (edited by Łukasz Neubauer and Gugliemo Spirito), is now available.
This book was previously announced here.
about this publication | about the editors | table of contents | abstracts | cover | announcements | more
(to link to this announcement: http://www.walking-tree.org/news_archive.php?item=220 )
The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien
17th March 2024: New publication, The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien's Arda illustrates how he incorporated and built on aesthetics, ideals, and philosophies that were, during his lifetime, associated with the Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien is a celebration of Romanticism's multiplicity, offering fresh perspectives on Tolkien's relationship with English, Scottish, German, transatlantic, musical, and artistic Romanticisms, working in concert to open up our discussions of Tolkien's Romantic Spirit.
By embracing this approach, the volume avoids generalisations or vague definitions of Romanticism and the Romantic, paving the way for future scholarship that seeks to understand Tolkien's stylistic and thematic connections with Romanticism.
The contributions to this volume by no means exhaust the discussion on Tolkien's Romanticism. Rather, they aim to ignite further exploration by embracing Romanticism's ever-growing cast of voices and spirits.
table of contents | abstracts | cover | announcements | more
(to link to this announcement: http://www.walking-tree.org/news_archive.php?item=216 )
Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium
17th March 2024: New publication, Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium
The theory of Northern Courage was J.R.R. Tolkien' s designation
for the heroic ethos found in 'Germanic' or Northern heroic lays
and epics. Tolkien admired the nobility of the old heroes, such as
Beowulf, but wrestled with the inherent cruelty of the Welands,
Ingelds, and Gunnars that is also expressed within this heroic framework.
This volume explores the means in which this conflict of nobility
and cruelty, virtue and vice, expresses itself in Tolkien's narrative
fiction. Such means include the use of secondary-world chroniclers
narrating a secondary-world history and tales to a secondary-world
audience through illustrative narratives that dramatize the moral
and ideological views of the narrators themselves. The narratives
are often tragic, but they serve to highlight the different aspects of
Northern courage through the examples of the Fingolfians, Fëanorians,
and subsequently the Edain and Dúnedain. The moral and ideological
views expressed by these secondary-world narrators parallel
Tolkien's own personal correspondence and academic essays, which
also criticized the vices and praised the virtues of Northern courage.
Gallant's study is the winner of the 2024 Inklings-Prize in the category 'best scholarly publication (PhD/Habilitation)' of the Inklings-Gesellschaft e.V.
table of contents | cover | announcements | more
(to link to this announcement: http://www.walking-tree.org/news_archive.php?item=215 )
Tweaking Things a Little. Essays on the Epic Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and G.R.R. Martin
2nd July 2023: New publication, Tweaking Things a Little
"World-building, name-finding, language-crafting; the flaws in chivalric practice, and the ethics (Machiavellian and otherwise) that produce the moral complexities of Middle-earth and the Known World are thus the topics that Tweaking Things a Little considers. The modest title belies what lies within these covers: nimble readings, profound knowledge of the medieval world, original and provocative reading of both books and the TV show await the reader here. Pointing both back in time to the medieval underpinnings of Tolkien's creation and outwards to the contemporary world that informs Martin's pragmatic and politically astute thinking, these essays enthral, astonish and challenge. Best of all, they encourage us to journey back into Middle-earth and the Known World, with newly opened eyes and ears, to rediscover their wonders anew."
Carolyne Larrington, Professor of Medieval European Literature (University of Oxford), author of Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of 'Game of Thrones' (2015) and All Men Must Die: Power and Passion in 'Game of Thrones' (2021).
About the author: Thomas Honegger is Professor for English Medieval Studies at the Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena (Germany).
table of contents | cover | announcements | more
(to link to this announcement: http://www.walking-tree.org/news_archive.php?item=207 )
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