14Sayer, Jack, pp. 161–2.
15 See H&S 1, p. 236.
16Tolkien’s preface is reprinted as the essay ‘On Translating Beowulf’ in M&C, pp. 49–71.
17See Letters, pp. 48–54 (to Michael Tolkien, 6–8 March 1941).
18See the lectures reproduced at www.michaeltolkien.com.
19He transferred to the RAF at the end of 1941; rear-gunners were not usually commissioned officers, so he may not have carried over an Army commission, if indeed he ever received one.
20Letters, p. 41 (to Stanley Unwin, 13 October 1938).
21Carpenter, Biography, p. 151.
22Letters, pp. 55–6 (to Michael Tolkien, 9 June 1941).
23Letters, p. 65 (to Christopher Tolkien, 9 December 1943).
24See Letters, p. 393.
25Letters, p. 76 (to Christopher Tolkien, 30 April 1944).
26Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 631 (to Charles A. Brady, 6 December 1944).
27See Letters, p. 342.
28See note 3 on previous page, discussing Hammond and Scull’s proposed dating for the story.
29Each of course was later revised: the Grammatik over eighteen years from the time Grimm was thirty-seven; the Mythologie twice, when he was fifty-nine and sixty-nine; the revised Geschichte appeared posthumously in 1868.
30TL, p. 93. Glyer and Long compare this to his declaration, in a newspaper interview given a quarter of a century later, that ‘Most of the time I’m fighting against the natural inertia of the lazy human being’ (in Fisher (ed.), Tolkien and the Study of his Sources, p. 205).
31See the Appendix for a more developed discussion of this question.
32Quoted in Sisam’s British Academy obituary (by Neil Ker), reprinted in Interpreters, pp. 331–48; cf. p. 345.
33See the obituary of Napier (also by Ker) in Interpreters, pp. 91–116, esp. pp. 113–16.
34Chambers, Beowulf, p .68.
35Letters, p. 58.
36See Letters, pp. 59–62. The relevant section is now pp. 104–14 of Mere Christianity (London, Collins, 2012); the passage Tolkien specially objected to is on p. 112. A draft of Tolkien’s letter was found in the pages of his copy of Christian Behaviour.
37See Chapter 8.II above.
38Duriez and Porter, The Inklings Handbook, p. 13; Tolkien’s lecture would have been on either Beowulf or Old English texts: see H&S 1, p. 262. The incident is dated to 11 November, which was a Thursday; Tolkien lectured on those two subjects back to back between 10 a.m. and midday.
39Letters, p. 68 (to Christopher Tolkien, 30 March 1944).
40Letters, p. 91 (to Christopher Tolkien, 12 August 1944).
41Tolkien mistakenly thought it had appeared in the Oxford Magazine; Lewis often placed poems in the latter journal. See Lewis’s Poems (London, HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 79, 156. Most accounts of the incident suppose Lewis’s lampoon recent; but in fact it had appeared five years before, in May 1939.
42See Letters, pp. 95–6 (to Christopher Tolkien, 6 October 1944).
43 H&S 1, p. 311.
44Letters, p. 105 (to Christopher Tolkien, 18 December 1944).
45See the note on Letters, p. 440.
46Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 5–6 (to Sr Penelope CSMV); also in W.H. Lewis (ed.), Letters of C.S. Lewis (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1966), p. 222 (this is the original heavily edited volume produced by Lewis’s brother Warnie).
47 M&C, p. 238.
48See Letters, pp. 112–14 (to Stanley Unwin, 18 March 1945).
49See Flieger and Anderson’s introduction to OFS.
50The Four Loves (London, Collins, 2012), p. 74.
51Eddison’s books (The Worm Ouroboros of 1922, and the ‘Zimiamvia Trilogy’ (Mistress of Mistresses of 1935, A Fish Dinner in Memison of 1941, and the posthumously published Mezentian Gate of 1958), are sometimes reckoned comparable to The Lord of the Rings, in extent and genre at least; but there is no ‘influence’ from one to the other.
52See Letters, pp. 49–50.
53See Letters, p. 83.
Chapter 9 – Peace, Not Rest
1In fact it was never finished by Tolkien; Mlle d’Ardenne finally published an edition of it in 1981, jointly with the philologist Eric Dobson (whose D.Phil. thesis Tolkien had examined). The concrete results of the 1945–6 Tolkien–d’Ardenne collaboration were two short articles: ‘“Iþþlen” in Sawles Warde’, English Studies, 28, no. 6 (December 1947), pp. 168–70, and, in response to an article by the Swedish scholar Ragnar Furuskog (who had bothered Tolkien during the war with requests for photographs of manuscripts), ‘MS Bodley 34: A Re-Collation of a Collation’, Studia Philologica, 20, nos. 1–2 (1947–8), pp. 65–72. They had projected an edition of the whole manuscript Bodley 34; Simonne d’Ardenne published a transcript, rather than an edition, of the whole text in 1977.
2He seems to have been meditating the story as early as mid-December 1944; see Letters, p. 105.
3See Caldecott, The Power of the Ring, p. 29. The text also included a poem on St Brendan’s last voyage; this was later published as a separate work, titled Imram (in Time and Tide for 3 December 1955; this version is reprinted in HME 9.296–9). Tolkien also carried over the ‘King Sheave’ verses from the legendary opening of Beowulf first included in The Lost Road.
4HME 9.227.
5Letters, p. 55 (to Michael Tolkien, 9 June 1941).
6Caldecott, The Power of the Ring, p. 30.
7Caldecott, The Power of the Ring, p. 30.
8See Rateliff’s fine article in TLeg, esp. pp. 212–13.
9From the unprinted portion of a letter to Stanley Unwin of 21 July 1946 (extracts from which are in Letters, no. 105 (pp. 117–18), quoted in H&S 1, p. 299.
10For 14 April 1946. The review was of E.K. Chambers’s volume of the Oxford History of English Literature (OHEL), English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, under the bland (and presumably editorial) title ‘Research v. Literature’.
11Sayer, Jack, p. 199. Heathcote William Garrod was a classicist and veteran Fellow of Merton (he was twenty years older than Lewis, and was first elected Fellow when Victoria was Queen) who had also published on Keats; Darbishire had just retired as Principal of Somerville, and was an authority on Wordsworth and Milton; Cyril Hackett Wilkinson, Vice-Provost of Worcester, was another literary scholar of an older generation (he was born in 1888) with interests in the seventeenth century (Lovelace). Lewis had had dealings with him as an examiner for the School Certificate, and refers to him approvingly (see Lewis’s Collected Letters, vol. 2, pp. 304, 323–4); either the regard was not mutual, or Wilkinson’s personal views on Lewis did not colour his estimate of him as a scholar.
12Carpenter, The Inklings, p. 205.
13See Dundas-Grant’s charming, if factually imprecise, memoir in Como (ed.), C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, esp. pp. 230–1. He describes Lewis’s attendance at ‘our meetings’ as briefly interrupted by his wife’s death; but this happened in 1960, by which time the Inklings as generally conceived had dissolved. Clearly Lewis maintained the habit of morning beer with cronies some years after its literary function had expired. This may suggest a proper caution about much of the anecdotal evidence from this circle.
14His essay in Como (ed.), C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (pp. 68–76) is a good illustration of this: glib, witty, chock-full of blandly dismissive (and plain wrong) aphorisms (‘his novels, which I take it are simply bad – he developed in later years a telltale interest in science fiction, which is usually a reliable sign of imaginative bankruptcy’), it is nevertheless admiring, of Lewis’s literary talent if of little else.
15Letters, p. 119.
16See Austin Farrer’s sermon ‘On Being an Anglican’, preached in 1960 and published posthumously in 1973; it is reprinted in The Truth Seeking Heart (Norwich, SCM-Canterbury Press, 2006), pp. 143–7; the quoted passage is on p. 145.
17See Wilson, C.S. Lewis, p. 217. One of Wilson’s informants was Christopher Tolkien, who was presumably present, so the story may be allowed to b
e truthful.
Chapter 10 – Hyde and Jekyll
1Letters, p. 124 (to Sir Stanley Unwin, 21 September 1947).
2In a letter to Unwin in July, Tolkien had mentioned revision of Chapter 5 of The Hobbit as the easiest way to fix the incompatibilities (primarily, the way Gollum, in the earlier text, apparently planned to give the Ring to Bilbo as a prize in the riddle-game); see Letters, p. 122.
3Its site at Caversham Park had been requisitioned as a BBC listening station in 1942, and was retained as such after the war.
4Letters, p. 131 (to Hugh Brogan, 31 October 1948).
5Letters, pp. 321–2 (to Jane Neave, 8/9 September 1962).
6Tolkien acted as external examiner for the Irish National University in seven of the ten years from 1949 (1949–51, 1954, 1956, 1958–9).
7The dedicatory elements in the foreword were removed in the book’s second edition; they can be found in HME 12.19, 25–6.
8See Carpenter, Biography, p. 130.
9Rayner Unwin, George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer (Ludlow, privately printed for the author by Merlin Unwin Books, 1999), pp. 114–15, quoted in H&S 2, pp. 361–2.
10Sayer, Jack, p. 151.
11It was published in the British Academy’s Proceedings for 1953, although, unusually, it does not seem to have been given as a lecture.
12Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf, pp. 20–2.
13Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf, p. 1, footnote 1.
14See H&S 1, p. 287; the last efforts to get Tolkien to abridge his Chaucer notes had been made, via George Gordon, in 1936.
Chapter 11 – Finished, at Last
1Shippey’s books and Fisher (ed.), Tolkien and the Study of his Sources can be recommended here.
2Letters, p. 145 (to Milton Waldman, c.1951).
3Undated letter (from 1963 or later) to George Sayer, quoted in Sayer, Jack, p. 197.
4C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: the Shape of My Early Life (London, Collins, 2012), p. 22.
5See Sayer, Jack, p. 198. Sayer there advances the theory that Lewis wrote Surprised by Joy as a therapeutic ‘deck-clearing’ exercise before turning to the Narnia books; the relative chronology of these texts, however, makes this impossible. The Narnia books were mostly written by early 1951; the autobiography was not finished until four years after that. The one definite exception is The Magician’s Nephew, which was unfinished at least as late as 1953, and (as we have seen) is the most personal of the stories. Perhaps the most we can say is that the writing of Surprised by Joy was contemporary with the Narnia books, and that they represent two parallel encounters with the wellsprings of Lewis’s imagination.
6See McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life, p. 124.
7Letters, p. 36.
8Quoted in H&S 2, p. 1084.
9Letters, p. 353 (to Michael Tolkien, 9–10 January 1965). This was one of the lectures later collected in Poetic Craft and Principle (London, Cassell, 1967).
10Garth, p. 216; UT, p. 20.
11See the careful article by Wynne and Hostetter in TLeg, pp. 113–39, esp. pp. 120–30; and HME 11.311–15.
12See Chapter 4.I above.
13The Dangweth is in HME 12.395–402.
14See Chapter 15.IV below.
15For more detail, see Noad in TLeg, pp. 50ff.
Chapter 12 – Philology at Bay
1For details, see Carpenter, Inklings, pp. 229–30.
2See H&S 1, pp. 372–3 (entries for 26 January, 12 February, 9 March).
3Hammond and Scull note two other Faculty Board meetings, in June and October 1952 (H&S 1, pp. 385, 391), at which Humphry House and Helen Gardner proposed changes to the ‘Prelim’, but secured only a minor and wholly insignificant substitution of one Old English text for another.
4See Chadwick’s obituary in Interpreters, esp. p. 213. He had made a similar point in a small book, The Study of Anglo-Saxon, which appeared in 1941.
5Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (London, Hutchinson, 1991), p. 52.
6Quoted in Z. Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (London, Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 123.
7It is no. 131 in Letters (pp. 143–61).
8Letters, p. 163 (to Rayner Unwin, 22 June 1952).
9In fact, Mass for Catholics in Headington was celebrated in a hall in Jack Straw’s Lane until 1960, when the church of St Anthony of Padua was built in Headley Way; neither site was more than a mile from Tolkien’s house.
10Warnie Lewis, Brothers and Friends, p. 242; quoted in H&S 1, p. 399.
11New series, 6 (October 1953), pp. 1–18.
12See Shippey, Roots and Branches, pp. 206 and 323–39.
13Tolkien’s colleagues on the committee were Humphry House, David Cecil, F.P. Wilson and (as chairman) J.N. Bryson of Balliol, an authority on Pre-Raphaelites but also a competent Anglo-Saxonist.
14Quoted in Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, p. 339. For details of the supposed 1951 meeting and its origin here, see H&S 1, pp. 432, 795–6.
15Shippey, ‘Tolkien’s Academic Reputation Now’, in Roots and Branches, p. 211.
16See Shippey’s essay ‘Fighting the Long Defeat: Philology in Tolkien’s Life and Fiction’ in Roots and Branches, pp. 139–56.
17Lewis to the Master of Magdalene, 12 May 1954; quoted in Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, p. 341.
18For details of the Cambridge election, see Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, pp. 340–5, and Wilson, C.S. Lewis, pp. 245–6.
Chapter 13 – ‘My heart, to be shot at’
1Printed in HME 12.422–37.
2HME 12.178.
3‘English and Welsh’, reprinted in M&C, p. 162.
4Letters, p. 172.
5Edmund Wilson, ‘Oo, Those Awful Orcs’, The Nation (14 April 1956), pp. 312–14.
6Peter Milward, quoted in H&S 2, p. 1124.
7See Letters, p. 238 (from 1956). There may be an unconscious reminiscence of one of W.P. Ker’s observations on Beowulf: ‘With a plot like Beowulf it might seem that there was danger of a lapse from the more serious kind of heroic composition into a more trivial kind’ (Epic and Romance, chapter II.vi, p. 167).
8Letter to John D. Rateliff (editor of the manuscripts of The Hobbit), quoted by Douglas Anderson in TMed, p. 24.
9From Stewart’s A Memorial Service, the third book in the sequence, published in 1976; quoted in Shippey, Author, p. 271.
10Letters, p. 238.
11Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 520 (to Sister Penelope CSMV, 11 May 1942).
12For more on this theme, see Shippey, Road, pp. 379–87.
13The extant chapter is printed in HME 12.410–18.
14See Chapter 17 below.
15Neame was a prolific writer in the early 1950s; as well as writing a full-length study of Ezra Pound (The Pisan Cantos: An Approach) he had work published in, amongst other places, the Poundinspired Agenda and Diana Mosley’s magazine The European. He later published a rather good book on Lourdes (The Happening at Lourdes, 1967) and another on the Holy Maid of Kent (1971), as well as a novel (Maud Noakes, Guerilla, 1965). He was later engaged in the early stages of the revision that produced the New Jerusalem Bible.
16The following section draws on various sources, in particular the careful account in McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life, pp. 320–41.
17Alan Jacobs, The Narnian (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), p. 275; quoted in McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life, p. 331.
18Warnie Lewis’s diary, quoted in Wilson, C.S. Lewis, p. 255.
19See, as above, Letters, pp. 59–62; although that is avowedly a draft, and there is no absolute evidence that it was ever finished and sent. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to believe that Tolkien did not bring his objections to Lewis’s notice in some form, even if not precisely in this one.
20McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life, p. 333.
21Undated conversation with Walter Hooper, quoted in Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, p. 217.
22Sayer, Jack, p. 229.
Chapter 14 – Silmarillion and Scholarship?
1‘The Sea-B
ell’, in ATB, p. 60.
2It is included in M&C, and also in Salu and Farrell (eds), J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller, pp. 16–32: the texts differ slightly, that in M&C incorporating changes that may have been made after it was delivered. Amongst the poems Tolkien alluded to in the lecture was Macaulay’s Horatius.
3This partial dispersal was the source of most of the books signed by Tolkien that still appear in sales catalogues.
4Letters, p. 301 (to Rayner Unwin, 31 July 1960).
5A number of later scholars (Geoffrey Shepherd, Eric Dobson and especially Bella Millett) have to some extent completed the task that Tolkien outlined, although in the course of their work his (and Chambers’s) theories on the supposed continuity of English prose have largely been abandoned.
6Lewis’s article was reprinted in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 301–11. The Festschrift was reissued as a print-to-order book in 2011.
7Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, p. 398.
8Quoted in Duriez and Porter, The Inklings Handbook, p. 119.
9See Noad in TLeg, pp. 66–7.
10A number of these have been published in HME. Laws and Customs is in HME 10.207–53; Converse is in 10.361–2; Reincarnation is summarized in 10.363–6. Athrabeth, with additional authorial notes and commentary, is in 10.303–60. Quendi and Eldar is in 11.359–424. Galadriel and Celeborn is in UT, pp. 233–40.
11See The Line of Elros in UT, p. 224. The Notion Club Papers probably alluded to the same idea, in noting, ‘Elendil has a book which he has written’ (HME 9.279).
12See the texts and commentary in HME 10.375–90.
13Rayner Unwin in TLeg, p. 4.
14For the persistence of Ælfwine, see Flieger in TLeg, pp. 183–98.
15 UT, p. 183.
16Selections from all these Númenórean fragments are included in UT.
17From a newspaper interview (with the Daily Telegraph magazine) published in March 1968, quoted by Glyer and Long in Fisher (ed.), Tolkien and the Study of his Sources, p. 198.
Chapter 15 – Unfinished Tales
1ATB, p. 8.
2See Noad in TLeg, p. 61.
3This collection does not exhaust Tolkien’s short verse; occasional fugitive pieces appeared in various periodicals throughout his life; a third Tom Bombadil poem, for instance, ‘Once upon a Time’, was included in a children’s anthology published in 1965. It has not been republished. See H&S 2, p. 689.
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