A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien

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Edited by Paul Lauter Edited by Gene Jarrett Edited by Julia M. Wright Edited by Charles Mahoney Edited by Nicolas S. Witschi Edited by Pamela K. Gilbert Edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas Edited by Erik Martiny Edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine Edited by David Punter Edited by Alfred Bendixen Edited by Deborah Cartmell Edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw Edited by Graeme Harper Edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher Edited by Charles L. Crow Edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter Edited by Herbert F. Tucker Edited by David E. Chinitz and Gail McDonald Edited by Stuart D. Lee

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C O M P A N I O N

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J. R. R. TOLKIEN EDITED BY S T UA R T D. L E E

This edition first published 2014 © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our web site at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Stuart D. Lee to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for Hardback ISBN: 978-0-470-65982-3 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: Photograph of J. R. R. Tolkien by Pamela Chandler, © Diana Willson. Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates Set in 11/13 pt Garamond 3 LT Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited 1  2014

For Conaire (“Con”) Lee

Contents

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Editorial Practices and Abbreviations Brief Chronology of the Life and Works of J. R. R. Tolkien

xi xiii xiv xxii

Introduction

1

Part I:  Life

5

  1  A Brief Biography John Garth

7

Part II:  The Academic

25

  2  Academic Writings Thomas Honegger

27

  3  Tolkien as Editor Tom Shippey

41

  4  Manuscripts: Use, and Using Stuart D. Lee

56

Part III:  The Legendarium

77

  5  Myth-making and Sub-creation Carl Phelpstead

79

  6  Middle-earth Mythology: An Overview Leslie A. Donovan

92

viii

Contents

  7  The Silmarillion: Tolkien’s Theory of Myth, Text, and Culture Gergely Nagy

107

  8  The Hobbit: A Turning Point John D. Rateliff

119

  9  The Lord of the Rings John R. Holmes

133

10  Unfinished Tales and the History of Middle-earth: A Lifetime of Imagination Elizabeth A. Whittingham

146

11  “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers”: Myth, History, and Time-travel Verlyn Flieger

161

12  Poetry Corey Olsen

173

13  “Minor” Works Maria Artamonova

189

14  Invented Languages and Writing Systems Arden R. Smith

202

Part IV:  Context

215

15  Old English Mark Atherton

217

16  Middle English Elizabeth Solopova

230

17  Old Norse Tom Birkett

244

18  Finnish: The Land and Language of Heroes Leena Kahlas-Tarkka

259

19  Celtic: “Celtic Things” and “Things Celtic” – Identity, Language, and Mythology J. S. Lyman-Thomas

272

20  The English Literary Tradition: Shakespeare to the Gothic Nick Groom

286

21  Earlier Fantasy Fiction: Morris, Dunsany, and Lindsay Rachel Falconer

303



Contents

ix

22  The Inklings and Others: Tolkien and His Contemporaries David Bratman

317

23  Later Fantasy Fiction: Tolkien’s Legacy Dimitra Fimi

335

24  Modernity: Tolkien and His Contemporaries Anna Vaninskaya

350

Part V:  Critical Approaches

367

25  The Critical Response to Tolkien’s Fiction Patrick Curry

369

26  Style and Intertextual Echoes Allan Turner

389

27  The Hero’s Journey Anna Caughey

404

28  Evil Christopher Garbowski

418

29  Nature Liam Campbell

431

30  Religion: An Implicit Catholicism Pat Pinsent

446

31  War Janet Brennan Croft

461

32  Women Adam Roberts

473

33  Art Christopher Tuthill

487

34  Music Bradford Lee Eden

501

35  Film Adaptations: Theatrical and Television Versions Kristin Thompson

514

36  Games and Gaming: Quantasy Péter Kristóf Makai

530

General Bibliography Index

545 555

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to several people for providing the inspiration for this volume, and for assisting in its production. I am particularly grateful to Catherine Parker at the Bodleian Library, Cathleen Blackburn of Maier Blackburn, and William Fliss of Marquette University for their assistance in key areas of this project. My thanks also to Emma Bennett of Wiley Blackwell for supporting the venture. Personally I would also like to thank my wife, Sarah, for putting up with the countless hours I had to spend editing; my family for their support and insights into Tolkien; Nick Gleeson and Tim Jones, my inspirational English teachers; Barbara Raw for allowing me to do my first extended undergraduate essay on Tolkien; and all the members of the Bancroft’s School Games Club (1981–1983) who led me down this path in the first place. My thanks also go to the Tolkien Literary Estate and HarperCollins Publishers Ltd for allowing material to be reproduced from the following works: The Hobbit © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited 1937, 1965; The Fellowship of the Ring © Fourth Age Limited 1954, 1955, 1966; The Two Towers © Fourth Age Limited 1954, 1955, 1966; The Return of the King © Fourth Age Limited 1954, 1955, 1966; Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1981; The Silmarillion © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited and C. R. Tolkien 1977; The History of Middle-earth © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust and C. R. Tolkien 1983–1996; On Fairy-Stories © The Tolkien Trust 1964; A Secret Vice © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1983; Mr. Bliss © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited 1982; Letters from Father Christmas © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited 1976; Roverandom © The Tolkien Trust 1998; Farmer Giles of Ham © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited 1949; Leaf by Niggle © The Tolkien Trust 1964; Smith of Wootton Major © The Tolkien Trust 1967; The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited 1953, 1966; Unfinished Tales © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited and C. R. Tolkien 1980; Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust

xii

Acknowledgments

1983; The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún © The Tolkien Trust 2009 for writings by JRRT, Foreword, Introduction, Commentaries, Appendices, and all other materials © C. R. Tolkien 2009; English and Welsh © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1983; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1975; Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust and Professor Alan Bliss 1982; Progress in Bimble Town © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1931. Stuart D. Lee Oxford University

Notes on Contributors

Maria Artamonova, D.Phil. (Oxon.), has taught Old and Middle English as well as courses on Tolkien at the Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education and a number of summer schools. Her publications include “Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles,” in Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (2010), and translations of Tolkien’s scholarly articles into Russian. Mark Atherton, D.Phil., teaches English language and literature at Oxford University and specializes in medieval literature. He has published on Hildegard of Bingen, the study of language in the nineteenth century, and late Anglo-Saxon literature; his recent publications include Teach Yourself Old English (2006/2010) and There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit (2012). Tom Birkett is a Lecturer in Old English at the School of English, University College Cork (UCC). He gained a D.Phil. in Old Norse and Old English from Oxford, and has written essays on the Old English riddles, manuscript marginalia, and the use of the runic script in early medieval poetry, as well as working as research assistant on a study looking at the influence of Old Norse myth on poets writing in English. He teaches on the undergraduate and MA programs at UCC, and is continuing research into medieval textual culture and the reception of Old Norse literature. David Bratman is co-editor of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review, and edited The Masques of Amen House by Charles Williams. His articles include studies of Tolkien, the Inklings, Mervyn Peake, and Neil Gaiman. Formerly a librarian at Stanford University, he works as a classical music critic. Liam Campbell is an independent writer and scholar from Northern Ireland who has lectured in English literature for the University of Ulster. He is the author of The Ecological Augury in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (2011) and has published previously

xiv

Notes on Contributors

on Tolkien and environmentalism, as well as given many talks across Europe and America on Tolkien, ecocriticism, and contemporary literature. Anna Caughey D.Phil. (Oxon.), teaches Old and Middle English at Keble College, Oxford. Her primary research interests are in the representation of masculinity, knighthood, and chivalry in both medieval and contemporary literature. Her most recently published articles are on conciliation in fifteenth-century Scottish romance, the Alexander the Great and adaptations of Arthurian literature for children. Janet Brennan Croft is Head of Access Services and Delivery Services and Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma Libraries. She is the author of War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (2004; Mythopoeic Award for Inklings Studies). She has also written on the Peter Jackson films, J. K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, and other authors, and is editor or co-editor of four collections of literary essays, including Tolkien on Film (2004), Tolkien and Shakespeare (2007). She edits the scholarly journal Mythlore. Patrick Curry is a writer and scholar living in London. He is the author of several books, including Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity, 2nd edn. (2004) and, most recently, Ecological Ethics: An Introduction, 2nd edn. (2011), as well as many papers in collections on Tolkien. He has been a Lecturer at Bath Spa University and the University of Kent. Leslie A. Donovan teaches interdisciplinary undergraduate courses as an Associate Professor in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico. Her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington emphasized Old and Middle English literature. Among her publications are studies of valkyries in The Lord of the Rings, women saints in Old English prose, the character of Hunferth in Beowulf, and various pedagogical topics. Bradford Lee Eden is Dean of Library Services at Valparaiso University. He has a masters and Ph.D. degrees in musicology and an MS in library science. He publishes in the areas of librarianship, medieval music and liturgy, and J. R. R. Tolkien. His most recent book is Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien (2010). He is also the editor of The Journal of Tolkien Research. Rachel Falconer is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Lausanne. Her publications include Orpheus Dis(re)membered: Milton and the Myth of the Poet-Hero (1996), Hell in Contemporary Literature (2005), and The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership (2009). She is currently working on contemporary nature writing, and editing a collection of essays on the poet Kathleen Jamie. Dimitra Fimi is a Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She is the author of Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (2008), which won the Mythopoeic Scholarship award in Inklings Studies. She has also published articles



Notes on Contributors

xv

and essays in journals (including Folklore and Tolkien Studies) and in edited collections (including Picturing Tolkien, 2011, and Critical Insights: The Fantastic, 2013). She lectures on Tolkien and fantasy literature at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Verlyn Flieger is Professor Emerita, Department of English, University of Maryland. Her books on Tolkien include Splintered Light, A Question of Time, Interrupted Music, and Green Suns and Faërie. She edited the Extended Edition of Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major, and with Douglas A. Anderson the Expanded Edition of On Fairy-stories. With Carl Hostetter she edited Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth. She is co-editor of the journal Tolkien Studies. Christopher Garbowski is an Associate Professor at the Department of English at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland. He is the author of a number of books, including Recovery and Transcendence for the Contemporary Mythmaker: The Spiritual Dimension in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (2000) and Spiritual Values in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2005). John Garth is the author of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003), winner of the Mythopoeic Award for Scholarship in Inklings Studies. He has reviewed books by and about Tolkien in The Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Beast, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Evening Standard, and Tolkien Studies, and he contributed key articles to the Routledge J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. He lives in Oxford and has spoken on Tolkien to general and specialist audiences in Britain, mainland Europe, and the United States. Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter. He has written extensively on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and culture, and on national identity. Among his books are The Forger’s Shadow (2002), The Union Jack (2006), The Gothic (2012), and The Seasons (2013). He is currently writing a cultural history of British saints’ days, a polemic on the English landscape, and a study of Tolkien and the Gothic. John R. Holmes has been teaching English at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio) since 1985. He has published numerous articles on Tolkien, including several in the Routledge J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. Thomas Honegger holds a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) where he taught Old and Middle English. He is, since 2002, Professor for English Medieval Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena (Germany). Leena Kahlas-Tarkka is a University Lecturer in English Philology in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her main research interests lie within the area of historical linguistics, especially syntax from Old to Early Modern English. She has also published an article on Beowulf and Tolkien in Finnish.

xvi

Notes on Contributors

Stuart D. Lee is a member of the University of Oxford’s English Faculty, and Merton College. His Ph.D. was in Old English and he lectures on Old English, Tolkien, and the Poetry of World War I. He co-authored The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (2005) and Key Concepts in Medieval Literature (2006), both with Elizabeth Solopova. He has published in Tolkien Studies, and also numerous articles on Old English, War Poetry, and Digital Humanities. Jaquelyn S. Lyman-Thomas is a Professor of English, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Humanities at Anne Arundel Community College (Arnold, MD). She is a freelance writer, an advanced student of the Welsh language, and a member of the Board of Cymdeithas Madog, the Welsh Studies Institute in North America. Péter Kristóf Makai is a Ph.D. candidate at the Doctoral School of Literary Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary, investigating the representation of mental functioning in novels about autism. He has published articles about the relationship between the fantastic and games in Tolkien Studies and in Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales (ed. Anna Kérchy, 2011). His research interests include game studies and ludology, narratology, cognitive literary and cultural studies, science fiction, and fantasy studies. Gergely Nagy is a Junior Assistant Professor at the University of Szeged, Hungary, where he teaches contemporary popular culture (including Tolkien) and medieval cultural history and literature. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on The Silmarillion, and has published articles on Tolkien, Malory, and Chaucer. Corey Olsen is the President of Signum University and the founder of the Mythgard Institute, an online teaching center for the study of Tolkien and other works of imaginative literature. He received his Ph.D. in medieval English literature from Columbia University, and his first book, Exploring J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, was published in 2012. Carl Phelpstead is a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University in Wales. He has published extensively on Old Norse and medieval English literature and on modern medievalism, including Tolkien. His book Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies in 2012. Pat Pinsent is Senior Research Fellow at Roehampton University, London, specializing in Children’s Literature, the subject matter of most of her 15 books, and supervising research students. She researches the current development of children’s literature, and the relationship between it and spirituality/religion; she also edits two journals. John D. Rateliff, an independent scholar, holds a Ph.D. from Marquette University. His major contribution to Tolkien studies is The History of The Hobbit, an edition, with extensive commentary, of the manuscripts of The Hobbit. He has contributed to volumes such as Tolkien’s Legendarium and journals such as Tolkien Studies.



Notes on Contributors

xvii

Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-century Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of various books, including several books of and on science fiction and fantasy. His latest critical work is The Riddles of the Hobbit (2013). Tom Shippey has taught medieval studies at several universities, including Oxford and Harvard, and for many years held the Chair at Leeds which Tolkien held in the 1920s. His The Road to Middle-earth was published in 1982, and has appeared in successive revised and expanded editions to 2005. It was followed by Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000) and Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (2007). He has also published extensively on Old and Middle English, and Old Norse. Arden R. Smith holds a Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and has published numerous articles on Tolkien, particularly on Tolkien’s invented writing systems and translations of Tolkien’s works. He is a member of a project to edit Tolkien’s unpublished linguistic papers. Elizabeth Solopova is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and William Golding Research Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. She researches on Old and Middle English literature, historical linguistics, book history, and medieval liturgical and biblical manuscripts. She is the author, with Dr Stuart Lee, of The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (2005). Kristin Thompson received her Ph.D. in cinema studies in 1977 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has been an Honorary Fellow since 1982. With husband David Bordwell, she is the co-author of two widely used textbooks: Film Art and Film History. She has published ten other books on cinema, most recently The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood and, with Bordwell, Minding Movies: Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking. She has also published a study of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves/Wooster series and is at work on a book closely analyzing narrative technique in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings novels. Allan Turner is a Lecturer in English at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. His main areas of research are translation studies and stylistics, particularly in relation to the works of Tolkien. Christopher Tuthill is Assistant Professor and Information Services Librarian at Baruch College, The City University of New York. He has recently published articles on Tolkien and on Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea novels. Anna Vaniskaya D.Phil. (Oxon.) is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History, and Propaganda, 1880–1914 (2010), and has published over 20 articles and chapters on topics ranging from Chesterton, Orwell, and Tolkien to

xviii

Notes on Contributors

socialism, popular reading, education, historiography, and Anglo-Russian literary relations. Elizabeth A. Whittingham teaches English at the College at Brockport State University of New York and at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York. Her book, The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-earth (2008), examines nearly six decades of Tolkien’s writings. She has been published in the Routledge J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (2006), The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock (2011), and in various journals. In 2009 she was a guest lecturer at the NEH Tolkien Summer Institute at Texas A&M University. She has presented at various conferences, most frequently at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.

Editorial Practices and Abbreviations

This section lists the editorial practices and main abbreviations used in this volume, which for the most part are in keeping with those established in the journal Tolkien Studies. Titles of Tolkien’s works are always notoriously difficult. Those that have been published in their own single volume are italicized, such as The Hobbit. Other titles of chapters, poems, or texts that are contained within other volumes are given in inverted commas, such as “Errantry,” “Leaf by Niggle,” “The Notion Club Papers,” or “A Secret Vice.” Three particular instances deserve special mention. “On Fairy-stories” refers to the lecture/essay of that name, whereas On Fairy-stories or OFS refers to the edition by Flieger and Anderson. “Narn i Hîn Húrin” or “Tale of the Children of Húrin” or “Narn” refers to either the chapter in Unfinished Tales or the text in The History of Middleearth, The Children of Húrin is the edition published by Christopher Tolkien in 2007. “The Silmarillion” or “Silmarillion” refers to the collection of papers and tales assembled by Tolkien during his lifetime, The Silmarillion to the version published in 1977. Similarly one must confront the issue of the races of Middle-earth. Elves, Men, Dwarves, etc., are capitalized (as are Hobbits, though Tolkien himself was inconsistent here). Foreign or unfamiliar words are italicized and then translated: for example, sigel “sun.” Tolkien’s use of diacritics (macrons, circumflexes, accents), usually denoting length marks in vowels (or in the case of diaeresis, e.g. “ë” separate enforced pronunciation of the vowel), was not consistent. They have been retained in keeping with the authoritative printed edition.

Bibliography Each essay has a list of non-Tolkien References specific to that chapter, and occasionally specific Further Reading. The General Bibliography at the end of the volume

xx

Editorial Practices and Abbreviations

contains details of texts by Tolkien, suggested Further Reading, and web sites. A list of Tolkien’s academic publications can be found at the end of ch. 2.

Abbreviations A&U AW “Beowulf” Beowulf Chronology Companion EETS Exodus f. FG FH FR

H HoH Jewels l. or ll. Lays Letters Lost Tales I Lost Tales II Lost Road MC MED MEV Morgoth OED OFS

Allen & Unwin (Publishers). Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse (Tolkien 1962a). “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (MC 5–48). The Old English poem of the same name. Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. 2006. The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. Vol. 1: Chronology. London: HarperCollins. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, eds. 2005. The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. London: HarperCollins. Early English Text Society. The Old English Exodus (Tolkien 1981). folio. Farmer Giles of Ham (Tolkien 2008a). Finn and Hengest (Tolkien 1982). The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien 2004a). For The Lord of the Rings, citations are by book, chapter, and page number. For example, “RK, V, i, 977” is The Return of the King, Book Five, chapter 1, page 977. The Hobbit (Tolkien 1995). John Rateliff. 2012. The History of The Hobbit. 2nd edn. London: HarperCollins. The War of the Jewels (Tolkien 1994). line(s). The Lays of Beleriand (Tolkien 1985). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Tolkien 1995b). Citations are by page number. The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (Tolkien 1983b). The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (Tolkien 1984). The Lost Road and Other Writings (Tolkien 1987). The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (Tolkien 1983a). R. E. Lewis, ed. 2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. A Middle English Vocabulary (Tolkien 1922). Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion (Tolkien 1993). The Oxford English Dictionary. “On Fairy-stories” (Tolkien 2008b).

“Papers” PDE Peoples Reader’s Guide RK S Sauron SG SGGK SGPSO Shaping Sir Gawain Smith TL Treason TT UT War YWES

Editorial Practices and Abbreviations “The Notion Club Papers” (in Tolkien 1992a). Present Day English. The Peoples of Middle-earth (Tolkien 1996). Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. 2006. The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. Vol. 2: Reader’s Guide. London: HarperCollins. The Return of the King (Tolkien 2004a). Cited by book number, chapter, and page. The Silmarillion (Tolkien 1977). Sauron Defeated: The End of the Third Age (Tolkien 1992a). The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (Tolkien 2009a). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Tolkien and Gordon 1967). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo (Tolkien 1995d). The Shaping of Middle-earth (Tolkien 1986). The Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Smith of Wootton Major (Tolkien 1990a). Tree and Leaf (Tolkien 2001a). The Treason of Isengard (Tolkien 1989). The Two Towers (Tolkien 2004a). Cited by book number, chapter, and page. Unfinished Tales (Tolkien 1998c). The War of the Ring (Tolkien 1990b). The Year’s Work in English Studies.

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Brief Chronology of the Life and Works of J. R. R. Tolkien

Date

Significant Events1

1892

Born January 3, Bloemfontein, South Africa to Mabel and Arthur Tolkien. Brother Hilary is born.

1894

1895

1896

Returns to England with Mother and Brother. Father dies. Moves to Sarehole.

1897 1899 1900

1901 1902

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

Oxford University English School established (Faculty of English Language and Literature).

William Morris dies. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Start of 2nd Boer War.

Attends King Edward’s School, Moseley, Birmingham. Enters St Philip’s Grammar School.

Queen Victoria dies. Coronation of Edward VII. End of Boer War

Date

Significant Events1

1903

Awarded scholarship and returns to King Edward’s School. Mother dies. Meets Edith Bratt. Moves to Edgbaston. Passes Oxford Entrance exam. Enters Exeter College, Oxford.

1904 1908 1910

1911 1913

Awarded Second Class degree in Honour Moderations, begins Honours School of English Language and Literature.

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

1916

1917

1918

Selected Historical Events

Barrie’s Peter Pan. Edward VII dies. George V crowned. “The Battle of Eastern Field” published in The King Edward’s School Chronicle. “From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames” in The Stapledon Magazine, 4.20: 11.

1914

1915

xxiii

Brief Chronology

Awarded First Class Honours. Commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers. Marries Edith Bratt. Sees action on the Somme. Invalided home. Son John is born.

“Goblin Feet” in Oxford Poetry 1915, reprinted in 1917 and 1920.

Joins staff of New Oxford English Dictionary. Works on letter W.

Introduction to G. B. Smith’s A Spring Harvest.

Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.

Start of World War I. August 4, Britain declares war on Germany. Oxford English Faculty Library opens. Dardanelles Campaign.

Battle of Jutland. July 1, start of the Battle of the Somme. United States enters War. 3rd Battle of Ypres. Women over 30 get the vote. World War I armistice. (Continued)

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Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

1920

Appointed as Reader in English Language, Leeds University. Son Michael is born. E. V. Gordon joins Leeds University.

“The Happy Mariners” in The Stapledon Magazine, 5.26: 69–70.

Oxford University admits women. Ancient Greek no longer required for Oxford entrance. BBC formed. Joyce’s Ulysses. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

1922

1923

1924

Appointed Professor of English Language, Leeds University. Son Christopher is born.

A Middle English Vocabulary for K. Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Prose and Verse. Issued separately at first then included as glossary. “Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden” in The Gryphon, N.S. 4.4: 130. “Holy Maidenhood” in Times Literary Supplement, April 26: 281. “The City of the Gods” in The Microcosm, 8.1: 8. “Obituary: Henry Bradley” in Bulletin of the Modern Humanities Research Association, 20: 4–5. “Tha Eadigan Saelidan (The Happy Mariners),” “Why the Man in the Moon Came Down too Soon,” and “Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo” in A Northern Venture: Verses by Members of the Leeds University English Association, 15–20. “The Cat and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked” in Yorkshire Poetry, 2.19: 1–3. “An Evening in Tavrobel,” “The Lonely Isle,” and “The Princess Ni” in Leeds University Verse 1914–24. “Philology, General Works” in The Year’s Work in English Studies, 4: 20–37.

First Labour Government.



Brief Chronology

xxv

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

1925

Appointed Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of AngloSaxon, Pembroke College, Oxford.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

1926

Moves to 22 Northmoor Road, Oxford. Forms “Coalbiters” club. Meets C. S. Lewis.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (edited with E. V. Gordon). “Some Contributions to MiddleEnglish Lexicography” in Review of English Studies, 1.2: 210–215. “Light as leaf on Lindentree” in The Gryphon, N.S. 6.6: 217. “The Devil’s Coach-Horses” in Review of English Studies, 1.3: 331–336. “Tinfang Warble” and “The Grey Bridge of Tavrobel” in the Inter-University Magazine (1925? 1927?). Contributes translation to Rhys Roberts’s “Gerald of Wales and the Survival of Welsh.” “Philology, General Works” in The Year’s Work in English Studies, 5: 26–65.

1927

1928

1929

Daughter Priscilla is born.

The General Strike.

“The Nameless Land” in G. S. Tancred (ed.), Realities: An Anthology of Verse, 24. “Philology, General Works” in The Year’s Work in English Studies, 6: 32–66. “Adventures in Unnatural History and the Medieval Metres, being the Freaks of Fisiologus” in The Stapledon Magazine, 7: 40. “Foreword” to W. E. Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District. “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meithhad” in Essays and Studies, 14: 104–126. (Continued)

xxvi

Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

1930

Whilst marking exam scripts writes “In the hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Moves to 20 Northmoor Road. Conversation with Dyson and Lewis possibly leads to theory of sub-creation and “Mythopoeia.”

“The Oxford English School” in The Oxford Magazine, 48.21: 778–782.

1931

1932

1933 1934

“Progress in Bimble Town” in The Oxford Magazine, 50.1: 22.

“Sigelwara Land” Pt 1 in Medium Ævum, 1.3: 183–196. “The Name ‘Nodens’ ” in Report of the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Sites in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, 132–137. “A Philologist on Esperanto” in The British Esperantist, 28. “Errantry” in The Oxford Magazine, 52.5: 180. “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale” in Transactions of the Philological Society, 1–70, see also Tolkien Studies, 5 (2008): 109–171. “Looney” in The Oxford Magazine, 52.9: 340. “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” in The Oxford Magazine, 52.13: 464–465. “Sigelwara Land” Pt 2 in Medium Æevum, 3.2: 95–111. “Firiel” in The Chronicle of the Covenants of the Sacred Heart, 4.

Selected Historical Events



xxvii

Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

1936

Delivers Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture on “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (London)

Songs for the Philologists with E. V. Gordon and others. Tolkien has 13 poems in the volume including “Ofer Widne Garsecg.” “The Shadow Man” and “Noel” in Annual of Our Lady’s School. The Hobbit: or There and Back Again. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” in Proceedings of the British Academy, 22: 245–295. “The Dragon Visit” in The Oxford Magazine, 55.11: 342. “Knocking at the Door” in The Oxford Magazine, 55.13: 403. “Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden” in The Oxford Magazine, 55.15: 473. Contributions to E. V. Gordon’s The Battle of Maldon. Letter in The Observer, February 20.

George V dies. Abdication crisis.

1937

1938

1939

1940

Delivers Andrew Lang Lecture “On Fairy-stories” (St Andrews). “Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of Beowulf” in J. R. Clark Hall, Beowulf and the Finnsburg Fragment: A Translation (revised by C. L. Wrenn).

1941 1942 1944

George VI crowned.

Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet. T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. World War II begins. Britain declares war on Germany, September 3. The Battle of Britain.

Pearl Harbor. United States enters war. Introductory note in A Philological Miscellany. Sir Orfeo [booklet].

D-Day. (Continued)

xxviii

Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

1945

Elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, Oxford.

“Leaf by Niggle” in The Dublin Review, 432: 46–61. “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun” in The Welsh Review, 4.4: 254–266. Letter on “The Name Coventry” in The Catholic Herald, February 23. Letter on “Research v Literature” in The Sunday Times, April 14. “ ‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde” in English Studies, 28.6: 168–170. “On Fairy-stories” in C. S. Lewis (ed.), Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 38–89. “MS. Bodley 34: A Re-collation of a Collation” in Studia Neophilologica, 20.1–2: 65–72. Farmer Giles of Ham.

Germany surrenders. Atomic bombs exploded over Japan.

1946 1947

Moves to 3 Manor Road.

1948 1949 1950 1951 1952

1953

Finishes The Lord of the Rings. Moves to 99 Holywell Street.

Peake’s Titus Groan.

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Revised edition of The Hobbit. Tolkien is interviewed and recorded reading several extracts from his works by George Sayer. Delivers W. Ker Memorial Lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Glasgow). Move to 76 Sandfield Road, Headington.

George VI dies. Queen Elizabeth II crowned.

“The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm’s Son” in Essays and Studies, N.S. 6: 1–18. “Middle English ‘Losenger’ ” in Essais de Philologie Moderne (1951), 63–76. “A Fourteenth-Century Romance” in Radio Times, December 4. Contributions to E. V. Gordon’s Pearl.

Date

Significant Events1

1954 1955

xxix

Brief Chronology

Delivers O’Donnell Lecture “English and Welsh” (Oxford). “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” dramatized for BBC radio.

1958

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

The Fellowship of the Ring. The Two Towers. The Return of the King. “Imram” in Time and Tide, 1561. “Preface” in M. B. Salu’s The Ancrene Riwle.

“Preface” to Gooden’s The Old English Apollonius of Tyre.

Pinter’s The Birthday Party performed.

1960

Letter in Triode, 18.

1962

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. “English and Welsh” in Angles and Britons: O’Donnell Lectures, 1–41. Tree and Leaf. “Once Upon a Time” and “The Dragon’s Visit” in C. Hillier (ed.), Winter’s Tales for Children: 1, 44–45 and 84–87.

Latin no longer required to be admitted to Oxford University. Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. “Love Me Do” by The Beatles reaches no. 1.

1959

1963 1964 1965

Retires from Oxford Professorship. Delivers Valedictory Address.

C. S. Lewis dies.

Ballantine Books in New York issue second edition of FR with new foreword, TT and RK to follow (1966). Ace Books scandal in United States.

Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone.

(Continued)

xxx

Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

1966

Deitch makes 12-minute animation of The Hobbit.

“Tolkien on Tolkien” in Diplomat, 18.197: 39. Contributed to The Jerusalem Bible. The Tolkien Reader. “A Elbereth Gilthoniel” and translation in Tolkien Journal, 2.1. Smith of Wootton Major “For W. H. A.” in Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review, 18.2: 96–97. The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle.

1967

1968

BBC Radio adaptation of The Hobbit. Interviewed by BBC TV for Tolkien in Oxford. Moves to Bournemouth.

1969

1971 1972

1973

Edith Tolkien dies. Tolkien is awarded CBE. Returns to Merton College rooms. Receives Honorary Degree of Letters from Oxford. Dies September 2. Posthumous Events Related to Tolkien

1974

Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.

Letter in W. L. White’s The Image of Man in C. S. Lewis. Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham. “The Hoard” in R. L. Green (ed.), The Hamish Hamilton Book of Dragons.

1970

Selected Historical Events

Letter in The Daily Telegraph, July 4.

Posthumous Publications Bilbo’s Last Song.

Moon landing.

Date

Brief Chronology Significant Events1

1975

1976 1977

1978

Carpenter’s Biography. Rankin/Bass release TV animation of The Hobbit. Carpenter’s The Inklings. Ralph Bakshi releases animated version of The Lord of the Rings.

1979

1980 1981

1982

1983 1984 1985 1986

Rankin/Bass release The Return of the King for TV. BBC produce full dramatization for radio of The Lord of the Rings. Tom Shippey publishes The Road to Middle-earth.

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

xxxi Selected Historical Events

Translations of Sir Gawain, Sir Orfeo, and Pearl. “Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings” in J. Lobdell (ed.), A Tolkien Compass. Letter in Mythlore, 3.2: 10. The Father Christmas Letters. Drawings by Tolkien. The Silmarillion.

The Tolkien Scrapbook.

“Valedictory Address” in M. Salu and R. T. Farrell (eds.), J. R. R. Tolkien: Scholar and Storyteller. Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien. Poems and Stories. Unfinished Tales. Carpenter publishes The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Old English Exodus. Mr Bliss. Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Lost Tales I. Lost Tales II. Lays. Shaping. (Continued)

xxxii Date

Brief Chronology Significant Events1

1987

Lost Road. The Hobbit (50th Anniversary). J. R. R. Tolkien: The Hobbit: Drawings, Watercolors, and Manuscripts. Return. “Mythopoeia” in Tree and Leaf (reprint). Treason. Oliphaunt. War. The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth. Bilbo’s Last Song. Sauron. The End of the Third Age. The Tolkien Family Album. Morgoth. Poems by J. R. R. Tolkien: I–III. Jewels. J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. Peoples. Tales from the Perilous Realm.

1988

1989 1990 1991 1992

1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

Roverandom. Farmer Giles of Ham (50th Anniversary). The End of the Third Age (The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part 4).

2000 2001 2002 2003

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Peter Jackson releases film of The Fellowship of the Ring. Jackson releases film of The Two Towers. Garth publishes Tolkien and the Great War. Jackson releases film of The Return of the King.

The Annotated Hobbit. Beowulf and the Critics. A Tolkien Miscellany.

Selected Historical Events

Pullman’s Northern Lights. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.



Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

2004

Tolkien Studies launched. Lee and Solopova publish The Keys of Middle-earth. Hammond and Scull publish The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. Hammond and Scull publish the two volumes Reader’s Guide and Chronology. Gilliver et al. publish The Ring of Words. Rateliff publishes The History of The Hobbit.

Sir Orfeo in Tolkien Studies.

2005

2006

2007 2008

2009 2010 2011 2012

2013

Phelpstead publishes Tolkien and Wales. Jackson releases film version of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Jackson releases film version of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

Smith of Wootton Major (Critical Edition). “Gerald of Wales” in Tolkien Studies.

The Children of Húrin. The Silmarillion (30th Anniversary) On Fairy-stories. “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale” and “The Reeve’s Tale” in Tolkien Studies. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. “Fate and Free Will” in Tolkien Studies. “The Story of Kullervo” and “On the Kalevala” in Tolkien Studies. The Art of the Hobbit. Letters from Father Christmas.

The Fall of Arthur.

xxxiii Selected Historical Events

xxxiv

Brief Chronology Notes

1  See also Chronology. 2  Does not include interviews or extracts of publications. Note also numerous writings by Tolkien on his invented languages have appeared in the journals Quettar, Vinyar Tengwar,

and Parma Eldalamberon (see chs. 1 and 14; and http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Index:Manu scripts_by_J.R.R._Tolkien, accessed September 2, 2013.)

Introduction Stuart D. Lee

Everyone has their own Tolkien story. Mine began with the early 1980s BBC Radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings lent to me at school. This was followed by the book itself, and then The Hobbit (a common experience). Enthused by what I had read I approached my English teacher to discuss the merits of both books, and having listened sympathetically to my arguments, he then presented me with another book he suggested I might like – it was a translation of Beowulf. Tolkien led me then to my future academic discipline of Old English which was to be such an important part of my life as it was of his. Yet every now and then our paths continued to cross. At University I chose to do an extended essay on the links between what I was studying as a student and Tolkien’s fiction. I innocently assumed that I was the first to notice this, but then I found Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth. This book opened my eyes to what could be possible, probably more so than any other book I had read. Anyone who studies Medieval Literature is never far from Tolkien, and his essay on “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is still essential discussion material in any course. However, that was not the end of it for me. I found myself at the Faculty of English at Oxford – Tolkien’s own department; Northmoor Road, Manor Road, Holywell Street were all places I came across daily; and eventually I became affiliated to Merton College – Tolkien’s last college at Oxford. Academically I also specialized in the literature of World War I, an event that occasionally brought Tolkien across my path again. Finally, at a time when the future of Old English was being discussed, enthusiasm for all things medieval soared with the release of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films. Tolkien’s work was introducing millions of people indirectly to medieval languages and literature – a driving factor also in my joint publication with A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

2

Introduction

Elizabeth Solopova of The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. However, ever present during all of this was the recognition that Tolkien could be very divisive. As Patrick Curry notes (ch. 25) the critical reaction to his works has not always been favorable (or fair). When I first opted to run a lecture series on Tolkien at Oxford, possibly the first ever, it was met with some disdain from other Faculty members. Partly this resulted from a dislike of his fiction, or a view that it was not worthy of a University literature course, but also because the wounds still ran deep in the Faculty over the prominence of medieval studies in the English syllabus which many felt originated with Lewis and Tolkien (“the Germanic wedge” as one colleague called them). To those, and to the people who no doubt will fulminate at the mere thought that Tolkien has been allowed a Companion in a literary series by such a respected publisher, I can only suggest they put their prejudices to one side and begin by looking at the table of contents for this volume. Presented here are 36 essays focusing on a single man who was a soldier, academic, lexicographer, but at the same time created a mythology that in itself was interwoven with the legends of medieval Europe, drew on the English literary tradition, and took forward (or possibly created) an entire genre. His works subsequently led to a film series that has broken box office records, controversially regularly topped polls as the best books of the twentieth century, inspired musicians as diverse as Led Zeppelin, and heavily influenced the direction of the computer-based gaming industry. Starting with John Garth’s brief account of Tolkien’s life in Part I, the temptation to dive directly into his mythology has been avoided, and instead Part II devotes its attention to exploring Tolkien’s career and impact as an academic – not only through his lectures and publications (Tom Honegger), but also in his excellent work as an editor (Tom Shippey). With this in mind one can then have a more balanced view of Tolkien’s fictional work which is clearly what he is best known for world-wide. Carl Phelpstead lays the foundations of Part III by exploring Tolkien’s own theories on fantasy (ch. 5), followed by an overview of the legendarium (the common term used to encapsulate Tolkien’s mythology) by Leslie Donovan. The key texts in Tolkien’s corpus are then taken in turn – The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (chs. 7–9 by Nagy, Rateliff, and Holmes respectively) – but as became clear with the work in the 1980s and 1990s by Tolkien’s son, Christopher, these were only a fragment of what was there. Tolkien had spent an entire lifetime creating his Middle-earth and the stories most people know seem to only skim the surface. Elizabeth Whittingham takes us through the extraordinary complexity of the 12-volume History of Middle-earth series; Verlyn Flieger then explores in detail his “time travel” stories (ch. 11); Corey Olsen looks at the extensive corpus of Tolkien’s often overlooked poetry; Maria Artamonova brings his so-called minor works to the fore; and the picture is completed by Arden Smith who details the invented languages of Middle-earth and Tolkien’s “secret vice.” What came before, what came after, and what might have influenced Tolkien is explored in Part IV. As a student and lecturer he studied and researched Old English,



Introduction

3

Middle English, and Old Norse, and was enthused (or not) by Finnish and Celtic Literature. Mark Atherton, Elizabeth Solopova, Tom Birkett, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, and Jackie Lyman-Thomas consider each of these in turn (chs. 15–19), looking at Tolkien’s engagement with them, and how they may (or may not) have influenced his writing. Nick Groom then looks at the contentious area of post-medieval literature, often overlooked in part due to Tolkien’s own apparent dismissal of the period. The next essays consider Middle-earth against the range of fantasy writers from those who preceded Tolkien (ch. 21 by Falconer), through his contemporaries and especially the role of the Inklings (ch. 22 by Bratman), to Tolkien’s legacy among later fantasy writers (ch. 23 by Fimi). Running through these essays is the common question – where do we place Tolkien? Is, as was once said, The Lord of the Rings the last literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages (Blisset 1959, 449) or is it a modernist novel dealing with themes core to the twentieth century as Anna Vaninskaya argues (ch. 24)? The final Part V includes a series of cross-cutting thematic explorations drawing from examples in all of Tolkien’s work – his fiction, his essays, his lectures, and his academic publications. Such an endeavor could run to several volumes in itself so the focus has had to be on the most widely discussed topics. Allan Turner considers Tolkien’s style, often used by critics to attack his writing (ch. 26); Anna Caughey looks at the recurring theme of the Quest as highlighted by W. H. Auden (1956) and then elaborated (1962) (ch. 27); and Tolkien’s depiction of evil (is it too simplistic as many say, or actually a finely tuned study?) is explored by Christopher Garbowski (ch. 28). In such a light how might we consider his own devout Catholicism with the seemingly pagan world he created – is there a Christian message there (ch. 30 by Pinsent)? Similarly, does Tolkien revel in warfare or is he more realistic in reflecting the attitudes of his time and personal experiences (ch. 31 by Croft)? And how should we react to his depiction of women (or lack of), an issue which has vexed many readers for some time (ch. 32 by Roberts)? What cannot be denied even by his staunchest of critics is the powerful afterlife of Tolkien’s work. An observer and supporter of the natural world, Tolkien’s depictions of the flora and fauna of Middle-earth and their destruction are seen by Liam Campbell as pioneering in their environmental attitudes (ch. 29). Similarly, while Tolkien himself engaged with the creative arts and wove them into his mythology, we also explore the creative industry that Tolkien’s imagination has engendered. From the various artists (ch. 33 by Tuthill), musicians (ch. 34 by Eden), and film-makers (ch. 35 by Thompson) who have tried to engage with his work, to the virtual representations of Middle-earth in the online world (ch. 36 by Makai), the Tolkien industry shows no sign of abating. A Companion is a guide, a vade mecum (“walk with me”), which can only hope to take the reader through the preliminary paths of discovery. Each essay will do just that, introduce the reader to the topic, but then point them in the direction of further study through the select bibliography after each chapter, and the further reading at the end of the volume. Wes þu hal!

4

Introduction References

Auden, W. H. 1956. “At the End of the Quest, Victory.” New York Times Book Review, January 22: 5. Auden, W. H. 1962. “The Quest Hero.” Texas Quarterly, 4: 81–93.

Blisset, William. 1959. “The Despots of the Rings.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 58: 448–456.

Part I

Life

1

A Brief Biography John Garth

Famous photographs have frozen J. R. R. Tolkien in his seventies. This is ironic: the photographers only came calling when fame was actively distracting him from writing. He wrote The Hobbit during his forties and most of The Lord of the Rings in his fifties; his most productive periods were between 23 and 58. Even the idea of the family man and professor, distilling his medievalist expertise into fiction, gives only half the picture. His grand creative project, the Middle-earth legendarium, was begun in his early twenties, during formative years marked by shocks and griefs, and by the violent advent of the modern age.1 The painful collisions between his faith and the fragility of life were highly productive. So was the encounter between his medievalism and the modern age, the violent birth throes of which engulfed his generation. Middle-earth emerged during World War I, which exposed Tolkien to almost unspeakable horror and killed most of his friends. No wonder he then pursued a life of calm, solid security. When a further World War threatened everything Tolkien held dear, it powered and colored The Lord of the Rings, partly by reawakening memories of the earlier war.

Ancestry and Childhood: 1892–1904 Imaginative and conflicting family legends emerged to explain why Tolkien’s German paternal ancestors left Saxony in the mid-eighteenth century; and to the origins of the surname Tollkühn, meaning “foolhardy.” An ancestor was said to have fought

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

8

John Garth

the Turks at the Siege of Vienna and captured the Sultan’s standard. Anyway, in nineteenth-century London and then Birmingham the family trade had been music: teaching, making pianos, or selling sheet music. However, Arthur Reuel Tolkien (b. 1857) left Birmingham in 1889 to work for the Bank of Africa; in 1890 he became branch manager in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, a Boer republic. His Birmingham fiancée Mabel Suffield (b. 1870) married him in Cape Town in April 1891. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892 in Bloemfontein, where he was baptized in the Anglican cathedral (for a detailed chronology of his life, see Scull and Hammond 2006). He became known to friends as Ronald, John Ronald, JRRT, Tollers, or just Tolkien. In 1894 a brother was born, Hilary Arthur Reuel (d. 1976). But the stovetop climate did not suit Ronald, so in 1895 Mabel took the boys to visit her parents in King’s Heath near Birmingham. That autumn Arthur contracted rheumatic fever and in February 1896 he died, so the single-parent family stayed in England. Even this early on, Middle-earth was perhaps brewing: giant spiders engendered by the tarantula bite he suffered in Bloemfontein, the recurrent sea awe awakened by seeing the Indian Ocean while not yet two years old, and the pivotal voyages of Eärendil and others prefigured by his own voyage to England. The Shire was shaped by his “particular love of central Midlands English countryside, based on good water, stones and elm trees and small quiet rivers”2 – and especially by Sarehole, a village outside Birmingham where Mabel and the boys moved in summer 1896. In stories told to Hilary, Ronald made ogres out of the big people in their little world – the miller’s son and the local farmer (see Hilary Tolkien 2009). Ronald came to identify closely with his mother’s Suffield family and their roots in the West Midlands – so closely that he even felt he had inherited an aptitude for the English dialect of the region, from the Old English of Mercia to the language of the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain poet (see chs. 15 and 16). Living frugally and supplemented by aid from relatives, Mabel taught the boys at home, introducing Ronald to drawing, calligraphy, botany, French, and Latin. She fueled his imagination with children’s literature including George MacDonald, as well as mythology and Arthuriana. He enjoyed fairy-stories (notably the Andrew Lang fairy books) but they were not his favorites. He particularly “desired dragons” but when he wrote about “a green great dragon” at the age of seven, and was told “green great” was bad English, it led to an interest in language which distracted him for years from further attempts at fiction (Carpenter 1977, 30–31; Letters 221). School began in fits and starts. Ronald enrolled in September 1900 at King Edward’s, and they moved into Birmingham to be nearer the school. Here, behind the new house in King’s Heath, he observed names on coal trucks which kindled his love for Welsh. But after Mabel embraced Catholicism and instructed the boys in the faith, most of the family distanced themselves, including the uncle who had been paying Ronald’s school fees. In 1902 the boys started at St Philip’s Grammar School, attached to the Catholic Oratory; but Ronald quickly outstripped his peers and Mabel resumed teaching the boys at home. By the age of ten Ronald was learning Greek, reading



A Brief Biography

9

Chaucer, and imbibing Mabel’s interest in etymology. A scholarship enabled him to return to King Edward’s in spring 1903. The following year Mabel fell ill from diabetes and they moved to Rednal in rural Worcestershire so she could convalesce. When she died in November 1904, Ronald felt she had martyred herself to keep her sons in the faith. He remembered “vainly waving a hand at the sky saying ‘it is so empty and cold’ ” (Letters 416). Yet he remained a lifelong Catholic, and later used Middle-earth to explore the consolations of mortality.

Youth: 1904–1911 The Oratory’s Father Francis Morgan (1857–1935), who had arranged and subsidized the cottage, now became the boys’ legal guardian. A strict but flamboyant and kind man, he spent his own money supplementing the returns from Mabel’s invested capital to provide for Ronald and Hilary. He moved them into a rented room in the Edgbaston home of their mother’s sister Beatrice. They spent much time at the Oratory and Father Francis took them for holidays at Lyme Regis, where Ronald found a fossilized jawbone and pretended it was a dragon’s. At King Edward’s Tolkien started German; but the headmaster and classics tutor Robert Cary Gilson also encouraged him to look at the history of Latin and Greek, while another teacher lent him an Anglo-Saxon primer, and in 1908 he discovered Joseph Wright’s grammar of Gothic. And as if the world did not hold enough languages to learn, he started inventing new ones. Nevbosh or “new nonsense” was a hodgepodge of mostly classical words.3 In due course he began devising codes and learning the artificial language Esperanto, creating the Spanish-influenced Naffarin, and supplementing the slim vocabulary of long-dead Gothic by reconstructing lost words from cognates in its kindred Germanic languages. Translating classical verse also awoke a taste for poetry: it was Homer that first gave him “the sensation of literary pleasure” (Letters 172). He acquired a taste for the Catholic mystic poet Francis Thompson and the verse and prose romances of medieval revivalist William Morris. By now he was reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Middle English, Beowulf in Old English, and the story of Sigurd in Old Norse. The boys were unhappy with Aunt Beatrice so in early 1908 Father Francis moved them to nearby Duchess Road. It was a fateful move. Here they befriended a fellow lodger and orphan, Edith Mary Bratt (b. 1889), who hoped to be a piano teacher; she and Ronald fell in love, reckless of differences. She was three years older than him, and an Anglican. By autumn 1909, when Father Francis got wind of the secret romance and forbade it, Ronald had neglected his studies, and in December he failed the Oxford University entrance exam. In January 1910 he was moved with Hilary to new Edgbaston lodgings and banned from all contact with Edith. She quickly moved to Cheltenham to stay with family friends.

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The loss of his mother and the forced break with Edith led to periodic introspection and despair which clashed with Ronald’s natural energy and geniality. It eventually proved a fertile brew. He turned in on himself, writing an unhappy diary but also a smattering of poetry that shows for the first time some interest in Faërie – perhaps due to seeing J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan in April 1910. Another building block of Middle-earth fell into place during the next school year – his last – when he discovered W. H. Kirby’s translation of the Kalevala, Finland’s mythological verse cycle (see ch. 18). But Ronald was not instantly turned into a mythmaker. His first published verse, “The Battle of the Eastern Field” (King Edward’s School Chronicle, March 1911), is not as epic as it sounds: it is a parody of epic, about a rugby match. Rugby proved important, nevertheless. It was on the school rugby pitch that he befriended Christopher Luke Wiseman (1893–1987) and Vincent Trought (b. 1893). The school debating, literary, and dramatic societies were soon dominated by their larger circle, including the headmaster’s son Robert Quilter Gilson (b. 1893). When Ronald was school librarian in his final term, the circle would meet for tea in the library office and at Barrow’s department store. They called themselves the Tea Club or Barrovian Society, soon simply the T.C.B.S.

Oxford Undergraduate: 1911–1915 After a summer hiking holiday in the Swiss Alps in October 1911 with his Aunt Jane Neave and others – material he later wove into The Hobbit – Tolkien began reading Classics at Exeter College, Oxford, having passed the entrance exam second time round and won an annual £60 exhibition (financial award lower than a scholarship). Here he formed new clubs, the Apolausticks and the Chequers, and involved himself in the college undergraduates’ Stapeldon Society and Essay Club. As was expected of Exonians born overseas, he also enrolled in the King Edward’s Horse, a territorial regiment. Meanwhile the thriving T.C.B.S. led a production of Sheridan’s The Rivals at King Edward’s that Christmas, in which Tolkien appeared as Mrs Malaprop, but a month later suffered its first loss when illness claimed Trought’s life. Further distractions included a rekindling of Tolkien’s love of Finnish, which blossomed after he discovered C. N. E. Eliot’s Finnish Grammar in the college library. But he wrote to Edith to renew his courtship the minute he turned 21 in January 1913. Her reply would have been a devastating blow to anyone less single-minded than Tolkien – she was engaged to another man – but Tolkien was undeterred. He took the train to Cheltenham and in the course of a long afternoon’s conversation he won her over. Telling no one but Father Francis (who now accepted the inevitable) the two became engaged. Tolkien’s classical studies reached their ignominious end with Honour Moderations, the February 1913 mid-course exams. He only achieved a Second, despite an alpha in comparative philology. The problem was sheer boredom with Classics. It was the Northern world of the Germanic and Celtic peoples that drew him. So he switched



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to English Language and Literature, specifically the language course, which included very little literature later than Geoffrey Chaucer but covered Old and Middle English, Gothic and Germanic Philology, as well as Old Norse. This, together with his engagement, set Tolkien squarely on his future road, academically and personally. But his creativity still ran no further than drawing landscapes or occasional symbolist pictures he called “Ishnesses” (Hammond and Scull 1995, 40), inventing languages and scripts that were rudimentary by his later standards, and writing a very few poems. The outbreak of World War I in summer 1914 was a profound shock – “the collapse of all my world” (Letters 393) – but Tolkien needed his degree for an academic career and delayed enlistment (on the war and its creative impact, see Garth 2003). It was also a creative turning point. Staying with Aunt Jane in Gedling, Nottinghamshire, in September he wrote “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star.” In method (it extrapolates from an obscure Old English reference to earendel) and imaginative specifics (it describes the mariner Éarendel sailing over the earth’s rim into the stars), the poem counts as the first Middle-earth text. Tolkien worked also on “The Story of Kullervo,” a retelling from the Kalevala, and enthused about the latter in a talk to college societies (see Flieger 2010; Tolkien 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). As he later wrote, he now “made the discovery that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition” (Letters 231). In other words, all this inventing of language was empty without a mythology to go with it. After a T.C.B.S. “Council of London” at the Wiseman home in December, Tolkien experienced “a tremendous opening up” of creative energy and ideas (Letters 10). Poems poured out, fluent and diverse (including “Goblin Feet,” 1915). Tolkien also began crafting a new language, Qenya, with its own linguistic history but inspired by the sounds of Finnish.4 More importantly, it would have its own stories. In the poems and in the Qenya lexicon, Tolkien first described the Elves, Eldar or “fairies” living with the divine Valar westward across the ocean from mortal Men.5 Britain was visualized in some ancient era as the Lonely Isle of the Elves, with Warwick (Edith’s new home) as its capital. Later Tolkien said his taste for fairy-stories was “quickened to full life by war” (OFS 56). Amazed by his poetry, the T.C.B.S., now reduced to Tolkien, Wiseman, Gilson, and Geoffrey Bache Smith (b. 1894), began to believe they had “been granted some spark of fire . . . that was destined to kindle a new light” in the world (Letters 10).

Soldier and Mythographer: 1915–1918 Tolkien achieved a First in his June 1915 final exams and immediately joined the Lancashire Fusiliers as a second lieutenant. A short officers’ course in Bedford was followed by training with the regiment’s 13th Battalion near Lichfield, and then on Cannock Chase. The outdoor life among men of all classes, and the darkness of the times, prompted him to write now not just of Elves but of mortals, wandering benighted in a world of fleeting enchantment. Urged on by the T.C.B.S. – with Smith

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and Gilson now at the Western Front – in early 1916 Tolkien submitted a collection of poems, “The Trumpets of Faërie,” to Sidgwick & Jackson, but the publishers turned it down. He married Edith in Warwick on March 22, 1916. The next month she moved with her cousin Jennie Grove to Great Haywood, Staffordshire, to be near him, but soon after that his embarkation orders came. After a final night with Edith, on June 6 he took ship to France. Transferred to the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, Tolkien was fortunate to be five miles from the front when the Somme offensive was launched on July 1, but he witnessed the “animal horror” of the trenches (Letters 72) on July 14–16, when his battalion seized Ovillers-la-Boisselle from the Germans. On return to base he learned that Gilson had been killed, one of 21,000 British deaths on the first day of battle. It seemed to call into question the T.C.B.S. “spark of fire,” but new duties as battalion signals officer gave Tolkien scant time to ponder. During three months in and out of the trenches, as the Somme became a mire, he wrote little except a handful of poems. Days after the battalion seized Regina Trench on an icy October 21, Tolkien succumbed to trench fever, a potentially fatal louse-borne virus. His battalion was sent on to Ypres, but the hospital ship Asturias returned him to England. The Somme dealt a final blow to the T.C.B.S. even after the battle was over. Smith was hit by a stray shellburst while organizing a football match several miles behind the lines; he died on December 3 (his poetry was edited by Tolkien and Wiseman as A Spring Harvest, published in 1918). Many other friends from school, University, and army died in the Great War, but from late 1916 Tolkien’s ill health kept him in England. At this point Tolkien achieved a new creative breakthrough, and Middle-earth assumed its lasting moral dimensions: a scene of desperate heroism in a war against tyrannical and demonic evil (see ch. 28). In Birmingham University’s wartime hospital and then convalescing at Great Haywood, Tolkien wrote the prose “Fall of Gondolin,” in which mortal Tuor joins the Elves fighting the forces of Melko (later Melkor Morgoth). In the winter of 1916–1917 he also wrote “The Cottage of Lost Play,” in which a Germanic mariner called Eriol meets the Elves of the Lonely Isle, whose histories were to form The Book of Lost Tales, the prose mythological cycle first adumbrated in Tolkien’s lexicon and poems (see ch. 10). In April 1917 Tolkien was posted to the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers, which trained recruits while guarding Yorkshire’s Holderness coast. Here he began a lexicon of a Welsh-inspired Elvish language, called Gnomish or Goldogrin6 – the prototype of the Sindarin of The Lord of the Rings. Edith moved to be with him; and a walk at Roos in which she danced among flowers of Queen Anne’s lace inspired “The Tale of Tinúviel,” written in hospital at Hull that summer: the enduring “kernel of the mythology” (Letters 221). However, tired of repeated moves, Edith returned to Cheltenham, and on November 16 gave birth to their first son John Francis Reuel Tolkien (d. 2003). Promoted to lieutenant, Tolkien wintered with the 9th Royal Defence Corps at Easington; returned to the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers at Cannock Chase in the spring of 1918, when he was reunited with his family; but spent much of that summer



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in hospital with gastritis. He may have written the Kullervo-inspired story of Túrin Turambar there.

Lexicography and “Lost Tales”: 1918–1920 Released from military duties in October 1918, Tolkien spent almost the next two years immersed in words. His former tutor William Craigie, one of the editors of the then incomplete Oxford English Dictionary, had him made an assistant lexicographer, dealing primarily with the etymologies of w- words under co-editor Henry Bradley. Supplementing his income with private tutorials to English undergraduates, in summer 1919 Tolkien began a Middle English glossary for Kenneth Sisam’s student anthology Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. He recalled that he “learned more in those two years than in any other equal period” (Carpenter 1977, 108). From 1919 Tolkien kept diaries using invented scripts which became linked to his legendarium. The latter acquired an overarching structure, opening with the cosmogonical “Music of the Ainur” and continuing with the earthly contest between the Valar and Melko, who suborns the Elves in Elvenhome. Revised stories of Tinúviel, Turambar, and Tuor became key episodes in the Elves’ hopeless war against Melko in exile. A climactic “Tale of Eärendil” was never begun. Instead in 1920 Tolkien began a revision of the frame-story, no longer equating the Lonely Isle with Britain, and recasting Eriol as an Anglo-Saxon named Ælfwine. It was the first of a series of revisions which endlessly postponed the completion of his legendarium.

Leeds: 1920–1925 On October 22 Edith had a second son, Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (d. 1984). That same month Ronald took up the post of Reader in English Language at Leeds University – one step below professor, and a testament to the reputation he had already achieved. With E. V. Gordon (1896–1938), who became a close friend, Tolkien popularized the language course by such innovations as a Viking Club to read sagas in Icelandic. He knew how to engage his audience as equals, with neither condescension nor compromise. His lectures were always popular, though his words might deteriorate drastically in a race with his thoughts. He once cited an observation that “I talk in shorthand and then smudge it” (Chronology 499). Tolkien’s academic output at this point is documented elsewhere in this book (see chs. 3 and 16) but includes his glossary to Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose entitled A Middle English Vocabulary (1922); an edition with Gordon of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925); and two papers on Middle English dialect (1925), “The Devil’s Coach-Horses” and “Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography.” The Sisam and Gawain have remained standard texts ever since. However, Tolkien’s academic

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projects tended to progress slowly and several were never completed. His standards were exacting; he lavished precious time on the work of colleagues and pupils; and with the arrival of a third son, Christopher John Reuel Tolkien, on November 21, 1924 he now had a considerable family competing for his attention. While at Leeds, Tolkien set aside The Book of Lost Tales to focus on a long alliterative version of the Túrin Turambar narrative, “The Children of Húrin” (Lays 3–130). A fresh, vital element in Tolkien’s creative output appeared in the annual letters he wrote to his children from Father Christmas (Tolkien 2009d) and the bedtime stories he made up. Some were written down, including an ambitious and whimsical adventure story, Roverandom (Tolkien 1998a), inspired by the loss of Michael’s toy dog on Filey beach (see ch. 13). In July 1924 a Professorship of English Language was created for Tolkien at Leeds. But a year later he was appointed Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.

Oxford and the Road to “The Silmarillion”: 1926–1930 In January 1926, in the middle of a period spent juggling duties at both Universities, the family moved to 22 Northmoor Road, Oxford. Tolkien, who was soon made a Fellow of Pembroke College, founded another club to read Icelandic sagas, the Kolbítar or Coalbiters. Into this he pressed a new friend and powerful ally: Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963), recently appointed to teach English at Magdalen College. Over the next decades, “Jack” Lewis picked up the fallen mantle of the T.C.B.S. in encouraging his creative work, all the better because his interests were closer to Tolkien’s and his energies irrepressible. The two were also allies on the conservative side of battles over English teaching at Oxford. Each was to have a profound impact on the other, although Lewis admitted: “No one ever influenced Tolkien. You might as well try to influence a bandersnatch” (Lewis 2007, 1049). The ideas of Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield (particularly his Poetic Diction of 1928) were also to prove a significant influence on his thinking. Tolkien meanwhile produced a landmark analysis “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad” (1929; see ch. 13) and for three years he contributed the survey of “Philology: General Works” for The Year’s Work in English Studies (vols. 5–7). The return to Oxford heralded two of the three central works of Tolkien’s legendarium. First, “The Silmarillion” came about almost incidentally. Tolkien started a long version of the Lúthien Tinúviel story in rhyming couplets, “The Lay of Leithian” (Lays 150–367). When in 1926 Tolkien sent parts of these poems to his former English teacher R. W. Reynolds (1867–1948), the response was disappointing, but Tolkien had also written a précis or sketch of the mythology as background (Shaping 11–75). This became the basis for the 1930 “Qenta Noldorinwa” or “History of the Gnomes,” (Shaping 199–338), a completely fresh telling of the events of The Book of Lost Tales and the first true version of what Tolkien later came to call “The Silmarillion.”



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Writings outside the legendarium included a long narrative poem in the form of a Breton lay, “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun,” about a childless lord who strikes a desperate pact with a witch (Tolkien 1945). Tolkien also continued to write stories and poems for his children, which were well developed by the time Priscilla Mary Reuel Tolkien, the youngest and the only daughter, was born on June 18, 1929. A character called Tom Bombadil, inspired by their Dutch doll, had probably already appeared, and the “Father Christmas Letters” had grown in ambition. A series of “Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay,” set in an imaginary seaside town, notably included “Glip” (Tolkien 2002a, 119), about a Gollum-like cave-dweller. Farmer Giles of Ham (Tolkien 2008a) told of a dragon and dragon tamer set among the villages to the east of Oxford. Mr Bliss (Tolkien 2007a) was prompted by Tolkien’s purchase of a family car, and was richly illustrated with examples of his artwork. However, one story proved truly momentous, and became the second central work of Tolkien’s legendarium. It originated – quite characteristically – in a moment of boredom. Perhaps in 1930, Tolkien idly wrote the words “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” on a student’s paper while marking summer exams, and soon he was telling the story of Bilbo Baggins to his children (see ch. 8).

20 Northmoor Road and The Hobbit: 1931–1937 The Tolkiens moved next door in January 1931 into a bigger house, 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford, where most of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were to be written. Tolkien’s academic output during these years was steady (see chs. 2 and 3; especially his articles on “The Name ‘Nodens’ ” (1932), “Sigelwara land” (1932 and 1934), and “Chaucer as a Philologist” (1934),7 the offshoot of a projected “Clarendon Chaucer” collection of annotated texts which was never completed). His deeply influential paper on medieval literature, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” argued for the Old English poem to be examined as a work of art in its own right rather than merely as a “quarry of fact” for archaeologists and historians. It was delivered to the British Academy in London in December 1936 and published the year after.8 Tolkien also made translations of Beowulf and Pearl (for BBC radio 1936, later to become his Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (Tolkien 1995d). However, much of his academic work was submerged in that of other authors. His assistance was vital to E. V. Gordon’s 1937 edition of the Old English The Battle of Maldon (as it had been to Gordon’s An Introduction to Old Norse a decade earlier). An edition of the Middle English Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Julien was published in 1936 as the doctoral thesis of his Belgian pupil and friend Simonne d’Ardenne (1899–1986), but in her own estimation it was a collaboration with Tolkien. Tolkien’s academic work was never wholly separate from his creativity. Using the difficult meter of the Norse Elder Edda, he composed two narrative poems in English to retell its Sigurd element and to fill a gap in the surviving story. These “new lays” of the Völsungs and of Gudrún (Tolkien 2009a) were probably written in the early

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1930s. Tolkien also dealt with “the matter of Britain” in The Fall of Arthur (Tolkien 2013), but notes for unfinished portions of the poem indicate that he planned to link it, tangentially or otherwise, with his legendarium. An unusual foray into philosophical poetry was “Mythopoeia” (TL 83–90; see also ch. 5), inspired by a discussion with C. S. Lewis and their friend Hugo Dyson one night in September 1931 during which Lewis became convinced of the truth of Christian belief. It developed Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation, by which the human capacity to create myths and stories is testimony to the greater creative powers of God. Despite encouragement from Lewis, Tolkien decided to set aside “The Lay of Leithian” still unfinished in 1931. The ensuing years were ones of deep development and dramatic extension in the legendarium. A revised version of the main narrative sequence, “Quenta Silmarillion,” was carried as far as the story of Beren and Lúthien by 1937 (Lost Road 199–338; see ch. 7). An elegant cosmography was mapped out in the “Ambarkanta” (Shaping 235–261), while the “Lhammas” recounted the history and interrelations of Middle-earth’s languages and “The Etymologies” provided an extensive lexicon of Elvish roots and derivations (Lost Road 167–198, 341–400). This was accompanied by other thorough analyses of the languages, especially Quenya (e.g., morphology and phonology, see Parma Eldalamberon, 18 and 19 (2009 and 2010)). Tolkien also gave an eloquent justification of language invention in “A Secret Vice,” a paper delivered to a philological society around 1931, including the world’s first public performance of Elvish poetry (MC 198–223). The major extension of the legendarium was elsewhere, however, and Lewis played a key part. Around 1936, he and Tolkien made a pact to write science-fiction stories because, as Lewis said, “there is too little of what we really like in stories.” The first volume of Lewis’s resultant “cosmic trilogy,” Out of the Silent Planet (1938), was read at meetings of the Inklings, a group of like-minded drinking, talking, and reading men who (from as early as the latter part of 1933) met weekly in The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford or in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen (see ch. 22 and Carpenter 1979). Tolkien’s side of the pact was “The Lost Road,” a “time-travel” adventure which introduced the Atlantis-story of Númenor (Lost Road 36–104; see ch. 11). Though “The Lost Road” was abandoned, along with its transparent references to the tyrannies and remilitarization of the 1930s, an accompanying account of “The Fall of Númenor” (Lost Road 11–35) began the extension of Tolkien’s legendarium beyond the fall of Morgoth. The Hobbit represented another new dimension: the entry of a quasi-modern (or at least Edwardian) Everyman figure, Bilbo Baggins, into the world of wizards, dragons, and Edda-inspired Dwarves. It allowed Tolkien considerable latitude to undercut or heighten the drama at will; and increasingly, as the story went on, to draw upon his own experiences as an ordinary man who had gone “There and Back Again” to war in his youth (see ch. 8 for a full exploration of the novel’s phases). By chance, news of the story’s existence reached publisher Stanley Unwin (1884–1968), of George Allen & Unwin, and it was accepted after his 10-year-old son Rayner Unwin gave it the thumbs-up.



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The Hobbit was published on September 21, 1937 to enthusiastic reviews, prompting a request from Stanley Unwin for “more from you about Hobbits” (Letters 23). Tolkien had already suggested “Roverandom,” “Mr Bliss,” and “Farmer Giles of Ham,” and now offered some items for a distinctly unjuvenile audience: unfinished “Silmarillion” materials including “The Lay of Leithian,” as well as “The Lost Road.” He resumed the “Quenta Silmarillion” while awaiting a response, which turned out to be severe. But work on the “Silmarillion” material was about to be delayed again, for more than a decade. Just before Christmas 1937 Tolkien told Unwin he had begun a new Hobbit story, with a chapter titled “A Long-expected Party.”

A “New Hobbit” and a New War: 1938–1945 Very quickly the sequel acquired a depth, detail, and complexity far greater than The Hobbit, affected both by increasingly liberal injections of “Silmarillion” elements and by the darkening European situation. The clarity of Tolkien’s thought on his “subcreation” is evident from “On Fairy-stories” (OFS), a paper presented at St Andrew’s University in Scotland in March 1939 which may be read as a manifesto for The Lord of the Rings. In World War II, Tolkien was exempt from conscription thanks to his age and University work, and Oxford was spared by German bombers. He had agreed to work in cryptography but was not required. However, by the start of 1941 he was an air raid warden, staying at post in Oxford on night duties. The war also drew off many colleagues and meant extra University duties for Tolkien. For a while he was examiner for Allied PoWs in German and Italian camps as well as the director of an English course for cadets from the RAF and Royal Navy (for whom he prepared an edition of the fourteenth-century Sir Orfeo; see Tolkien 1995d and 2004b). Tolkien’s sons were more directly affected by the war. When hostilities began in September 1939, John was in Rome training for the priesthood and had to flee in civilian clothes, finally reaching England on the last boat to leave Le Havre, France. Michael earned the George Medal as an anti-aircraft gunner defending aerodromes during the Battle of Britain in 1940, but transferred to the RAF and served as a reargunner on bombers over France and Germany until 1944, when he was found medically unfit (“virtually a shell-shock case” wrote his father; Reader’s Guide 1021). Christopher, the closest to Tolkien in spirit, was called up to join the RAF in July 1943 and was sent to South Africa in 1944 to train as a fighter pilot. Work progressed in fits and starts on The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien read in stages to the Inklings, now with the vital addition for a few years of Charles Williams (1886–1945), author of mystical Christian novels and a long narrative poem, Taliesin through Logres. By war’s outbreak Tolkien had produced drafts of what is now Book I, and by the end of 1939 had reached Moria. He resumed in August–September 1940, and in 1942 he probably reached the first pages of what became Book IV, but then became “dead stuck” (Letters 321). His anxieties about the fate of his unfinished

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work on Middle-earth are reflected in “Leaf by Niggle” written that spring (published in the Dublin Review 1945 and Tree and Leaf 1964; see Tolkien 2001a and 2008e). However, two inspired months in 1944 produced Book IV (sent in installments to Christopher in South Africa). Tolkien began Book V in October but soon halted again.

The Lord of the Rings Completed, The Silmarillion Resumed: 1945–1955 In June 1945 Tolkien was elected Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College, Oxford. Soon, disquisitions on Númenórean history in Book IV doubtless led to the diversion Tolkien took between Christmas 1945 and August 1946, when he wrote “The Notion Club Papers” (Sauron 145–327; see ch. 11), featuring an Oxford cabal very like the Inklings and using dream and time-travel to connect with ancient Númenor. This unfinished story included a poem within it about the voyage of St Brendan which was later revised as “Imram” (published in Time and Tide December 1955; see Sauron 296–299). The related “Drowning of Anadûnê” gave a new account of the Atlantean downfall (Sauron 340–413), and Tolkien even created a new language, Adunaic, for the Númenóreans. In a version of the cosmogonic “Ainulindalë” from same period (Morgoth 199–205), Tolkien experimented with the idea that the world was created round – a scientific concept radically undermining his mythological concepts so far. He returned to the chapter “Minas Tirith” in autumn 1946 and over the next year managed to complete Book V of The Lord of the Rings. After moving to the smaller 3 Manor Road with Edith and Priscilla in summer 1947, Tolkien first planned several revisions to The Hobbit to match The Lord of the Rings, notably in the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter. “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” (S 339–366), created from substantial historical material initially devised for “The Council of Elrond” chapter in The Lord of the Rings, was written by summer 1948. Tolkien finally completed The Lord of the Rings in draft by mid-September 1948, including an Epilogue later excised (Sauron 114–135). Typing, revising, and work on the appendices went on until August 1950. Allen & Unwin had been eager for a stopgap while the Hobbit sequel gestated, and Tolkien began a productive working relationship with the artist Pauline Baynes in 1948 when he selected her to illustrate Farmer Giles of Ham (which first appeared in 1949; see Tolkien 2008a). On his recommendation, she was later commissioned to illustrate Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. The Lord of the Rings nearly fell at the final hurdle. Motivated by his publisher’s earlier rejection of “The Silmarillion,” by late 1949 Tolkien entered into discussions with Milton Waldman of Collins over the idea of publishing both books simultaneously. In April 1950, just ahead of a move to 99 Holywell Street in Oxford with Edith and Priscilla, he freed himself from Allen & Unwin by handing them the impractical ultimatum: two books or none. But Waldman promptly demanded cuts to The Lord of the Rings, then fell ill, and discussions progressed little.



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Nevertheless, Tolkien turned back to “The Silmarillion,” writing with vastly greater confidence and maturity thanks to the long honing of his craft on The Lord of the Rings. New revisions and expansions included a sprawling prose “Narn i Chîn Húrin” (UT 75–209 and Tolkien 2007b). And he reassigned the Welsh-inspired Noldorin language, first devised in 1917, from the High-elves to the Grey, a fundamental change with complex ramifications. To this phase also belongs “Akallabêth,” a new account of Númenor (S 307–338). What was to prove a decisive blow to “The Silmarillion” came in April 1952 when Collins told Tolkien that joint publication with The Lord of the Rings was prohibitively expensive. He reopened negotiations with Allen & Unwin over The Lord of the Rings in June and was welcomed back, with a 50:50 profit-sharing deal (though nothing until costs were covered). During the summer break, on holiday in Malvern as guest of his friend George Sayer (1914–2005), he was tape-recorded reading from both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.9 That autumn his projects included work on “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son” (appearing in Essays and Studies 1953, dramatized for BBC radio in 1955; see TL 119–150), a verse drama begun in the early 1930s as a sequel of sorts to The Battle of Maldon, questioning the Old English poem’s Northern heroic ethic. Shortly after a move with Edith to 76 Sandfield Road in Headington, Oxford, in March 1953, Tolkien gave the W. P. Ker Lecture at the University of Glasgow, speaking about the Middle English Sir Gawain (MC 72–108) and quoting from his own translation. A 1955 paper on “English and Welsh” reveals many of his views on language in general and striking insights into the position of Britons in Anglo-Saxon England (first published in Angles and Britons: O’Donnell Lectures, 1963; see MC 162–197). The first volume of The Lord of the Rings was published as The Fellowship of the Ring in July 1954, with maps by Christopher Tolkien. Tolkien completed the appendices but not a glossarial index (excised appendix material appears in Peoples 19–289, and as “The Hunt for the Ring” in UT 436–459 and “The Quest of Erebor” in UT 415–435 and Tolkien 2002a, 367–377, while the index appears in Parma Eldalamberon, 17 (2007)). Publication of The Lord of the Rings was completed (again with maps by Christopher Tolkien) with The Two Towers in November 1954 and The Return of the King in October 1955.

Success and Retirement: 1955–1964 The Lord of the Rings earned Tolkien £3000 in royalties in 1955 alone – equal to more than £64,000 today. It meant demand for “The Silmarillion” at last, but Tolkien was stressed and often ill. For years, he had been writing in the interstices between University and domestic duties, and he confessed, “I am rather tired, and no longer young enough to pillage the night to make up for the deficit of hours in the day” (Letters 228). Eventually he retained a secretary to type up his manuscripts. Now that he no

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longer needed the money, Tolkien regretted having taken on two further years’ academic tenure. At the same time he suspected colleagues resented him for devoting such energies to “trivial literature” (Letters 238). The business of The Lord of the Rings brought pleasures but also distractions. In 1957 he won the International Fantasy Award and made a substantial £1500 from the sale of manuscripts of his published fiction (plus Mr Bliss) to Marquette University, Milwaukee (see ch. 4). He wrote extensive advice to translators (“Guide to Words and Names in The Lord of the Rings”; see Companion 750–782). A BBC radio version and Forrest J. Ackerman’s 1957 proposals for an animated film distressed him (see ch. 35). What he saw as misrepresentation of his character and misunderstanding of his works led to vituperations against biographical criticism, though at the same time he drew attention to his kinship with his creations: I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.10

Probably in 1958 a sequel to The Lord of the Rings, “A New Shadow,” was quickly abandoned as “not worth doing” (Peoples 409–421). Tolkien’s final term teaching at Oxford was Trinity (Summer) 1959, and he gave his valedictory address on June 5 (MC 224–240). In his final years with the University, and the first of his retirement, Tolkien revised the story of the fall of the Noldor (Morgoth 141–300), and produced the separate “Valaquenta” (Morgoth 199–205), as well as “The Wanderings of Húrin” (unfinished; see Jewels 251–310). But much attention was given to ancillary or underlying matters at the expense of actual story. He experimented with the radical revision of Middle-earth’s cosmos, considered the moral nature and influence of Melkor, discussed “Laws and Customs among the Eldar,” and in “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” meditated on immortality (all in Morgoth 369–431, 207–253, and 303–366). Often overlapping with these philosophical concerns, work continued on the Elvish languages (e.g., “Ósanwe-kenta, or Enquiry into the Communication of Thought” in the journal Vinyar Tengwar, 39 (1998)). Númenor was not neglected, with “A Description of the Isle of Númenor,” “The Line of Elros,” and an unfinished story of unhappy marriage, “Aldarion and Erendis” (UT 212–293). Everywhere, there were the signs of a desire to give close attention to too many matters. After this burst of activity it appears that Tolkien quickly floundered. In July 1960 he confessed to Rayner Unwin that he was “utterly stuck – lost in a bottomless bog” (Letters 301). Professional duties had provided a rhythm and regular outside contact to energize him. He lost his Merton College rooms and had to move his books and papers to a garage-cum-study at Sandfield Road. He dealt with a growing postbag including letters from fans – some in runic or the Elvish script tengwar – and requests



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for interviews or for permission for adaptations, amateur and professional, artistic, dramatic, and musical. Further delays came from his health problems, including worsening fibrositis and arthritis, as well as from Edith’s. The Vatican II reforms to Catholic worship depressed him (he continued to use the Latin liturgy, loudly, while those around him used English). He also now lacked effective encouragement from any close, understanding, powerful personality. C. S. Lewis’s intense involvement with Charles Williams and with Christian apologetics, as well as his Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956) seem to have opened a gap which Tolkien’s sympathies struggled to bridge. Lewis’s secret 1956 marriage to divorcée Joy Gresham (1915–1960) widened it further. After Lewis’s death in 1963, Tolkien resumed keeping a diary, largely when depressed. He completed an edition of Ancrene Wisse for the Early English Text Society in 1962 – long overdue, it had originally been commissioned in 1935. Allen & Unwin, while breathing regular encouragement over “The Silmarillion,” were happy to accept other Tolkien material, and he had plenty to offer from among his papers; but polishing for publication inevitably distracted him from the larger task. At the suggestion of his Aunt Jane Neave, he compiled his poems (new or revised) in 1962 as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, illustrated again by Pauline Baynes. Christopher Tolkien was suggested by Rayner Unwin as a possible editor for his unfinished works in 1963, but then became a Fellow of New College, Oxford.

Final Years: 1965–1973 The last story J. R. R. Tolkien saw published in his lifetime, Smith of Wootton Major (1967), was characteristically unplanned, originating in a 1965 attempt to write a preface to George Macdonald’s The Golden Key. In 1961 the critic Philip Toynbee had said of The Lord of the Rings, “today these books have passed into a merciful oblivion” (see ch. 25). He could not have been more wrong. Sales of Tolkien’s books continued to rise and rise through the decade, and a piracy row took his fame into the stratosphere. The American publisher, Ace Books, exploited a legal loophole to release an unauthorized paperback of The Lord of the Rings in 1965. To counter this, Tolkien prepared an authorized second edition, with new “Foreword,” emendations, and index, published in October by Ballantine. In his letters to fans he promoted a widespread boycott of Ace, who backed down. The furore made Tolkien a cult figure in America. Even in Oxford he was plagued with phone calls and knocks at the door from unannounced strangers. However, not all visits were unsolicited. Tolkien gave time to journalists, photographers, and even a BBC film crew (Tolkien in Oxford, 1968). In 1966 Clyde S. Kilby (1902–1986) of Wheaton College, Illinois, came to Oxford and spent several months trying (with little success) to assist Tolkien in preparing “The Silmarillion” for completion. Donald Swann (1923–1994), of Flanders and Swann, set several songs and

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poems from The Lord of the Rings to music; the sheet music was published as The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle (Tolkien and Swann 2002) with extensive notes from Tolkien on the Elvish of “Namárië” and “A Elbereth Gilthoniel.” Swann also performed at the Tolkiens’ Golden Wedding celebrations in 1966. The marriage, though firmly rooted, had not always been easy. Catholic observance had been a source of occasional friction, while Tolkien’s decades of University work and world-building had often left Edith – never academically minded – feeling isolated in Oxford. Needing a smaller home, and hoping that a new address would be a refuge from interruption, they moved in July 1968 to Bournemouth, the retirement backwater on the South Coast. Since arriving in England as a child, and with the notable exception of his war service, Tolkien had rarely traveled far. He had shared walking holidays with the Lewis brothers, traveled to Ireland (mostly as an external examiner), to Venice and Assisi with Priscilla in 1955, and to Rotterdam as a guest of Dutch fans in 1958. A Mediterranean cruise in 1966 had been marred when Edith was injured in a fall on the first day. Otherwise, a staple had been holidays in seaside towns. The couple had stayed in Bournemouth many times – so frequently in recent years that the Hotel Miramar had become a home from home. Now they bought a bungalow in Lakeside Road, where Tolkien set up a study in the garage. But the move was disruptive and he found conservative, unintellectual Bournemouth little more congenial than Edith had found Oxford. Middle-earth did not thrive here. Progress on “The Silmarillion” narratives was piecemeal and minimal, and Tolkien mostly steered back into his comfort zone, tinkering with his languages (mingled with glimpses of story, e.g., “The Problem of Ros” in Peoples 367–376, and “The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor” in Vinyar Tengwar, 42 (2001)). Edith died in hospital on November 29, 1971, following inflammation of the gallbladder. Tolkien, awarded a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List for 1972, no longer wanted to stay in Bournemouth, and Merton College invited him to become a Residential Fellow with rooms in Merton Street, where he moved in March. Oxford awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in June. Again he engaged a secretary; again he made scant progress on his legendarium. During a visit to Bournemouth in August 1973, Tolkien fell ill. Diagnosed with an acute bleeding gastric ulcer, he died in hospital there on September 2, 1973. He was buried alongside Edith at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, and along with their names the headstone carried the names Beren and Lúthien. Despite the epic scale of The Lord of the Rings, what Tolkien published in his lifetime does not suggest a productive writer. However, as will already be clear from this sketch, his posthumous publications vastly outnumber what he published in his lifetime. In 1977 The Silmarillion was published, edited and compiled as a continuous, consistent text by Christopher Tolkien. His Unfinished Tales and 12-volume History of Middle-earth series (1983–1996, see ch. 10) trace through its many stages the unique creative project begun in 1914–1917. Academic notes edited by others include Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode (Tolkien 1982), The Old English Exodus



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(Tolkien 1981), and Beowulf and the Critics (Tolkien 2002b). At the time of writing, further unpublished items include poems from as early as 1910; “The Orgog,” a Leeds-era children’s story; “The Sellic Spell,” an early 1940s story based on folklore in Beowulf; “The Bovadium Fragments,” an early 1960s satire on Oxford and the car; and many writings about his invented languages (on-going publication in Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar). It remains true that Tolkien’s success is generally measured by the impact of a few works, yet he is a prime example of an artist whose visible genius is a function of vast invisible labor. As the efficient Lewis observed, he worked “like a coral insect” (Lewis 2007, 1579). Tolkien was a perfectionist, and the vitality of his creation was bound up with its breadth and depth. Notes

  1  The term Middle-earth is used here for convenience. Tolkien did not use the term until the late 1930s (Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner 2006, 164).   2  Interview with Dennis Gerrolt, January 1971, BBC Radio 4, “Now Read On . . .”   3  His previous interest at inventing languages stemmed from his cousins’ “Animalic” code (Carpenter 1977, 43).   4  Qenya was so spelt at first, later Quenya; Éarendel became Eärendil.   5  See Parma Eldalamberon, 12 (1998, revised 2011).

  6  See Parma Eldalamberon, 11 (1995).   7  The “Chaucer” article is reprinted in 2008 alongside his version of The Reeve’s Tale in Tolkien Studies, 5: 109–183 (see Tolkien 2008c and 2008d, and ch. 3).   8  See MC 5–48, which also includes Tolkien’s useful preface to the 1940 revised John R. Clark Hall translation of Beowulf (MC 49–71).   9  Released as LPs by Caedmon, now available on CD as The Tolkien Audio Collection (HarperCollins, 2002). 10  Interview with Dennis Gerrolt (see n. 2).

References Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1979. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their Friends. London: Allen & Unwin. Flieger, Verlyn. 2010. “Introduction to ‘The Story of Kullervo’.” Tolkien Studies, 7: 211–214. Garth, John. 2003. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. London: HarperCollins. Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner. 2006. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hammond, Wayne G. and Christina Scull. 1995. J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. London: HarperCollins.

Lewis, C. S. 2007. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. Vol. 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950–1963. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins. Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond. 2006. The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. London: HarperCollins. Tolkien, Hilary. 2009. Black and White Ogre Country: The Lost Tales of Hilary Tolkien. Edited by Angela Gardner. Moreton-in-Marsh: ADC Publications. Tolkien, J. R. R. and Donald Swann. 2002. The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle. 3rd edn. London: HarperCollins.

Part II

The Academic

2

Academic Writings Thomas Honegger

During most of his lifetime, J. R. R. Tolkien was primarily known as an Oxford professor and philologist specializing in Old and Middle English language and literature. This fact has to be stressed since the gap between the appreciation or mere knowledge of his works of fiction, most prominently The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and of his non-fiction publications, notably his academic essays and editions, has greatly increased over the decades. Tolkien may have started out as an Oxford don writing a book or two for children, but by now he is perceived mostly and often uniquely as an author of fantasy who also published a few academic essays. These are read, if at all, only in order to gain insight into the way his literary creative process developed, so that we have an at first implicit subdivision into, on the one hand, essays considered of “general interest” and, on the other, papers thought to be too specialized to appeal to anyone but a few philologists. Such a categorization has (unwittingly) received support from the publication of The Monsters and the Critics, edited by Christopher Tolkien in 1983 (Tolkien 1983a). Christopher’s main criteria for the inclusion of a text in this volume seem to have been its general appeal and comprehension for a lay audience. Not surprisingly the seven papers that constitute The Monster and the Critics have by now achieved canonical status among Tolkien scholars, whereas most of the other academic essays have sunk into oblivion. The current status of an essay need therefore not reflect its original importance and impact. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” has been recognized as a landmark in Beowulf criticism ever since its publication in 1937, but “On Fairy-stories” (delivered in 1939, and first published 1947, see Tolkien 2008b), by contrast, seems to

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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have had little impact whatsoever before it was republished in Tree and Leaf in 1964 and discovered as a possible authorial commentary on the principles behind Tolkien’s works of fiction. It is very difficult to assess objectively the influence of Tolkien’s academic publications on the field, and Tom Shippey’s (2007b) and Michael Drout’s (2007) studies remain the only attempts so far. The published academic lectures and essays, which are the focus of this chapter, represent only a fraction of Tolkien’s academic writings. The Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian library holds – among other documents – thousands of pages of Tolkien’s lecture and research notes and drafts (see also ch. 4). These include polished, much revised, and frequently used texts of standard lectures, extensive research notes on the language and style of a text (e.g., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), or drafts for his published articles. This stupendous treasure trove of notes and drafts is the product of a long and busy academic life and a close examination has shown that they contain material – in various degrees of refinement – for many a publication. The posthumous edition of Tolkien’s notes and comments on Finn and Hengest by his pupil Alan Bliss (Tolkien 1982) are just one example. The relatively few essays that Tolkien saw into print during his lifetime constitute thus the proverbial tip of the iceberg and are witnesses to a time when the demands of the recurrent research assessment exercise had not yet forced academics to publish as much as possible. As a consequence, Tolkien’s influence was as much (if not even more) indirect by means of his actual teaching and thesis supervision, where he must have discussed and shared his research with his students,1 inspiring them to start their own explorations in the field. This attitude of sharing and especially of inspiring students comes to the fore in his “Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford” (given June 5, 1959) where he attacks the practice of severely limiting the students’ academic freedom so that, as a consequence, they are no longer able to follow their own intellectual curiosity (MC 227). The motivation for any genuine research must not be the desire to attain a degree, but “the desire for knowledge” (MC 227) pure and simple, and not limited by any departmental ideology. Thus, Tolkien argues, the division into Lit and Lang2 at Oxford University is not only artificial and unfortunate but also downright detrimental for the entire subject and its students precisely because it creates a distinction where none actually exists, because anyone with a general interest in English will necessarily be concerned with both. Tolkien’s own papers are often products of the holistic approach he favored, combining philological expertise with historical knowledge and literary sensibility. The prime example of such a successful collaboration is arguably his “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” (published in 1953, see Tolkien 2001a) in which he combines historical information with philological analysis and literary co-creation (see Honegger 2007). His philological interpretation of ofermo¯ d has provided the starting point for a fruitful and extensive debate about the poet’s stance towards the “heroism” of the Anglo-Saxon leader Beorhtnoth (see Shippey 2007c). Moreover, Tolkien scholars have taken up his arguments for the evaluation of leader-figures in his own works of fiction



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(Ferré 2008). This practice of applying Tolkien’s comments on (mostly medieval) texts to his own works of fiction has gained increasing currency among Tolkien scholars so that his essays on Beowulf, Sir Gawain, and fairy-stories have been repeatedly used in an attempt to establish an ‘intertextual’ framework for an exploration of his authorial intentions. As mentioned above, Tolkien frequently uses a holistic approach and his essays are therefore often difficult to categorize. Nevertheless, they can be grouped according to their main focus into three categories: (1) Tolkien on words (comprising those papers that center on the philological analysis of a word); (2) Tolkien on language (essays dealing with more general aspects of language); and (3) Tolkien on (medieval) literature (where one or several literary works stand in the foreground).

Tolkien on Words Almost all of Tolkien’s early scholarly publications focus on a hard word or difficult and obscure expression (e.g., Sigelwara land or the name Nodens). They were written for a specialized readership and published in renowned and venerable academic journals such as Medium Ævum or Review of English Studies. Tolkien brings to bear the full weight of his Oxford English Dictionary-trained philological scholarship, which had been expanded and honed by his work on A Middle English Vocabulary (1922), on the glossary to the edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925; see Tolkien and Gordon, 1967), by his dialect studies (cf. his foreword to A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District (1928)), and by his wide reading for the review essays for The Year’s Work in English Studies. The foundation for his argument is invariably the thorough and comprehensive etymological analysis of the word in question, a consideration of its occurrence in the known texts, and its possible historical references. His two-part article (published in 1932 and 1934 in Medium Ævum) on the Old English word Sigelwara is a good example of this approach (see also ch. 3). The term Sigelwara was used in Old English times to translate the Latin Æthiops, “Ethiopian,” yet Tolkien argues that it must have existed before literate Anglo-Saxons used it to refer to the inhabitants of Ethiopia. He regards the manuscript form as deviating from the original correct form, which he establishes as Sigelhearwan (nom./acc. plural of Sigelhearwa). In the following part, he adduces a plethora of textual evidence for the use and meaning of the two forms sigel and hearwa throughout the centuries and comes to the conclusion that sigel meant originally both “sun” and “jewel,” whereas hearwa is the Germanic form of an Indo-European root related to Latin carbo, “soot.” He then argues that before the term was applied to the sun-scorched people of Africa, it had referred to “the sons of Múspell [. . .],3 the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot” (Tolkien 1934, 110), allowing us some glimpses of a lost heathen mythology. Although Tolkien the philologist-scholar judiciously hedges his conclusions and is anxious to remain within the narrow limits of the philological method, we can, in hindsight, see that the argument had an impact

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on his legendarium. As Tom Shippey (2005, 49) has pointed out, it may have helped Tolkien to achieve an indirect naturalization of the Balrog in the traditions of the North and “to create (or corroborate) the image of the silmaril, that fusion of ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’ in physical form.” It is furthermore an example of what Tolkien, in his lecture “A Secret Vice,” termed “mythology concomitant” (MC 210) for any language, whether invented, rediscovered, or living. It must have irked Tolkien greatly that philology was more and more considered a nasty “pill” (MC 225) to be pushed down the throat of unwilling students. He lived long enough to witness (and to mourn) the fading of the great philological tradition (see Shippey 2007a), of which he had been a typical representative in the early decades of his academic work. Considering the general trend in academia towards a greater differentiation in and focus on synchronic linguistic studies and the concomitant loss of importance of philology (especially the historical dimension of language), it comes as no surprise that Tolkien’s essays in this field had only a limited impact and are little known nowadays (see ch. 3). His legacy to the generations after him lies not so much in his contributions to philology itself, but in the way he made it fruitful for the study and production of literature.

Tolkien on Language Tolkien’s philological papers discussed in the preceding section are, of course, also on language, yet what they contain of more general observations on the topic is rooted in and developed from a close analysis of individual words. The two papers treated in this section, by contrast, focus primarily on general aspects of language and language philosophy, though the philological foundation is discernible throughout. The first essay, published for the first time in The Monsters and the Critics in 1983 under the title “A Secret Vice,” goes back to the 1930s. The notes and minor revisions on the typescript suggest that it was presented twice, once in 1931, and then again two decades later. The topic is the possible origin, status, use, and aesthetics of invented languages – a subject that caught the interest of a larger public when the first specimens of (sometimes untranslated) Elvish appeared in The Lord of the Rings and later texts, which led to the foundation of study-groups and publications on these languages (see ch. 14). Later, the advent of the Internet made it easier for creators and aficionados of created languages to get into contact and to share their passion. This has not always been so, and as Tolkien points out right at the beginning of his lecture, creating languages was usually a private affair kept secret, and any discussion of the topic had to make do with a very limited and personal set of languages. The lecture, as a consequence, develops into a commented linguistic biography which describes Tolkien’s earliest encounters with created languages in the form of codes and nursery languages, such as Animalic and Nevbosh, both of which remain heavily indebted to traditional languages in phonetics and grammar. The primary motivation for inventing such languages is the desire for secrecy in communication. Yet, as Tolkien is eager



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to point out, the creative freedom gives rise to a new quality that goes beyond the aspect of mere practicality: the phonaesthetic pleasure derived from the beautiful sound-form of a word and the way it expresses the semantic content in a suitable and fitting manner. The English word “doom” with its dark long vowel, final nasal sound, and its connotations of judgment and catastrophe may serve as an example. This artistic aspect grows in importance as the number of speakers of a language decreases. Thus a created language neither shared with nor developed in exchange with other speakers is bound to reflect the linguistic and phonetic predilections of its creator; he is likely to choose those forms that meet his subjective aesthetic criteria and thus give him pleasure. This pleasure can, of course, also be found in existing languages, and Tolkien, quite fittingly for a student of medieval and classical languages, stresses the aesthetic appeal scholars find in languages long extinct. The criteria determining the aesthetic appeal of a language remain necessarily vague: in the end, it is a matter of individual linguistic character that determines a language-creator’s choices (MC 211).4 This seems to link up with Tolkien’s views on the concept of “native language” first proposed in his lecture “English and Welsh” (see below), though he does not yet use the terms “native language” and “cradle tongue” to express his ideas. The specimens used to illustrate the aesthetic appeal of an advanced created language are all taken from Tolkien’s own hoard of Elvish (Quenya and Sindarin) poems, referring to persons and events from his legendarium, and one may wonder what the original audience’s reaction was. Tolkien obviously relied on the poems’ aesthetic appeal and poetic qualities – aspects he could expect his listeners to appreciate in spite of their complete ignorance of either language. A second point of importance is Tolkien’s claim that for the “perfect construction of an art-language it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology concomitant” (MC 210). This is echoed in his later claim in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings that his legendarium “was basically linguistic in inspiration” (FR xxiii) and the result of a wish to provide a world, history, mythology, and people for his languages.5 The other paper of relevance for this section was given at Oxford on October 21, 1955 as the O’Donnell Lecture and published under the title “English and Welsh” (see also ch. 19). Although Tolkien’s lecture was aimed at an obviously philologically educated audience – as can be deduced from his remarks directed to his listeners as well as from some of his rather detailed comments on linguistic aspects, such as the shared phenomenon of i-mutation or the possible influence of Celtic forms on the Old English verbal forms of the verb “to be” – he makes some more general points that are of interest for the study of his literary texts. First, he discusses the complex and often confusing relationship between language and race, pointing out that although language plays a central role for the cultural and political identity of a people, it can be easily transferred from one race to another. This is to some extent reflected in Tolkien’s fictional texts where we find peoples adopting languages other than their own (e.g., the Men of Númenor speaking Elvish, or the Hobbits abandoning their original tongue after entering the Shire and using Westron instead). Developing his

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argument about race and language further, Tolkien then explodes the myth of the “typical Teuton” and the “typical Celt” by means of textual passages from their respective literatures. The picture Tolkien paints of the language contact situation in Britain during the first century after the Anglo-Saxon invasion is detailed and nuanced, avoiding the usual clichés and simplifications, and could be seen as one possible source of inspiration for the similarly complex contact-situation in Middle-earth. The greater part of the lecture focuses upon the relationship between the two British languages and their speakers, as the title suggests. Towards the end, however, Tolkien introduces a new topic, which has only a tenuous relationship to the overall theme. He takes the (subjectively felt) beauty of Welsh as the starting point for an inquiry into the foundations of personal linguistic aesthetic preferences. Tolkien proposes that every person has a “native language” (MC 190), which seems to be a hereditary and thus genetically transmitted linguistic predisposition (if not indeed a genetically inherited full language) that is ultimately responsible for his or her individual and otherwise inexplicable linguistic aesthetic preferences. This “native language” need not be (and probably is not) identical with what Tolkien calls the “cradle tongue” or “the first-learned language of custom” (MC 190). Tolkien never published his ideas in a more developed and explicit form, though the question of individual aesthetic linguistic predilections was addressed in his lecture “A Secret Vice” too. These ideas, taken together with his notes on his created languages, the few instances of genetically transmitted knowledge (cf. “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers”; see chs. 10 and 11), and the presentation of invented-language texts in his literary works, provide the reader with tantalizing glimpses of a theory of language that would stand in opposition to the dominant linguistic theories.6

Tolkien on Literature Even if Tolkien had never published The Lord of the Rings or anything else, he would still be remembered among medievalists for his one paper that effected a radical change in Beowulf studies: “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (delivered in 1936, published in 1937, MC 5–48). The number of publications on the poem was already high back in Tolkien’s day and has increased ever since so that there is probably no scholar alive who can claim to have an overview of the field in its entirety. Yet almost all publications that were written after Tolkien’s lecture acknowledge, in one way or another, the importance of his 1936 contribution in which he argued for the re-evaluation of the Old English epic as a piece of literature and according to an aesthetic proper to the work.7 It does not lack a certain irony that it took a philologist (and thus a representative of Lang) to establish the literary credentials of what has since then been labeled (somewhat erroneously or at least for the wrong reasons) the national epic of England. We must not think that Tolkien had changed sides and gone over to the Lit faction. On the contrary, his masterful interpretation of the poem is rooted in his continuous and intimate study of its language, and



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a demonstration of the fundamental unity of the study of English. Tolkien’s knowl­ edge of Beowulf was deep and detailed,8 yet he carries it lightly in the main part of the text, which is almost completely free from philological analyses in the narrower sense of the word. What there is of technical philological discussion has been banished to the appendix so that it does not disturb the flow of the argument. Thus the success of Tolkien’s argument and the overwhelming influence of his lecture are as much due to his skilled rhetoric as to the originality of his approach (cf. Tolkien 2002b, and Drout 2006). Tolkien begins his lecture by briefly sketching the contemporary scholarly approach, which he sees as dominated by the historical discourse that treats Beowulf not so much as a poem but rather as a historical document. Analyzed from such a point of view, there are of course major deficiencies to be noted. The author, according to those critics, has put the marginal elements such as the fantastic monsters in the center and neglected the development of the narrative potential of those numerous historical episodes and digressions. Tolkien, by contrast, argues that the poem’s structure is not to be compared to that of a narrative epic such as the Aeneid, but that it is rather based on the static contrast between the three episodes with the fights against the monsters at their center. They depict three crucial moments in a heroic life. The first two fights against Grendel and his mother, respectively, are the deeds of a young warrior on the rise. The last and final confrontation with the dragon provides the fitting conclusion to a long, successful reign. The balance is between these elements, and Beowulf’s death in his fight against the (mythical) dragon is tragic but nevertheless much more fitting than would be an end by a (historical) Swedish sword. Tolkien identified the poet’s intention as wanting to compose a heroic-elegiac poem (MC 31), and he therefore “expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote” (MC 33). The tone of the Old English epic is one that evokes the sympathetic sorrow of the audience and the whole “must have succeeded admirably in creating in the minds of the poet’s contemporaries the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with deep significance – a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow” (MC 27) – which could be as well a characterization of Tolkien’s own epic The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s analysis of Beowulf thus not only influenced all later scholarly work on the Old English poem, but became likewise a metatext for the interpretation of his own legendarium, to which he himself seems to have created a link by identifying the Beowulf poet as one Heorrenda,9 half-brother of Hengest and Horsa, the semihistorical leaders of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain in his planned frame narrative for The Book of Lost Tales. He made Eriol their father and thus linked his legendarium with the prehistory of the English as it appears in both primary-world history and the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons (e.g., in poems such as Beowulf or Deor; see ch. 15). Beowulf, ever since its availability in scholarly editions from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, has been generally considered the epitome of Anglo-Saxon

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literature. It was (and still is) a canonical work to be studied by every serious-minded student of Germanic languages and literatures. So when Tolkien chose Beowulf as the topic for his Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy in 1936, he could be sure that his audience was familiar with the poem. Almost two decades later, when invited to give the W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture, which was delivered on April 15, 1953, he opted for another canonical text: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien was doubly qualified for talking about this late fourteenth-century Middle English romance. First, he had prepared an edition of the poem (together with E. V. Gordon) in 1925 (Tolkien and Gordon, 1967), the scholarship and accessibility of which helped greatly to establish it as a set text. Furthermore, Tolkien had repeatedly lectured on the poem during his long academic career. Thus, the fact that Sir Gawain was considered one of the canonical works of Middle English literature was, to a great extent, due to Tolkien’s own work. Second, his lecture coincided with the conclusion and slightly later (December 1953) broadcasting of his translation of the Middle English poem. He had prepared a translation of the poem that faithfully imitates the complex verse-pattern of the original while at the same time remaining as close to the original wording of the text as possible, yet with special consideration for the requirements of its overall comprehension and enjoyment as a poem – a translation that could be seen as a practical illustration of his ideas set forth in his “Prefatory Remarks” on Clark Hall’s translation of Beowulf in 1940. The lecture was thus to be, as Christopher Tolkien believes, his father’s “principal pronouncement on the poem to which he devoted so much thought and study” (MC 1). It may come therefore as a surprise that it was not available in print until its inclusion in The Monsters and the Critics in 1983, and its impact on the scholarship of the poem has, as a consequence, been very small. In his lecture, Tolkien explicitly forgoes any investigation into the sources and analogues of the story and instead concentrates on the narrative skill of the poet in his re-arranging of traditional plot elements (e.g., the “Perilous Host” motif) – a strategy that had been so successful in his 1936 Beowulf lecture. Tolkien locates the nub of the poem in the third fit, the temptation of Gawain by the beautiful lady in Castle Hautdesert and the confession on the day before his departure. By means of a close reading of central passages Tolkien identifies the main aim of the poet as an exploration of “the problems that so much occupied the English mind: the relations of Courtesy and Love with morality and Christian morals and the Eternal Law” (MC 105). He argues that the testing of Gawain took place on three distinct (and hierarchically differing) levels. On the lowest plane we find jesting pastimes, such as the “exchange of winnings” compact with his host. On the next higher level we have the rules of courtesy “as a code of ‘gentle’ or polite manners” (MC 95), which comprise the morally dangerous game of courtly lovemaking. Last and highest are the “real morals, virtues and sins” (MC 95). The central problem is thus how to deal with the advances of the lady on the one hand, and how to treat the gift of the (allegedly magical) girdle on the other. Tolkien’s answer is clear: Gawain is bound to follow the



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moral precepts in all cases, which is why his “breach of courtesy” when rejecting the explicit sexual advances of the lady is not only pardonable but the only morally correct solution. Keeping the girdle for himself and not even mentioning it is, by contrast, merely a breach of the compact with his host and thus preferable to a breach of courtesy towards the lady (see also chs. 16 and 27). This brief outline of Tolkien’s argument makes clear that a direct exploitation of his lecture for an interpretation of his fictional work is difficult, and there exist to date few scholarly publications that try and use his ideas on Sir Gawain as an inter- or metatext for the study of The Lord of the Rings (e.g., Schlobin 2000). The moral dilemma identified as the central element of the Middle English romance may have parallels in similar situations in Tolkien’s own epic romance, so that his thoughts prove illuminating for them, too, yet they are not as obviously relevant for or applicable to his work as the observations in his “On Fairy-stories” (see ch. 5). The subject of Tolkien’s Andrew Lang Lecture, delivered at the University of St Andrews on March 8, 1939, is not another recognized masterpiece of medieval literature but a literary genre that many people would have considered sub-literary: fairystories. The theme was to some extent suggested by the fact that the lecture was expected to have a connection with the work of Andrew Lang, who was widely known for his scholarly and literary interest in fairy-tales. Taking Andrew Lang’s volumes of collected fairy-stories as his starting point of research, Tolkien must often have felt irritated by what was included under this heading in Lang’s and also in other similar collections. Thus, instead of commenting on the literary value and qualities of the tales found in Lang’s volumes, Tolkien decides to use the opportunity for an exploration of the origins, nature, characteristics, and key functions of fairy-stories, and ends up writing a text that provides insights into his thoughts on mythopoeia and literary sub-creation in general rather than into Lang’s fairy-stories proper.10 For a long time the lecture itself had virtually no impact. Delivered shortly before the outbreak of World War II, its publication was delayed until 1947 when it was included in a volume commemorating his fellow Inkling Charles Williams, which must have been read by relatively few people and quite soon went out of print. In addition, Tolkien had camouflaged the true theme of his essay so well that it was read merely by those who wanted to find out more about fairy-stories – and probably came away somewhat mystified. The reception was therefore very slow and the discovery of the essay’s true potential began only with its republication (together with the short story “Leaf by Niggle”) in Tree and Leaf in 1964. From then onwards it moved into view of an audience that knew its author primarily as the creator of a fantasy epic, and the way was open for making connections between the Tolkien who was talking about Sub-creation, Fantasy, and Escape, and the Tolkien who, during the same period, had been busy writing what would become The Lord of the Rings. In hindsight and with many of Tolkien’s sub-creative texts now available, it is of course easier to recognize and assess the importance of the concepts he presented for the first time to an audience that was expecting to hear a paper (primarily) on Lang’s traditional fairy-stories.

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The argument of the lecture is somewhat meandering, which is due to Tolkien’s endeavor to keep up the pretence of talking, at least intermittently, about Lang’s fairy-stories. The following discussion lays therefore no claim to completeness or to following the sequence of his arguments, but merely tries to present the most important ideas and concepts. The first part of “On Fairy-stories” is an extensive and critical exploration of the semantics and etymology of the key-term “fairy” and some of its compounds, such as “fairy-story.” Tolkien comes to the conclusion that “[m]ost good ‘fairy-stories’ are about the aventures of men in the Perilous Realm11 or upon its shadowy marches” (OFS 32), which implies that most of the tales that are traditionally labeled “fairy-stories” fall short of the ideal. At the heart of Faërie lies the desire to “survey the depths of space and time [. . . and] to hold communion with other living things” (OFS 35). Yet fairystories must not grant the fulfillment of these desires by means of narrative mechanisms such as spaceships, time-machines, or the machinery of dream since these are incompatible with the artistic enchantment wrought by Faërie, whose power resides in the ability “of making immediately effective by the will the visions of ‘fantasy’ ” (OFS 42).12 Tolkien furthermore points out that children are neither more credulous than adults nor necessarily the ideal audience for these tales, which have ended up in the nursery by misfortune and accident rather than due to any intrinsic qualities of their own. The story-maker’s task, whether writing for children or adults, or both, is to create “a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside” (OFS 52). It is towards this enchanted state that Fantasy as a natural human activity aspires. In a later section Tolkien discusses the purpose of fairy-stories and identifies three further key characteristics in addition to that of Fantasy, namely Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. Recovery in the Tolkienian sense implies the “regaining of a clear view” that frees us “from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity” (OFS 67) which has its origin in our possessiveness. The products of Fantasy, such as centaurs or a green sun, help us to see our own horses and sun with renewed clarity – maybe not as what they are, but certainly as how they were meant to be seen. Recovery thus designates the restorative aspect of fairy-stories and is closely linked to Escape. Tolkien avoids giving a clear-cut, one-sentence definition for this term, yet his discussion (OFS 69–76) makes clear that one important function of Escape is to leave behind the limitations of normal life. Again, Fantasy provides the means to overcome the (mental) obstacles and boundaries imposed by society and the primary world. Thus, next to offering escape from such real-world threats as hunger, thirst, poverty, etc., it even holds out the promise of the Escape from Death – after all, fairy-stories are “not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability” (OFS 55). Consolation, finally, is achieved by the happy ending – especially in the form of the eucatastrophe, the “sudden joyous ‘turn’ ” which shows the working of “a sudden and miraculous grace” (OFS 75). In the “Epilogue” this specific understanding of the happy ending is then related to the gospels: the evangelium is the divine fairy-story come true in our



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primary world, with the incarnation as the eucatastrophic turn that frees mankind from the bondage of original sin. It is of interest that some key concepts such as “sub-creation” or the specific connection between the happy ending of the fairy-story and the Christian gospel were not yet in existence in the original lecture and the early drafts. Also, we can see how Tolkien was developing and refining his critical vocabulary and concepts which, in the end, would comprise the central terms Fantasy, Enchantment, Escape, Recovery, and Consolation. And, as Heidi Krüger’s (2008) discussion of the development of “On Fairy-stories” has made clear, the documents show that the final product, the 1947 essay and its later reprints, is not so much a harmoniously unified whole, but rather a text that still harbors many of the contradictions, tensions, and unresolved issues as the heritage of its long germination and diversified scope. Its rise to fame and popularity among critics must be seen as largely due to the overwhelming popular success of The Lord of the Rings – a text that has irritated many a literary critic who found that his or her toolbox of criticism does not contain many suitable instruments to come to terms with it (see ch. 25). Tolkien’s essay has helped to provide some critical concepts and terminology to fill this gap and, as a consequence, The Lord of the Rings with its elements of Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation has often been interpreted as a (somewhat oversized) fairy-story in the Tolkienian sense of the term.13 Since it also constitutes a prime example of the art of sub-creation, and has served as a model for many of the later works in the genre, Tolkien’s essay has indirectly become the theoretical cornerstone for the secondaryworld tradition within fantasy (vs. the Todorovian framework). Nevertheless, it would be pushing things a bit too far to put it into the same category as Aristotle, Sidney, Wordsworth, and Coleridge’s texts on imaginative writing (cf. Flieger and Anderson in Tolkien 2008b, 20).

Conclusion Most of Tolkien’s lectures and essays have for a long time suffered the fate of neglect and oblivion among their primary audiences – not least since some of them were published decades after he had delivered them orally. There are, however, a few exceptions, such as “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” or his ideas on ofermo¯ d as part of “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Son of Beorhthelm.” Both caused a sea change in the critical reception of the poems in question and have been part of the critical discourse ever since their publication. Yet the greater number of Tolkien’s lectures gained in importance only due to a shift away from reading them in their original context towards applying their ideas to “Tolkien the author.” Thus his essays on medieval literature, fairy-stories, or philology have become increasingly inter- and metatexts for the interpretation of Tolkien’s works of fiction and thus gained a new lease of life.

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List of Academic Essays and Other Relevant Academic Publications by J. R. R. Tolkien 1922. A Middle English Vocabulary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1924. “Philology: General Works.” In The Year’s Work in English Studies, 4: 20–37. (London: Oxford University Press for The English Association.) 1925. “Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography.” Review of English Studies, 1.2: 210–215. 1925. “The Devil’s Coach-Horses.” Review of English Studies, 1.3: 331–336. 1925. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Edited by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1926. “Philology: General Works.” In The Year’s Work in English Studies, 5: 26–65. (London: Oxford University Press for The English Association.) 1927. “Philology: General Works.” In The Year’s Work in English Studies, 6: 32–66. (London: Oxford University Press for The English Association.) 1928. “Foreword.” In Walter E. Haigh, A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, xiii–xviii. London: Oxford University Press. 1929. “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad.” In Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 14: 104–126. (London: Oxford University Press.) 1930. “The Oxford English School.” Oxford Magazine, 48.21: 778–780, 782. 1932. “Appendix I: The Name ‘Nodens’.” In R. E. M. Wheeler and T. V. Wheeler, Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, 132–137. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1932. “Sigelwara Land [Part 1].” Medium Ævum, 1.3: 183–196. 1934. “Sigelwara Land [Part 2].” Medium Ævum, 3.2: 95–111. 1934. “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale.” In Transactions of the Philological Society, 1–70. 1937. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. London: Humphrey Milford. 1940. “Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of Beowulf.” In Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment: A Translation into Modern English Prose by John R. Clark Hall, viii–xli. London: George Allen & Unwin. 1947. “Iþþlen in Sawles Warde.” Written together with S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne. English Studies, 27.6: 168–170. 1947. “On Fairy-Stories.” In Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 38–89. London: Oxford University Press. 1948. “MS Bodley 34: A Re-Collation of a Collation.” Written together with S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne. Studia Neophilologica, 20.1–2: 65–72. 1953. “Middle English ‘Losenger’: Sketch of an Etymological and Semantic Enquiry.” In Essais de philologie moderne (1951), 63–76. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 1953. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son.” In Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, N.S. 6: 1–18. (London: John Murray.) 1963. “English and Welsh.” In Angles and Britons: O’Donnell Lectures, 1–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



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1975. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo. Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin. 1982. Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode. Edited by Alan Bliss. London: George Allen & Unwin. 1983. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Contains “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” “On Translating Beowulf,” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” “On Fairy-Stories,” “English and Welsh,” “A Secret Vice,” and “Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford.” London: George Allen & Unwin. 2008. On Fairy-stories. Expanded edition, with commentary and notes. Edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins. Notes   1  See discussion of Tolkien’s collaboration with his students M. B. Salu and S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne in ch. 3.   2  Lit[erature] referring to the courses focusing on the study of the literary texts beginning with Chaucer, whereas Lang[uage] denotes the study of Old and Middle English and the literature of these periods.   3  Múspell, also called Muspellsheimr, is one of the nine worlds in the Old Norse mythology of the Edda. It is the land of fire and home of the fire-giants, the “sons of Múspell,” who will be led to Ragnarök by the fire-giant Surtr.   4  See Ross Smith (2007) and Fimi (2009, 69– 115) for an in-depth discussion of these aspects.   5  This is, however, too radical and simplifying a claim. See Fimi (2009) for a nuanced and comprehensive analysis of the development of Tolkien’s languages on the one hand, and his legendarium on the other.   6  See the respective chapters in Smith (2007) and Fimi (2009).   7  See Drout (2010) and Shippey (2010) for discussions of the lecture’s/essay’s impact.

  8  There exist two (partial) translations of Beowulf among Tolkien’s academic papers in the Bodleian, one into alliterative verse, the other into prose.   9  The Old English poem Deor mentions Heorrenda as the scop (court-poet) who usurped Deor’s place. 10  The recent critical edition of Tolkien’s lecture text, notes, and preliminary sketches by Douglas A. Anderson and Verlyn Flieger (Tolkien 2008b) allows us to study the development of Tolkien’s ideas in some detail. 11  The Perilous Realm is “Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being [.  .  . and which] holds [also . . .] mortal men, when we are enchanted” (OFS 32). 12  Fantasy refers to the sub-creation by means of the “magic” of language which allows “the making of glimpsing of Other-worlds” (OFS 55) and presupposes the “freedom from the domination of observed ‘fact’ ” (OFS 60). 13  The one work by Tolkien that comes closest to his ideal of a fairy-story is Smith of Wootton Major (Tolkien 2008e).

References Drout, Michael. 2006. “The Rhetorical Evolution of ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’.” In The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 183–215. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.

Drout, Michael. 2007. “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance.” Tolkien Studies, 4: 113–176. Drout, Michael. 2010. “ ‘Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics’: The Brilliant Essay that Broke Beowulf Studies.” Available at Scholars’ Forum,

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http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum_posts .asp?TID=237825, accessed November 21, 2013. Ferré, Vincent. 2008. “The Rout of the King: Tolkien’s Readings on Arthurian Kingship – Farmer Giles of Ham and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.” In Tolkien’s Shorter Works: Essays of the Jena Conference 2007, edited by Margaret Hiley and Frank Weinreich, 59–76. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Fimi, Dimitra. 2009. Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Honegger, Thomas. 2007. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth: Philology and the Literary Muse.” Tolkien Studies, 4: 189–199. Krüger, Heidi. 2008. “Eine Neuberwertung der theoretischen Konzeption von ‘Faërie’ und ‘fairy-story’ auf Basis der 2008 erschienenen erweiterten Ausgabe Tolkien On Fairy-stories.” Hither Shore, 5: 197–217. Schlobin, Roger C. 2000. “The Monsters are Talismans and Transgressions: Tolkien and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” In J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons, 71–81. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2007a. “Fighting the Long Defeat: Philology in Tolkien’s Life and Fiction.” In Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien, 139–156. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Shippey, Tom. 2007b. “Tolkien’s Academic Reputation Now.” In Roots and Branches, 203–212. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Shippey, Tom. 2007c. “Tolkien and ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’.” In Roots and Branches, 323–339. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Shippey, Tom. 2010. “Tolkien’s Two Views of Beowulf, One Hailed, One Ignored: But Did We Get This One Right?” Available at Scholars’ Forum, http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum _posts.asp?TID=238598&PN=1, accessed No­ vember 21, 2013. Smith, Ross. 2007. Inside Language: Linguistic and Aesthetic Theory in Tolkien. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Tolkien, J. R. R. and E. V. Gordon, eds. 1967. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Rev. edn. by N. Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Further Reading Flieger, Verlyn. 1993. “The Green Man, the Green Knight, and Treebeard: Scholarship and Invention in Tolkien’s Fiction.” In Scholarship and Fantasy: Proceedings of the Tolkien Phenomenon (May 1992, Turku, Finland), edited by K. J. Battarbee, 85–98. Turku: University of Turku.

Miller, Miriam Youngerman. 1991. “ ‘Of sum mayn meruayle, that he myht trawe’: The Lord of the Rings and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Studies in Medievalism, 3.3: 345–365.

3

Tolkien as Editor Tom Shippey

As far as we know, it was never in Tolkien’s mind to write a critical monograph, a work of literary criticism or literary history such as W. P. Ker’s Epic and Romance (1897) or H. M. Chadwick’s The Heroic Age (1912). Tolkien would have been the ideal author for an account (none has ever been written) of the medieval literature of his favorite counties in the West Midlands, but the thought seems not to have occurred to him. Such critical articles as he did write are mostly either discussions of single words and phrases, or else responses to special invitations: both categories are carefully discussed by Michael Drout (2007, 115–120, 134–145). For whatever reason, however, Tolkien’s conception of his professional role centered, not on criticism and interpretation, but on editing, with translation as a more personal by-product of his editorial work. In the modern academic world, editing is often regarded as a low-prestige occupation, not requiring the literary skills for a successful monograph. Tolkien would not have agreed. He might well have replied that mere critics can side-step difficult places, especially in ancient texts in little-known languages. Editors, however, especially if they are also glossators, have to come to a conclusion about the meaning of every word. And it is only through this that one may hope – to use Tolkien and Gordon’s phrase – to come to “an appreciation [of a text] as far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired” (SGGK v). Editing is the foundation, the most important part of bringing ancient works and forgotten authors back to life. All the rest is merely superstructure.

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Tolkien accordingly committed himself to 11 editorial projects during his professional career, which are dealt with individually below. One has to admit that his success rate in these endeavors was not high. Two of the 11 appeared only posthumously (Exodus and Finn and Hengest). Two more had only a limited aim and limited circulation (see Tolkien 2004b, 2008c, and 2008d). Two were completed and published under the names of E. V. Gordon (1953) and his widow Ida L. Gordon (1960). A further two proved abortive. Although Tolkien worked on them, sometimes for years, and may have come close to completion on both (see Lee 2009 and further comment below), both projects were abandoned and his work on both appeared to be lost (once again, see further comment below). Of the remaining three, although Tolkien’s edition of an important manuscript of Ancrene Wisse was awaited for over 30 years, when it did appear in 1962 (AW) it proved an anti-climax. The bright spot in the list is certainly the 1925 joint edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, produced in collaboration with Tolkien’s Leeds colleague E. V. Gordon (SGGK). Although Sir Gawain had been edited previously, it remained little known. Tolkien and Gordon’s edition, by contrast, immediately made what many would call the greatest English poem of the Middle Ages accessible to generations of students. Although there have been several later editions, Tolkien and Gordon’s, updated by Tolkien’s Oxford successor Norman Davis in 1967, is still widely used. One may well think that it was this edition which clinched Tolkien’s election to the Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford the year it was published (see ch. 1). At that point, in 1925, Tolkien, rather than his former tutor Kenneth Sisam, appeared to be the up-and-coming young man of English philological studies. This was a striking reversal, given that the first of Tolkien’s 11 editorial projects had been A Middle English Vocabulary, printed separately in 1922, but originally intended to be (as it eventually became) the “Glossary” to the texts edited by Sisam for his 1921 anthology, or “Reader,” Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose.1 It was the graduate assistant of 1919, however, who became the Oxford Professor of 1925. Nevertheless, the seeds of much trouble might well be seen in this first collaboration. It is obvious that a “Reader,” a selection of texts to be used by undergraduates, is not much use without a glossary, but that is what Oxford University Press initially had to publish, because of Tolkien’s delay in delivering the work he had been assigned. Late or non-delivery was to become a pattern. It was especially infuriating to Sisam, who had been passed over for his former pupil, and who then, as an employee of Oxford University Press, had to deal for many years with Tolkien’s missed deadlines and complex excuses. His annoyance was expressed in several letters, and it was shared.2 The ill-feeling created no doubt had a part in making Tolkien unpopular among sections of the Oxford community, an unpopularity of which he was himself aware.3 One has to ask, rather bluntly, what was Tolkien’s problem? What were his intentions? And, with rather more discrimination, and some hope of answering the questions just raised, what accounts for his very different editorial practices in those works which he did complete?



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The Task of a Glossator Much can be deduced from the “Note” with which Tolkien prefaced his Middle English Vocabulary (MEV).4 It should be said first that the whole point of Sisam’s “Reader” was to introduce undergraduate students to as wide a range of Middle English texts as possible. There was no such thing as Standard English in the fourteenth century, and dialect divisions were far deeper than in later periods. Even common pronouns like “she” and “them” might appear, for instance, as “ho” or “hem.” An undergraduate reading any of Sisam’s 17 different texts, then, might be looking up different forms of the same word again and again. Tolkien’s MEV dealt with this by coding word-meanings to Sisam’s texts by item and line number. Some words appeared in only one text. Thus the entry for “gryndel” (which occurred only in Sir Gawain, text no. 5 in Sisam), read: Gryndel, adj. wrathful, V 270; Gryndelly, adv. wrathfully, V 231. [? Back-formation from *grindlaik (gryndellayk Sir Gaw. 312), O[ld] N[orse] grimmd + leik-r; cf. ON grimm-leikr.]

The entry not only gave the meaning of the word, it also suggested a derivation from one of the languages which contributed to or provided evidence for Middle English (Old English, Old Norse, Old French, Middle Dutch, etc.). In this way the student was also given some sense of the developing history of the language. But while gryndel was a hard word in one way (not found in modern English), it was an easy one in another sense, for it occurred only twice in the “Reader.” How should one deal with far more common words, words still familiar? Tolkien expressed his conviction very firmly in his prefatory “Note” (unpaginated): This glossary does not aim at completeness, and is not primarily a glossary of rare or ‘hard’ words. A good working knowledge of Middle English depends less on the possession of an abstruse vocabulary than on familiarity with the ordinary machinery of expression – with the precise forms and meanings that common words may assume; with the uses of such innocent-looking little words as the prepositions of and for; with idiomatic phrases . . . These are the features of the language which an English reader is predisposed to pass over . . . [So] I have given exceptionally full treatment to what may be called the backbone of the language.

It is, as always, hard to argue with Tolkien, but sometimes the effort of resisting the argumentative flow has to be made. Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, claiming that the charge of “dilatoriness” leveled against Tolkien is in this case “entirely mistaken,” note that Tolkien’s glossary contains some 4740 entries, nearly 6800 definitions, almost 15,000 text references, “every one of which would have to be individually identified,” and 1900 cross-references (2006, 35). In those pre-computer days, it must have taken a lot of index cards.

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So much is true. But what happens if one moves away from words like, for instance, “Fairi, -y, Feyré, Faierie (XII), n. faery. Fairyland . . .” – seven citations from two different texts, with an alternative meaning “magic” – to a word like “Ȝe, pron. 2 pl. nom. you . . .”? For this Tolkien gives 35 citations to most of Sisam’s texts, taking up 24 close-set half-lines (the “Glossary” was printed in double columns). There is potentially valuable information in the remark about differentiation from þou, but just the same, few students would have needed to recognize that “ȝe = ye = you” more than once. The entry on Do(n), Doo makes the point even more clearly: 64 half-lines, ending with the note that the word derives from Old English dón. Nearly all of this is obvious. It is true that idioms might catch one out. Tolkien notes that ded come means “fetched” (not “did come”), that I haue at do means “I have something to do.” Especially useful (and explaining his remark about “innocent-looking” prepositions) is his comment, under Ȝou, that ȝou to means “for yourselves”: so that John Ball’s warning to the rebellious peasants of Essex, loke schappe ȝou to on heued, and no mo means “see you set up one chief for yourselves and no more.” These are exceptions, however. Most uses of these common words needed only one translation plus much more selective citation.5 My guess is that in its many decades of use, a high proportion of Tolkien’s thousands of text references have never been looked at once. Tolkien may or may not have been dilatory, but his own self-accusation was that he was a “niggler,” someone who spends (wastes) time on unnecessary detail. This was the problem with his next follow-up project, the disastrous “Clarendon Chaucer.” The idea here was simple: to provide an anthology of selections from Chaucer for use in schools, along the lines of Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, with no more introduction and annotation than would enable the works to be read in Middle English. Sisam’s view was that the texts would be taken from W. W. Skeat’s already existing Oxford edition, so they would require no work at all. The notes would be explanatory, not scholarly. What we thought we knew of the sad results has been set out by Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond, rather defensively (Reader’s Guide 153–156), and more neutrally by Gilliver (2008, 64–70), but in brief Tolkien was coopted into the project as glossator in 1922; was thought by Sisam to have given up in 1924; continued to receive deadlines and letters from the Press for many years; and eventually pulled out in 1951, offering his notes to anyone who could use them, after which (as far as anyone knew) they disappeared. But while this present volume was in preparation, and thanks to the persistence of John M. Bowers, all Tolkien’s materials for this project have been rediscovered: page proofs corrected by Tolkien, notes by Tolkien, proofs of Tolkien’s glossary and notes on language, and testimonials for the “Introduction” by Tolkien’s co-editor George Gordon. Further search by Peter Gilliver uncovered George Gordon’s long, handwritten “Introduction” itself.6 Much of this material will no doubt eventually be published, but it will now inevitably function as a coda to Tolkien studies, not, as intended, a stimulus to Chaucer studies. Without being unduly censorious, one has to concede that Tolkien could have handled the project better. Clarendon successfully published several school editions of Chaucer tales without Tolkien’s involvement, two of them from Sisam in



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1923 and 1927, while in 1979 Norman Davis once again continued Tolkien’s work by bringing out his Chaucer Glossary. It is hard to resist Gilliver’s still-valid conclusion that “when Tolkien started to write, he couldn’t help writing about what he thought was worth writing about, rather than writing what he had been asked to write” (2008, 70). While this was proceeding, Tolkien was working on the edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, not a selection but the whole poem, and this time he had what seems to have been an ideal collaborator in E. V. Gordon, described by Tolkien as “an industrious little devil” (see Anderson 2003). Whatever the relationship between the two men (see ch. 1), they did succeed in driving the project to a successful completion. It is thought that the division of labor was for Gordon to provide the bulk of the explanatory notes, and probably of the “Introduction,” while Tolkien took care of establishing the text, providing (once again) the glossary, and probably writing the commentary on the poem’s language.7 These latter tasks were ideally suited to Tolkien’s talents; they were in some respects easy, in others engagingly challenging. Establishing the text cannot have given Tolkien much difficulty. Sir Gawain exists in only one manuscript, so different readings did not have to be checked and decided between. The manuscript was written by a scribe who seems to have been close to the poet in time and space, and so to have understood the poem and the dialect of the poem. Tolkien made about 170 corrections to the poem’s 2530 lines, including some added in reprints after 1925, but the majority are trivial, doing no more than correcting slips of the pen. So, in line 629 emdeleȝ was altered to endeleȝ, “endless”; in lines 705 and 930 clapel and claplayneȝ were corrected to chapel, chaplayneȝ; doublets like þy þy in line 2247 and he he in line 2305 were reduced to þy and he. Sometimes a larger change was indicated by a failure to maintain alliteration: at line 958 the scribe wrote that the old lady, Morgan le Fay, was Chymbled ouer hir blake chyn with mylkquyte vayles, but this gives only two alliterating syllables, not three, and Tolkien emended to chalkquyte. Similarly he corrected the in-context meaningless tag in erde, in line 881, to inurnde, “adorned.” Elsewhere Tolkien straightened out some confusions: the man who copied the poem seems, not unreasonably, to have been deceived several times by the scenes of marked gender-reversal, with the large and bearded host kissing Gawain publicly, while the beautiful hostess makes unladylike sexual advances to him privately. In lines 1389, 1770, 1872, Tolkien changed ho, “she,” to he, prynce to pryncece, and conversely he to ho, thus saving the joke each time. Even these brief examples, however, show also the difficult part of Tolkien’s assignment. Chymbled is not a common word. Tolkien’s glossary entry, which follows precisely the format of his 1922 MEV, reads “chymbled, pp. bound, wrapped up, 958. [Cf. ON. kimbla.]” By contrast *inurnde is treated as a variant form of enn(o)urned, with three line references and three meanings offered, while the word originates, Tolkien suggested, from “OFr. aourner, with altered prefix.” One of the charms of the poem has been, ever since Tolkien and Gordon brought it back into English cultural life, its mixture of high-status French words, often to do with dress, or armor, or the aristocratic sports of hunting and flirtation, with words which (if they survived) would

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now be lower-class Northernisms excluded from Standard English and often derived from Norse:8 words like snart, “bitterly,” from Old Norse snarr + neuter ending, or snitered, “came shivering down, 2003. Cf. Norw[egian] dial[ect] snitra, shiver with cold.” The poet seems to have had no sense of the “cultural cringe” with respect to French found in the fourteenth century as in the twentieth; he used French, Norse, and English words just as he found them convenient. As he would do with Ancrene Wisse, Tolkien very much appreciated such signs that gentility could still be a native quality, had not been entirely erased by the Norman Conquest and the imposition of a French ruling class. One final advantage for Tolkien was that while the poem’s vocabulary was “rich . . . approximately as many distinct individual words as there are lines in the poem: a new word for every line,” there was no call for him to save space. He could declare – in direct contrast with his “Note” to the 1922 MEV – that “In the Glossary completeness is aimed at” (SGGK 133). He could look at every word and inject all his linguistic learning into the etymological derivations. For this generations of students and scholars have been grateful.

False Starts and Dialect Studies The natural follow-up to this success would have been an edition of the poem Pearl, found in the same manuscript as Sir Gawain, and surely written by the same man. Tolkien’s admiration for the poem was signaled by his 1924 poem “The Nameless Land” (published in 1927), which imitates the otherwise unique meter and stanzaic structure of Pearl, and also draws on its vision of a strange paradisaical land. We do not exactly know what went wrong. While Gordon and Tolkien remained in contact, after Tolkien’s move to Oxford they were no longer in daily contact, which Tolkien seems to have needed; and Gordon died young in 1938. The edition did appear, under E. V. Gordon’s name, in 1953. In it Gordon’s widow Ida states that it was Tolkien’s idea, once “he found himself unable to give sufficient time to it,” that Gordon “should continue the work alone. This he did, and at the time of his death in 1938 the edition was complete.” Publication was delayed, however, and when it eventually appeared 15 years later Ida Gordon had made “extensive alterations . . . considerable rewriting.” She adds on the same page: “My warmest thanks must go to Professor Tolkien, who had the original typescript for some time and added valuable notes and corrections; he has also responded generously to queries” (Gordon 1953, iii). Further acts of generosity by Tolkien will be noted below, but one wonders quite what was meant by “for some time.” Years? A decade? Be that as it may, it is no longer usually possible to separate out Tolkien’s contribution from that of E. V. or Ida L. Gordon, although pp. xi–xix of the 1953 “Introduction,” on the poem’s “Form and Purpose,” were reprinted as Tolkien’s work alone in the “Introduction” to his 1975 volume of translations (see Tolkien 1995d). I have suggested elsewhere that the long note on line 115, stroþe-men, sounds very Tolkienian (Shippey 2000, 204), as do several



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detailed notes on Northern and other dialect forms, see those on lines 51, 107, 358, 609–610, etc., but this can only be speculation. Another project associated with the Gordons was to provide a joint edition of two Old English poems, The Wanderer and The Seafarer, found close together in the Exeter Book, one of the most important manuscripts of Old English poetry. It would be a joint project, but Tolkien would take the lead role for The Wanderer and Gordon for The Seafarer. Both poems were already well known, for they had been printed in Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader (many editions from 1876), and were staples of the Oxford English course, partly because they appealed directly even to a modern taste (see chs. 2 and 15). The poems are, however, extremely difficult lexically and grammatically. Tolkien’s projected edition might then have been original and valuable if it had appeared in the 1930s. It is thought that Tolkien was close to finishing it, and may have sent his materials to Gordon, but if so, they have disappeared (Anderson 2003, 19). His extensive unpublished notes on the poem survive, but as Stuart Lee comments, “Simply collating these does not an edition make” (2009, 197). The poem continued to be personally important to him. Lee notes his reading of five lines from it at the close of his 1959 “Valedictory Address” to Oxford; the same lines formed a model for the Rohirric poem quoted by Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings (see also ch. 12). The Seafarer was also deeply significant personally to Tolkien. The seven lines of Old English verse in Lost Road (84) are a collage of Seafarer lines, and Ælfwine’s five Old English lines are also reminiscent of the poem (Lost Road 44, 103, 203). As with Pearl, an edition of The Seafarer did eventually appear, completed by Ida Gordon in 1960. This time, however, she noted that while her “first intention” had been “to bring into final form” the “uncompleted draft” of the joint edition of both poems, matters changed so quickly that in the end she decided only to edit The Seafarer and to revise it much more thoroughly. Significantly, she published this edition under her own name, not her husband’s. She noted that her edition “incorporates much of the original material, esp. in the Notes,” and thanked Tolkien “for some notes given to me with his usual generosity” (Ida L. Gordon 1960, vii). Her heavy revision has however left no clear trace of Tolkien’s influence: unless it be the notes on Anglian/Mercian forms for words in lines 52 and 69, close to the focus of Tolkien’s personal interest. In contrast with these abortive collaborative projects, in 1929 Tolkien did make a solo breakthrough in academic studies with his article on two early medieval texts, Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. This was in effect a statement about dialect purity (see also ch. 16). What Tolkien had noticed, and then proved to the hilt, was that two manuscripts, one of Ancrene Wisse and one of Hali Meiðhad (and several associated female saints’ lives), were written in exactly the same dialect but in different handwriting. In medieval conditions, this could not have come about by accident or coincidence. The two scribes had been taught to write the same way. There was, then, even in the era of Norman-French dominance, a holdout area of England where English was still not just spoken, but written, and written as taught in a school of some kind. This holdout area – one has to say, a model for “the Shire” – was moreover in the

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West Midlands, very close to what Tolkien regarded as home, and was linguistically continuous with Old English from the same area. All this was, for Tolkien, particularly exciting, personally but also philologically: for if there was one thing which got philologists of Tolkien’s time excited, it was a manuscript which gave a form of one particular dialect, preferably written by the author himself, but in this unique case copied out by scribes using a fixed form of what might very well have been the authors’ dialect as well – that fixed form being labeled, by Tolkien, as “AB language” (see further Zettersten 2006). Tolkien’s article led the EETS to establish as a priority editions of the many manuscripts of the Ancrene Riwle, or “Rule for Anchoresses,” which in Tolkien’s manuscript was more accurately called Ancrene Wisse, “Guide for Anchoresses.” Remarkably, this English work had been translated into both Latin and French – translations then nearly always went the other way – and two editions of such versions appeared from the EETS in 1944. English texts appeared in 1952, 1954, and 1956, with another French one in 1958.9 Tolkien’s edition (AW) did not appear, however, until 1962, 33 years after his initial breakthrough; and when it did appear it was out of line with EETS policy. With just one exception, all other editions in this series of texts, including six more published after 1962, contain introductions by the editors. Tolkien’s has only a brief “Preparatory Note,” with a ten-page “Introduction” by N. P. Ker. Why did Tolkien not publish the results of what must have been by this time his extensive study of the manuscript and its language? The next EETS edition of the Riwle, E. J. Dobson’s 1972 edition of what he thought (disagreeing with Tolkien) was probably the oldest copy of the work, has an editorial introduction 165 pages long. Why did Tolkien not produce something on a similar scale? One might say, “because he was writing The Lord of the Rings,” and to that there is no answer. Tolkien was also, however, “niggling” again. In his “Prefatory Note” to the 1962 edition he states that, “Owing to the regularity of the hand it has been possible to preserve the lineation of the manuscript” (AW vi). In other words, Tolkien’s printed edition follows the manuscript line by line. The textual notes at the bottom of each page are moreover all but entirely concerned with detail about initials, underlinings, capital letters, marginalia. There are virtually no emendations or corrections in what is a long text, far longer than Sir Gawain. Tolkien clearly thought that this particular scribe knew what he was doing, so that his work was best left alone; while he also wanted to come as close as he could to reproducing in print the appearance of his manuscript. The EETS did not agree with him. Tolkien was creating a lot of extra work, not only for himself. Scull and Hammond’s long account of the to-and-fro of correspondence (Reader’s Guide 44–49) takes Tolkien’s part and claims that his arguments were “strongly worded, eloquent and logical” (47), but as said above one sometimes has to dig in one’s heels against Tolkien’s argumentative tide. His letters of 1936 and 1958, defending line-by-line transcription, could well have been answered – had Tolkien not been an Oxford Professor. This is exactly what did soon happen, with reference to Tolkien’s hitherto unchallenged 1929 opinions. Just after Tolkien’s edition came out, Angus McIntosh (1963)



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tacitly dismissed Tolkien’s views on the importance of dialect purity, while in 1986 McIntosh quoted Tolkien’s 1929 paper at some length and, respectfully but firmly, answered its claims point by point.10 That is the way academic study is supposed to work, but Tolkien would have had more academic impact if he had produced his edition earlier, without unnecessary detail, and with a substantial supporting apparatus, as found for instance in G. T. Shepherd’s partial edition of the same manuscript (1959). Possibly, however, such a supporting apparatus has been hidden from us by Tolkien’s characteristic “generosity,” mentioned twice above. In 1936 one of his graduate students, Simonne d’Ardenne, brought out an edition of one of the female saints’ lives written in “AB language” and from the same manuscript as Hali Meiðhad. This is, Gordon wrote in his review, “the ideal treatment of a Middle English text” (1937, 134). It contains text, translation, emended text, a complete account of “AB language,” a glossary, and etymological notes on many words. Although it was published first as her thesis by the University of Liège, so that her name alone appeared, as likewise in the subsequent EETS edition, d’Ardenne herself agreed that the edition was a joint product by herself and Tolkien.11 Gordon must have known this when he wrote his almost ecstatic review. Among the things he says which went to the heart of what Tolkien would have aimed at are: “The editor is above all a critic . . . who knows the right use of scholarship” (Gordon 1937, 134). He quotes d’Ardenne (or possibly Tolkien, see Drout 2007, 127–128) as declaring: “We can indeed get from AB a very good idea of what Anglo-Saxon would have become, had none of the invasions and dynastic changes of the preceding three centuries ever occurred” (1937, 134). Gordon went on to add, surely cheered on by Tolkien: And it is a good form of language, neater, more careful, and weightier than the English we have now. It is the chief attraction of this group [of “AB” texts] that it preserves the pure tradition of Anglo-Saxon England. (135–136)

Gordon ended his review with the question, perhaps intended hopefully, “When can we look for more of such work?” Not, alas, from Tolkien. One should add that he no doubt also gave a great deal of assistance to another work by one of his graduate students, Mary Salu, who published a translation of Ancrene Wisse, based on the Cambridge manuscript, with a “Preface” by Tolkien which states his conviction that this was “possibly the oldest surviving copy” and made by a scribe “perfectly at home with the language.”12 Tolkien’s other two editorial projects of the 1930s were both also concerned with issues of dialect consistency. Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale is set in Trumpington near Cambridge, but has among its characters two Northern students, whose dialect forms part of the tale’s comedy (see also ch. 16). In 1931 Tolkien read a paper to the Philological Society, printed in 1934, centered on the issue of dialect; while in July 1939 he recited his own version of the tale, which was issued as a pamphlet, as an Oxford

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“Summer Diversion,” in which the students’ dialect had been “corrected” to what Tolkien thought Chaucer had intended.13 One simple example of the dialect comedy is that one of the students says, of their college administrator, “Our manciple, I hope he wil be deed / swa werkis ay the wangis in his heed” (Tolkien 2008d, 177). In Southern English, the first line would be rude. In Northern English, however, hope just meant “suppose, expect”; werkis also did not mean “works” but “hurt,” for to the Northerners the -is verbal ending is a plural form. No-one knows now what wangis are: “back-teeth”? In his 1934 article Tolkien argued that only true philologists could appreciate the joke and with it Chaucer’s artistry; the “father of English literature” was on the side of “lang.” not “lit.” (see Tolkien 2008c). But the joke had been spoiled, Tolkien argued, by scribes who had not understood it and had replaced accurate dialect Northern features by more familiar Southernisms. Tolkien accordingly rewrote sections of the tale with the aim of restoring philological accuracy, thus creating a kind of partial edition. The changes, to a non-philological eye, are not substantial – the major one being that Tolkien omits a total of some 29 lines which describe or allude to the students’ sexual assaults on the miller’s wife and daughter, writing in or adapting a couple of lines to save rhyme. That apart, Tolkien deleted terminal -e endings which he thought would not have been pronounced, both in Chaucer’s own English and in the students’; marked those he thought would have been pronounced with ë; and often replaced y by i, assuming that the former is a mere spelling convention. One Northernism he marked more regularly than Chaucer was the use of long a, not rounded, as in Chaucer’s English and ours, to o. Chaucer noted this as a characteristic Northernism, for early on in the students’ speech we have na swayn, meaning “no servant,” as well as ham (changed by Tolkien to haam) for “home.” But elsewhere Chaucer (or his scribes) forgot, so that we have in various places geen, neen, for “gone, none,” altered by Tolkien to gaan, naan. Tolkien also altered to to til (though not consistently, see line 174). He changed some verbal forms, so that are we dryve becomes er we dreuen; I wil becomes I sal; and man sal becomes man suld. One standard test for Middle English dialect is present tense verb endings. John’s men sayth is clearly wrong, for -th endings are Southern, but is confirmed by the rhyme word fayth: Tolkien changed to by my fay . . . men say, though even that should arguably be sayis. He also kept clerkis sain, where the Midland -n ending is confirmed by the rhyme with swain. It was easier to be consistent over another standard test, changing the Southern/Midland form hem to thaim. The past participle lorn was emended to lost at line 137 of Tolkien’s text, but retained two lines later, where lorn has to rhyme with corn. Simon Horobin (2001) has concluded that Tolkien was wrong to think that Chaucer was even aiming at complete consistency, though he also notes (2002) that Chaucer may have deliberately included forms designed to imitate the Reeve’s own Norfolk dialect. Tolkien was also wrong about the scribes, for while the scribes of some manuscripts “Southernized” Chaucer’s text, others “Northernized” it. The inconsistencies were probably original to Chaucer.



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To end this section, Carl Hostetter’s exceptionally full reediting of Tolkien’s 1944 pamphlet edition of Sir Orfeo makes it possible to summarize the work relatively briefly (Tolkien 2004b). Though the poem has been preserved in three manuscripts, Hostetter shows that “Tolkien’s Middle English version .  .  . was based on Kenneth Sisam’s edition” in the “Reader” which Tolkien had glossed 20 years before. The germ of it may indeed have been a speculative note by Sisam in which he restored a number of cases of final -e, as belonging to an earlier form of English, thus improving the poem’s meter. In a brief “editorial note” Tolkien stated that the poem was originally composed “in the South-East of England (that is probably in Essex)” but had been “infected” by forms from other areas (Tolkien 2004b, 89, 88, 104). This differs only slightly from the conclusion of A. J. Bliss’s later detailed study, which is that the original dialect was that of Westminster-Middlesex (Bliss 1966, xx). Tolkien seems in fact to have made little effort to return the language of his edition to the suggested Essex origin. Though he thought that “the original appears to have used the old native form hye or he for sche and they (thai)” (Tolkien 2004b, 104) he did not reintroduce them to his text. Most of the 400+ alterations from Sisam’s text recorded by Hostetter are either: replacements of y by i (merely a spelling change); additions of final -e (as opposed to the frequent deletions in The Reeve’s Tale); or changes made for the sake of a more regular meter, though these are often justified by readings from the two manuscripts other than the one used as a base by Sisam, see lines 64, 180, 194, 419, etc. Tolkien’s mini-edition was a teaching text only, designed perhaps to make the poem slightly more accessible for the naval cadets who (for some reason) had been assigned to study it. Hostetter notes that Tolkien’s modern English translation was based on this Middle English version, citing several cases where the former agrees only with the latter, not with Sisam (Tolkien 2004b, 86–88). Both were probably written at the same time, in 1944.

Imaginative Reconstructions The last two works to be considered are Tolkien’s edition of the Old English poem Exodus, and his edition of the Old English Finnsburg Fragment together with lines 1063–1159 of Beowulf, which give an elliptical account of the same event, the so-called “Finnsburg Episode.”. Both were published posthumously, Exodus being put together from Tolkien’s notes by Joan Turville-Petre, Finn and Hengest (FH) by A. J. Bliss.14 Though Tolkien never saw them into print himself, he worked on both projects for many years. Between 1928 and 1937 he gave six full lecture courses at Oxford on the problems of Finnsburg, coming out of retirement to give his lectures again in 1963. Tolkien started lecturing on Exodus even earlier, in 1926; in 1932 he mentioned in a letter that he would very much like “to tackle a proper edition” of it (Reader’s Guide 681). The posthumous editions preserve many years of thought.

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They are also Tolkien’s most ambitious editions. In editing the text of Sir Gawain he made few changes, virtually none to the text of Ancrene Wisse. With the three Old English poems, however, he made scores of changes (especially to Exodus), amounting sometimes to rewrites. The reason for this different approach is obvious. Tolkien thought that the scribes of Sir Gawain and Ancrene Wisse were close to the authors in place and time, and understood the languages of the works they were copying. By contrast, Tolkien regarded it as established fact that Beowulf was written in “the age of Bede,” the early eighth century (see MC 20). But the one copy we have was made about the year 1000, nearly three centuries later: plenty of time for mistakes and misunderstandings to arise. He thought it likely that Exodus was of similar date (see Shippey 2000, 161–163). The case of the Finnsburg Fragment was even worse, for there we have no manuscript copy at all, only a transcript made by George Hickes some time before 1705, a time when knowledge of Old English had all but vanished: Hickes barely understood what he was writing. Tolkien accordingly treated all three works with great freedom, as well as learning and imagination – something which has not appealed to conservative scholars (see Reader’s Guide 681–682; Drout 2007, 124–125). There is moreover an irony in the general lack of academic response to Finn and Hengest. The essence of Tolkien’s “Reconstruction” of the event recorded in the poems is that it was a historical event, remembered because it was an important one, part of the movement which brought the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to Britain in the fifth century, and led to the creation of England. In 1936, however, Tolkien had argued so persuasively against taking Beowulf as a historical document that by the 1980s it had become an article of scholarly faith that it was useless as history. As remarked twice already, sometimes one has to dig in one’s heels against Tolkien’s argumentative flow, which (very obviously in 1936) may have had an immediate and personal motive – proclaiming creative autonomy for the writers of fantasy. The fight at Finnsburg, nevertheless, tells the story in its two versions of a fight in Frisia, in which a group of Danes, or “Half-Danes,” are treacherously attacked at night by Frisians and Jutes, though it is the Jutes, in Beowulf, who are given the major part of the blame. What caused the attack, what the Jutes are doing in Frisia, what are the details of the deal eventually made between the Frisian king Finn and the surviving Danish leader Hengest – all these have been given multiple and contradictory solutions over the years. Tolkien’s solution, very briefly, was that there were Jutes on both sides, attackers and defenders. In World War II terms, Hengest (in English tradition, a Jute not a Dane) is what one might call a “collaborator Jute,” who has accepted the Danish take-over of Jutland. The treacherous attackers are “Free Jutes in exile,” taking shelter in Frisia while planning a come-back. Though these two groups meet on neutral territory, there is naturally bad blood between them. The vital event, Tolkien suggested – in the long “Glossary of Names” and the even longer “Textual Commentary” which formed main parts of his edition – was the death of Garulf recorded in the Fragment, for he was the last relic of the old Jutish royal dynasty.



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Tolkien supported this view with many emendations. He thought the meter of the Fragment was so irregular that words and phrases had to be added to fill out defective lines: his version of the poem is three lines longer than anyone else’s. He added a line to Beowulf also, to deal with what seems a grammatical failure. His editing is often daring: in the Fragment he suggested the rare words hlencan and þindað for Hickes’s landa, windað. It is sometimes peremptory: after a bold rehandling of a difficult passage in the Episode, Tolkien wrote “I do not see the value of discussing any other view” (FH 98). As in 1936, one may sometimes suspect a personal motive. Tolkien suggested that the name of the Danish chief, Hnæf, would have been Hnefi in Old Norse, that this might be related to the form Hniflungar, and that this was the original form of what became the “Nibelungs,” in which case Hnefi “must once have been a figure of importance in legend” (FH 52). Tolkien also noted, however, that the name might have become the modern surname “Neave,” borne of course by his own Aunt Jane! So Tolkien was related, if remotely, to ancient heroes himself. Tolkien’s overall view of events is most easily recovered from the ten pages of text-and-translation and the four-page “Reconstruction” which close the edition. The whole story has also been told along strongly Tolkienian lines in a “young adult” novel, Hengest’s Tale (1966), by Jill Paton Walsh, who read English at Oxford, though apparently not when Tolkien was giving his Finnsburg lecture courses.15 When it came to Exodus Tolkien was even bolder (see also ch. 2). He swapped two sections in the poem over, so that lines 93–107 in the manuscript in his text follow lines 108–124: not his own idea, but bold nonetheless. Elsewhere he repeatedly altered words so that they became more foreboding, more suggestive of pre-Christian mythology. One example on which he had already expended great erudition was the Sigelwara land of line 69, which Tolkien emended in his text to Sigelwarena, and noted in his commentary could well be Sigelhearw(en)a, the land not of “the Sundwellers” but of the fire-demons. In line 46 most would read hergas on helle as “hellish armies,” but Tolkien thought the scribe had misread the whole line, writing in both “Hell” and “Heaven” because they were words he was familiar with; Tolkien saw the hergas as “heathen fanes” (as in modern place-names like Harrow), changed on helle to onheldon, “toppled,” and replaced heofon by heof, “lamentation.” At line 488 (487 in Tolkien) most editors see no need to change the word pað, meaning “path,” but Tolkien wrote “certainly an error” (Exodus 73), corrected to wað, noted that the Devil a bið on waðe, is always on the prowl, and translated “onrush.” His most daring solution may have been at line 202, where the poet appears to be describing the Israelite dismay at the approach of the Egyptian army. The manuscript reads here wælnet weredon, which would ordinarily mean “deadly nets defended.” Defended what? And how is that dismaying? Could wælnet mean “battle-nets,” that is, mail shirts? Tolkien decided that the words did not make sense however they were glossed. Weredon was just wrong: read wyrgdon, from the rare verb wyrgan = Latin strangulare, and translate “deadly toils cut off escape” (24). As with the word wælceasega, with its hints of “the necromantic practices of the female followers of Odinic magicians” (50), wyrgdon has a pagan history behind it.

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This the eighth-century poet might well have known, living as he did not long after the peaceful overthrow of paganism in England. Nearly three centuries later, most of them filled with warfare against violently pagan Vikings, the manuscript scribe not only did not know but had every reason not to want to know. Tolkien valued the Exodus poem, then, both for its memories of a vanished mythology, and as a sign of the entirely successful triumph of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. A good idea of the effect of Tolkien’s changes can be gained by reading his translation of the poem, and then a more conservative translation such as S. A. J. Bradley’s (1982). A final point is this. As is rare among editors, Tolkien habitually translated what he edited. He did it in the two editions just discussed, he did it also for Sir Gawain and Sir Orfeo, as also for Pearl, in SGPSO, and for poems whose translations are still unpublished (Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon among them). Tolkien saw this activity as an integral part of the editor’s task. If a glossator has to consider every word, a translator has to translate every line, every sentence. One may then think that the poem meant something different, but at least one knows what the translator thought it meant. Space forbids any consideration here of the aesthetic qualities of Tolkien’s translations (always into the same meter as the originals), but they can be a valuable guide to his editorial opinions. Translating, like glossing, keeps an editor honest.

Notes   1  See further Hammond and Anderson (1993, 1–2, 281–282).   2  See the 1924 and 1953 letters from Sisam quoted by Peter Gilliver (2008, 65–66, 69); Eugène Vinaver’s 1967 comment quoted in Anderson (2003, 24); Ida L. Gordon’s letter of 1982 likewise quoted by Anderson (2003, 16).   3  He hints at it in his 1944 story “Leaf by Niggle” (see Shippey, 2000, 265–273).   4  For further discussions of Tolkien’s work in Middle English see ch. 16.   5  Tolkien seems to have been aware of this, see his 1921 letter complaining about “recording forms that could be eliminated” quoted by Gilliver (2008, 64).   6  I owe this information to a private communication from Dr Bowers, in which he also acknowledges the very material assistance given by the Oxford University Press archivist Martin Maw, and by Peter Gilliver.   7  Hammond and Anderson (1993, 285). Douglas Anderson kindly informs me (private communication) that the ultimate source for this

  8 

  9 

10  11  12 

13 

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15 

is an unpublished letter of 1967 from Tolkien to N. R. Ker. Tolkien commented appreciatively on several such examples in his 1928 “Foreword” to Haigh, xiii–xviii. Zettersten (2006, 18–19) lists 12 EETS editions, to which one should add a thirteenth, published 2009. McIntosh (1986, 30) quotes and answers Tolkien (1929, 111). Scull and Hammond note several acknowledgements of the fact (Reader’s Guide 202). Tolkien (1955a, v). Salu must presumably have had access to Tolkien’s then unpublished transcript to make her translation. Both the 1934 paper and the 1939 pamphlet have now been reprinted in Tolkien Studies (see Tolkien 2008c and 2008d). The two volumes are discussed more extensively than is possible here in Shippey (2007), 175–186. Her maiden name, however, was Bliss. I do not know if she was related to Tolkien’s editor Alan Bliss.



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References Anderson, Douglas A. 2003. “ ‘An industrious little devil’: E. V. Gordon as Friend and Collaborator with Tolkien.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, 15–25. London: Routledge. Bliss, A. J., ed. 1966. Sir Orfeo. 2nd edn. London: Oxford University Press. Bradley, S. A. J., ed. and trans. 1982. Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: Dent. d’Ardenne, S. R. T. O., ed. 1936. Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene. Liège. Reprinted in 1961 by EETS, Original Series 248. London: Oxford University Press. Drout, Michael. 2007. “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance.” Tolkien Studies, 4: 113–176. Gilliver, Peter. 2008. “The Word as Leaf: Tolkien as Lexicographer and Philologist.” In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, edited by Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger, 57–84. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. [Gilliver’s “Part 1” is 59–70.] Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner. 2006. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon, E. V. 1937. “Review of d’Ardenne, 1936.” Medium Ævum, 6: 134–143. Gordon, E. V., ed. 1953. Pearl. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gordon, Ida L., ed. 1960. The Seafarer. London: Methuen. Hammond, Wayne G. and Douglas A. Anderson. 1993. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press.

Horobin, Simon. 2001. “J. R. R. Tolkien as a Philologist: A Reconsideration of the Northernisms in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale.” English Studies, 82: 97–105. Horobin, Simon. 2002. “Chaucer’s Norfolk Reeve.” Neophilologus, 86: 609–612. Lee, Stuart D. 2009. “J. R. R. Tolkien and The Wanderer: From Edition to Application.” Tolkien Studies, 6: 189–211. McIntosh, Angus. 1963. “A New Approach to Middle English Dialectology.” English Studies, 44: 1–11. McIntosh, Angus. 1986. “General Introduction.” In Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Later Middle English, vol. 1, 2–36. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Shepherd, G. T., ed. 1959. Ancrene Wisse, Parts Six and Seven. London: Nelson. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2007. “A Look at Exodus and Finn and Hengest.” In Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien, 175–186. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Zettersten, Arne. 2006. “The AB Language Lives.” In The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 13– 24. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.

4

Manuscripts: Use, and Using Stuart D. Lee

Introduction Every medieval manuscript is unique . . . The immediacy of personal contact with the artefact brings a thrill which cannot be over-emphasised . . . In addition, for the imaginative, there is the frisson that comes from knowing that one is following the hands of all those who have worked with the manuscript before . . . the scribe(s) and Anglo-Saxon owners; later medieval scholars who have read, glossed, added to or erased text, learning, borrowing and teaching from it; early modern collectors like Archbishop Matthew Parker; and recent giants in the field of scholarship such as J. R. R. Tolkien. (OwenCrocker and Cesario 2009, 7) .  .  . but beside the shattered lid of one there lay the remains of a book. It had been slashed and stabbed and partly burned, and it was so stained with black and other dark marks like old blood that little of it could be read. Gandalf lifted it carefully, but the leaves crackled and broke as he laid it on the slab. (FR, II, v, 419)

A running theme throughout this companion is the interrelationship between two dominating aspects of Tolkien’s life – his career as a medievalist, and his legendarium. The two opening extracts continue this by focusing on a key component of any medieval scholarship, the primary source document or manuscript. The term “manuscript” is used in its true definition here – a handwritten document that records the text or illustration one is studying, be it the codex, inscription, scroll, or fragment. In the first quote one is presented with a glimpse of the thrill one encounters when handling

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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a medieval manuscript itself; in the latter this enjoyment of discovery and connection with the past is transformed to the dread that Gandalf experiences in the Chamber of Mazarbul as he realizes the manuscript they have discovered is the last record of the doomed colony of Moria. Tolkien and manuscripts is an often overlooked topic, but it is also a multi-headed beast. Not only does it cover how Tolkien the medievalist worked with manuscripts (and which ones), but also how his professional experience filtered into his creative work (as illustrated by the extract from The Lord of the Rings above). It also spans Tolkien’s own manuscripts, the drafts of his lectures and novels, and how these can be used to provide further insight into Tolkien’s creative processes.1

An Introduction to Medieval Manuscripts It is a fair assumption that at some point in their career, medievalists will have to engage with what is called the “primary source document” – the manuscript itself. Whereas in modern literature the starting point is usually the published editions of the text, in the pre-print age (as most of the medieval period is defined to be), this is not the case. A text may survive in only one manuscript (as with most Old English poetry such as Beowulf) which in turn may be incomplete, fragmentary, or damaged. It will be undated, anonymous, and for the most part its provenance will be unknown, and the scholar will have to assemble a range of clues before any conclusion can be reached. The manuscript also has to be viewed solely as a record of the text at the time of writing it down. It is possible, indeed highly probable, that the original version (especially in the case of Old English poetry) had its origins centuries before and was presumably passed down orally, possibly changing on each handover, and it is only by chance that it survives to us because someone at some point wrote down the version they had heard. Indeed it is very rare to find anyone suggesting that the hand that wrote the text on the page was the hand of the author. We also have the example of multiple copies of the same text surviving (such as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). But whilst they are clearly the same text at their core there may be numerous differences within them where scribes have made alterations. To complicate matters further many manuscripts are damaged, have been dismembered and reside in different physical locations, or are in fragments. Scholarly printed editions of medieval texts do attempt to capture as much information as possible about their manuscript sources, but in the end there is no substitute for looking at the original documents. Armed with a training in paleography (the study of handwriting) and codicology (the study of the composition of the codex) scholars will pore over these documents, transcribing what they see, noting peculiarities, seeing if there is any evidence in the physical object that up to now has been overlooked, and finally making their own decisions as to what they can see and what they cannot. Tolkien, as a medievalist of considerable note, was no exception to this, and we know that he worked directly with manuscripts.

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However, the physical handling of a manuscript is not to be taken lightly. Written on vellum (animal skin), gummed into their bindings or loose-leaf, these are often unique documents, centuries old, and very fragile. For the most part they will be held in the great libraries of the world, under strict preservation conditions and restrictions. Getting access to them is often very difficult and only allowed under special conditions. To assist with this, and to provide greater access, advances in photographic technology throughout the twentieth century allowed many scholars to work with facsimiles of the manuscripts, albeit in a watered-down way. Although Tolkien was not alive to see the benefits of digitization that appeared in the 1990s he did witness the advent of high-quality facsimile editions of manuscripts, and from the 1930s onwards the availability of microfilm reproductions. Again we can assume that he worked with facsimiles also. The key question is – which ones? Although the Early English Manuscript in Facsimile series did not start until 1951 (with Kemp Malone’s Beowulf edition), as far back as the mid-nineteenth century there were attempts to reproduce manuscripts through photographic means.2 When Tolkien was a young academic he would have seen E. G. Millar’s 1923 facsimile (mixed color and monochrome) of the great Anglo-Saxon codex known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Other highlights that would have clearly attracted his attention were Sir Israel Gollancz’s 1927 edition of the so-called Junius manuscript. This notably contained the Old English poem Exodus that Tolkien was to work on extensively, although he would also have had access to the manuscript itself after his arrival in Oxford (it is held in the Bodleian Library: see chs. 1, 2, and 3, and Bratman 2007, 68). To this list one could also add R. W. Chambers’s 1933 edition of The Exeter Book, one of four major collections of Old English poems from the period.3 By then a new technology was coming to the fore – microfilm. In 1927–1935 the Library of Congress began to microfilm the manuscripts in the British Library, and in 1938 University Microfilms International was formed. In addition the great libraries were setting up reprographic studios to photograph their collections and Tolkien noted in his preface to his edition of Ancrene Wisse (AW viii) that he had worked from photographs of a manuscript in the British Library.4 Whatever the means of access we can be certain that Tolkien was engaged with manuscript studies throughout his career. Michael Drout suggests two instances of known direct contact with manuscripts. First he notes that “Tolkien did work very closely with at least one Oxford manuscript: Oxford Bodleian Library, Bodley 34” (2007, 404) along with his student Simonne d’Ardenne, which led to the work on the Hali Meiðhad and Sawles Warde (see chs. 2, 3, and 16). Drout also observes that Tolkien engaged with Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 402 (Ancrene Wisse) which led to his 1962 edition for the Early English Text Society. This is also attested to by the title of the edition which indicates he is working from the manuscript itself. We can also assume that either Tolkien or Gordon must have consulted British Library, Cotton Nero A. x for their work on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; but Drout sees no evidence that Tolkien ever actually handled the Beowulf manuscript (British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv) probably relying instead on the facsimile edition by Julius Zupitza.



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In addition to this we also know that Tolkien was acutely aware of the problems medieval manuscripts presented to scholars, as can be seen in his unpublished lecture on “O.E. [Old English] Textual Criticism.” This is available in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (Tolkien MS A15/1), and runs to 50 pages. Ostensibly looking at the pitfalls of manuscripts and textual history, Tolkien begins by explaining how the nature of manuscript transmission can inevitably lead to errors being introduced. Using the terms A(uthor), R(eproducer), and C(ritic) he notes that “C only knows A through R” (f. 2v) – or to put it another way we (in the modern day) are working with a text that is at least once removed from the author. He recognizes that “R” could be careless or misrepresent “A” by exceeding basic “mechanical functions” (i.e., copying), and could “alter text.” “A” may also have produced multiple versions of the same text, or could have written the text then delivered it orally (and it is the latter which survives through the copy). Moreover the chain of reproducing/copying could be much longer (e.g., “A – R – R – R – C”). Using examples from a variety of Old English poems Tolkien argues then that manuscripts must be approached with caution, but nevertheless are crucial to any medievalist.

Manuscripts in Tolkien’s Fiction Either through direct access, photographs, facsimile editions, or film surrogates, Tolkien would have built up considerable knowledge of medieval manuscripts – how they were constructed, how they were disseminated and collected, and how they appeared and felt. It is not surprising therefore that these experiences were to find their way into his legendarium. It is an interesting point to note though that Middle-earth is not homogeneous, and could be said to be a mixture of oral and literate cultures. For example in The Silmarillion the Elves seem to be a predominantly oral culture. Possibly due to their “immortality” they did not need to rely on the written word to pass on their stories and records as such, which in the case of the fall of Doriath led to a loss of much information as it had all been held in memory. That said we do know they invented writing systems in Valinor and in Doriath (see ch. 14), but use was sporadic. It was more the race of Men who really embraced literacy (S 313) leading ultimately to the great collections of Númenor and then Gondor. But even in Men there was a divide between oral and literate cultures. Whilst Gondor had its scrolls and books (FR, II, ii, 328) we are also told that the men of Rohan wrote “no books” but sang “many songs” (TT, III, ii, 560). This mixed development and attitude towards the written word runs throughout Tolkien’s legendarium. In Lost Tales I “The Cottage of Lost Play” and subsequent stories seem firmly rooted in an oral culture with Vairë, Rúmil, and Meril telling tales to Eriol as a performance. However in Lost Tales II we have mention of the “colored” manuscripts and “The Golden Book of Heorrenda” (290–291) as part of the Eriol/ Ælfwine saga, and undoubtedly the Annals, especially their Old English versions, are

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written down by Eriol/Ælfwine (a “literate” Englishman). Next, in The Lord of the Rings we are told that it is only after the Hobbits are part of the “Reunited Kingdom” that they shift to a literate society, writing down their stories (FR, Prologue, 18). It can be assumed that any written record referred to in the legendarium is a handwritten document – a manuscript scroll or codex. Even by the Third Age of Middleearth (despite the anachronisms in The Hobbit) we are still in a pre-industrial world to all effects, and most importantly a pre-print one. Even the official notices the Hobbits encounter at the end of The Lord of the Rings and the “Rules” Sharkey has imposed are not printed, nor is there any mention of paper mills or printing presses in Sharkey’s Shire. As control of the printed word and its mass production are key facets of a dictatorship, it can be assumed that if this technology was available to them both Sauron and Saruman would have utilized it. Having considered this curious state of the written word in Middle-earth, it is worth now considering a few examples of how Tolkien does inject his knowledge of early manuscripts into his fiction – sometimes in a quite playful manner. The Hobbit opens with Thror’s hand-drawn map, described later as “a piece of parchment” (H 20), and in a nice symmetry the story ends with a manuscript, this time Bilbo “sitting in his study writing his memoirs – he thought of calling them ‘There and Back Again, a Hobbit’s Holiday’ ” (H 278). Maps (which are manuscripts also of course) were extremely important to Tolkien and he devoted a lot of attention to them (“I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit”: Letters 177). Campbell (2007) discusses the two maps in The Hobbit, the three in The Lord of the Rings, and the two in The Silmarillion, suggesting they are akin to an Arts and Crafts style after William Morris, with the handwriting referring back to both medieval Irish half-uncial and runic inscriptions. With Thror’s map Tolkien also produced a second draft and noted on it “copied by Bilbo Baggins” in a nod towards the practice of recording provenance and scribal hands. As Campbell says this is “consistent with Tolkien’s experience with medieval manuscripts which were often rewritten, copied, annotated, or expurgated” (406). The Hobbit also touches, in a roundabout way, on the issue common in medieval literature of the authority of the text. Medieval attitudes to the author, and the fixed text, were not akin to modern attitudes and scribes felt completely at ease in altering material when copying to suit their needs. Consequently different versions of the same text can survive. As described elsewhere (see ch. 8) there are two versions of The Hobbit in existence – the 1937 and 1951 editions – and they vary notably in the chapter containing Gollum and the finding of the Ring. Necessitated by the development of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had to then make changes to the text of The Hobbit to match the new story, but this left him with the “real world” problem of two versions in circulation. To explain this he used his knowledge of manuscript variances, by explaining that the 1937 edition was Bilbo’s original text (where the author (A) misreports the incident with Gollum to gloss over his own dishonesty in obtaining the Ring) but the 1951 edition is the version written down by Frodo and Sam, reproducers (R) who in effect make scribal changes, this time telling the true version of events. In The Lord of the Rings there are three noteworthy “manuscript” episodes. First in “The Council of Elrond” Gandalf recounts how he entered the libraries in Gondor



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looking at the “hoarded scrolls and books” (FR, II, ii, 328), and found Isildur’s scroll describing the One Ring. Second, in “The Bridge of Khazad-Dûm” Gandalf discovers the so-called Book of Mazarbul noted at the beginning of this essay. Gimli helpfully informs him that “Mazarbul” is Dwarvish for “Records” and that the Chamber of Mazarbul was seemingly an archive or library of the Dwarves. It is noticeable how the manuscript is described as damaged, and burned, so that when Gandalf lifts it some of the leaves crackle and break. Tolkien went so far as to produce several versions of folios from the book for possible inclusion in printed editions.5 Several initial attempts survive in Marquette (MSS–2/1/10, 3/4/11–13) and some more finalized versions in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (MS Tolkien Drawings 69–75) and the attention to detail is quite extraordinary with holes cut out of the paper, watercolor paint and ink utilized to imitate burn marks, and smearing of the ink to show water/blood damage (see the sample reproduction in Hammond and Scull 1995, 175). Similarities here can obviously be drawn with the damage inflicted on manuscripts in the great fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, the most noticeable victim being the Beowulf manuscript.6 In Moria it is also worth noting how practiced a scholar Gandalf appears to be. He observes that pages are missing (FR, II, v, 418–420), and when he reads from the manuscript aloud he notes, quite properly, where the text is damaged or obscure. He is also able to quickly detect section breaks, changes in script, and changes in scribes. Finally, the main manuscript mentioned in The Lord of the Rings (which contains the novel of course) is the “Red Book of Westmarch” recounting the entire Hobbits’ story.7 It gains its name from the fact that the library at Undertowers was home to the Fairbairns, the Wardens of Westmarch and it was contained in a “red case.” The title also delivers a nod to a real manuscript of the late fourteenth century, the “Red Book of Hergest” (containing the great Welsh myth cycle, known as The Mabinogion),8 and possibly also the Andrew Lang fairy-tale books identified by their color which Tolkien read as a child. Bilbo presents the original manuscripts to Frodo, but it is Frodo and Sam who conclude the final entries and thus complete the record of the whole saga (RK, VI, ix, 1344–1345).9 However, Tolkien, always with an eye for detail, also provides a full history of the manuscript. We know its origin (the core text) was “Bilbo’s private diary,” but this was expanded with three further volumes (FR, Prologue, 19). Although the original no longer survives, copies do and we even have the names of scribes and dates (ibid.). Some versions were so important that they even had their own name (as is common with real medieval manuscripts) such as “The Thain’s Book,” and later scribes annotated the pages, added extra stories, and so on, but some material was omitted in copies. This is also alluded to in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil where Tolkien notes that the verses in the Red Book are “found on loose leaves . . . written in margins and blank spaces” (Tolkien 2008e, 169). We are also told that the manuscripts were held in libraries (in Gondor and the Shire),10 and as happened in later times with medieval manuscripts were collected by antiquarians – in this case Pippin and his successors (FR, Prologue, 20). Outside of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, there are several other links between Tolkien’s fiction and medieval manuscripts. For example, Drout (2007, 405) notes

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that “the letter forms of the Codex Argentus [sixth-century Gothic manuscript] are strikingly similar to some of those of the Goblin Alphabet that Tolkien discussed in his 1932 and 1936 letters from Father Christmas to his children.”11 The entire context for “The Notion Club Papers” (see ch. 11) is based on the discovery of a manuscript of “205 foolscap pages, all written in one hand, in a careful and usually legible script” (Sauron 156), and Farmer Giles of Ham opens playfully with hints of a lost medieval manuscript of which only a “few fragments survive” in “insular Latin” and a mock Latin title (Tolkien 2008e, 99–102). These are but a few examples of Tolkien using his knowledge of medieval manuscripts in his fiction, but the question one may ask is why did he do this? An interesting suggestion is that he was imitating the practices of the antiquarians (see ch. 20) but the answer must also lie in his theory of “sub-creation” (see ch. 5). Drawing on his knowledge of manuscripts and scribal practices was the same as drawing on his knowledge of languages, medieval themes, texts, and cultures. It made his Middleearth feel real because this is how manuscripts are in the real world.

Tolkien’s Own Manuscripts Tolkien’s own manuscripts created by himself (mainly handwritten but occasionally typed with annotations) contain his lectures, notes, talks, letters, illustrations, and fiction. They are extensive, dispersed, and both problematic and rewarding to deal with, collectively demonstrating an “extraordinarily meticulous process of writing, revising, and rewriting” (Fisher 2007). Before beginning to consider the documents themselves, and exploring in detail an example from The Lord of the Rings, one could ask what is the value of consulting his manuscripts? The reasons are similar to those behind studying a medieval manuscript. First, although a lot of scholarly work is available which acts as a good intermediary, one may wish to see if there is more information in the primary source document (e.g., what did he originally write and reject, how did the plot develop, and so on). Second, despite the best efforts of successive scholars things may have been missed. Third, although a lot of work has been done on certain manuscripts there is still a wealth of material left relatively unexplored, and in these documents there may still be important discoveries, such as with “The Story of Kullervo” which remained relatively unknown until Flieger’s edition (Tolkien 2010a). For the most part the manuscripts reside in two collections: Marquette University and the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. There are also important documents at HarperCollins (the present publishers of Tolkien’s works), Oxford University Press, and with the family estate itself. In addition there are minor manuscripts (mainly letters) that are dispersed across the world, not to mention correspondences directly to individuals which remain their private possession. By way of example all the following are strictly speaking Tolkien “manuscripts”: 2 x letters to Rev. Claude Jenkins, 1947 (Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1634, ff. 273–274);



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1 x signed typescript letter and 8 x letters, 1957–1967 (CUL, Royal Society of Literature Papers); 8 x letters to the Bursar, 1932–1945 (Pembroke College, Oxford); 37 x letters to BBC staff, 1937–1962 (BBC Written Archives Centre, Radio Contributors file 1); letter re The Manchester Guardian, 1948 (John Rylands Library, Guardian B/ T140/1–5); 1 x letter to Arthur Ransome plus notes on The Hobbit, 1937 (Brotherton Library, BC Ransome); 1 x letter to Miss Duncan of Somerville College on Old English, 1920 (BL, RP5971(i)); 1 x letter to R. W. Chambers, 1937 (UCL, Chambers papers file 101); 1 x letter to Roger Sharrock, 1945 (BL, RP 6698(ii)); 1 x letter to Sir Thomas Knox, 1947 (University of St Andrews, MS 37525/512); letters to Gwyn Jones, 1944–1947 (NLW, Gwyn Jones papers 1 & 41–42); letters to grandson Michael G. D. R. Tolkien, 1942–72 (BL, MS Add. 71657); letters to Naomi Mitchison, dates unknown (NLS, Accs. 10489, 10502, 10503, 10506, 10522); letter to Elizabeth Jennings, 1955–1957 (BL, MS Add. 52599(8)); 1 x postcard to W. A. Craigie, 1926 (UCD, MS UCD.L.1). Nevertheless, undoubtedly it is the material held at Marquette and Oxford that draw the most attention and forms the bulk of the surviving material. Beginning with Marquette University, Milwaukee, in the Special Collections and University Archives are the manuscripts of the J. R. R. Tolkien Collection12 (dated circa 1930–1955), plus printed and secondary material from 1910 onwards. The finding aids note that this collection contains original drafts and holographs of The Hobbit, Farmer Giles of Ham, The Lord of the Rings (and additions), Mr Bliss, other Tolkien writings (e.g., poems published by Tolkien), and various other supporting material. Collected into “series” these are then divided into boxes and folders, thus Series 1, Box 1, Folder 5 (1/1/5) has a manuscript copy of Chapter 5 of The Hobbit (“Riddles in the Dark”), and 1/1/36 contains a typescript with corrections by Tolkien of the same chapter. In total the collection contains 11,000 pages of manuscripts and was sold to the University by Tolkien himself in 1957 for about £1500 (or at the time $5000). It has been supplemented by further donations from Christopher Tolkien during the period of compiling the History of Middle-earth series. In Oxford, the Bodleian Library holds an extensive collection given to the University by the family in 1979. This contains Tolkien’s academic papers (given the shelfmark “Tolkien A”), as well as some of his literary papers ( “Tolkien 1–25”), his drawings (“Tolkien Drawings 1–102”), and books from his personal library (“Tolkien E). The papers are collected into folders (e.g., Tolkien A 33) and held in boxes, and consist of single leaves, exercise books, reused exam scripts, and so on. There is also a large collection of restricted papers which are not accessible without prior permission from the literary estate. In addition the English Faculty Library at Oxford holds Tolkien’s collection of books related to Celtic and Old Norse literature. The papers in Bodley have formed the basis for the recent publications of Tolkien’s versions of Sigurd and Gudrún (Tolkien 2009a) and The Fall of Arthur (Tolkien 2013) by way of example. Bodley also holds various drafts of the early tales that were to form The Silmarillion (fragments are also found at Marquette). With reference to all these Verlyn Flieger’s astute observation of the problems she encountered in her study of the “Kullervo” manuscript is illustrative:

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“The Story of Kullervo” exists in a single manuscript, Bodleian Library MS Tolkien B 64/6. This is a legible but rough draft, with many crossings-out, marginal and aboveline additions, corrections, and emendations. The text is written in pencil . . . The main narrative breaks off abruptly halfway down the recto of folio 13, at a point about three quarters through the story. It is followed on the same page by notes and outlines for the remainder, which fill the rest of the space and continue onto the top portion of the verso. There are in addition several loose sheets of variable size containing what are clearly preliminary plot outlines, jotted notes, lists of names, lists of rhyming words, and several drafts of one verse section of the story, “Now in sooth a man I deem me.” If, as appears likely, Tolkien B 64/6 contains the earliest and (aside from the note pages) the only draft of the story, Tolkien’s revisions on this manuscript must stand as his final ones. (Flieger 2010, 212)

As Flieger notes, the manuscript is in an incomplete state, more a draft with numerous alterations, but it is the best we have. This is not uncommon. Indeed, the problems facing anyone who wishes to engage with Tolkien’s manuscripts are considerable including: 1. Illegibility. Tolkien’s handwriting varies between very neat to extremely cursive, making some of the material completely unreadable. This seems to reflect the different stages of writing, and presumably the different contexts. He heavily annotates, makes use of all writing space on the page (including margins), and employs his own (sometimes inconsistent) abbreviations. 2. Reworkings. Tolkien was an obsessive rewriter constantly reworking material, sometimes on the same page, but more often than not in a series of successive drafts. 3. Reuse. Documents are reused taking on the form of palimpsests (possibly due to paper shortages, especially in World War II). He would reuse exam scripts, old lecture notes, spaces on newspaper cuttings, etc. He would also rub out or write over earlier drafts of the same work (e.g., in ink over pencil). 4. Lost material. We know that Tolkien was a ferocious rewriter and threw away drafts (HoH 3–4). This particularly affects the latter parts of The Return of the King (see War ix). 5. Dating. Nearly all of his manuscripts are undated. Christopher Tolkien has attempted to remedy this but even he found the task impossible in places. Sometimes dating can be found by references within the text,13 by seeing the progression of successive drafts, or by the fact that the text is written on a piece of paper that contains other information (e.g., a dated newspaper cutting). 6. Pagination/foliation. There are often two or three pagination schemes in place making it difficult to refer to or cite the manuscripts. 7. Catalogues. Whilst considerable work is under way to tackle this in the holding libraries the cataloguing available to scholars is still at a preliminary stage. 8. Inconsistent collections. Whilst Tolkien’s retention of his own manuscripts was admirable his own collections were often in a disorganized state, and while he was at Oxford were split between his house and college. Pages from the same manuscripts have then occasionally become separated.



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Whilst this list may seem off-putting at first, assistance is provided in the form of secondary studies. For his fiction there is Christopher Tolkien’s work that manifested itself in The History of Middle-earth series (see ch. 10). This is an invaluable study and one which is indispensable to anyone working with the manuscripts related to Tolkien’s legendarium. Containing transcripts, notes, and editorial comments, the scale of the achievement across all 12 volumes is astonishing. In addition to this there is John Rateliff’s equally scholarly History of The Hobbit (HoH, see ch. 8), while for The Silmarillion one is indebted to Charles Kane’s painstaking work (2009),14 and for dating purposes across the board to Scull and Hammond’s Chronology. Yet the task is still considerable. By way of example what follows is a brief study of the manuscripts surrounding “Shelob’s Lair” which serves as a good example of some of the issues one can encounter but is also illustrative of Tolkien’s creative writing process.

“Shelob’s Lair” At first glance the manuscripts that contain what was to evolve into “Shelob’s Lair” (TT, IV, ix) are daunting. Although the vast majority are held at Marquette there are pages that also need to be consulted in Oxford. They represent everything from fragmentary workings on a few paragraphs, outlines or notes about the plot, questions Tolkien was pondering over, rough drafts, and eventually final drafts and typescripts. Some are written neatly on clean paper in ink, some are ink copies written over pencil, some pages are true palimpsests, or are single leaves from small notepads. As Flieger also encountered there are numerous crossings out, alterations, additions (often in the margins), and the handwriting ranges from legible to indiscernible. Help is at hand, of course, with Christopher Tolkien’s painstaking work on the surviving material15 in The History of Middle-earth chapter “Kirith Ungol” (War 183–226). This provides transcripts of some (though not all) of the manuscripts, and discusses the major issues. Christopher could not refer to any shelfmarks for the manuscripts though, as by that time they had not found their way to the libraries. This needs addressing. Looking at the manuscripts that survive one can discern 14 distinct variants, of varying length and quality (not all of these are noted in War). In Table 4.1 these are listed with new sigla for each manuscript, their location, contents (beginning and end lines), pagination (how they are numbered), their relation to the text in The Lord of the Rings, and further notes. With the latter there is also information about the state of the manuscript itself, and the link to notes in War. All the manuscripts seem to date from 1944 (and the evidence in H and I substantiates this). They reside in two physical locations: Oxford’s Bodleian Library (Dii and L), and Marquette (all the rest). In Marquette they are in three folders 3/6/8 (i.e., Series 3, Box 6, Folder 8), 3/6/9, and 3/2/17. The former contains J and K, and the latter A, B, C, Di, Diii, E, F, G, H, and I. Trying to be more exact when referring to them is difficult as there are two Marquette pagination schemes at work on the same page, one detailing the page number within the folder, the other continuing from the number scheme in the previous folder, as well as Christopher Tolkien’s own scheme. In addition to the

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manuscripts noted here there are two typescript versions, one known as the “Printer’s typescript” (3/6/35) which supersedes a more general typescript (MSS–3/2/25).16 As discussed earlier we can begin, from these manuscripts, to identify Tolkien’s creative methodology. He often started with an attempt to outline the plot in skeletal form. In “The Story Foreseen from Lórien” (Treason 330ff., cited in part in War 184–186) the general details of what was to happen as the Hobbits and Gollum attempt to enter Mordor are covered. Manuscript (MS) C detailed in Table 4.1 follows this by providing a more detailed synopsis (Christopher’s “new” or second outline). By looking at these we can see Tolkien employing a rather terse and succinct style, with major questions still unresolved about the plot: “Will Faramir be across? Will army slay them? . . . They pass unto the tunnel. Halfway through they find it blocked with webs. Gollum refuses to say what they are” (War 187). A closer look at MS C in comparison with the transcriptions in War (187–190) is informative. First, despite his lengthy familiarity with his father’s handwriting even Christopher found it difficult to read many words (the script is extremely cursive, and often uses abbreviations). Understandably the transcription omits minor alterations (corrections, deletions, additions, etc.), though in some cases these are of interest (e.g., the transcription in War (187) fails to note that after “through a [?narrow] cleft” Tolkien had also drawn a quick illustration of the mountain peaks). Further plot outlines survive in other manuscripts for the events around Cirith Ungol. At times the manuscripts contain more fuller drafts but then tail off as Tolkien struggles with the development of the plot and reverts back to outline form (i.e., MS B presents an outline of part of the plot, as do MSS H and L, but MS E begins as a draft version of the text very much in tune with the final version but on page 20 reverts again to notes and outlines as Tolkien struggles with what was to come next). We should also note that the exact breakdown of the chapters only began to form later on, in this case into what was to become “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol” (SCU), “Shelob’s Lair” (SL), and “The Choices of Master Samwise” (CMS, see TT VIII, IX, and X respectively). As Christopher Tolkien notes, the plot also changed. The numbers of spiders differ (first there are many, then a single one – Ungoliant – and then finally Shelob), Gollum’s movements alter (for example he originally is captured by Orcs and brings them to Frodo), and the geographical layout is reworked (which explains why MS B and MS L, which includes a hand-drawn map of the lair, firmly state that it has to be “Stair – stair – tunnel” as opposed to the original idea of stair – tunnel – stair). Finally the chronology of events surrounding the use of the star-glass, the barrier of the webs, and the eventual escape from the tunnel changes. But in all examples what we can see is an author making changes to things which were unrealistic, improbable, or less effective. MSS G, H, and I provide examples of two other things that are common to Tolkien’s manuscripts. First, they are, in effect, jotted notes on the odd paragraph here and there. Second, they show Tolkien reusing any bit of paper he could (in this case exam regulations and candidate lists, but see also MS A which is written over notes on Old English and Old Norse grammar).



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The first attempted draft at a proper version of the chapter is contained in MSS Di–iii (“version 1” as Christopher terms it). This uses three sigla (Di, Dii, and Diii) to note that the manuscript has now been physically separated. Di and Diii are in Marquette, but Dii (the middle section) is in Oxford’s Bodleian collection because it contained an illustration by Tolkien (though it is worth noting that Marquette also holds several original illustrations as well). The style of this initial draft though is quite different from the outlines noted earlier, with the prose being far more developed, and characters are given direct speech. Tolkien also adopted his common practice (which Christopher terms “frustrating,” War 192) of writing first in pencil, and then writing a fair copy in ink over it. This indicates that he was, at least for the time being, more confident of the text he had written. MS A moves forward to a second draft (or “version 2”) and the prose is developed further from “version 1” in MS D. Next there is what we could term a final draft (or “fair copy”) which would then lead to the typescripts that would have been sent to the publisher. Three manuscripts – E, J, and K – should be considered here but a question remains as to their order of composition. In War (208) Christopher Tolkien suggests that MS J (his “second text of the episode in the tunnel”) came after MS E (the “rejected draft”) before the production of the “fair copy” in MS K. That MS K is the final extant version is not in question, it clearly is nearest to the text as it appears in the published version of The Lord of the Rings. But a question remains about the ordering of the other two manuscripts. For example in The Two Towers, we have the following final text: “ ‘Stand! Stand!’ he cried desperately. ‘Running is no use.’ Slowly the eyes crept nearer” (TT, IV, ix, 943). The “fair copy” MS K has: “Stand, stand!” \he/ cried [del. Frodo] desperately. “Running is no use”. [del. “Galadriel!” he called, and gathering courage lifted up the phial once more] Slowly the eyes crept nearer.

Which is clearly very similar to the published text. MS E, however, has: “Stand! Said Frodo desperately. [del. Its no good running] \Running is no use/ /The eyes crept slowly forward\ “Galadriel!” he cried, and gathering courage lifted the phial once more.

Notable here is the phrase “Its [sic] no good running” which Tolkien deletes and replaces with “Running is no use” as in MS K. This clearly indicates MS E came before MS K, or more importantly MS K follows on from MS E. However, in MS J, which Christopher suggests came after MS E in the writing stages, the text reads: “Stand!” said Frodo. “It’s no use struggling. \We’re caught/ [del. And] He hurried to face the [del. Trapped! Said Sam] eyes, and as he did so, he drew his sword. Sting flashed out, and about the edges of the sharp elven-blade a blue fire flickered.

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Which is very different from both the final version, MS K, and importantly MS E. Analysis of other examples across the manuscripts suggests therefore that the correct chronology should instead read MS J led to MS E led to MS K.

Conclusion The brief analysis of “Shelob’s Lair” hopefully shows the value of manuscript study when it comes to Tolkien’s work. More importantly this whole essay has demonstrated Tolkien’s engagement with manuscripts, how this experience filtered into his fiction, and how we, using the skills of manuscript studies, can begin to get further insights into his own creative processes.

Notes   1  Due to space this study has had to forgo an analysis of Tolkien’s letters and artwork.   2  In 1861 John Earle produced the Facsimile of Some Leaves in Saxon Handwriting on Saint Swidhun (London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts) using photozincography; in 1878–1884 W. Sanders edited his Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts Photozincographed by Command of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (Southampton: Ordnance Survey). Copies of both were held at Oxford when Tolkien was a student.   3  In Tolkien’s lecture on “O.E. Textual Criticism” (Oxford, Bodleian Library Tolkien MS A15/1) he suggests that any scholar of Old English criticism should have a range of “Materials for Study” (f. 56v) including “O.E. variant mss” and more importantly “facsimiles. Junius XI. Beowulf. Vercelli. Waldere. (Exeter Book)”.   4  British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C. vii.   5  See also the mocked-up maps (e.g., HoH plates I and II), “King’s Letter” (Sauron 130– 131), and “Leaves from the Notion Club Papers, edited by Howard Green, second edition, MMXIV” (Sauron 154).   6  Drout (2007) also sees links to the damaged eighth-century Ragyndrudis Codex (Fulda, Dombibliothek, Bonifatianus 2).

  7  Other manuscripts are mentioned with nods towards medieval texts, e.g., Herblore of the Shire and Reckoning of Years (FR, Prologue, 20).   8  The Red Book of Hergest is so called because it came into the possession of the Vaughans of Hergest Court (as opposed to the Westmarch wardens), though it now resides in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, Bodley MS 111).   9  Also in the abandoned “Epilogues” to The Lord of the Rings Sam reads from the Red Book to his children (Sauron 114). 10  The three great libraries of the Hobbits were at Undertowers, Great Smials, and Brandy Hall (FR, Prologue, 13–15). 11  From 1927 onwards a facsimile edition of the manuscript was available to Tolkien to consult. 12  See http://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/ Mss/JRRT/JRRT-main.shtml, accessed November 21, 2013. 13  See the example in Lee (2009). 14  Although Kane himself was working from the texts presented in The History of Middleearth series. 15  We know (War 183) that Tolkien “wrote and tore up and rewrote most of it a good many times.” 16  The author is indebted to William Fliss, Archivist at Marquette, for his assistance in this essay.

Marquette 3/2/17 A

Sigla

Five pages paginated 16–19, with the last page unnumbered.

Pagination Page 16 Ll. 1–24 “You’ve done what you promised . . . Terch Ungol. This is the way in. // Description of [?]?” . . . Page 19 Ll. 1–27 “malice and purpose . . . worst dreams.” As Christopher Tolkien notes, from l. 4 onwards the prose returns to outline form (although his transcription on War 205 misses the opening). All of this has a single line crossed through it. Unnumbered Page Ll. 1–6 are very difficult to read but ll. 7–16 are a working of the description of Sauron’s relationship with Shelob. Ll. 7–16 “And Sauron! It pleased him that she should dwell there hungry . . . play she made.”

Contents

Table 4.1  The manuscript variants of “Shelob’s Lair.”

TT, IV, viii, 937, and then TT, IV, ix, 938–948.

Reference

(Continued)

Christopher Tolkien’s “Version 2,” War 200–205 Written in ink. On the pages Christopher Tolkien has noted these relate to SCU 325, then SL 326 to 333. He also uses the numbering system (26)–(30). The text is written over old notes on Old English and Old Norse. Transcriptions and notes on these pages appear in War 200–205, but the last page (not paginated) is not mentioned by Christopher. The nature of the writing is of continuous prose initially, but suddenly stops with Tolkien asking questions of the plot and whether descriptions are needed. It then moves into outline form.

Notes

Four pages paginated a, b, c, and d. Note “c” was originally paginated “d” and vice versa.

C

Paginated 4 and 5

One page, not paginated.

B

Marquette 3/6/8 Di

Pagination

Sigla

Table 4.1  (Continued)

“a strange odour came out of it . . . nor Sam gave him heed”

Page a Ll. 1–30 “Description of the endless . . . down into a” . . . Page d Ll. 1–28 (separated by two solid lines after l. 3) “Frodo cries – or is . . . and Mt. Doom”

In two distinct sections of 4 lines and 16 lines. Ll. 1–4 “a strange odour came out of the place . . . a repellant taint in the air” Ll. 5–20 “Must be stair – stair // tunnel. Tunnel is Ungoliant’s lair . . . out of tunnel.”

Contents

TT, IV, ix, 940–942.

Outline of SCU, SL, CMS.

TT, IV, ix, 940? Possibly source of “and out of it came a reek so foul . . .”

Reference

Christopher Tolkien’s “Version 1,” Part 1, War 192–193 The opening lines are similar to MSS B.

Christopher Tolkien’s “new” or second outline, War 187–190 Christopher Tolkien notes this as a “Preliminary outline for SCU – SL – CMS (5) (–8) 4 pages”.

Christopher Tolkien’s “Additional Outline,” War 221 n. 8 Christopher provides a note on the manuscript of “Outline for S. L. (11)” This is quite a small page, more notebook in size. Again it is a reuse of paper as it is written in ink but over notes on sound changes in Old English, but crossed through. A very brief outline of the plot progression across SCU and SL.

Notes

Marquette 3/2/17 Diii

Bodley, MSS Tolkien Drawings Dii

Two pages, paginated 20, 21 (and 8 and 9).

One folio, 81r–v (also paginated 6 and 7).

Page 20 Ll. 1–44 “ – it had a comfortable feel . . . and the blow” Page 21 Ll. 1–41 “fell not on his head as S. intended, but across his back. But it was enough for G! . . . the glass of Galadriel. And held it up.”

81r Ll. 1–34 “Before them was a greyness which the lights . . . no sign of them could they find. /[?] make Gollum come shouting [?] back.\” 81v Ll. 1–45 “ ‘That’s that!’ said Sam . . . He was soon to learn.”

TT, IV, ix, 949–954

TT, IV, ix, 934 (81v) and 944–946 (81r).

(Continued)

Christopher Tolkien’s “Version 1,” Part 3, War 196–198 Christopher Tolkien notes for page 20 “SL 334–5 (9) & (31)”. For page 21 he includes the note “(335–botto