16For these letters and their content, see H&S 1, pp. 56–7.
17See Garth, p. 100.
18Smith’s then unit was training in Oxford, and he was billeted at Magdalen College.
19This early text, which Tolkien came to call Qenyaqetsa, was published in Parma Eldalamberon, 12 (1998); it was also used to compile the nominal appendices to HME 1 and HME 2.
20 See H&S 1, pp. 58–9.
21 HME 1.136.
22See here Garth, pp. 95–100.
23Garth, p. 98.
24It was sent to France as part of the 25th Division in September 1915.
25These included ‘The Princess Ní’, another short imagistic poem about a fairy, written on 9 July. It was published in 1924.
26The earliest text of the poem is in Carpenter, Biography, pp. 76–7; a later revision (perhaps as late as
1924) is in HME 2.271–2.
27It was published in 1920, and again (with very light revisions) in 1923; it was further revised in 1940, but not then republished. The original and the 1940 texts are in HME 2.273–7.
28‘Kortirion among the Trees’, 1915 version, lines 80–2; in HME 1.34.
29Garth, p. 76.
30‘Narqelion’ was written between November 1915 and March 1916; four lines from it are given in Carpenter, Biography, pp. 75–6, the complete text in Mythlore, 15 (1988), pp. 47–52, and Vinyar Tengwar, 6 (July 1989), pp. 12–13.
31The vestigial proto-mythology of early 1916 is well summarized by John Garth: see Garth, pp. 125–9.
32Various texts of it, with commentary, are printed in HME 2.295–300.
33Rob Gilson, 30 June 1916: quoted in Garth, p. 151.
34Late interview, quoted in Garth, p. 138.
35It appeared in a collection of Leeds University Verse published in 1924; it is reprinted in Garth, p. 145.
36See Letters, p. 78.
37Letters, p. 10 (to Geoffrey Smith, 12 August 1916).
38 H&S 1, p. 88.
39 H&S 1, p. 89.
40Edmund Blunden, ‘Thiepval Wood’ (written in September 1916).
41Carpenter, Biography, p. 84.
42Presumably named after Staufen-im-Breisgau in the Black Forest, where, legend has it, Dr Faustus sold his soul to the devil; many German trench systems were given this sort of name, perhaps initially by troops from the area named.
43It is reproduced in the catalogue of the centenary exhibition, Priestman (ed.), J.R.R. Tolkien, Life and Legend, p. 32. However, both John Garth and Christina Scull doubt the map was drawn by Tolkien.
44The following March, the ship that had carried Tolkien was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank with the loss of all its crew; the sick and wounded, fortunately, had already been disembarked.
45Francis Thompson, ‘The Mistress of Vision’ (The Poems of Francis Thompson, pp. 283–9).
46Quoted in Carpenter, Biography, p. 86.
47There is an extant manuscript of The Fall of Gondolin (actually titled Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin, but invariably referred to by Tolkien under the familiar name) in Edith’s handwriting; it seems to date from 1919 or early 1920, however, rather than from this period (see HME 2.146–7).
48See Garth, p. 186.
49Letters, p. 78 (to Christopher Tolkien, 6 May 1944).
50See HME 2.290–2, and Garth, p. 226.
51 HME 2.323.
52 HME 2.290.
53 HME 2.304.
54HME 1.31. Two versions of the poem, titled ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’, are given in HME 1.28–31. Christopher Tolkien points out that it includes a clear reference to Francis Thompson’s mawkish poem ‘Daisy’.
55Dale Nelson (TEnc, p. 375) lists only three direct references (in a letter of 1972, an interview, and the poem ‘The Mewlips’ of, originally, 1927), all to stories from the 1912 collection The Book of Wonder.
56There is an account of these two earliest lexicons in HME 1.246ff. They have been published in the journal Parma Eldalamberon, 11 (1995) and 12 (1998, revised 2011).
57See HME 1.99.
58 HME 2.70.
59These casualty figures are from Garth’s essay ‘Tolkien, Exeter College, and the Great War’ published online at http://www.johngarth.co.uk/php/tolkien_exeter_great_war.php. In absolute terms, of 771 Exonians who served in the armed forces in the Great War, 141 were killed: fully two and a half years’ worth of undergraduate intake, or 18 per cent – one in five – of those who fought. See also Garth, pp. 249–50.
60There is an interesting anecdote in the (highly literate) spy-thriller Tomorrow’s Ghost by Anthony Price: ‘But he [Tolkien] was fascinated by trenches, certainly … I can remember meeting him in the High once – at Oxford. He was standing in the rain watching workmen digging a trench in the road, absolutely transfixed by them …’ (Grafton edition, 1990, p. 44). This may be fictional, or may not: Price has lived in Oxford for much of his life, and (after Merton between 1949 and 1952, during Tolkien’s time as a professorial fellow there) worked as a journalist on various Oxford papers, ending as editor of The Oxford Times. Tomorrow’s Ghost was first published in 1979, and probably written the year before, as it refers to The Silmarillion, and Carpenter’s biography, as ‘just out’.
61Letters, p. 46 (to Michael Tolkien, 6 October 1940).
Chapter 4 – The Young Scholar
1See the obituary in Interpreters, pp. 172–91.
2The OED was at the time Tolkien worked for it usually known as the New English Dictionary or NED, although the more familiar title had appeared on its covers since 1895.
3See Gilliver, Marshall and Weiner, The Ring of Words, for a good account of his time at the OED.
4A Spring Harvest, published by Erskine Macdonald, London. R.W. Reynolds had arranged for it to be considered by Sidgwick and Jackson, but they were no more interested in Smith’s verse than they had been in Tolkien’s. Eight of the poems are printed in an appendix to Mark Atherton’s There and Back Again; a new edition is being prepared by the American Tolkienist Douglas A. Anderson. Tolkien also inherited some of Smith’s books of Celtic scholarship.
5See Garth, pp. 250–1.
6A New Zealander of Scots descent, Rutherford was the (in 1919 newly appointed) Director of the Cavendish Laboratory and a pioneer of nuclear physics. He devised his model of atomic structure (nucleus and orbiting electrons) in 1911, and it has been universally adopted. He was the first to ‘split the atom’ in 1917; in 1920 he discovered the proton, and he was at the time Wiseman worked with him hypothesizing the existence of the neutron (it was demonstrated by one of his pupils in 1932). He is reckoned the ‘father of nuclear physics’; his pupils were central to the wartime Manhattan Project (Rutherford himself died suddenly in 1937, aged only sixty-six, of a strangulated hernia).
7For Sisam, no experience was it seems ever wholly wasted: in an article published in 1925, his knowledge of the pig meat market contributed one of the grounds for arguing an Elizabethan printing of an Old English law code was not genuine but a sixteenth-century fake – see his Studies in the History of Old English Literature, pp. 240–1.
8See HME 1 and 2, ad loc.
9The order of the Tales in the published text in HME 1 and 2 reflects that of the later Silmarillion, not that of composition.
10 HME 2.242.
11 HME 2.278–334, ‘The History of Eriol or Ælfwine’.
12HME 2.287–8.
13Modern Language Review, 14 (1919), pp. 202–5.
14The Letter of Alexander is reckoned to derive, in some part, from the lost Indica of the fifth-century BC Greek doctor Ctesias of Cnidos, physician at the Persian royal court, who also wrote a history of Persia; both works survive only in fragments. An Indian legend would not necessarily feel alien; the mythological as well as etymological connexions between India and Europe had been thoroughly and convincingly established in the nineteenth century. The great popular advocate of India and Indian material as archetypally explanatory was Max Müller, whose conclusions Tolkien distrusted; but he had pro
bably read him with attention (see OFS, pp. 41, 74).
15Cockayne, Oswald, Narratiunculae Anglice Conscriptae (London, I.R. Smith, 1861), pp. 51ff; W.M.
Baskervill, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem’, Anglia, 4 (1881), pp. 139–67.
16Modern Language Review, 14 (1919), pp. 203, 204.
17It may well be, also, that a relevant passage either appeared in a volume of extracts illustrative of dialectical phonology, or had been privately extracted by Sisam for teaching purposes, since he noted that the unexpected ‘Mercian’ form triow (instead of the usual ‘west-Saxonized’ treow) is found fifteen times in the text, all in this passage (see Sisam, ‘The Compilation of the Beowulf Manuscript’ in Studies in the History of Old English Literature, p. 93, first published in that collection in 1953). He, or another, may well have lighted on the trees for philological reasons, which would have interested Tolkien also, and which served to bring the content of the text to Tolkien’s attention.
18 OFS, p. 68.
19Steele’s 1894 children’s book, The Story of Alexander, pp. 158–70, esp. p. 165; see H&S 2, p. 174. It is a finely illustrated and bound volume that would surely have appealed to the same side of the young Tolkien that later relished Morris’s tales.
20See Interpreters, p.108.
21Quoted in Interpreters, p. 182.
22Letters, p. 56.
23 See H&S 1, p. 109.
24 Printed in Parma Eldalamberon, 15 (2004), pp.31–40.
25 HME 2.321.
26See Letters, p. 56.
27Shippey, Author, p. xii; his italics.
28Tolkien’s diary for January 1922, quoted in Carpenter, Biography, p. 104.
29‘The Song of Right and Wrong’, first published in the January 1913 New Witness, contains the famous stanza, ‘Tea, although an Oriental, / Is a gentleman at least; / Cocoa is a cad and coward, / Cocoa is a vulgar beast, / Cocoa is a dull, disloyal, / Lying, crawling cad and clown, / And may very well be grateful / To the fool that takes him down.’ This was universally taken, probably fairly, as an attack on the Daily News, a Liberal paper Chesterton had written much for in the past but had fallen out with over the Marconi scandal; it was owned by George Cadbury, the cocoa magnate, and was widely known as ‘the Cocoa Press’.
30They, and two other poems, are printed by Shippey in an appendix to Road. The original mimeo-graphed booklet was only ever produced for private circulation amongst Leeds students (presumably as song-books for Viking Club meetings). In 1935 or 1936, one of them, A.H. (Hugh) Smith, by then teaching at UCL and a stalwart of place-name studies (he later succeeded Chambers as Quain Professor), had his students print a selection of the songs as an exercise in book production – Smith had obtained a working hand-press for the College. This small booklet was titled Songs for the Philologists; Smith quickly realized he had not asked either Tolkien or Gordon for permission to publish their work, and so most of the copies printed were withdrawn from distribution, and were later lost in a fire. Tolkien later commented that, in any case, the texts were in many places badly garbled in reproduction.
31Shippey, Road, p. 402; he translates, ‘The oak will fall into the fire, losing joy and leaf and life. The birch shall keep its glory long, shine in splendour over the bright plain’ (Road, p. 403).
32See, here, Shippey, Road, esp. pp. 316–17.
33Bodley 34 contains five texts: lives of SS Catherine of Alexandria, Juliana of Nicomedia, and Margaret of Antioch; the admonitory Hali Meiðhad; and a treatise on the soul, its friends and enemies, Sawles Warde (translated from a Latin original sometimes attributed to Anselm). The Ancrene Riwle, a handbook for anchoresses which exists in multiple manuscripts and several versions, is another product of the same school or author; there are also six short devotional pieces, usually called the ‘Wooing Group’ (after the first of them, Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd), addressed to a similar audience and in the same literary dialect.
34Quoted Carpenter, Biography, p. 106.
35‘The Nameless Land’ was published in 1927, in an anthology done to benefit a children’s hospital, and never reprinted, although later revised and attributed to Ælfwine; texts are in HME 5.98–104.
36Jason Fisher, ‘Tolkien and Source Criticism’, in Fisher (ed.), Tolkien and the Study of his Sources, p. 40.
37Kingsley Amis, introduction to The Faber Popular Reciter (London, Faber & Faber, 1978), pp. 17–18.
38It was published in Parma Eldalamberon, 14 (2003), pp. 35–86, edited by Carl Hostetter and Bill Welden, under the title ‘Early Qenya Grammar’.
39These early Noldorin texts are collected in Parma Eldalamberon, 13 (2001).
40 See H&S 1, p. 124.
41The 1923 review appeared in January 1925; that for 1924, which ran to thirty pages, in March 1926; and that for 1925, fully thirty-five pages, in February 1927.
42Review of English Studies, 1, no. 1 (January 1925), pp. 4–23, reprinted as a pamphlet by Sidgwick and
Jackson that same year. I cite references from the reprint.
43Chambers, ‘Recent Research’, p. 20.
44Chambers, ‘Recent Research’, p. 13.
45Review of English Studies, 1, no. 3 (July 1925), pp. 331–6.
46Drout, Michael D.C. (ed.), Beowulf and the Critics by J.R.R. Tolkien, revised second edition (Tempe, AZ, ACMRS, 2011), p. 68.
47See Shippey’s article ‘Scholars of Medieval Literature, Influence of’, in TEnc, pp. 594–8, esp. pp. 596–7.
48Chambers, Widsith, pp. 1–2.
49Garth, p. 229.
50Although, oddly enough, Cambridge University Press reprinted the unrevised (1898) edition of Wyatt in 1914 also (that, at least, is the date in my copy).
51Chambers published an expanded edition in 1932; in 1959, a third edition was issued with a supplement by C.L. Wrenn, incorporating more recent scholarship.
52M&C, p. 12. ‘Heroic Age’ in Chambers’s title was a reference to Hector Chadwick’s 1912 book The
Heroic Age, which examines a conspectus of ‘heroic’ verse from across Europe, from Homer to medieval Serbian epic.
53The Library (Transactions of the Bibliographical Society), 4th series, 5, no. 4 (March 1925), pp. 293–321.
54Shippey, Author, p. 62.
55Letters, p. 20 (to C.A. Furth of Allen & Unwin, 31 August 1937).
56For more on Chambers, see the obituary for the British Academy, reprinted in Interpreters, pp. 221–33.
57Bradley had died in 1923, so the reference was presumably one provided when Tolkien applied to Leeds.
58Mawer had considered applying for the chair himself. Tolkien probably knew him through the English Place-Name Society, which Mawer had founded in 1923 and which Tolkien had joined at its inception; Tolkien’s student Hugh Smith (the one who eventually printed Songs for the Philologists) had done a doctoral thesis on Yorkshire place-names, and Mawer had perhaps been involved, most likely as an external examiner.
59Quoted in H&S 2, p. 349.
60In 1916 Sisam had published a short but important article on the Beowulf manuscript (reprinted in Studies in the History of Old English Literature, pp. 61–4, immediately before a later piece expanding on the question), and in 1923 both an edition of a previously unpublished Old English translation of one of St Boniface’s letters (reprinted in Studies in the History of Old English Literature, pp. 199–224) and a long review article exposing some reputed Old English law codes as sixteenthcentury pastiche; in 1925, he followed up the latter piece with a conclusive rebuttal of objections to it (collected in Studies in the History of Old English Literature, pp. 232–58).
61Letters, p. 13.
62Francis Fortescue ‘Sligger’ Urquhart was elected Fellow of Balliol in 1896, and was the first Catholic don since the sixteenth century. By 1925, however, Catholic dons were less unusual: both the Jesus Professor of Celtic, John Fraser, and the Regius Professor of Civil Law, Francis de Zulueta, were Catholic: the latter stood godfather to Priscilla Tolkien.
63Quoted
in TMed, p. 16.
64Reprinted in M&C, p. 238.
65The Leeds professorship had brought £800 a year. The £1,000 seems to have been a concession to new circumstances; as we saw, Craigie had been told to make do with £600 a year, and the chair had been omitted from a salary review in 1920 on the grounds that Craigie also enjoyed a salary from the OED; he not unnaturally thought this reasoning bogus, and it seems to have soured his relations with the English Faculty (particularly with Joseph Wright, to whose influence he attributed the decision) and led in part to his eventual resignation. See the British Academy obituary of Craigie, reprinted in Interpreters, pp. 173–91, esp. pp. 181–2.
66He had in fact been an external examiner for Oxford Final Schools since 1923, presumably for similar reasons.
Chapter 5 – Oxford and Storytelling
1Ker, The Dark Ages, p. 141 (on the Venerable Bede).
2We are more than usually reliant on secondary sources for this period of Tolkien’s life; his published Letters contain nothing between 1925, the year of his election to the Chair of Anglo-Saxon, and 1937, when The Hobbit was in proof. There is some useful material in H&S 1, drawn from (amongst other places) the OUP correspondence archive.
3Derek Brewer in Como (ed.), C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, p. 51. This is borne out by such versions of Tolkien’s textual lectures as have been published.
4See Carpenter, Biography, p. 135; Shippey (Author, p. 270) reckons Carpenter’s figure of thirty-six lectures a mistake for thirty-five, being five sets of seven. H&S 2, p. 722 supports Carpenter’s figure.
5See H&S 2, p. 722.
6He may not actually have received the notes until 1928: see H&S 1, p. 144, but also H&S 2, p. 154.
7See, here, H&S 2, pp. 735–8.
8See OFS, p. 47.
9See Noad in TLeg, pp. 39–40, and HME 2.278–334, esp. pp. 304–10.
10Garth, p. 280.
11George Sayer, however, claims the nickname was a reflexion of Lewis’s physique – since leaving the Army he had filled out, and was ‘heavy but not tall’. There is of course no reason why both explanations should not be simultaneously true. See Sayer, Jack, p. 100. McGrath, rather implausibly, tries to make it a pun on the Army issue Lewis Light Machine Gun; this, however, was universally known not as a ‘Light Lewis’ but as a ‘Lewis gun’ without further qualifier. See McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life, p. 98.
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