4Quoted in Wilson, C.S. Lewis, p. 294.
5John Tolkien, quoted in Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis, p. 430.
6Letters, p. 341 (26 November 1963).
7Letters, p. 352 (to David Kolb SJ, 11 November 1964).
8Quoted in H&S 1, p. 615.
9Letters, p. 354 (to Michael Tolkien, 9–10 January 1965). Christopher Tolkien is not mentioned in the published part of this letter, but the inference seems a reasonable one. In September 1967, after divorcing his wife, he married Baillie Klass (who, as Baillie Knapheis, had briefly acted as his father’s secretary).
10We have only Wollheim’s daughter’s authority for this description (in an interview given to LOCUS magazine in June 2006), and may wonder whether the story has been improved by time and in the telling; but it would not be an implausible response by Tolkien to a request that, perhaps, was made abruptly and ill timed.
11This is to simplify the matter very slightly: in fact the first 1,500 copies of any imported text could be protected by an interim copyright against the appearance of an American-printed text; but Houghton Mifflin soon exceeded this quota on the first two volumes, and outran it from the start on the third. For details of the whole Ace Books affair and the nature of American copyright law at the time, see the full discussion in H&S 2, pp. 1–7.
12LOTR, Prologue (p. 15).
13 HME 10.374.
14Ballantine was founded in 1952 and from the start had published simultaneous paperback editions of books that Houghton Mifflin issued in hardback; they also published original science fiction in paperback.
15It appears in Wolfe’s essay ‘The Best Introduction to the Mountains’, available online (www.thenightland.co.uk/MYWEB/wolfemountains.html) but not, I think, in book form, although it was printed in the magazine Interzone in December 2001. It was offered to the editor of the (uneven) 2001 anthology Meditations on Middle Earth (essays on Tolkien by writers of science fiction and fantasy), who turned it down.
16Details of subsequent editions, and the textual vagaries they exhibit, can be found in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion by the indefatigable and compendious Hammond and Scull, esp. pp. xl–xlv, and, in outline, in Douglas Anderson’s ‘Note on the Text’ prefixed (in successive forms) to editions published since 1994.
17Tolkien in Oxford. It can be seen online (www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12237/.shtml); some good footage of Tolkien himself is intercut with preposterous interviews with undergraduates in a very irritating directorial style.
18Letters, p. 413 (to Carole Batten-Phelps, autumn 1971).
19Tolkien sold the manuscripts of The Hobbit, Farmer Giles of Ham and The Lord of the Rings, together with the unpublished Mr Bliss, to Wheaton in May 1957 for £1,500.
20Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion, p. 20.
21Flieger in TLeg, p. 196. See also Flieger’s edition of SWM (Extended edition, London, HarperCollins, 2005).
22 SWM, p. 32.
23Letters, p. 413 (to Carole Batten-Phelps, autumn 1971).
24Unpublished letter to Clyde Kilby, December 1967; quoted in H&S 2, p. 364.
25See TEnc, pp. 417–18.
26All, apart from The Shibboleth (HME 12.331–66), are in UT in whole or in part.
27Letters, p. 404 (1 January 1970).
28 Letters, p. 411 (17 July 1971).
29OFS, p. 53 and footnote 1.
30Letters, p. 415.
31Letters, p. 420 (to Christopher Tolkien, 11 July 1972).
32See Garth, p. 283.
33Carpenter, Biography, p. 255.
34Letters, p. 429.
35Letters, p. 431 (to Lord Halsbury, 4 August 1973).
Chapter 16 – Posthumous Publications
1Letter to Michael Tolkien, 6 October 1940, in Letters, p. 46.
2Rayner Unwin in TLeg, p. 6.
3See Chapter 6.I above.
Chapter 17 – A Cinematic Afterlife
1See Carpenter, Biography, p. 226, and H&S 2, pp. 16–20.
2The curious may find it on YouTube. It is very bad.
Epilogue
1Leaf by Niggle, in TL (2001 edition) p. 95.
2John Buchan, ‘The Rime of True Thomas’, in The Moon Endureth (in Four Tales, pp. 631–2).
Appendix – Tolkien the Catholic
1Stratford Caldecott, for instance: see p. 86 of The Power of the Ring.
2Letters, p. 340.
3Caldecott, The Power of the Ring, pp. 90–1.
4Their various versions appeared in Vinyar Tengwar 43 (January 2002) pp. 4–38 and 44 (June 2002), pp. 5–20.
5Letters, p. 66 (to Christopher Tolkien, 8 January 1944).
6The full ICEL translation of the 1969 Missale Romanum was not adopted in England and Wales until 1973; from 1970, however, a composite translation was in use, combining the ICEL Ordinary of the Mass with Propers translated by the English National Liturgical Commission, which are of significantly higher literary quality (and accuracy) than either of the later ICEL versions (1973, 2010) subsequently adopted; before this composite Missal (known as the ‘Gordon Wheeler Missal’ after the Commission’s chairman) was adopted, however, various quasi-official English translations of very uneven quality were in use. ICEL, for those who may not know, is the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, the body responsible for providing English versions of Catholic liturgical texts to a number of different Bishops’ Conferences.
7Letters, p. 393 (to Michael Tolkien, 1967/8).
8For those interested in liturgical history, it should be noted that the indult gave permission for the celebration of Mass with the modifications introduced in 1965 and 1967 (principally, the dropping of certain duplicated prayers and with scripture readings normatively in the vernacular) and not according to the Roman Missal of 1962, which has subsequently become the touchstone of Tridentinist praxis. That text owes its vogue to its adoption by the (eventually) schismatic Society of St Pius X of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre; it was later officially sanctioned (without mention of the 1965 and 1967 modifications) by the ‘universal indult’ Quattuor abhinc annos of 1984, and subsequently by other magisterial texts culminating in the remarkable Summorum pontificum of 2007, which effectively rewrote history by declaring by papal fiat that the 1962 Missal was ‘never abrogated’, although the invariable practice of the Church, and the assumption of numerous documents issued in the immediate aftermath of the introduction of the reformed Missal, is that any subsequent edition of the Roman Missal automatically replaces its predecessor, which is thus de facto abrogated. Austin Farrer’s papal fact factory is clearly still functioning. But this digression has probably strained the patience of my readers, and so should end.
9Robert Murray SJ, ‘A Tribute to Tolkien’, The Tablet (15 September 1973); quoted in H&S 2, p. 467. See also Letters, p. 357 (to Zillah Sherring, 20 July 1965).
10Anthony Curtis, ‘Remembering Tolkien and Lewis’, British Book News (June 1977), p. 429, quoted in H&S 2, p. 464. Curtis was an RAF cadet during the war, whom Tolkien taught for one of the short courses described in Chapter 8.III above.
11See Drout, Michael D.C. (ed.), Beowulf and the Critics by J.R.R. Tolkien, revised second edition (Tempe, AZ, ACMRS, 2011), p. 125.
12Letters, p. 112 (to Christopher Tolkien, 11 February 1945).
13Letters, p. 172 (2 December 1953). Murray’s grandfather was the great Sir James Murray, founder of the OED.
14Notably, the destruction of the Ring, and the power of Sauron, on 25 March, a date on which thereafter ‘the New Year will always now begin’; it is also, of course, the feast of the Annunciation, which marks the coming of Christ into the womb of Mary, and thus the beginning of defeat of death and sin, and was until the eighteenth century the start of the calendar year. We could also instance the Elvish invocations of Elbereth (Varda) as analogous to Marian devotion.
15Foreword to Bradley J. Birzer, Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (Wilmington DE, ISI Books, 2002), p. xiii.
16Quoted in H&S 2, p. 838.
> 17OFS, Epilogue (p. 79); also in M&C, p. 156, and TL, p. 73.
18See the essay The Reincarnation of Elves, written in 1959–60 and printed in part in HME 10.363–6.
19OFS, pp. 38–9.
20 OFS, pp. 55, 75; also in M&C, pp. 134, 153, and TL, pp. 41, 69.
21For details, see Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, pp. 181–2. Earliest of all is a poem, ‘Joy’, from 1924: it is printed in the ‘Miscellany of Additional Poems’ in the 1994 edition of Lewis’s Poems (London, HarperCollins) (it does not appear in other editions).
22See Caldecott, The Power of the Ring, p. 82.
23Caldecott, The Power of the Ring, p. 83.
24Shippey, Road (3rd edition), p. 244.
Further Reading and Bibliography
Further reading
To help the reader who is interested to navigate further the crowded waters of Tolkieniana, these are some of the books I have personally found most useful and informative. There is now a thriving academic field of Tolkien Studies, with the regular appurtenances of conferences, volumes of collected papers and learned journals. As with most fields of academic study, a good deal of this is sad stuff, and I confess I have not been so diligent in my special walk as duly to read all that has been printed on this man and his work. But I have read a good deal of it, and some of it has both enriched my understanding of Tolkien and, if it were possible, increased my enjoyment of his work.
The first place to start is of course with Tolkien’s own writings, readily available (for the most part) in numerous cheap editions; collectors and the curious will find in Hammond and Anderson a comprehensive bibliography.
The best source for his life remains Humphrey Carpenter’s authorized biography; Carpenter is the only writer ever to have had access to all of Tolkien’s private papers, and this alone gives his book enduring value, although obviously it does not cover most of the posthumously published work in full. It is usefully supplemented by Carpenter’s later book The Inklings, which is especially good on C.S. Lewis. More recently, John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War gives invaluable detail on Tolkien’s early life and writing. Anyone seeking additional detail should consult the magisterial and very comprehensive J.R.R. Tolkien: A Companion and Guide by Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond. Relations between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are well covered by a number of complementary biographies of the latter: Green and Hooper, A.N. Wilson and most recently Alister McGrath are all worth reading, as is the idiosyncratic but illuminating Jack by George Sayer. The old collection C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (edited by James T. Como and reissued in 2005 as Remembering C.S. Lewis) is a modest gold-mine of personal accounts.
The best work on Tolkien’s academic background and its fundamental influence on, and importance to, his writing is Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth (first published in 1982, revised for its second edition in 1992, and again for its third – much expanded – edition of 2005), supplemented by the same author’s later collection, Roots and Branches. Also useful are The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by three of the OED’s current editors, Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner, and Tolkien the Medievalist (edited by Jane Chance). The collection Tolkien’s Legendarium is uneven, but contains some valuable work; Charles Noad’s essay ‘On the Construction of the Silmarillion’ is fundamental.
For literary criticism of Tolkien, the best place to start is again with Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. For the theological undercurrents in Tolkien, see Stratford Caldecott’s Secret Fire, now in its revised American edition, The Power of the Ring. Copies of Clyde Kilby’s Tolkien and the Silmarillion can still be found second-hand; it is an interesting if slight book.
There are hundreds of other books – big and small, good and bad – on Tolkien and his writings; some of them are listed in the works named above. The journal Tolkien Studies has been published annually since 2004; it is a useful source of often more academically substantial Tolkien criticism.
It is perhaps worth saying something further about my use of sources. For those who want to know the mature Tolkien – discursive, forcible, unexpected, eloquent – his published Letters are invaluable. Copyright law means that my quotations from them here are exiguous and give little idea of the enjoyment to be had from reading them in extenso. From the earlier part of his life – before, in fact, the publication of The Hobbit, when he was forty-five – there is very little in the public domain. The published volume of Letters contains just over 350 items, but of these only a bare dozen date from before The Hobbit was published; and it contains nothing at all from the first dozen years of his tenure as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, which from an academic point of view are perhaps the most interesting of his career. The editors had a great profusion of material to select from, and reckoned, probably rightly, that most readers were primarily interested in the genesis of Tolkien’s published work rather than his campaign for syllabus reform, or his abortive negotiations with the OUP. But this does throw us back on inference and speculation more than we might wish. Extensive letters between Tolkien and his fiancée-then-wife exist, but are not accessible; nor is the diary he kept between 1919 and 1933 and again between 1964 and his death (see Carpenter, Biography, p. 277). So we must rely, to a great extent, on what can be inferred from the external facts of his life; our best insight into his inner life comes, in fact, from what we know – and it is fairly large – about his intellectual interests and academic focus.
Supplement, 2020
Of the wealth of secondary materials published since this book first appeared, I would especially notice John Garth’s Tolkien at Exeter College (2015) and Hammond and Scull’s revised and expanded JRR Tolkien Companion and Guide (2017), whilst John Bowers’s Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer (OUP, 2019) gives fascinating detail of the Clarendon Chaucer debacle and of Tolkien’s engagement with Chaucer in general. Lastly, Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist by Oronzo Cilli (Luna Press, 2019) is both exhaustive and illuminating.
Bibliography
This, as I have said, has no pretensions to being a complete bibliography of books and articles on Tolkien; I have merely collected references to the material I have used or cited in my text. This should make it easier for those who are interested in such things to follow up what I have said, or see whence I have drawn and from whom. I have omitted works by Tolkien himself.
Adams, D.Q. and Mallory, J.P. (eds), The Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. London, Routledge, 1997.
Amis, Kingsley, Memoirs. London, Hutchinson, 1991.
Atherton, Mark, There and Back Again: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit. London, I.B. Tauris, 2012.
Barfield, Owen, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. London, Faber & Gwyer, 1928; Middletown CT, Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
Birzer, Bradley J., Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth. Wilmington, DE, ISI Books, 2002.
Bowers, John M., Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer. Oxford, OUP, 2019.
Buchan, John (Lord Tweedsmuir), Four Tales. Edinburgh, William Blackwood & Sons, 1936; frequently reprinted.
Caldecott, Stratford, The Power of the Ring. New York, Crossroad, 2012.
Campbell, Alistair, Old English Grammar. Oxford, OUP, 1959.
Carpenter, Humphrey, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. London, George Allen & Unwin, 1977.
—— The Inklings. London, George Allen & Unwin, 1978.
Chambers, R.W., Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Poetry. London, Cambridge University Press, 1912; reprinted 2010.
—— Beowulf: An Introduction. London, Cambridge University Press, 1921; 2nd edition, 1932; 3rd edition, with Supplement by C.L. Wrenn, 1959.
—— ‘Recent Research upon the “Ancren Riwle”’, Review of English Studies, 1, no. 1 (January 1925), pp. 4–23; reprinted London, Sidgwick and Jackson [1925].
—— On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School. London, OUP for the EETS, 1932.
Chanc
e, Jane (ed.), Tolkien the Medievalist. New York and London, Routledge, 2003.
Cilli, Oronzo, Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist. Edinburgh, Luna Press, 2019.
Cockayne, Oswald, Narratiunculae Anglice Conscriptae. London, I.R. Smith, 1861.
Como, James T. (ed.), C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table. London, Wm Collins, 1980.
Dawson, Christopher, Progress & Religion: An Historical Inquiry. London, Sheed & Ward, 1929; Washington, DC, CUA Press, 2001.
Drout, Michael D.C. (ed.), J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. New York and London, Routledge, 2007.
Dunsany, Lord, Time and the Gods. London, Victor Gollancz, 2000.
Duriez, Colin, J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend. Oxford, Lion Hudson, 2012.
—— and Porter, David, The Inklings Handbook. London, Azure, 2001.
Fisher, Jason (ed.), Tolkien and the Study of his Sources. Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Company, 2011.
Flieger, Verlyn, and Hostetter, Carl F., Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth. Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 2000.
Fox-Davies, Arthur Charles, Armorial Families: A Directory of Gentlemen of Coat-Armour (7th edition). London, Hurst & Blackett, 1929.
Garth, John, Tolkien and the Great War. London, HarperCollins, 2003.
——Tolkien at Exeter College. Oxford, Exeter College, 2015.
Gilliver, Peter, Marshall, Jeremy, and Weiner, Edmund, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford, OUP, 2006.
Green, Roger Lancelyn, and Hooper, Walter, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (rev. and expanded edition). London, HarperCollins, 2002.
Hammond, Wayne, and Anderson, Douglas A., J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography. New Castle, DE, Oak Knoll Press, 1993.
Hammond, Wayne G., and Scull, Christina, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator. London, HarperCollins, 1995.
—— The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. London, HarperCollins, 2005.
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