This list accounts for entries posted between 11 July 2008 and 31 March 2015, and refers only to the original edition, published in 2006. See elsewhere on this site for the complete list of addenda and corrigenda to the Chronology. For citations to entries in the chronology proper (pp. 1–803), line numbers are counted from the start of the entry on the page cited, or if the entry breaks between pages, from the top or (when stated) bottom of the page cited. Significant revisions of addenda or corrigenda (as opposed to revisions of the Chronology proper), but not merely additions, are marked thus: [REVISED]. Hyperlinks are included selectively, to lead to further (especially pictorial) material; for additional links, see the supplemental bibliography of sources.
p. 7, entry for Early 1902, ll. 4–5: An early photograph of St Philip’s is reproduced in the ‘Tolkien Gallery’ on the website of the Library of Birmingham.
p. 26, entry for 26 July 1911, ll. 4–6: A photograph of Tolkien costumed as Hermes is reproduced in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 6. The printed programme for the Aristophanes play is reproduced in the ‘Tolkien Gallery’ on the website of the Library of Birmingham.
p. 28, add entry:
August 1911 The Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board issue a report on King Edward’s School, Birmingham. In this – prepared evidently in the Board’s role as examiner of schools or school programmes rather than of individual students – Tolkien and some of his friends are singled out for mention for their work in Class 1 on Roman history. ‘The best work was undoubtedly done by [Robert Q.] Gilson in both papers. . . . [F.T.] Faulconbridge and [Sidney] Barrowclough were also very fair, and shewed considerable promise. Tolkien gave signs of a more acute and independent judgement than anyone else; his style also was more matured, but he seemed to have no control over it and sometimes became almost unintelligible; he was also very irrelevant, particularly on the Special Period, in which he only attempted four questions’ (quoted in Giampaolo Canzonieri, ‘Tolkien at King Edward’s School’ (2014), p. 149).
p. 28, entry for End of the second week in October 1911: In a letter to R.W. Reynolds’ daughter (6 March 1964), Tolkien also recalled that he lunched at the Mitre Hotel (*Oxford and environs) and considered it a privilege to have done so. In regard to l. 5, ‘no. 9 on the no. 7 staircase’, John Garth (Tolkien at Exeter College (2014)) gives this as Tolkien’s address beginning in his second year, from autumn 1912; previously, from autumn 1911, Tolkien was in no. 7, at the top of staircase 8.
p. 28, entry for Michaelmas Term 1911: According to John Garth (Tolkien at Exeter College), Tolkien joined the Oxford Union debating society at the end of his first week as an undergraduate. There is no mention of him participating in either debate or administration in the Proceedings of the society through Trinity Term 1912.
p. 29, entry for 25 November 1911: At the same time, Tolkien borrowed volume 5 of the History of Greece (1846–56) by George Grote and the English Dialect Grammar by Joseph Wright (1905).
p. 31, entry for 22 January 1912, final line: C.A.H. Fairbank, an Etonian and a son of the noted surgeon Sir William Fairbank, entered the Army near the end of 1915 and long served as an artillery officer, rising in the Second World War to the rank of Brigadier.
p. 31, final line: There is an extraneous space between ‘in’ and ‘C.A.H.’.
p. 32, entry for 27 January 1912, l. 1: Michael William Maxwell Windle, from Blundell’s School in Devon, was an exhibitioner at Oxford, where he was remembered as a keen oarsman and a hard worker. He joined the Devonshire Regiment in 1914, and the following year was killed in action in the Battle of Loos.
p. 32, entry for 3 February 1912, l. 1: Robert Hope Gordon attended Fettes College in Edinburgh before entering Oxford on an open scholarship to study Classics. In 1914 he joined The King’s Liverpool Regiment, was wounded at Ypres, and in 1916 was killed in action on the Somme.
p. 32, entry for 10 February 1912, ll. 1–2: Harold Gilbert Lutyens Trimingham, from Bermuda, entered Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar after attending Dulwich College. It is recorded that he joined the Queen’s Westminster Rifles in 1915 and was attached to the Tank Corps during service in France. An H.G.L. Trimingham, likely the same, is also mentioned as commanding a contingent of the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corp (Lewis gunners) which arrived in France in 1916. Trimingham ultimately returned to Bermuda, where he became a government Auditor.
p. 32, entry for 24 February 1912, l. 1: Osric Osmond Staples, from the Orange Free State, attended Transvaal University and went up to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Once a sergeant in the King Edward’s Horse, he was commissioned in the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1914, and the following year was killed in action near Loos.
p. 32, entry for 2 March 1912, l. 1: Werner William Thomas Massiah-Palmer was born in Cornwall to Thomas and Helen Palmer, and is referred to in one Apolausticks calendar as W.W.T. Palmer, but by his matriculation at Oxford had been adopted by the Rev. Thomas Packer Massiah, hence the compound surname found in other records (compare our entry for 13 November 1912). Massiah-Palmer entered military service in 1914, secondarily with the Northumberland Fusiliers and primarily as Deputy Assistant Director of Graves Registration and Enquiries. He died in 1919 of illness contracted at Salonika (Thessaloniki). (Thus according to online records; according to John Garth, Massiah-Palmer contracted typhoid in Salonika, but died in London from Spanish Influenza.)
p. 33, entry for May 1912: John Garth (‘Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War’ (2008), p. 22) has identified the students in the photograph, from annotations on a copy preserved by one of the members (L.L.H. Thompson): standing, left to right, are Allen Barnett, M.W.M. Windle, G.S. Field, O.O. Staples, and R.H. Gordon; seated on chairs, left to right, are W.R. Brown, W.W.T. Massiah-Palmer (then Secretary of the Apolausticks), Colin Cullis (President), Tolkien, and J. Mackreth; and seated on mats, left to right, are H.G.L. Trimingham and L.L.H. Thompson. Walter Rolfe Brown, not mentioned elsewhere in Chronology (no meetings were scheduled in his rooms, as far as we know), joined the Artists’ Rifles as a private in 1916 and was killed in action at Ypres the following year. Theology student John Mackreth, also not mentioned elsewhere, was born in Brighton and attended Brighton College; he served with a signal company of the Royal Engineers from 1914, until his death in action the following year on the Somme.
p. 33, entry for 11 May 1912, l. 1: Geoffrey Simpson Field, from Reading, Berkshire, was educated at Marlborough College, Wiltshire, before entering Oxford. He was later a captain in the Army and survived the war, becoming a solicitor.
p. 33, add entry:
June 1912 Exeter College transfers its financial support of Tolkien for one year to the Loscombe Richards Exhibition, intended for poor scholars (see John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014)).
p. 33, entry for 15 June 1912: That the Apolausticks met in M.W.M. Windle’s rooms is an assumption. The members were to meet there, according to their printed schedule for the term, but at some time this year Windle resigned his membership and was replaced by W.E. Hall (see entry for 27 November 1912). Tolkien’s motion was opposed in debate by L.L.H. Thompson.
p. 34, entry for Michaelmas Term 1912: By now, Tolkien has moved within ‘Swiss Cottage’ to no. 9 on the no. 7 staircase. John Garth notes (Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 15) that Tolkien’s rent rose from £10 10s to £16 16s, and the cost of his furniture hire increased from £3 14s to £5. We ourselves had recorded in our working notes the increased figures from an Exeter College ledger, but when writing the Companion and Guide chose to omit most mentions of Tolkien’s expenditures or debts, not to pull a veil over a possibly unflattering picture of Tolkien but because we lacked (and lack) enough comparative data on income and costs of living. John Garth suggests (p. 15, ‘he appears to have put money worries in the back of his mind’) that Tolkien as an undergraduate lived less frugally than he should have, given his means; but we do not know how rents or other costs may have increased generally between the Oxford terms, nor do we know if students were required, or encouraged, to change rooms in the course of their Oxford career, or if Tolkien’s first rooms had proved for some reason inhospitable and a move was necessary.
Garth also notes that the no. 9 rooms had belonged to Anthony Shakespeare, a friend or acquaintance who likewise had attended the Birmingham Oratory school, and was now, a year in advance of Tolkien, studying law at Oxford.
p. 34, entry for 25 October 1912, l. 1: Allen Barnett was a Rhodes Scholar with whom Tolkien joined in undergraduate shenanigans. Before entering Oxford, he was educated at Georgetown College, Georgetown, Kentucky. Barnett later became President of the Apolausticks, and long remained in touch with Tolkien. The early Tolkien biographer Daniel Grotta made use of letters by Barnett (d. 1970); but see our addendum to the Reader’s Guide for pp. 110–11.
p. 34, entry for 30 October 1912, l. 1: Louis Lionel Harry Thompson served with the Cheshire Regiment and later became Deputy Master and Comptroller of the Royal Mint. He received a knighthood in 1953.
p. 35, entry for 27 November 1912, l. 1: William Ernest Hall, from Darjeeling, India, and Exeter School of Exeter, Devon, was commissioned in the Royal Fusiliers in 1914, and killed in action nine months later near Krithia, Turkey, in the failed Gallipoli campaign. Hall was elected to membership in the Apolausticks following the resignation of M.W.M. Windle. With Tolkien and Colin Cullis, Hall was elected an officer (Treasurer) of the Stapeldon Society for Hilary Term 1914.
p. 36, entry for Hilary Term 1913: According to John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 23, ‘a mere six weeks’ before Honour Moderations (which began 27 February), Tolkien borrowed from the Exeter College library Œdipus Tyrannus and Elektra by Sophocles and the Eumenides, Agamemnon, and Choephoroe by Aeschylus, some of which were set texts.
p. 37, entry for 17 February 1913: On this date, Sydney Cohen, one of Tolkien’s former neighbours in ‘Swiss Cottage’ but now on a different staircase and floor, killed himself in the presence of a fellow student, Henry ‘Rex’ Allpass.
p. 42, add entry:
4 June 1913 Tolkien and Allen Barnett visit the charred ruin of Fred Rough’s Oxford boathouse, burned to the ground by militant suffragettes.
A photograph from the Daily Graphic newspaper of 4 June 1913, reproduced in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 18, purports to show Tolkien and Barnett at the arson site. Garth quotes a statement by Tolkien that he and Barnett walked to the ruins and came ‘out large in photograph’ (presumably from a letter or diary; Garth credits personal communication from Douglas A. Anderson).
pp. 47–8, entry for 1 December 1913: Tolkien’s manuscript minutes for this meeting of the Stapeldon Society are reproduced in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), pp. 55–8.
p. 49, add entry:
January 1914 Tolkien borrows from the Exeter College library A History of English Sounds from the Earliest Period by Henry Sweet. He will do so again on 5 November 1914.
p. 50, entry for Hilary Term 1914, ll. 16–17: A photograph of Tolkien playing rugby in 1914 is reproduced in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), pp. 62–3.
p. 51, entry for Spring 1914: Some have suggested that Tolkien also used part of his Skeat Prize money to purchase William Morris’s lecture Some Notes on Pattern Designing (1899), as Tolkien’s copy, sold at auction in 2013, bears on its upper cover the Exeter coat of arms; but this need not follow. It may be, instead, that the Morris volume was presented as an Exeter prize to Tolkien separately, or that it was a prize to some other Exeter student which Tolkien bought at a later date. See also addendum for Reader’s Guide, pp. 599–600.
p. 52, add entry:
June 1914 Tolkien and other Exeter College students pose for a group photograph; see Frances Cairncross, ed., Exeter College: The First 700 Years (2013), pp. 78–9 (Tolkien is at upper right, holding onto a vine).
p. 53, entry for 23 June 1914: A photograph of those who attended the 600th anniversary ball is reproduced in Frances Cairncross, ed., Exeter College: The First 700 Years (2013), pp. 72–3. The upper cover of the printed programme for the event, reproduced in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 31, bears many signatures in addition to Tolkien’s.
p. 56, entry for 27 October 1914, l. 4: ‘Dr Marett’ was Robert Ranulph Marett, an ethnologist who focused on the anthropology of religion. In 1914 he established at Oxford a Department of Social Anthropology, and became Rector of Exeter College after Lewis Farnell. According to John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), Marett was the tutor assigned to Tolkien to deal with his pastoral care.
p. 66, entry for 10 June 1915: Prior to the examinations, Tolkien borrowed from the Exeter College library the Cambridge History of English Literature and introductions to Dryden, Keats, and Shakespeare. John Garth suggests that these were ‘clearly the areas of his course which he had neglected’ (‘Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War’ (2008), p. 46), but they might also have been areas in which Tolkien wished to review what he had already studied.
p. 71, entries for 16 July 1915 and 17 July 1915: In Tolkien and the Great War (2003), p. 88, John Garth writes, without making a direct quotation: ‘On Friday 9 July the War Office had written to tell [Tolkien] he was a second lieutenant with effect from the following Thursday [i.e. 15 July]’. Both he and we read the letter of 9 July written to Tolkien by Col. W. Elliott of the War Office (see Chronology, p. 70), but in our transcription of this, which we believe to be correct, there is no mention of ‘the following Thursday’ (or words to that effect). At any rate, 15 July is the date of Tolkien’s commission given in the Oxford University Roll of Service (ed. by E.S. Craig and W.M. Gibson, 1920), and also within the ‘London Gazette’ column of the Times of 17 July. We note the latter source in Chronology, and on checking it again see that ‘15 July’ is given for a group of names, including Tolkien’s, within the article; this was presumably an operative date within War Office records. The ‘London Gazette’ information, however, bears the overall date of 16 July, and it was under this date in Chronology that we noted that the War Office had issued Tolkien’s commission. We now see also, from what seems to be a new online database (at least, it is new to us) for the separate newspaper The London Gazette (from which the Times drew its information), that the notice of Tolkien’s commission was first published on 16 July, also with the internal date of 15 July. That said, it is our understanding that the official date of a commission was that on which it was published in The London Gazette (hence the term gazetted; see https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/The_London_Gazette#Officers), which would make it officially 16 July. G.B. Smith wrote to Tolkien around 10 July 1915, suggesting that the notice Tolkien would receive from the War Office would be the ‘gazetting’, and Tolkien himself wrote a letter on 11 July stating ‘I have at last been gazetted’, so perhaps the word was also used more loosely.
p. 88, entry for 22 August 1916: Add: ‘Possibly on this date, Wade-Gery presents to Tolkien a copy of The Earthly Paradise by William Morris, vol. 5 of the Collected Works edited by Morris’s daughter May.’
pp. 110–11, entry for 10 March 1920: The manuscript minutes of this meeting of the Exeter College Essay Club are reproduced in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), pp. 52–4.
p. 148, add entry:
2 January 1929 Tolkien writes to E.V. Gordon, referring to Gordon’s plan to start an Icelandic collection at the University of Leeds and enclosing songs.
p. 154, entry for 2–9 August 1930: In connection with the Congress, a sermon was preached in Esperanto to the Catholic delegates in the Dominican church at Blackfriars by Father Gaffney, O.P. Oronzo Cilli has noted (‘“The Educational Value of Esperanto”: The Word of Tolkien in The British Esperantist’, blog post, 24 March 2014) that Tolkien’s name does not appear in lists of participants in the Congress which appeared in numbers of the British Esperanto Association journal International Language, January–October 1930. Cilli is inclined to think, nonetheless, that Tolkien may have participated in some activities rather than attend the entire week (i.e. as a registered delegate); we would hesitate to make this assumption, particularly for a time of year when Tolkien may have been otherwise occupied marking school examination scripts on deadline.
p. 168, add entry before that for 1 April 1933:
April 1933 Tolkien’s name is included at the end of a list of twenty scholars, all of them involved in some manner with education, ‘associat[ing] ourselves with the efforts that are being made to introduce Esperanto as a regular subject of instruction, and to encourage its use in the schools of the world’. This manifesto will be published in The British Esperantist for May 1933 as ‘The Educational Value of Esperanto’.
p. 168, add entry:
14–17 April 1933 The twenty-fourth British Esperanto Congress is held in Oxford, with headquarters at the Randolph Hotel. Tolkien is one of its patrons, together with the Duke of Connaught, the Mayor of Oxford (Alderman G.H. Brown), Sir Michael Sadler, Professor Braun Holtz, Councillor the Rev. John Carter, the Master of Balliol (Dr. A.D. Lindsay), and the Principal of Ruskin College (A. Barratt Brown). Oronzo Cilli suggests (‘“The Educational Value of Esperanto”: The Word of Tolkien in The British Esperantist’, blog post, 24 March 2014), as one hypothesis among several, that Tolkien may have written A Secret Vice for this congress, though no address by Tolkien is recorded in The British Esperantist, and it seems to us, from the language of the first paragraphs of A Secret Vice, that it was not delivered to an audience of Esperanto specialists.
p. 215, entry for 1 April 1938, l. 4: For ‘John Lane at The Bodley Head’ read ‘The Bodley Head’.
p. 219, add entry:
31 July 1938 Tolkien writes to Ida Gordon, widow of E.V. Gordon, expressing condolences. Edith Tolkien does the same this day in a separate letter.
p. 220, entry for 11 August 1938: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to Ida Gordon, apparently in reply to a letter in which she expressed concern for her children following their father’s death. Tolkien refers to his own childhood in speaking of bereavement. He discusses the Old English elegies The Wanderer and The Seafarer, editions of which he and E.V. Gordon had planned to edit.’
p. 220, add entry:
19 August 1938 Tolkien writes to Ida Gordon, offering advice on her family’s financial situation following the death of her husband.
p. 221, add entry:
26 September 1938 Tolkien writes to Ida Gordon, again speaking of her bereavement as well as acknowledging receipt of papers relating to the poem Pearl.
p. 222, entry for Mid-October–December 1938, l. 2: For ‘beginning of the story’ read ‘beginning of The Lord of the Rings’.
p. 238, add entry:
March 1940 Tolkien is thrilled to receive, on subscription, the March 1940 number of the journal Antiquity, devoted to the Anglo-Saxon ship-burial at Sutton Hoo (discovered 1939).
p. 337, entry for ?August 1948–?end of August 1950, ll. 9–11: The ‘quick sketch’ of Minas Tirith belongs rather with other drawings showing the city’s ‘keel’: see Chronology, p. 430, entry for 8 May 1954, and addendum below.
p. 430, entry for 8 May 1954, ll. 13–16: The ‘keel’ drawings referred to here, as well as the one mentioned on p. 337 (see addendum above), were drawn on documents datable to January–May 1954.
p. 437, add entry:
21 August 1954 Tolkien writes to Nevill Coghill, pleased that his friend has written to praise The Fellowship of the Ring. Tolkien had feared criticism, especially at Oxford, for spending time on fiction rather than philology. He feels fortunate that Allen & Unwin agreed to publish The Lord of the Rings if not ‘The Silmarillion’, which Coghill recalled from Tolkien’s reading of The Fall of Gondolin at Oxford many years earlier (see pp. 110–11). Allen & Unwin have promised, however, to think about publishing ‘The Silmarillion’ if they are able to recover their costs on The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien offers to lend Coghill page proof of The Two Towers; the final volume is still in galley proof. Coghill has questions about The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien wishes to leave explanations until his friend reads the entire work. He comments, however, that numerous characters fall or stand, each on a knife’s edge, in the manner expressed by C.S. Lewis in his poem ‘Nearly they stood who fall . . . / Nearly they fell who stand’; and he notes that Tom Bombadil will not be explained. Tolkien also comments on medieval thinking in regard to fallen angels and the rebellion of peoples against their chief, in connection with Sauron and the Black Riders.
p. 615, addendum entry for 17 January 1964: Add: ‘– Tolkien replies to a Mrs Mountfield, a teacher at Eltham Green School in London who has sent a letter informing Tolkien of class activities concerned with The Hobbit. He writes that ‘all teaching is exhausting, and depressing and one is seldom comforted by knowing when one has had some effect’ (online listing, Bonhams, 18 June 2014, lot 277). He wishes he could tell some of his former students that he remembers them and things they said, though he may have appeared to them to be otherwise occupied.’
p. 685, entry for 2 January 1967, penultimate line: For ‘Charlotte and Denis’ read ‘Charlotte and Denis Plimmer’.
p. 739, add entry:
3 January 1969 Tolkien writes to Bridget Mackenzie, eldest daughter of Ida and E.V. Gordon. He has sent her an autograph she has requested for friends.
p. 755, add entry:
8 August 1971 Tolkien adds a manuscript note to a carbon copy of the national anthem translated into Greek, partly by P.G.M. Rhodes and partly by R.M. Rattenbury.
Rhodes (1885–1934) attended King Edward’s School, Birmingham, where he composed the verse of ‘God Save the King’ sung at the end of the Greek play and other proceedings performed on Speech Day. After reading Classics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he converted to Roman Catholicism, became a priest, and taught theology at St Mary’s College, Oscott, the seminary of the Archdiocese of Birmingham. On his retirement from Oscott he became the parish priest of Evesham and was a friend of Tolkien’s brother Hilary. Tolkien recalled that Rhodes was interested in pests of trees, while his brother had a small farm. Rhodes is best remembered as a botanical collector and an expert on lichens.
Robert Mantle Rattenbury (1901–1970) came to the University of Leeds as assistant to Classics Professor William Rhys Roberts, and was a close friend of Tolkien and E.V. Gordon. Later he became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In his note, Tolkien records that he and Rattenbury maintained their friendship, and that he frequently visited Trinity College, Cambridge (presumably on occasions when he consulted the Ancrene Wisse manuscript at Corpus Christi College). Rattenbury wrote his part of the translation of ‘God Save the King’, Tolkien recalled, to complete the work by Rhodes, which Tolkien repeated to him; but they were never used publicly.
p. 757, add entry:
16 November 1971 Tolkien writes to Fay Darrington, a reader, returning two books she has asked him to sign (one at least is The Hobbit). He also sends her, or causes to be sent, a copy of the Pauline Baynes Hobbit poster-map.
p. 759, add entry:
16 February 1972 Tolkien replies to a letter from Fay Darrington, thanking her for the delight she feels in his books. He is now dealing with the breaking up of his library and other possessions as he prepares to move; Goadsby & Harding are handling the sale of his house. Since Miss Darrington appears to have lived near his realtor’s offices, Tolkien hopes to make a brief call on her.
p. 775, entry for 2 September 1973: According to the London Times for 11 January 1974, Tolkien left an estate with a net value (after duty was paid) of £144,159. £1,000 were left to the Birmingham Oratory in memory of Father Francis Xavier Morgan, £500 to Trinity College, Oxford (where both Michael and Christopher Tolkien matriculated), £300 to Exeter College, Oxford, and £200 to Pembroke College, Oxford.
p. 777, note for Hilary Term 1913: In Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 23, John Garth quotes from the Stapeldon Magazine (issue not cited) that the paper on Oscar Wilde was ‘most brilliant’; this was delivered by Sydney Cohen, once a neighbour of Tolkien’s in the ‘Swiss Cottage’, and who would commit suicide on 17 February 1913.
p. 813, final line: Add before ‘Contains’: ‘An extended ‘pocket’ edition prepared by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, with earlier versions or antecedents of the poems and other extra material, was published in 2014 by HarperCollins, London.’
p. 814, fourth paragraph, entry for Farmer Giles of Ham: The Scull and Hammond edition was also published in ‘pocket’ format, with added illustrations by Pauline Baynes from Poems and Stories, by HarperCollins, London, in 2014.
p. 815, second paragraph, entry for The Lord of the Rings: For a comparison of the various British and American editions published from 2004 to 2014, see our blog post ‘Lord of the Rings Comparison 2’.
pp. 828–9, list of published art by Tolkien: Add:
Broad Street, Oxford. Reproduced in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 28.
Exeter Coll[ege Hall]. Reproduced in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 29.
pp. 841–73, list of poetry by Tolkien: In addition to those titled poems added to this list from the Tolkien–Gordon collection at Leeds (see Reader’s Guide addenda and corrigenda under ‘Societies and clubs’), there exists an untitled epistolary poem, written by Tolkien to thank his friends Ida and E.V. Gordon for their hospitality.
p. 841: Add entry, in sequence: ‘All Hail! Unpublished.’
p. 842: Add entries, in sequence:
Bleak Heave the Billows. Unpublished.
Brýdleop. Unpublished.
Bummsdrápa. Unpublished.
p. 842, l. 6 from bottom: Replace the entry for The Bumpus with: ‘The Bumpus. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014), pp. 202–6.’
p. 850: Add entry, in sequence: ‘The Lion Is Loud and Proud. Unpublished.’
p. 852: Add entry, in sequence: ‘Noel. The ‘Annual’ of Our Lady’s School, Abingdon, no. 12 (1936), pp. 4–5.’
p. 854, entry for Shadow-Bride: For ‘An earlier version . . . Abingdon Chronicle.’ read ‘An earlier version, The Shadow Man, was published in The ‘Annual’ of Our Lady’s School, Abingdon, no. 12 (1936), p. 9.’
p. 12, entry for 4 April 1907: Replace note as follows: ‘Field Marshal Earl Roberts visits King Edward’s School, as one of four public engagements in Birmingham. He inspects the newly formed Cadet Corps, of which Tolkien is now a member. A photograph is taken of the assembled group of some 120 cadets. After the inspection, Lord Roberts gives an address in the school hall, encouraging the boys to learn to shoot and to understand that it is not only his duty, but an honour and privilege, to defend his country.’
p. 36, entry for 8 January 1913: While in Cheltenham, Tolkien stayed at the Moorend Park lodging house in Charlton Kings. Edith evidently was living at this time in Charlton Kings, at 2 Lyefield Lawn (Tolkien’s postcard to Edith of 1 February is so addressed).
p. 37, add entry before that for 24 February 1913:
Late February 1913 Tolkien appears to have made another visit to Moorend Park in Cheltenham at some time between 17 February (when he was present at the Stapeldon Society meeting in Oxford) and 27 February (when he began to take Honour Mods). Morgan Thomsen has found that the weekly magazine The Cheltenham Looker-on published the names of guests staying in Cheltenham lodging establishments: ‘Tolkien, Mr. J.R.R.’ appears in the number for 11 January 1913 (see addendum for 8 January 1913), and ‘Tolkien, Mr.’ in that for 1 March 1913. Since the latter does not include initials or a forename, it cannot be conclusive proof that Tolkien visited again at this time, though the evidence is strongly suggestive.
p. 61, entry for 10–11 March 1915: For ‘*Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon (An East Anglian Phantasy),’ read ‘Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon (An East Anglian Phantasy) (*The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon),’.
p. 104, entry for May–June 1918, l. 2: For ‘One is a view of the house, another a series of vignettes:’ read ‘One is a view of the house (Gipsy Green), another a series of vignettes (High Life at Gipsy Green)’. In regard to one vignette, labelled ‘The fish we couldn’t get at Swanwicks’, David King has noted, in the Tolkien Society’s Facebook forum, that Swanwicks were a fishmonger in Stafford.
p. 110, add entry:
1920s (by June 1927) Tolkien writes four poems inspired by medieval bestiaries: *Fastitocalon, Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt (*Oliphaunt), Monoceros, the Unicorn, and Reginhardus, the Fox.
p. 113, entry for Summer 1920, ll. 1–2 [REVISED]: For ‘in Trywn Llanbedrog ’ read ‘near Trwyn Llanbedrog’.
p. 120, entry for 13 February 1923: The article by Elizabeth Wright was undoubtedly ‘The Word “Abloy” in “Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight”, l. 1174’, in the section ‘Miscellaneous Notes’, Modern Language Review 18, no. 1 (January 1923), pp. 86–7.
p. 141, entry for June 1927: Lines 1–2, for ‘Two poems by Tolkien, *Fastitocalon and *Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt (composed probably in the 1920s)’ read ‘Two poems by Tolkien, composed probably earlier in the 1920s, Fastitocalon and Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt’.
p. 154, entry for 2–9 August 1930: In connection with the Congress, a sermon was preached in Esperanto to the Catholic delegates in the Dominican church at Blackfriars by Father Gaffney, O.P. Oronzo Cilli has noted that Tolkien’s name does not appear in lists of participants in the Congress which appeared in numbers of the British Esperanto Association journal International Language, January–October 1930. Cilli is inclined to think, nonetheless, that Tolkien may have participated in some activities rather than attend the entire week (i.e. as a registered delegate); we would hesitate to make this assumption, particularly for a time of year when Tolkien may have been otherwise occupied marking school examination scripts on deadline.
p. 168, add entry before that for 1 April:
April 1933 Tolkien’s name is included at the end of a list of twenty scholars, all of them involved in some manner with education, ‘associat[ing] ourselves with the efforts that are being made to introduce Esperanto as a regular subject of instruction, and to encourage its use in the schools of the world’. This manifesto will be published in The British Esperantist for May 1933 as ‘The Educational Value of Esperanto’.
p. 168, add entry:
14–17 April 1933 The twenty-fourth British Esperanto Congress is held in Oxford, with headquarters at the Randolph Hotel. Tolkien is one of its patrons, together with the Duke of Connaught, the Mayor of Oxford (Alderman G.H. Brown), Sir Michael Sadler, Professor Braun Holtz, Councillor the Rev. John Carter, the Master of Balliol (Dr. A.D. Lindsay), and the Principal of Ruskin College (A. Barratt Brown). Oronzo Cilli has suggested, as one hypothesis among several, that Tolkien may have written A Secret Vice for this congress, though no address by Tolkien is recorded in The British Esperantist, and it seems to us, from the language of the first paragraphs of A Secret Vice, that it was not delivered to an audience of Esperanto specialists.
p. 215, entry for 1 April 1938, l. 4: For ‘John Lane at The Bodley Head’ read ‘The Bodley Head’.
p. 284, entry for 24 November 1944, l. 3: For ‘Exeter Book’ read ‘tenth-century Exeter Book’.
p. 294, entry for 22 October 1945: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien inscribes two books by Hilaire Belloc as birthday gifts to his son Michael: Characters of the Reformation (1936) and The Crisis of Our Civilization (1937).’
p. 351, entry for 22 June–5 July 1949, l. 5: Add after ‘examiners.’: ‘While visiting Galway, he is entertained by Diarmuid Murphy, Professor of English at University College, and will become a family friend and correspondent.’
p. 454, entry for 12 May 1955, ll. 1–6: Replace the sentences preceding the en dash with the following:
Tolkien writes to Rayner Unwin, evidently in reply to a recent letter. He is glad that Unwin has (by now) approved the map. He has not received any further proofs of The Return of the King, but has now returned corrected galleys for parts of Appendices A and B, corrections for family trees, and corrected revises for Appendix F. He is unhappy about the appendices, which he feels contain both too much material (given limitations of space) and also too little (to satisfy readers wanting ‘lore’). He has been influenced in his choice of material to include or discard by letters he has received and by the requests of critics such as W.H. Auden, P.H. Newby, and (the most critical of these) Hugh Brogan. He thinks it particularly important to include The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, ‘an allegory of naked hope’, and, in Appendix E, the tables for the Angerthas and Tengwar. It is his choice to omit the Bolger and Boffin family trees. If still more space is needed, he would discard the second part of Appendix F, ‘On Translation’, about which he has second thoughts. He asks Rayner’s opinion about the appendices. Nonetheless, he is still sorry that the ‘Book of Mazarbul’ ‘facsimiles’ cannot be included, and that there are no lists of names to give him the opportunity to provide some Elvish vocabulary. He asks for a copy of the latest printing of The Hobbit and for copies of the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship of the Ring. He has had fan mail from the Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and from the physiologist Sir Peter Medawar, and thanks Rayner for sending a reader’s comment from the London bookseller Bumpus. Most of the ‘intelligentsia’ who write to him, he finds, are scientists rather than ‘literary’, Auden being a notable exception. He has not had time to examine accounts for the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings.
p. 454, entry for 12 May 1955, ll. 6–7: For ‘Tolkien replies to P.H. Newby’s letter of 28 April by telephone’ read ‘Tolkien replies by telephone to P.H. Newby’s letter of 28 April’.
p. 551, add entry:
8 November 1959 Tolkien writes to Naomi Mitchison. He and Edith have gone to Bournemouth chiefly on her account. It is a rare holiday for himself as well, though an ‘obstacle to writing’ (Sotheby Parke Bernet, Catalogue of Valuable Autograph Letters, Literary Manuscripts and Historical Documents, 12–13 December 1977, p. 183). He hopes that when he returns home he will be less tired than he has been.
p. 582, entry for 14 December 1961, l. 11: For ‘with illustrations as important as the verses’ read ‘in which illustrations were as important as the verses’.
p. 590, entry for 19 April 1962, l. 6: For ‘‘fashioned and shaped’ the poems ‘very promisingly’’ read ‘fashioned and shaped the poems very promisingly’ (without quotation marks).
p. 597, entry for 12 September 1962, l. 4: For ‘observe . . . that the’ read ‘observe that . . . the’.
p. 673, entry for 12 September 1966: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to Rose MacNamara (née Murphy), whom he had met in Ireland in 1949. He congratulates her on her final profession upon becoming a nun. His son, Father John, has said a Latin mass for Rose’s father, Professor Diarmuid Murphy (1895–1966), while Tolkien himself served.’
p. 724, entry for ?Early May 1968: Add at end: ‘– Mary Fairburn, an artist in Winchester, England, sends Tolkien at least three sample illustrations she has made for The Lord of the Rings. These include a pen-and-ink drawing of Gandalf on the tower of Orthanc and a small sketch of Gollum.’
p. 725, add entry following that for 15 May 1968:
?Mid-May 1968 Tolkien replies to Mary Fairburn. He thinks that her illustrations ‘are better pictures in themselves and also show far more attention to the text than any that have yet been submitted to me’. Tolkien begins to think favourably about an illustrated edition of The Lord of the Rings. He feels that Pauline Baynes would not be suitable for that work, as it would require pictures ‘more noble or awe-inspiring’ than those she has supplied for his other books (quoted in Paul Tankard, ‘A Vision of Middle-earth’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 2012, p. 14).
p. 726, add entry following that for 29 May 1968:
?Early June 1968 Mary Fairburn sends Tolkien three more paintings or sketches for The Lord of the Rings, including one of the mirror of Galadriel and one of the inn at Bree.
p. 729, entry for ?Late July 1968: Add at end: ‘– Mary Fairburn writes again to Tolkien, having had no reply to her last letter.’
p. 731, entry for 7 August 1968: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien asks his secretary (probably Miss Jenkinson) for Mary Fairburn’s address so that he can write to her from hospital. He comments: ‘I was greatly interested in her drawings – especially since they caught in style and colouring something of my own feelings. . . . I will do what I can to compensate her for her anxiety and delay’ (quoted in Tankard, ‘A Vision of Middle-earth’, p. 15). He considers whether to pay for her to visit him, at his expense, once the drawings she has sent him are found among his papers moved to Poole.
p. 732, add entry:
4 September 1968 Tolkien writes to Mary Fairburn, explaining that his delay in replying has been due to his accident and move. He has found her drawings, but has not been able to show them to Rayner Unwin, who is abroad. Although the prospect of an illustrated edition of The Lord of the Rings is now not promising, he likes some of her pictures enough to offer to purchase them.
p. 733, add entry before that for 1 October 1968:
?Early October 1968 Mary Fairburn writes to Tolkien. Now in desperate financial circumstances, she is disappointed that her pictures will not be used to illustrate The Lord of the Rings. She asks for the immediate return of those she sent to Tolkien, as she has offered them to a friend in part payment of a debt, but mentions three more that she has done, including views of the Dead Marshes and the Old Forest.
p. 734, entry for 10 October 1968: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to Mary Fairburn, distressed at her news. He will send her pictures back, reluctantly, and would like to see the other illustrations she mentioned, especially that of the Old Forest. He comments that publishing any edition of The Lord of the Rings in the present market is expensive; he has, however, while writing this letter, talked by telephone with Rayner Unwin about Fairburn’s art, with the result that Unwin is willing to ‘consider’ an illustrated edition. But Tolkien advises that pen-and-ink drawings, rather than paintings, would be more likely to be published, that a prompt decision by Allen & Unwin is unlikely, and that it was not a hopeful situation. He encloses £50 as a gift.’ Following receipt of this letter, Fairburn will make pen-and-ink versions of some of her illustrations, originally intending one per chapter of The Lord of the Rings, until she had twenty-six in this medium as well as painted in colour.
p. 735, add entries:
18 October 1968 Mary Fairburn writes to Tolkien, apologizing for her earlier letter and proposing that she send all of her pictures to him for purchase, the proceeds of which she would use to help pay off her debt.
4 November 1968 Tolkien replies to Mary Fairburn, declining her offer, as he does not have enough wall space for all of her pictures. But he would like her illustration of the Mirror of Galadriel, which ‘so very nearly corresponds to my own mental vision of the scene’, and which would be a good sample to show to Rayner Unwin (quoted in Tankard, ‘A Vision of Middle-earth’, p. 15; the illustration of Galadriel will be reproduced on p. 1 of the same number of the Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 2012, and one of the Great River on p. 14).
p. 819, bibliography of Tolkien’s published writings, part IV: Add:
The ‘Annual’ of Our Lady’s School, Abingdon, no. 12. Abingdon: Our Lady’s School, 1936. Contains two poems by Tolkien, ‘Noel’ and ‘The Shadow Man’, pp. 4–5 and 9 respectively.
p. 112, entry for Trinity Term 1920, l. 2: 40 Broad Street at that time was a former doctor’s surgery, which since 1911 had been occupied by the University of Oxford School of Geography. Tolkien presumably was allotted a spare room for his class. The building was one of a group of old houses demolished in 1937 to make way for the New Bodleian Library.
p. 160, entry for 30 October 1931, l. 7: For ‘Colburn’ read ‘Colborn’.
p. 161, entry for 4 December 1931, l. 8: For ‘Colburn’ read ‘Colborn’.
p. 164, add entry:
27 May 1932 Tolkien writes a letter of recommendation for his B.Litt. student A.F. Colborn.
p. 170, entry for 8 October 1933, l. 10: For ‘Colburn’ read ‘Colborn’.
p. 172, entry for 14 January 1934, l. 7: For ‘Colburn’ read ‘Colborn’.
p. 217, add entry:
21 July 1938 Tolkien writes a letter of recommendation for his former B.Litt. student A.F. Colborn.
p. 241, entry for 10 July–31 October 1940: Michael Tolkien’s award was announced in the Catholic Herald for 25 July 1941: ‘Officer-Cadet M.H.H. Tolkien has been awarded the George Medal for gallantry when on defence duty during a heavy bombing attack on an R.A.F. station’ (‘Son of Oxford Professor Gets G.M.’, p. 7).
p. 249, entry for 12 October 1941: Add at end: ‘– John Tolkien is tonsured (received into the clergy) in an ordination ceremony at St Mary’s Hall, Stonyhurst.’
p. 265, add entry:
13 February 1944 John Tolkien is made Exorcist and Acolyte (the two highest of the Minor Orders of the Roman Catholic Church) in a ceremony at Stonyhurst.
p. 484, entry for 5 January 1956, ll. 10–12: The artist who sent drawings to Tolkien was Doris Elizabeth Sykes.
p. 485, add entry:
28 January 1956 Tolkien writes to Doris Elizabeth Sykes, who has sent him drawings based on The Lord of the Rings (see entry for 5 January 1956). He praises her technical skill and finds that her drawings ‘not only in many cases correspond closely to my vision, but even enrich it’. He is particularly pleased by a drawing of Treebeard with Merry and Pippin, and makes special mention also of her pictures of hobbits, orcs, and Gimli. Only her picture of Aragorn ‘does not closely correspond to my vision. . . . I think of him as sterner, keener and in face less “Greek” and straight-nosed, more Roman’ (Christie’s, Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts, auction catalogue, London, 18 June 2013, p. 12). But immediate prospects of an illustrated Lord of the Rings are not good.
p. 492, add entry:
?Early July 1956 Tolkien writes to Doris Elizabeth Sykes (as ‘Miss’ Sykes), who has sent him a second set of drawings based on The Lord of the Rings. Again he expresses appreciation for her art, and asks if she would like her earlier drawings returned. An illustrated Lord of the Rings is still unlikely in the near future. (According to an entry in the Christie’s auction catalogue, Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts, London, 18 June 2013, in this letter Tolkien offers to send Sykes a set of The Lord of the Rings with which she could continue her work. On 5 July 1956 he will ask his publisher to send a set to ‘Mrs’ Sykes.)
p. 493, entry for 5 July 1956, l. 3: Mrs D.E. Sykes was Doris Elizabeth Sykes; see addenda for 5 and 28 January 1956.
p. 586, l. 9: For ‘whom’ read ‘who’.
p. 604, add entry:
11 March 1963 Tolkien writes to T.P. Dunning, sending a copy of the Ancrene Wisse. He explains that he had not yet put in order everything he wrote for the introduction (ultimately supplied by Neil Ker), including much work on associated Elizabethan matter. He is going away on doctor’s orders.
p. 604, entry for ?Late March–1 April 1963: For ‘?Late March’ read ‘15 March’.
p. 771, add entry:
?May 1973 Norman Davis and Bruce Mitchell, with their wives, visit Tolkien at Merton College, accompanied by Liisa Lautamatti, a recent recipient of a doctorate from the University of Helsinki. Dr Lautamatti and Tolkien discuss her thesis and recent research in medieval studies.
‘His own field was Old and Middle English literature, while mine was language structures and meanings, but we had enough of common ground. Tolkien also described the influence of the Kalevala and Old Scandinavian literature on his fiction. I told him how my family had been driving along the northern coast of Norway as I read out The Hobbit for my sons, and how the Nordic scenery with gloomy grottos, steep mountainsides and the wild sea had formed a perfect context for the adventures’ (Liisa Lautamatti, ‘Meeting Professor J.R.R. Tolkien’, Facebook, 8 October 2010). Dr Lautamatti’s thesis (The Uses of So, Al So and As in Early Middle English) had been a focal point of dispute between traditional philological research, such as she had conducted, and newer approaches to linguistic study.
p. 28, entry for End of the second week in October 1911: The Tablet for 28 October 1911 will report that at this time, Tolkien was one of ninety-nine Roman Catholic students at Oxford, and one of thirty-seven Catholic freshmen. A new Roman Catholic chaplain, Father Lang of Brighton, had replaced the ailing Msgr. Kennard.
p. 120, entry for ?1923–1926 [REVISED]: Change the date heading to May 1927, relocate the entry, and replace with the following: ‘A revised version of Tolkien’s poem Tinfang Warble (first composed in 1914), and his poem The Grey Bridge of Tavrobel (written in ?1927), are published in the May 1927 number of the Inter-University Magazine, a journal for Roman Catholic students published by the University Catholic Societies Federation.’
For a lengthy rationale of our dating of the poems, see our blog post of 2 March 2012 and follow-up post of 18 April 2013. When we wrote the first of these, evidence suggested that the poems were published after Tolkien returned to Oxford from Leeds in 1925 but before the Inter-University Magazine ceased publication under that title (it began anew in October 1927 as the University Catholic Review). It has since been called to our attention that the following note appears in the 28 May 1927 number of the Roman Catholic journal The Tablet:
The May issue of the Inter-University Magazine, in the production of which Father Martindale now has evidently a capable assistant, deals attractively with many matters of interest. In ‘The Holy Maries,’ C.M. Girdlestone discusses at length the legend relating to the Holy Cave, ‘high up in the face of a grey limestone cliff, inland from Marseilles.’ H.J. Parkinson commends Mr. Hilaire Belloc’s ‘The Catholic Church and History’ in ‘The Catholic Student of History’. . . . Other notable articles [and features] include . . . verses by J.R. Tolkien and Wilfred R. Childe. [‘Catholic Education Notes’, p. 723]
In our blog post we concluded, on the basis of page numbering, that Tinfang Warble and The Grey Bridge of Tavrobel could have been published in the same number of the Inter-University Magazine, vol. 8, no. 2, in 1927, though other possibilities existed. The Tablet description confirms that both poems were indeed published at the same time: printed on the reverse sides of the cuttings of the two poems preserved by Tolkien are a note that the issue also includes an article by Girdlestone on the Holy Cave, and part of an article on the Catholic student of history.
p. 144, entry for 1928, ll. 4–5: Move the sentence ‘Tolkien reads a paper . . . in Oxford’ to a new entry, below.
p. 144, add entry following that for 22 January 1928:
Hilary Term 1928 Tolkien reads a paper, The Chill Barbarians of the North, at a meeting of the Newman Society in Oxford. The Tablet for 7 April 1928 will report that ‘Mr. Tolkien, the newly appointed Professor of Anglo-Saxon, criticized the views associated with Mr. [Hilaire] Belloc and maintained that the Northern culture was quite as real as the Latin, and that so far as observation of foreign lands was concerned the Romans were stupid and devoid of imagination’ (‘University Notes’, p. 467; the writer for The Tablet maintained that ‘our literary inspiration has been Greek, apart from our own Northern sentiment and delight in wild nature which is the antithesis of either the Greek or Latin spirit ’).
p. 146, entry for 17 August 1928: The organizers of the Pax Romana Congress were assisted, as The Tablet for 1 September 1928 reported, ‘by Reception Committees and voluntary helpers drawn from students and senior members of the Universities. . . . At Oxford, Fr. [Leslie] Walker had been fortunate to have secured the help of Professors Fraser [John Fraser, Jesus Professor of Celtic] and Tolkein [sic] and of a Reception Committee composed of Messrs. M. Wilkinson, J.E. Warrington, B.J. Wall, and the Misses Segar, Lee and Lindsay and had the help of numerous other members of the University who undertook to show visitors round’ (President of P.R. [Pax Romana], ‘The Pax Romana Congress’, p. 280). The formal business of the Congress was conducted at Cambridge from 14 to 17 August, with preliminary or preparatory meetings the three days preceding. On Friday, 17 August, some 150 of the members went to Oxford by special train, were received by the Mayor of Oxford at the Town Hall, attended a lantern lecture on Oxford at the Ashmolean Museum, and were given dinner at the Town Hall. On Saturday, tours were conducted at Oxford colleges and in the Bodleian Library.
p. 152, add entry:
24 February 1930 Tolkien attends a dinner at All Soul’s College, Oxford, in honour of the Archbishop of Birmingham, who the previous day held an Ordination at the Dominican Priory. The dinner is given by Regius Professor of Civil Law Francis de Zulueta, and is attended by the Superiors of the Congregations in Oxford, Senior Fellow of Balliol College Francis Urquhart, and ‘one or two others’ (‘University Notes’, The Tablet, 12 April 1930, p. 488).
p. 160, add entry:
4 October 1931 On the Feast of Saint Francis, Tolkien attends the formal opening of the new Franciscan friary at Oxford, next to the parish church of Saints Edmund and Frideswide in the Iffley Road. The blessing is given by the Archbishop of Birmingham, and the sermon by Father Francis Devas, S.J., on the subject of the Franciscan spirit in history. Also present, among many distinguished guests, are the Vice-Chancellor of the University, the Mayor of Oxford, Father Ronald Knox, and Professor de Zulueta. In its account of the event, The Tablet for 10 October 1931 will describe Tolkien as ‘the Censor of St. Catherine’s Society’ (‘The New Franciscan Friary at Oxford’, p. 478).
p. 169, add entry:
?End of July 1933 Tolkien and his wife attend Prize Day at the Oratory School, where their son John is a pupil. Also among the attendees are Professor and Mrs de Zulueta and Father Vincent Reade. A paper by the Right Reverend Dom John Chapman, O.S.B., the Abbot of Downside, on Cardinal Newman and the Oxford Movement, is read in Chapman’s absence by Lord FitzAlan, chairman of the School’s Board of Governors, followed by remarks by Lord Rankeillour ‘on the circumstantial difficulties which had militated against the practical success of so many of Cardinal Newman’s admirable projects’, excepting the Oratory School which has had ‘a steady output of achievement’ (‘Prize Day at the Oratory School’, The Tablet, 5 August 1933, p. 175).
p. 169, entry for ?Summer 1933: Relocate preceding the entry for ?August–early October 1933, and following the added entry above for ?End of July 1933. We assume that John Tolkien was present for Prize Day at his school, and only afterward could have devoted time with his father to the erection of a trellis.
p. 174, add entry:
28 July 1934 Tolkien and his wife attend Prize Day at the Oratory School. Father Vincent Reade expresses the satisfaction of the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory with recent developments at the School, in particular the appointment of a lay headmaster.
p. 177, add entry:
11 May 1935 The Tablet for this date reports that Tolkien, together with R.G. Laffan, Tutor of Queen’s College, Cambridge, have been appointed members of the Universities’ Catholic Education Board, replacing the late Abbot Butler and the late Professor Bullough.
p. 183, add entry:
15 February 1936 The Tablet for this date notes that the latest number of the Abingdon Annual, published by Our Lady’s School, a ‘well-known convent school’ in Abingdon, includes ‘a poem or two’ by Tolkien.
One of these (if there are more than one) is presumably the early version (or printing) of Shadow-Bride for which there is a reference in Tolkien’s papers, associating it with an ‘Abingdon Chronicle’. The Tablet unfortunately did not go into specifics on this point, and we have not yet found a copy of this slim annual (iv, 37 pp.).
p. 227, add entry:
12 June 1939 Tolkien attends a dinner at the Randolph Hotel by the Newman Society, to bid farewell to Monsignor Ronald Knox, who has been Catholic chaplain at the University since 1926. More than one hundred guests are present, including Professor de Zulueta, R.E. Havard, and Evelyn Waugh.
p. 486, entry for 21 March 1956: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to Ernest Rasdall, who has sent the author a parcel of books (probably The Lord of the Rings) to autograph. Tolkien apologizes that he has not replied earlier; he has been ill and went away to recuperate. He hopes to return Rasdall’s books soon.’
p. 622, entry for 28 August 1964, l. 1: For ‘E. Rasdall’ read ‘Ernest Rasdall’.
p. 689, add entry:
13 February 1967 Tolkien writes to John J. Walsdorf, an American working at the Oxford City Library who has sent him a copy of The Hobbit to inscribe. Walsdorf will recall that ‘late one winter’s evening, just as it was getting dark, there was a knock at the door of my flat, and there stood Professor Tolkien, with the book in hand, returning it not only inscribed, but also with a letter thanking me for my interest, and the stamps I had enclosed to make mailing the book to me all the easier!’ (Clara Finley, ‘The Morrisian Interview Series, #2: John J. Walsdorf’, The Morrisian (blog), 12 April 2013).
p. 847, l. 7: For ‘[?mid-1920s]’ read ‘May 1927’.
p. 856, l. 18: For ‘[?mid-1920s]’ read ‘May 1927’.
p. 867, ll. 10–11: For ‘[?mid-1920s]’ read ‘May 1927’.
p. 869, final line: For ‘[?mid-1920s]’ read ‘May 1927’.
p. 1, entry for 16 April 1891, l. 8: The Roslin Castle, originally 4,267 gross tons at its launch in April 1883, had one funnel and two masts (ships of this type typically used sail as well as steam). In 1888, she was returned to her builders to correct defects, and at that time was enlarged and its passenger accommodation improved. At the time of Mabel’s voyage, the Roslin Castle sailed the west coast of Africa. (See further, our blog post for 17 February 2013.)
p. 3, entry for Beginning of April 1895, l. 2: The Guelph was a relatively new steamship at this time, of 4,917 gross tons, launched at Belfast in 1894 and at first employed on the Union Line’s Durban–Cape Town–Tenerife–Southampton ‘intermediate service’, i.e. it was a vessel designed for cargo and passengers rather than the speedy shipment of mail. A photograph of the Guelph, with a single funnel and three masts, is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 18, and in our blog post for 17 February 2013. Much later in life, according to The Tolkien Family Album (p. 18), Tolkien remembered from the long voyage to England on the Guelph ‘two brilliantly sharp images: the first of looking down from the deck of the ship into the clear waters of the Indian Ocean far below, which was full of lithe brown and black bodies diving for coins thrown by the passengers; the second was of pulling into a harbour at sunrise and seeing a great city set on the hillside above, which he realised much later in life must have been Lisbon’.
p. 39, add following the entry for 21 March 1913:
Easter 1913 Tolkien inscribes his name in a 1910 printing of Charles Grosvenor Osgood’s edition of Pearl (first published 1906).
p. 241, entry for Late August 1940–?late 1941, l. 1: For ‘?late 1941’ read ‘?autumn 1941’.
p. 243, entry for Late August 1940–?late 1941, l. 13 from bottom: For ‘Late 1941–early 1942’ read ‘Late 1941–?January 1942’.
pp. 250–1, entry for Late 1941–?January 1942: Relocate earlier on p. 250, following the entry for Autumn 1941. In his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote that he ‘came to Lothlórien and the Great River late in 1941’. Thus the starting point of this Chronology entry is ‘late 1941’; but the portion of the story in question (from ‘Lothlórien’ through ‘The Breaking of the Fellowship’) comprises five chapters, and it may be too much to expect that Tolkien wrote so many chapters between the end of Michaelmas Term (hence the existing location of this entry, to coincide with the Oxford vacation) and the start of Hilary Term on 18 January 1942. Eight chapters of Book III, roughly 125 printed pages, seem to have taken Tolkien about seven months to write; the end of Book II, including ‘The Bridge of Khazad-dûm’, occupies 86 printed pages. Placing the entry earlier, but still within autumn of the year, extends the definition of ‘late 1941’ potentially by a few months but is perhaps more reasonable.
p. 754, entry for 10 June 1971: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to two ladies (in care of one of them, Mrs Robertson) whom he has met in Sidmouth, also sending autographed copies of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from The Red Book. The weather in Oxford has just brought heavy rain.’
p. 773, entry for c. 10–17 July 1973, l. 2: Delete ‘his former student’.
p. 29, entry for 21 November 1911, l. 3: For ‘Lehar’ read ‘Lehár’.
p. 29, entry for 24 November 1911, l. 3: For ‘Herold’ read ‘Hérold’.
p. 96, add entry:
27 November 1916 A letter is sent from the 3rd (Reserve) Battalion to the South General Hospital, Edgbaston, directing that orders should be issued for Tolkien ‘at an early date’ (quoted in Phil Mathison, Tolkien in East Yorkshire, 1917–1918 (2012), p. 12).
Mathison concludes that at this date ‘Tolkien was expected in Yorkshire, as soon as possible’ to aid in the coastal defence. It was not possible for Tolkien to do so for several months. Mathison also records later official correspondence referring to the battalion at Holderness.
p. 100, entry for 19 April 1917, ll. 5–6: Edith and Jennie Grove were resident in Hornsea, at 1 Bank Terrace, by 5 May 1917.
p. 100, entry for Spring 1917: Change the date heading to ?Late spring 1917 and relocate the entry to follow that for 1 June 1917. Lines 3–4, delete: ‘This arrangement lasts, perhaps, through late May or early June.’ Letters from Edith to her husband are recorded in the period 5 May to 1 June 1917, sent from her address in Hornsea to Thirtle Bridge Camp. There is then a gap in the letters from Edith preserved in the Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, until one dated 12 July 1917 and sent from 76 Queen Street, Withernsea, to Tolkien at Thirtle Bridge Camp.
Phil Mathison suggests in Tolkien in East Yorkshire, 1917–1918 (2012), which includes a chronological list of relevant letters, that Edith left 1 Bank Terrace, Hornsea on 1 June 1917 (based on the date of the latest preserved letter from that address) and stayed with Tolkien ‘probably at Thirtle Bridge [i.e. in camp], or possibly at Roos’ (p. 71), before moving to Withernsea. Mathison feels that if Ronald and Edith had lodged in Roos proper, Tolkien would not have written later of ‘a lonely house near Roos’ (emphasis ours); and furthermore, Thirtle Bridge Camp is itself near Roos ‘and is indeed a very lonely location’ (p. 46). But as Mathison admits, the question of where (let alone when) Ronald and Edith lodged during this period cannot be answered conclusively, with the available evidence largely hearsay and local tradition.
p. 100, add entry after that for 1 May 1917:
May 1917 Tolkien spends part of his time at the Musketry Camp near Hornsea. (‘Musketry camps’ were established by the Army to refresh regimental officers and non-commissioned officers in the use of the rifle in battle.)
p. 100, entry for ?Late May–?early June 1917: Change the date heading to ?Early June 1917 and relocate the entry to follow that for ?Late spring 1917 (see addendum for Spring 1917, above, itself now to follow the existing entry for 1 June 1917).
p. 101, add entry:
;?c. 14–21 July 1917 Tolkien is at the Royal Engineers Signal Depot, Dunstable, Bedfordshire, for a signalling examination or, perhaps, a refresher course.
The Signal Depot at Dunstable was one of six depots of the Signal Service Training Centre. Two letters preserved in the Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, dated 14 and 21 July 1917, were addressed to Tolkien at the ‘R.E. [Royal Engineers] Signal Depot, Dunstable, Bedfordshire’; the second of these was redirected to Withernsea, indicating that Tolkien was no longer at the depot. A letter dated 12 July was also addressed to Tolkien at Withernsea (Thirtle Bridge Camp). This suggests that Tolkien was at the signal depot during mid-July, for perhaps a week, and accords with the note ‘July 1917 Lt., Signal Dépot’ in the Service Record of King Edward’s School, Birmingham during the War 1914–1919 (see the conclusion of our note for 19 April 1917, p. 786).
p. 101, entry for Mid-August 1917: Tolkien was admitted to Brooklands by 13 August. Line 6: For ‘Mother Mary Michael’ read ‘Sister Mary Michael’. On this point, we have relied on the biographical note about Sister, later Mother, Mary Michael in Phil Mathison, Tolkien in East Yorkshire, 1917–1918 (2012), pp. 23–4. A photograph of Mother Mary Michael is reproduced in Mathison, p. 31.
p. 101, add entry:
Between 21 and 24 August 1917 Unhappy in their lodgings in Yorkshire and unable to visit Tolkien in hospital often because of the difficult journey to Hull, and with Edith now in an advanced state of pregnancy, Edith and Jennie Grove decide to return to Cheltenham until the birth of the child. Their address will be 37 Montpellier Villas, Cheltenham, until 11 September (inclusive).
p. 102, add entry:
12 September 1917 By this date, Edith and Jennie move to 6 Royal Well Terrace, Cheltenham. They will lodge there through at least 15 October.
p. 102, entry for ?Late September 1917: Delete. This is replaced by addenda for Between 21 and 24 August 1917 and 12 September 1917.
p. 102, entry for 16 November 1917: A slip added to the Medical Board report, which we seem to have missed recording at the National Archives but which is reproduced in Mathison, Tolkien in East Yorkshire, 1917–1918 (2012), notes that Tolkien continued to require hospital treatment. For ‘May Incledon visits Edith and writes to reassure Tolkien’, ll. 8–9, read ‘May Incledon writes to reassure Tolkien’. We interpreted Aunt May’s letter, quoted on p. 36 of Life and Legend, to mean that she visited Edith, but now feel that this was not necessarily the case.
p. 103, entry for Late November–December 1917: Change date heading to By 19 November 1917. The letter by R.W. Reynolds on that date was sent to Tolkien at Kilnsea (the associated envelope was in the Bodleian Library file when we consulted it twelve years ago, but separated from the letter). Reynolds’ wife had seen a notice of John’s birth in the Birmingham Post. Phil Mathison, Tolkien in East Yorkshire, 1917–1918 (2012), notes that letters of congratulation on the birth of John Tolkien were sent either to Edith’s address in Cheltenham or to Tolkien in Kilnsea.
p. 104, entry for Spring (?May) 1918: Gipsy Green was located on the Teddesley Park estate near Penkridge.
p. 105, entry for 29 June 1918: Revise as follows: ‘Tolkien contracts gastritis at Brocton Camp. By 12 July, he will be admitted to ‘Brooklands’ officers’ hospital in Hull. Although she is once again separated from her husband by a long distance, Edith will stay at Gipsy Green until 24 July.’ See addendum for 25 July 1918.
p. 105, add entries:
25 July 1918 From this date, Edith writes to her husband from 1 Blenheim Parade, Pittsville, Cheltenham. She had sent a letter on 24 July from Teddesley, near Penkridge, i.e. Gipsy Green.
10 August 1918 By this date, Edith moves to 2 Trinity Terrace, Cheltenham. She will still be at this address on 19 November.
p. 106, add entry:
19 November 1918 By this date, Tolkien is staying at 39 St John’s Street, Oxford.
p. 114, entry for 22 October 1920, ll. 3–4: For ‘Mother Mary Michael’ read ‘Sister Mary Michael’.
p. 151, add entry:
c. 1930 Tolkien takes some children to see a performance of Toad of Toad Hall by A.A. Milne, an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. He will later write in On Fairy-Stories: ‘The play is, on the lower level of drama, tolerably good fun, especially for those who have not read the book; but some children that I took to see Toad of Toad Hall, brought away as their chief memory nausea at the opening. For the rest they preferred their recollections of the book’ (Tree and Leaf, pp. 66–7).
Christopher Tolkien remembers this performance, and thinks that it took place around 1930.
p. 154, entry for Summer 1930, l. 2: For ‘hobbit’), while’ read ‘hobbit’) while’, i.e. delete the comma.
p. 180, entry for 1936: Add at end: ‘See note.’
p. 239, add entry:
22 April 1940 The Times (London) reports (‘“War Degrees” at Oxford: Requirements of Residence’, p. 11) that the Oxford Hebdomadal Council has announced a set of general principles regarding special ‘war degrees’ granted during the present conflict. These include: that the candidate has completed a minimum of nine months of war service (to be considered equivalent to three terms of residence); that the ordinary requirements for residence remain at nine terms for a B.A. and six for a research degree; and that fourteen months or more of war service is to be equivalent to four terms of residence.
p. 253, add entry:
15 March 1942 Tolkien replies to a fan letter from John Kettle, a Hobbit admirer and student at Felsted School, Essex, which had been evacuated to Ledbury, Herefordshire. Tolkien discusses The Hobbit at great length, as well as ‘another book’, ‘very long’ and ‘very dark’, set in the same world, which he has ‘nearly finished’. He lists characters and places in The Lord of the Rings, and mentions the existence of the ‘Silmarillion’ mythology. He comments that he must ‘put aside the more interesting (and I think more important) tracts of Ancient History [his fiction] for Examinations’, i.e. setting the exams for June. He believes that it would comfort the students examined if they knew that the examiners ‘suffer at least as much in what we must suppose to be a good cause . . . as they do. Indeed, more, for the torture of the Examiners is more prolonged’ (Sotheby’s London, English Literature, History, Children’s Books and Illustrations, auction catalogue, 12 December 2012, p. 111).
p. 256, add entry:
December 1942 With the passage of the National Service Bill, reducing the age of conscription to eighteen, Oxford University restricts entry to students under the age of eighteen at matriculation. Although entries to the University in Michaelmas Term 1943 are not expected to be substantially fewer than for the current academic year, the total number of students in residence probably will fall as more are called into the armed forces. According to a report in The Times (London) for 17 December 1942, ‘after the present academic year there will be virtually no men students reading the humane subjects unless they come up under the age of 18, which is somewhat unusual. Exceptions will be men returned from the services, students who are medically unfit, and a few non-British subjects. There will [however] be an increasing number arriving for short service courses. . . . So far as has been heard at present, women will be at the university in virtually unreduced numbers. There are always many more applicants than there are places. Though they will be up for two years instead of three, there will be a more rapid succession’ (‘Oxford University Students: Effect of National Service Bill’, p. 2).
p. 262, add entry:
20 October 1943 The Times (London) reports (‘Oxford University: Opening of the New Academic Year’, p. 7) that there are ‘about as many undergraduates’ at Oxford ‘as last year, but of different composition’: scientists, the medically unfit (including those invalided out of the armed forces), some who have come up to Oxford at an early age, and those who are already in the services,
probationers, sent by the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force for six months courses; their average age is about that of the ordinary freshman; and alongside their more specifically military training they pursue a variety of academic courses.
The Navy and the Air Force permit, and indeed encourage, their cadets to read subjects other than science. . . . The Army sends no infantry cadets, and the R.A. [Royal Artillery], R.A.C. [Royal Armoured Corps], and R.C.S. [Royal Corps of Signals] cadets are limited to courses more specifically technical.
As to women, the new regulations provide that – again apart from scientists and those medically unfit – no woman may come into residence unless she is intending to undertake work of national importance of some kind to which a university career is a normal preliminary, and unless she will complete six terms at the university before reaching the age of 20½. . . .
p. 467, l. 17 from bottom: For ‘Piave’ read ‘[librettist Francesco Maria] Piave’.
p. 566, entry for 14 December 1960 or later, l. 2: for ‘Eärendil’ read ‘Eärendel’.
p. 739, entry for ?1969 or later: Tolkien’s draft letter also could have been written in the latter part of 1968, after he moved to Poole (he refers to a recent relocation).
p. 759, entry for 3 January 1972: Also present at Tolkien’s birthday party are Pauline Baynes, Nevill Coghill, Joy Hill, Donald Swann and his wife, and Rayner Unwin and his wife.
p. 771, entry for 20 April 1973: Add at end: ‘He has been staying with his son John during Holy Week, and though it is very cold at Stoke-on-Trent, he is feeling refreshed for the visit. He intends to return to Oxford on 23 April. – Tolkien writes to John Higgins, Arts Editor of The Times, declining to join a “jury” for some project on which he looks favourably. He remarks on the pressure of his personal affairs, the state of his health (he has been under medical care since January), and his desire to address unfinished writings while he can.’
p. 786, ll. 8–9, note for 19 April 1917: See addendum for c. 14–21 July 1917, above.
p. 786, note for ?Late May–?early June 1917: According to John Garth in Tolkien and the Great War (2003), the wood at Roos is identified by ‘Roos tradition . . . as Dents Garth, at the south end of the village, beside the parish church of All Saints’ (p. 238). Phil Mathison, Tolkien in East Yorkshire, 1917–1918 (2012), agrees with Garth. We would hesitate to make any certain identification of the wood on the basis of a local tradition (supposition) apparently sprung up decades after the fact – presumably no earlier than the first published mention of the ‘small woodland glade . . . near Roos’ in the Diplomat for October 1966, more widely publicized in Carpenter’s 1977 Biography. One also has to allow that landscape can change radically over the years, with wooded areas unfortunately often disappearing in favour of development. Dents Garth is the largest surviving piece of woodland in the vicinity of Roos, in fact in rather than near Roos; Ordnance Survey maps show a few other, smaller wooded areas near Roos at the turn of the 20th century.
p. 786, note for c. 22 November 1917, ll. 6–7: For ‘?late September 1917’ read ‘late August 1917’.
p. 788, add note for 1936: In a letter to Rayner Unwin of 15 December 1965, Tolkien did not recall ‘when the rough sketch of the Death of Smaug [Artist and Illustrator, fig. 137] was made; but I think it must have been before the first publication, and 1936 must be near the mark’ (Letters, pp. 364–5). In Artist and Illustrator we commented that Tolkien seemed to have drawn this picture ‘as an aid to working out the scene in chapter 14 of The Hobbit in which the bowman, Bard, shoots Smaug above Lake-town as it burns’ (p. 141); but if this is so, and the pages describing the death of Smaug were written by the start of 1933, as all seem to agree, then Tolkien was mistaken in his guess of 1936. In The Art of The Hobbit (2011), we speculate also that Death of Smaug may have been ‘a preliminary sketch for one of the colour pictures Tolkien agreed to produce [for The Hobbit] in 1937, but in this instance he abandoned the effort’ (p. 112).
p. 829, l. 4 from bottom: For ‘p. 6’ in two instances, each should read ‘p. 7’.
p. 830, add following the third paragraph:
In 2012, HarperCollins published a hardback edition based on the 2009 trade paperback, with 39 new images, all but a few of pages of letters. A few previously published items were not included. The three most significant omissions are the 1924 envelope to John (reproduced in Artist and Illustrator); the verso of the dark 1927 envelope with worn white writing (reproduced only in the 1999 edition); and a ?1932 relatively plain envelope (published on p. 121 of the 1999 edition). Other omissions are versos of envelopes, one with a commercial ‘Father Christmas’ seal (reproduced in the 1995 and 1999 editions), two others with red seals (reproduced in the 1999 edition); and the inscription on the verso of the 1926 drawing (reproduced in the 1976 edition).
See further, Christina Scull, ‘The “Father Christmas” Letters’, Tolkien Collector 31 (December 2010), update in Tolkien Collector 34, forthcoming, and this blog post.
pp. 874–6, list of Translations of Tolkien’s Works:
The Hobbit, add: Bengali, Latin, Marathi. For ‘Danish’ read ‘*Danish’; for ‘French’ read ‘*French’; for ‘Hungarian’ read ‘*Hungarian’.
The Lord of the Rings, add: Bengali (The Fellowship of the Ring only).
p. 96, add entry:
22 November 1916 Tolkien completes a War Office form, recording the date he left his unit while overseas, when he embarked for and arrived in England, the name of the vessel on which he travelled, and the cause of his return (trench fever), among other details. (This manuscript is reproduced on the national archives website.)
p. 98, entry for 2 January 1917: Tolkien’s letter is reproduced on the national archives website.
p. 175, entry for September 1934, ll. 7–8: John D. Rateliff has identified ‘Aurora’ as a guest house operated by a Mr and Mrs Livesey and their son Edgar. See The History of The Hobbit (2nd edn., 2011), pp. 886–7.
p. 181, entry for ?Early 1936: With C.A. Furth’s letter to Tolkien of 30 March 1936 (see below) now come to light, we can further narrow the period of time in which the events described in this entry occurred; and if, as it may be, Tolkien took up and completed The Hobbit at this time, the window in which he did so was only from roughly April to October 1936. The first sentence of the entry must stand for the time being, since the letter indicates that Allen & Unwin had approached Tolkien regarding the Clark Hall book at least once before Furth wrote on 30 March; but it is not known if Tolkien by then had already declined the offer, or if he failed to reply.
p. 183, add entry:
30 March 1936 At the suggestion of Elaine Griffiths, C.A. Furth of George Allen & Unwin approaches Tolkien to ask if he would edit the new edition of Clark Hall’s Beowulf, or suggest someone else for the job. The context of his letter suggests that this is not the first time he has made this request. (See entry for ?Early 1936.)
p. 201, entry for 21 September 1937: John D. Rateliff has published in the second edition of his History of The Hobbit (2011) a document written by Tolkien in the page proofs of The Hobbit, listing in two versions those family members, friends, colleagues, and students to whom he wished to give copies of the book. Rateliff points out that one cannot be certain that the lists represent Tolkien’s final intentions, though some of the persons named did receive copies, as documented in preserved letters or by the copies in question having appeared in the marketplace. The intended recipients were: E.V. Gordon; C.S. Lewis; Elaine Griffiths; K.M. Kilbride; Marjorie Incledon; Mary Incledon; R.W. Chambers; Aileen and Elizabeth Jennings; Mabel Mitton (Aunt Mabel); Florence Hadley (Aunt Florence); C.L. Wrenn; Simonne d’Ardenne; Helen Buckhurst; Jane Neave; ‘Rattenbury’ (identified by Rateliff as ‘probably R.M. (Robert Mantle) Rattenbury . . . Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the University of Leeds from 1924 to 1927’); ‘Livesleys’ (Rateliff, pp. 886–7: ‘or Livesey: friends of the Tolkien family, probably the Mr. & Mrs. Livesey who . . . ran a guest house called “Aurora” in Sidmouth . . . where the Tolkien family stayed’; see addendum for September 1934); A.H. Smith; Jennie Grove; Stella Mills; W.R. Childe; George S. Gordon; and Hilary Tolkien. Copies were also to go to the Oxford Magazine and the ‘Book Soc.’ (Rateliff, p. 889: ‘possibly the group more formally known as the Society of Bookmen’). Tolkien added to some of these names the word ‘have’, presumably to mark that the intended recipient already had a copy of The Hobbit and therefore did not need to receive an author’s copy.
p. 224, add entry:
24 December 1938 Tolkien replies to a letter from K.M. Kilbride, writing on a picture postcard which reproduces a painting by Josef Madlener, Heilige Familie. He mentions the illnesses in his household and the loss of more than twelve friends and relatives during 1938; and yet, he and his family are joyful at Christmas. His eldest son, John, has come of age, is still an undergraduate at Oxford, living at home, and looking ahead to entering the priesthood. Tolkien feels that Oxford is changing fast and mostly for the worst, with the disappearance of old shops and the transformation of streets and fields into the equivalent of a London suburb, mainly due to the growth of industry (Morris Motors are implied but not named). He anticipates for 1939 a visit to St Andrews (to give the Andrew Lang Lecture) and acting as an outside examiner at Edinburgh. He is concerned about Ida Gordon, widow of his friend E.V. Gordon, and about his former Leeds student Stella Mills. (This manuscript was reproduced in an auction listing by Bonhams, London, for their sale of 12 June 2012.)
p. 575, add entry:
9 May 1961 Tolkien writes to a Mr Hart (presumably Henry St J. Hart, Dean of Queen’s College, Cambridge) that unexpectedly he will be able to go to Cambridge on Saturday (13 May), driven there by the Warden of Merton (G.R.G. Mure), and although the Warden will be returning to Oxford the following day, Tolkien himself will not have to do so until some time on Monday (15 May). He does not expect to be occupied on the Sunday (14 May; see entry for 14 May 1961, in regard to Tolkien’s visit to a Cambridge club devoted to his works). He has also sent this message to a Mr Dufton.
p. 575, entry for ?13–?16 May 1961: Change the date heading to 13–15 May 1961. See added entry for 9 May 1961.
p. 691, entry for 1 March 1967: Add: ‘– Tolkien belatedly replies to a letter from Hans-Jörg Modlmayr, who has written concerning a German translation of The Lord of the Rings (there have been none to this date, and none will be published until 1969–70). He has forwarded (or perhaps will forward: see addendum for 14 March 1967) Modlmayr’s message to the Foreign Rights Department of Allen & Unwin. He himself would be pleased to have a German translation, and informs Modlmayr that Allen & Unwin are in discussions to license one.’
p. 692, entry for 14 March 1967: The letter forwarded by Tolkien was from Hans-Jörg Modlmayr (see addendum for 1 March 1967); either we chose not to his name public (which we did now and then for a variety of reasons), or we had only his surname and did not make a connection between it and the companion of J.S. Ryan mentioned in our entry for 27 July 1966 (p. 670). The letter is either the one to which Tolkien refers on 1 March or (as we are inclined to think) another from Modlmayr. Lines 9–11, delete sentence ‘It is not clear if he is proposing himself as the artist, or if it is the English edition or the German edition that he thinks should be illustrated’, and cf. addendum for 16 March 1967.
p. 692, entry for 15 March 1967: Add: ‘– Tolkien inscribes a copy of Tree and Leaf to Hans-Jörg and Hildegard Modlmayr.’
p. 692, entry for 16 March 1967: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes to Hans-Jörg Modlmayr, probably in reply to another letter, received after 1 March. He has not yet had a reply from Allen & Unwin in regard to the progress of a German translation, one proposed translator having been rejected in part due to his criticisms. He echoes his statement to Alina Dadlez on 14 March, that he does not favour any illustration of The Lord of the Rings, though his objections would depend upon the illustrator; however, it would be up to the publisher to decide if illustrations would improve the book and its potential sales. Modlmayr had suggested the German (born Czechoslovakia) linocut artist Fritz Möser as an illustrator, presumably referring to him as a genius (to judge by Tolkien’s remark to Alina Dadlez on 14 March 1967); Tolkien would be greatly interested to see a series of designs by Möser for The Lord of the Rings, though this was a separate matter from the question of whether they should be published.’ Modlmayr had by this time, and continued to have, a close relationship with Fritz Möser. He and his wife collected Möser’s work, and Modlmayr and Möser have collaborated on books as poet and illustrator respectively. Möser has also created graphic cycles exploring the Bible and classical mythology.
p. 712, add entry:
7 December 1967 Tolkien writes to Hans-Jörg Modlmayr, declining to help in a matter of children’s books, partly because his own affairs need attention after his illness. He also pleads that he has never loved books for children and has seldom read any since childhood (presumably excepting his own children’s stories and those he read to his sons and daughter). He recommends Roger Lancelyn Green as an expert on the topic.
p. 772, add entry:
14 June 1973 Tolkien writes to Mrs Jeronimides [sic], in regard to her translation of The Hobbit into Italian (published as by Elena Jeronimidis Conte in 1973). She had asked about the geography described in Chapter 10, i.e. of Lake Town; Tolkien assures her that this is ‘odd but perfectly possible’ (Christie’s, Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts, auction catalogue, London, 19 June 2012, p. 74), and mentions that he had made an illustration of it for the original edition of the book. He also addresses the issue of translating names of mythological creatures, which he thinks are best only slightly adapted to the language of translation, leaving it to the story to reveal what kind of creatures they meant. Thus, for instance, ‘troll’ (itself borrowed into English from Scandinavian tradition) could become ‘trolle’ or ‘trollo’.
pp. 874–6, list of Translations of Tolkien’s Works:
The Hobbit, add: Irish, Lower Sorbian. For ‘Italian’ read ‘*Italian’.
p. 51, entry for 4 March 1914: Further details on Tolkien’s paper on Francis Thompson are provided by John Garth in ‘“Francis Thompson”: Article for Exeter College Essay Club’, J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (2006).
p. 115, add entry:
?1921 Tolkien writes the first of at least five texts of the Qenya poem ultimately titled *Nieninque.
p. 120, entry for ?1923–1926: Change the date heading to ?1925–?1927 and relocate the entry to p. 128. Line 5, for ‘not in the same issue’ read ‘possibly not in the same issue’. For a lengthy rationale of our dating of the poems, and arguments for and against publication in separate issues, see our blog post of 2 March 2012. In short, evidence suggests that the poems were published after Tolkien returned to Oxford from Leeds in 1925, but before the Inter-University Magazine ceased publication under that title (it began anew in October 1927 as the University Catholic Review). Although Christopher Tolkien in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 108, dates the publication of Tinfang Warble unambiguously to 1927, later he could not confirm this date or retrace its line of evidence.
p. 128, add entry at the beginning of 1925:
Mid- to late 1920s Tolkien creates a number of alphabets in which he refines the work he has done with the Alphabet of Rúmil and the Valmaric script, leading eventually to the Tengwar of the 1930s. Documents of this period are written on paper which Tolkien began to use in summer 1924 as an external examiner at Oxford.
p. 140, entry for 18 February 1927: C.S. Lewis recorded in his diary on 9 February 1927 that he had purchased a copy of the Völsunga Saga ‘having had a card last night to say that the Kolbitár are reading it this term and I am put down for Chapter I and II at the next meeting’ (All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922–1927 (1991), p. 449). Lewis worked on this task with the aid of the William Morris translation, and found the Kolbitár meeting on 18 February ‘very pleasant’: ‘followed a good deal better than before’ (p. 453, diary entry for 18 February).
p. 152, entry for Early 1930s: Add at end: In ?1930 or ?1931, Tolkien begins to compose a poem in Qenya, Oilima Markirya, and an English version, *The Last Ark. (See further, entry for ?Autumn 1931.)
p. 160, entry for ?Autumn 1931: Line 1, for ‘*A Secret Vice’ read ‘A Secret Vice’. Add at end: ‘The essay includes examples of poetry in ‘Elvish’ languages (with versions in English) related to the ‘Silmarillion’ mythology: Oilima Markirya (The Last Ark), Nieninque, and Earendel (*Earendel at the Helm) in Qenya, and a ‘fragment’ in Noldorin.’
p. 171, entry for 21 December 1933: For ‘Tolkien gives to R.W. Chambers’ read ‘Tolkien writes to R.W. Chambers, thanking him for a note and conveying best wishes for Christmas and the new year. Either with the letter or separately, he sends Chambers’.
p. 189, add entries at the beginning of 1937:
c. 1937 Tolkien writes a ‘general historical account of the Quendian [Elvish] languages’, the Tengwesta Qenderinwa.
c. 1937–41 Tolkien writes a sentence in Quenya, with an English translation, related to his mythology, telling of Orome and the Waters of Awakening (‘The Koivienéni Manuscript’).
p. 262, entry for ?November 1943: The title of the poem given here (and elsewhere in our book) is that of a copy typed by Margaret Douglas, seen in the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois. A text accompanying the typescript records that neither Douglas nor Charles Williams are certain of the title, due to the (from their point of view) illegibility of Tolkien’s manuscript.
p. 356, entry for 1950s, ll. 3–4: For ‘Ae Adar Nín: The Lord’s Prayer in Sindarin’ read ‘Ae Adar Nín’.
p. 459, add entry:
?July 1955 Tolkien writes a fifth version of his poem Nieninque, with glossarial comments.
p. 555, add entry:
18 February 1960 In a supplement to the Oxford University Gazette, Tolkien is recorded as one of 203 members of Convocation to indicate support of Harold Macmillan, the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, to be elected Chancellor of the University. Macmillan will remain Chancellor until his death in 1986.
p. 560, entry for 7 July 1960: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes to his friend Heinrich Wolfgang Donner, professor of English at Uppsala University. Tolkien does not approve of the cover art for the Swedish translation of The Fellowship of the Ring (Sagan om ringen, 1959), which he thinks contradicts the text. (The cover art, drawn somewhat in the style of archaic Greek paintings, depicts an army of blue-skinned, vaguely feminine warriors in black tunics and blue helmets, armed with swords and bows and arrows, some riding oxen, opposing an army of pink-skinned, distinctly male warriors wearing only black helmets and armed with axes, spears, and shields, some riding horses.)’
p. 560, entry for ?11–?16 July 1960: Correct heading to 11–?16 July 1960. Tolkien says in his letter to Prof. Donner of 7 July (see above) that he is going away on ‘Monday’, i.e. 11 July.
p. 575, add entry:
18 May 1961 Tolkien replies to a letter from Lars Gustafsson of Uppsala, who has asked to visit Tolkien to discuss matters of common interest. Tolkien will be in Oxford through 17 June.
p. 578, add entry for By the end of August 1961, transferring the text from our existing Chronology entry for ?December 1961: ‘Cor Blok visits Tolkien in Sandfield Road and shows him illustrations of The Lord of the Rings’, etc. See further, our corrigendum for entry for ?December 1961.
p. 581, entry for ?December 1961: Delete entry, moving the text to a new entry for End of August 1961.
p. 592, entry for 28 May 1962: In his letter to Cor Blok on 1 February 1962, Tolkien said that he would like to buy The Battle of the Hornburg and The Dead Marshes. His letter to Rayner Unwin on 23 May 1961 implies that he thought The Battle of the Hornburg to be both attractive and a good illustration, though not fulfilling his wish for art that depicted ‘the noble and the heroic’ (see Reader’s Guide, p. 422). It has been reproduced several times, most recently in the Tolkien Official Calendar 2011 (2010) and in A Tolkien Tapestry: Pictures to Accompany The Lord of the Rings by Cor Blok (2011), pp. 112–3; the latter reproduction shows more detail as it is larger, spread across two pages, but the effect is spoiled by the deep gutter. Dunharrow has been reproduced in Tolkien Official Calendar 2012 (2011) and in Blok’s book, p. 137. Both pictures are detailed panoramic views with small figures, and both are reasonably good illustrations of the text, suggesting the kind of works by Blok that appealed to Tolkien.
The Dead Marshes illustration Tolkien wanted was probably one of the pictures shown to him by the Dutch publisher in summer 1961, which might explain the wrong one being sent. Cor Blok says that he did not take any Lord of the Rings pictures with him when he visited Tolkien in August 1961. We have seen no further correspondence to indicate how the issue of the wrong picture was resolved.
Blok reproduces A Tolkien Tapestry three versions of The Dead Marshes, numbered II–IV. The Dead Marshes II, typical of many of Blok’s paintings, with prominent simplified figures and minimal indication of the setting, possibly fell within the category Tolkien described in his letter of 23 May as attractive in itself but bad as an illustration. Since The Dead Marshes II and IV are noted as now being owned by Blok, Tolkien presumably was able to return the unwanted picture, and the version he wanted was I or III. That version I is not reproduced in Blok’s book, which indicates that its present whereabouts are unknown, suggests that if it was the one Tolkien wanted, Blok was unable to send it; the other two pictures Tolkien owned are reproduced. Tolkien’s third picture may have been The Dead Marshes III, or else an entirely different subject as a substitute for a picture which was no longer available.
p. 602, entry for 20 December 1962: In his foreword to A Tolkien Tapestry: Pictures to Accompany The Lord of the Rings by Cor Blok (2011), Pieter Collier writes: ‘In December 1962, when asked about a six-volume deluxe edition of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien suggested Cor Blok or Pauline Baynes as the possible artist’ (p. 9). Elsewhere, Collier has said that his source for this statement was our Chronology entry; but we make it clear that it was Rayner Unwin who raised the question of a possible illustrated edition, and named two artists whose work he knew had pleased Tolkien. There is no further mention of this project in the correspondence, but the project may have been discussed and abandoned when Rayner visited Tolkien in February 1963. Although in his letter dated 20 December 1949 Tolkien briefly considered that Pauline Baynes might provide illustration or decoration for The Lord of the Rings and the still unfinished Silmarillion, when the time came to publish The Lord of the Rings the only illustrations he wanted were his own (the ‘Doors of Durin’ and the fragments of the Book of Mazarbul), and the cost of illustration in the usual sense was prohibitive given the length of the text. Cor Blok himself in A Tolkien Tapestry writes that Tolkien was not in favour of illustrated editions: ‘J.R.R. Tolkien himself told me so when I visited him in 1961. He did not want his readers to see his characters through the eyes of any individual artist, as we see Alice through the eyes of John Tenniel’ (p. 15). In fact, in his letter to Rayner Unwin on 23 May 1961, Tolkien had asked him to express his appreciation of Blok’s pictures in a way that would not arouse hope of the chance of them being used for an illustrated edition.
p. 615, add entries:
17 January 1964 Tolkien writes to Jocelyn Gibb of the publisher Geoffrey Bles, thanking him for sending a copy of Letters to Malcolm by C.S. Lewis. Tolkien has been reading it.
22 January 1964 Jocelyn Gibb writes to Tolkien, asking if the latter would be willing to write a chapter in a proposed book on C.S. Lewis (Light on C.S. Lewis, published in 1965).
24 January 1964 Tolkien replies to Jocelyn Gibb, declining his request to contribute. He has as much work as he can manage, and would find it difficult to write about Lewis for the general public.
p. 616, entry for End of January 1964: Delete the second sentence. Line 2, for ‘On 11 November 1964 he’ read ‘On 11 November 1964 Tolkien’. Tolkien did not need to purchase a copy of Letters to Malcolm, as he was sent one by its publisher.
p. 617, add entry:
29 April 1964 Jocelyn Gibb replies to Tolkien’s letter of 24 January. He asks if Tolkien could suggest someone to write for the proposed book on Lewis a chapter on his fantasy and science fiction.
p. 619, add entry, incorporating text from our entry for 30 August 1964:
July 1964 L. Sprague de Camp sends Tolkien a copy of Swords and Sorcery, an anthology of heroic fantasy he has edited, with works by Poul Anderson, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Howard, Henry Kuttner, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore, and Fritz Leiber.
p. 622, entry for 30 August 1964, ll. 3–4: For ‘Tolkien writes to L. Sprague de Camp’ read ‘Tolkien writes to L. Sprague de Camp to thank him for his gift of Swords and Sorcery’. Tolkien also responded to the gift by recording, on a sheet of stationery from the Hotel Miramar in Bournemouth, a rough negative criticism of the ‘Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweler’, a story by Lord Dunsany in the De Camp collection.
p. 626, add entries:
3 December 1964 Jocelyn Gibb writes to Tolkien. He asks if Tolkien has any correspondence by C.S. Lewis he could lend for inclusion in the volume of Lewis’s letters being prepared by W.H. Lewis.
15 December 1964 Tolkien writes to Jocelyn Gibb. He and C.S. Lewis exchanged few letters; there was no need in the early years of their friendship, when they saw each other often.
17 December 1964 Jocelyn Gibb writes to Tolkien, sad that Tolkien and Lewis seldom exchanged letters.
p. 645, add entry:
28 October 1965 Tolkien writes to Jocelyn Gibb, thanking him for sending a copy of Light on C.S. Lewis. He feels that its contents say more about the contributors than about their subject.
p. 651, entry for Mid-1960s, ll. 2–3: For ‘Alcar mi Tarmenel na Erun: The Gloria in Excelsis Deo in Quenya’ read ‘Alcar mi Tarmenel na Erun’.
p. 680, entry for 1 November 1966, l. 5: For ‘1966–7’ read ‘late 1966 or early 1967’. For ‘Plotz declensions’ read ‘Plotz Declension’.
p. 738, entry for c. 1969 and later, l. 9 from bottom: For ‘Notes on Óre’ read ‘Notes on Óre’.
p. 751, add entry:
14 December 1970 Tolkien writes to his cousin Wilfred Arthur R. ‘Roy’ Hadley, son of his Aunt Florence (née Tolkien) and Tom Hadley. He would like to visit Roy in Canada, and to see South Africa again, but is unable to do so. On the same air letter form with Tolkien’s message, Edith also writes to Roy, sending news of her family and relations. They have had power cuts in Britain due to striking electrical workers, but are comfortable in the cooler weather as they heat and cook with natural gas. Hilary Tolkien’s wife having died, his son Gabriel and his family are moving to Evesham to live with him.
p. 758, add entry:
28 December 1971 Tolkien writes to the tobacconist W.B. Crouch of the Southern Cigar Company, Poole. He apologizes for ‘breaking in on him so abruptly on Monday’, i.e. 27 December, ‘in great haste and also distress’ (online listing, Bonhams, 27 March 2012, lot 220). He wishes him success and is sorry to cease dealing with him, though he hopes to call in on visits to Bournemouth. (By this date, then, he had resolved to no longer live in Poole, following his wife’s death on 29 November.)
p. 826: So much has been published in Parma Eldalamberon since the Companion and Guide appeared, and because we wished to make some emendations and improvements in presentation to our lists of features in Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar, we present here revised bibliographies:
Parma Eldalamberon
‘Addendum to “The Alphabet of Rúmil” and “The Valmaric Script”’. 15 (2004), pp. 85–8. Edited by Arden R. Smith. In the Reader’s Guide, see Writing systems.
‘The Alphabet of Rúmil’. 13 (2001), pp. 3–89. Edited by Arden R. Smith. In the Reader’s Guide, see Writing systems.
‘Earendel’. 16 (2006), pp. 98–104. Edited by Christopher Gilson, Bill Weldon, and Carl F. Hostetter. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see Earendel at the Helm.
‘Early Noldorin Fragments’. 13 (2001), pp. 91–165. Edited by Christopher Gilson, Bill Welden, Carl F. Hostetter, and Patrick Wynne. Includes ‘Early Chart of Names’, ‘Early Noldorin Grammar’, ‘The Gnomish Lexicon Slips’, ‘Goldogrin Pronominal Prefixes’, ‘Heraldic Devices of Tol Erethrin’, ‘Noldorin Dictionary’, ‘Noldorin Word-lists’, and Official Name List. In the Reader’s Guide, see under these titles, except for ‘The Gnomish Lexicon Slips’ see Gnomish Lexicon; and for ‘Goldogrin Pronominal Prefixes’ see Gnomish Grammar in addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide.
‘Early Qenya Fragments’. 14 (2003), pp. 3–34. Edited by Patrick Wynne and Christopher Gilson. Includes The Creatures of the Earth, ‘Matar and Tulir’, ‘Names of the Valar’, ‘Otsan and Kainendan’, and The Quenya Verb Forms. In the Reader’s Guide, see under these titles.
‘Early Qenya Grammar’. 14 (2003), pp. 35–86. Edited by Carl F. Hostetter and Bill Welden. In the Reader’s Guide, see Qenya: Descriptive Grammar of the Qenya Language.
‘Early Qenya Pronouns’. 15 (2004), pp. 41–58. Edited by Christopher Gilson. In the Reader’s Guide, see under this title.
‘Early Runic Documents’. 15 (2004), pp. 89–121. Edited by Arden R. Smith. In the Reader’s Guide, see Writing systems.
‘English–Qenya Dictionary’. 15 (2004), pp. 65–84. Edited by Arden R. Smith and Christopher Gilson. In the Reader’s Guide, see under this title.
‘Index of Names for The Lay of the Children of Húrin’. 15 (2004), pp. 59–64. Edited by Bill Welden and Christopher Gilson. In the Reader’s Guide, see under this title.
I·Lam na·Ngoldathon: The Grammar and Lexicon of the Gnomish Tongue. 11 (1995). Edited by Christopher Gilson, Patrick Wynne, Arden R. Smith, and Carl F. Hostetter. Includes ‘The Gnomish Grammar’ and ‘The Gnomish Lexicon’. In the Reader’s Guide, see respectively, Gnomish Grammar and Gnomish Lexicon.
‘Name-list to The Fall of Gondolin’. 15 (2004), pp. 19–30. Edited by Christopher Gilson and Patrick H. Wynne. In the Reader’s Guide, see under this title.
Names and Required Alterations. 15 (2004), pp. 5–18. Edited by Patrick H. Wynne. In the Reader’s Guide, see under this title.
‘Nieninqe’. 16 (2006), pp. 88–97. Edited by Christopher Gilson, Bill Weldon, and Carl F. Hostetter. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see Nieninque.
‘Oilima Markirya’. 16 (2006), pp. 53–87. Edited by Christopher Gilson, Bill Weldon, and Carl F. Hostetter. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see The Last Ark.
‘Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets’. 16 (2006), pp. 5–51; 18 (2009), pp. 110–49. Edited with introduction and commentary by Arden R. Smith. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see Writing systems.
‘Qenya Conjugations’. 16 (2006), pp. 116–28. Edited by Christopher Gilson and Carl F. Hostetter. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see under this title.
‘Qenya Declensions’. 16 (2006), pp. 105–15. Edited by Christopher Gilson and Patrick H. Wynne. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see under this title.
‘Qenya Word-lists’. 16 (2006), pp. 129–48. Edited by Patrick H. Wynne and Christopher Gilson. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see under this title.
Qenyaqetsa: The Qenya Phonology and Lexicon; Together with The Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa. 12 (1998). Edited by Christopher Gilson, Carl F. Hostetter, Patrick Wynne, and Arden R. Smith. In the Reader’s Guide, see Qenyaqetsa and The Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa.
‘Sí Qente Fëanor’. 15 (2004), pp. 31–40. Edited by Christopher Gilson. In the Reader’s Guide, see under this title.
‘The Valmaric Script’. 14 (2003), pp. 89–134. Edited with introduction and commentary by Arden R. Smith. In the Reader’s Guide, see Writing systems.
Vinyar Tengwar
‘Ae Adar Nín: The Lord’s Prayer in Sindarin’. 44 (June 2002), pp. 21–30, 38. Edited with notes and analysis by Bill Welden. In the Reader’s Guide, see Ae Adar Nín (as revised in addenda and corrigenda).
‘Alcar mi Tarmenel na Erun: The Gloria in Excelsis Deo in Quenya’. 44 (June 2002), pp. 31–7. Edited with notes and analysis by Arden R. Smith. In the Reader’s Guide, see Alcar mi Tarmenel na Erun (as revised in addenda and corrigenda).
‘The Bodleian Declensions: Analysis’ by Patrick Wynne, Christopher Gilson, and Carl F. Hostetter. 28 (March 1993), pp. 8–34. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see ‘The Bodleian Declensions’.
‘A Brief Note on the Background of the Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to Dick Plotz Concerning the Declension of the High-elvish Noun’ by Jorge Quiñonez. 6 (July 1989), pp. 13–14. The declension chart, but not Tolkien’s notes, was published earlier in Tolkien Language Notes 2 (1974) and in Beyond Bree for March 1989. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see ‘The Plotz Declension’; in addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see ‘The Ambidexters Sentence’.
‘Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals and Related Writings’. 47 (February 2005), pp. 3–42; 48 (December 2005), pp. 4–34; and 49 (June 2007), pp. 3–37. Edited by Patrick H. Wynne. In the Reader’s Guide, see Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals.
‘The Elves at Koivienéni: A New Quenya Sentence’. 14 (November 1990), pp. 5–7, 12–20. Analyzed by Christopher Gilson and Patrick Wynne. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see ‘The Koivienéni Manuscript’.
‘The Entu, Ensi, Enta Declension: A Preliminary Analysis’ by Christopher Gilson. With an introduction by Carl F. Hostetter. 36 (July 1994), pp. 7–29. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see ‘The Entu, Ensi, Enta Declension’.
‘Etymological Notes on the Ósanwe-kenta’. 41 (July 2000), pp. 5–6. Edited with notes by Carl F. Hostetter. In the Reader’s Guide, see Quendi and Eldar.
‘From Quendi and Eldar, Appendix D’. 39 (July 1998), pp. 4–20. Edited with introduction, glossaries, and additional notes by Carl F. Hostetter. In the Reader’s Guide, see Quendi and Eldar.
‘From The Shibboleth of Fëanor’. 41 (July 2000), pp. 7–10. Edited with notes by Carl F. Hostetter. In the Reader’s Guide, see The Shibboleth of Fëanor.
‘Notes on Óre’. 41 (July 2000), pp. 11–19. Edited with notes by Carl F. Hostetter. In the Reader’s Guide, see under this title (as revised in addenda and corrigenda).
Ósanwe-kenta. 39 (July 1998), pp. 21–34. Edited with introduction, glossary, and additional notes by Carl F. Hostetter. In the Reader’s Guide, see Quendi and Eldar.
The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor. 42 (July 2001), pp. 5–31. Edited by Carl F. Hostetter, with additional commentary and materials provided by Christopher Tolkien. In the Reader’s Guide, see under this title.
‘Trees of Silver and of Gold: A Guide to the Koivienéni Manuscript’ by Patrick Wynne and Christopher Gilson. 27 (1993), pp. 7–42. In addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide, see ‘The Koivienéni Manuscript’.
‘“Words of Joy”: Five Catholic Prayers in Quenya’. 43 (January 2002), pp. 4–38, and 44 (June 2002), pp. 5–20. Edited by Patrick Wynne, Arden R. Smith, and Carl F. Hostetter. In the Reader’s Guide, see ‘Words of Joy’.
p. 828, first paragraph: To the three sources previously used as authorities for ‘titles in quotation marks’ (l. 4), we have now added (below) our Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (2011). If such titles differ between this book and J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator (1995), the later use is preferred.
p. 828, second paragraph: To Artist and Illustrator and Pictures we have now added (below) as a cited authority The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, here abbreviated Art of Hobbit. In regard to our statement, ll. 3–6 of this paragraph, that Artist and Illustrator ‘is to be preferred for clarity of image, fidelity of colour, and attention to scale; it is also, now, more commonly found in libraries and bookshops, whereas Pictures is out of print’, for The Hobbit and a few other illustrations the preferred choice is now The Art of The Hobbit, since all the artwork is reproduced in good colour and definition, and most of it larger than in Artist and Illustrator but without the excessive enlargement of some images in Pictures. Artwork with landscape (horizontal) orientation is less constricted in the square format of The Art of The Hobbit compared with the narrower page size of Artist and Illustrator; by the same token, the taller pages of the latter allowed a few vertically-oriented illustrations with full-page reproductions to be reproduced larger and closer to actual size than in The Art of The Hobbit. References to previous publication of Hobbit illustrations other than in Pictures or Artist are replaced by Art of Hobbit references.
p. 829, l. 7: For ‘Mountain Landscape’ read ‘Mountain Landscape’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 36; Artist, fig. 53.
pp. 831–2: Replace the list of art for The Hobbit with the following, now incorporating references to The Art of The Hobbit (2011):
illustrations (in art of hobbit order)
One Morning Early in the Quiet of the World. Art of Hobbit, fig. 1; Artist, fig. 89.
Bag End Underhill. Art of Hobbit, fig. 2; Artist, fig. 90.
Gandalf. Art of Hobbit, fig. 3; Artist, fig. 91.
The Hill: Hobbiton. Art of Hobbit, fig.4; Artist, fig. 92.
‘The Hill: Hobbiton’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 5; Artist, fig. 93.
The Hill: Hobbiton. Art of Hobbit, fig. 6; Artist, fig. 94.
Sketch for The Hill: Hobbiton across the Water. Art of Hobbit, fig. 7.
Sketch for The Hill. Art of Hobbit, fig. 8; Artist, fig. 95.
Sketch for The Hill: Hobbiton across the Water. Art of Hobbit, fig. 9; Artist, fig. 96.
The Hill: Hobbiton across the Water. Art of Hobbit, fig. 10; Artist, fig. 97; Pictures, no. 1a (2nd edn. only; in the 1st edn. a tracing of this drawing was published in error).
The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the Water. Art of Hobbit, fig. 11; Artist, fig. 98; Pictures, no. 1b.
Trolls’ Hill. Art of Hobbit, fig. 13; Artist, fig. 99.
The Three Trolls Are Turned to Stone, first version. Art of Hobbit, fig. 14.
The Three Trolls Are Turned to Stone, second version. Art of Hobbit, fig. 15; Artist, fig. 100; Pictures, no. 3a.
The Trolls. Art of Hobbit, fig. 16; Artist, fig. 102; Pictures, no. 2a.
Riding Down into Rivendell. Art of Hobbit, fig. 17; Artist, fig. 104.
‘Elrond’s house and the bridge at Rivendell’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 18.
‘Elrond’s house’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 19.
Sketch for Rivendell Looking West. Art of Hobbit, fig. 104.
Rivendell Looking West. Art of Hobbit, fig. 20; Artist, fig. 105; Pictures, no. 4.
Rivendell Looking East. Art of Hobbit, fig. 21; Artist, fig. 106; Pictures, no. 5.
Rivendell, sketch. Art of Hobbit, fig. 22; Artist, fig. 107.
Rivendell, finished art. Art of Hobbit, fig. 23; Artist, fig. 108; Pictures, no. 6.
The Mountain-path. Art of Hobbit, fig. 34; Artist, fig. 109; Pictures, no. 7a.
The Misty Mountains Looking West from the Eagles’ Eyrie towards Goblin Gate. Art of Hobbit, fig. 37; Artist, fig. 110.
The Misty Mountains Looking West from the Eyrie towards Goblin Gate. Art of Hobbit, fig. 38; Artist, fig. 111; Pictures, no. 8a.
Bilbo Woke Up with the Early Sun in His Eyes. Art of Hobbit, fig. 39; Artist, fig. 113; Pictures, no. 9.
Eagles’ Eyrie. Art of Hobbit, fig. 40.
Firelight in Beorn’s House. Art of Hobbit, fig. 41; Artist, fig. 115.
Sketch for Beorn’s Hall. Art of Hobbit, fig. 42.
Sketch for Beorn’s Hall. Art of Hobbit, fig. 43.
Beorn’s Hall. Art of Hobbit, fig. 44; Artist, fig. 116; Pictures, no. 10a.
Mirkwood. Art of Hobbit, fig. 47; Artist, fig. 88; Pictures, no. 37a.
‘Entrance to the Elvenking’s halls’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 49; Artist, fig. 117.
‘The Elvenking’s gate from across the river’, unfinished painting. Art of Hobbit, fig, 50; Pictures, no. 11.
Entrance to the Elvenking’s Halls. Art of Hobbit, fig. 51; Artist, fig. 118.
‘Entrance to the Elvenking’s halls’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 52; Artist, fig. 119.
Gate of the Elvenking’s Halls. Art of Hobbit, fig. 53; Artist, fig. 120.
‘Entrance to the Elvenking’s halls’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 56.
Elfking’s Gate. Art of Hobbit, fig. 57.
The Elvenking’s Gate, finished art. Art of Hobbit, fig. 58; Artist, fig. 121; Pictures, no. 12a.
Preliminary art for Sketch for the Forest River. Art of Hobbit, fig. 60.
Sketch for the Forest River. Art of Hobbit, fig. 61; Artist, fig. 122; Pictures, no.13.
The Forest River. Art of Hobbit, fig. 62.
Sketch for Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves. Art of Hobbit, fig. 63; Artist, fig. 123.
Sketch for Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves. Art of Hobbit, fig. 105.
Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves. Art of Hobbit, fig. 64; Artist, fig. 124; Pictures, no. 14.
Esgaroth. Art of Hobbit, fig. 65; Artist, fig. 126.
Lake Town. Art of Hobbit, fig. 66; Artist, fig. 127; Pictures, no. 15a.
The Lonely Mountain and map of the Long Lake. Art of Hobbit, fig. 87; Artist, fig. 128.
The Front Gate. Art of Hobbit, fig. 68; Artist, fig. 130; Pictures, no. 16a.
The Back Door. Art of Hobbit, fig. 69; Artist, fig. 131.
View from the Back Door. Art of Hobbit, fig. 70; Artist, fig. 132.
‘Plan of the Lonely Mountain’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 84.
‘Plan of the Lonely Mountain’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 85.
View through B[ack] G[ate]. Art of Hobbit, fig. 86.
Conversation with Smaug. Art of Hobbit, fig. 71; Artist, fig. 133; Pictures, no. 17.
‘Smaug in flight and dwarves marching’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 73; Artist, fig. 103.
‘Smaug flies around the Lonely Mountain’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 74; Artist, fig. 134.
Smaug Flies round the Mountain. Art of Hobbit, fig. 75; Pictures, no. 18.
The Front Door. Art of Hobbit, fig. 76; Artist, fig. 135.
The Lonely Mountain. Art of Hobbit, fig. 77; Artist, fig. 136.
Death of Smaug. Art of Hobbit, fig. 78; Artist, fig. 137; Pictures, no. 19.
The Coming of the Eagles. Art of Hobbit, fig. 80; Artist, fig. 138.
The Hall at Bag-End, Residence of B. Baggins Esquire. Art of Hobbit, fig. 90; Artist, fig. 139; Pictures, no. 20a.
‘Sketch of a hobbit’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 102.
maps
‘Early manuscript for chapter 1, with sketch of Thror’s Map’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 24.
Thror’s Map, Copied by B. Baggins. Art of Hobbit, fig. 25; Artist, fig. 85.
Sketch for Thror’s Map. Art of Hobbit, fig. 26.
Thror’s Map, final art (with alterations). Art of Hobbit, fig. 28.
Thror’s Map, printed proof with corrections. Art of Hobbit, fig. 29; Artist, fig. 86.
‘Page from The Hobbit manuscript with sketch map’ of the Misty Mountains and upper part of Great River. Art of Hobbit, fig. 45.
‘Revised map of the Misty Mountains and the upper part of the Great River’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 46.
‘Map of the Lonely Mountain and surrounding lands’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 81.
‘Map of the Lonely Mountain and surrounding lands’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 82.
‘Map of the Lonely Mountain and surrounding lands’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 83.
Wilderland, preliminary art. Art of Hobbit, fig. 88; Artist, fig. 84.
Wilderland, final art. Art of Hobbit, fig. 89; Artist, fig. 87.
related calligraphy
‘Thorin’s letter to Bilbo’, recto and verso. Art of Hobbit, fig. 12.
‘Sketches for moon-letters’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 30.
‘Moon-letters drawn in mirror-reverse’. Art of Hobbit, fig. 31.
The Moon-Runes, title and runes in mirror-reverse. Art of Hobbit, fig. 32.
These Are the Moon Runes Seen by Elrond. Art of Hobbit, fig. 33.
Death of Smaug, reverse side of sheet. Art of Hobbit, fig. 79.
binding and dust-jacket
The Hobbit, designs for the upper binding. Art of Hobbit, fig. 91.
The Hobbit, design for upper binding. Art of Hobbit, fig. 92; Artist, fig. 140.
Trial drawings for the binding frieze. Art of Hobbit, fig. 93.
Design for the binding frieze. Art of Hobbit, fig. 106.
The Hobbit, design for upper binding. Art of Hobbit, fig. 94.
The Hobbit, design for upper binding. Art of Hobbit, fig. 95.
Design for the lower binding and spine. Art of Hobbit, fig. 96.
The Hobbit, designs for lower binding and spine. Art of Hobbit, fig. 97; Artist, fig. 141.
The Hobbit, original binding, based on Tolkien’s designs. Artist, fig. 142.
The Hobbit, trial dust-jacket. Art of Hobbit, fig. 100; Artist, fig. 143 (black and white).
The Hobbit, final dust-jacket art. Art of Hobbit, fig. 101; Artist, fig. 144.
p. 836, l. 2 from bottom: For ‘Artist, fig. 75’ read ‘Art of Hobbit, fig. 72; Artist, fig. 75’.
p. 837, l. 9 after titling: For ‘Pictures, no. 33’ read ‘Art of Hobbit, fig. 54; Pictures, no. 33’.
p. 837, l. 10 after titling: For ‘Artist, fig. 57’ read ‘Art of Hobbit, fig. 55; Artist, fig. 57’.
p. 837, l. 14 after titling: For ‘Artist, fig. 54’ read ‘Art of Hobbit, fig. 48; Artist, fig. 54’.
p. 839, under ‘Miscellaneous Art’, l. 5 after titling: For ‘Artist 49’ read ‘Art of Hobbit, fig. 27; Artist, fig. 49’.
p. 839, under ‘Miscellaneous Art’, l. 11 after titling: For ‘Artist, fig. 129’ read ‘Art of Hobbit, fig. 67; Artist, fig. 129’.
p. 839, l. 13 from bottom: For ‘Artist, fig. 200’ read ‘Art of Hobbit, fig. 35; Artist, fig. 200’.
p. 839, l. 4 from bottom: For ‘Artist, fig. 60’ read ‘Art of Hobbit, fig. 99; Artist, fig. 60’.
p. 2, l. 9: For ‘G. Edward Jelf’ read ‘George Edward Jelf’. Jelf lived in various houses in Bournemouth.
p. 7, add entry:
1902 According to Tolkien’s grandson Simon (*Christopher Reuel Tolkien), Ronald made a train journey all by himself from Birmingham to Torquay when he was ten years old, which made him feel ‘rather grand’ (‘My Grandfather’, The Mail on Sunday, 23 February 2003, reprinted on the author’s website).
p. 12, entry for 9 May 1907: Carl Phelpstead comments in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), p. 9, that Tolkien’s copy of Salesbury’s Dictionary ‘contains a page of manuscript notes translating the opening of the Welsh prologue’ but ‘the pages of the dictionary proper remain uncut’, i.e. unopened; and because of the latter point, he questions our conclusion that the inscription in this copy is by Tolkien. ‘The fact that most of the pages of the dictionary are uncut would . . . be very surprising if Tolkien obtained the book in 1907, when he had only very limited access to materials on the Welsh language, and one wonders if the inscription might not be by a previous owner of the book’ (p. 124). Mr Phelpstead’s conclusion is correct, and the entry should be deleted. In our files is a note which somehow was overlooked, that although the translation is by Tolkien, the inscription is not.
p. 42, entry for 1 May 1913, l. 1: For ‘acquired a copy’ read ‘inscribes this date in a copy’.
p. 51, entry for Spring 1914: Line 4, for ‘Morris Jones’ read ‘Morris-Jones’. Carl Phelpstead describes some of Tolkien’s annotations to his copy of the Welsh Grammar in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), pp. 10–11.
p. 108, add entry:
Summer 1919 Tolkien inscribes ‘Summer 1919’ in his copy of A Welsh Grammar for Schools by E. Anwyl (3rd edn., London, 1907).
p. 113, entry for October 1920: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien inscribes ‘Oct. 1920’ in his copy of Peredur ab Efrawc, edited by Kuno Meyer (Leipzig, 1887).’ Carl Phelpstead notes in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), p. 60, that this copy of Peredur ‘has annotations that indicate it was read carefully against the manuscript facsimile edited by Rhŷs and Evans’, which Tolkien also owned.
p. 117, add entry:
1922 Tolkien inscribes this date in his copies of Barzaz-Breiz: chants populaire de la Bretagne, edited by Th. Hersart de la Villemarqué (Paris, 1846); Annales Cambriae (London, 1860) and Brut y Tywysogion, or The Chronicle of the Princes (London, 1860), edited by John Williams ab Ithel; Dosbarth Ederyn Davod Aur, or The Ancient Welsh Grammar, translated with notes by Williams ab Ithel (Llandovery, 1861); Svenskt-Dialect-Lexicon eller Ordbok öfver Svenska allmogespraket by Johann Ernst Reitz (Lund, 1877); Vocabulaire vieux-breton avec commentaire . . . by Joseph Loth (Paris, 1884); The Text of the Mabinogion and Other Welsh Tales from the Red Book of Hergest, edited by John Rhŷs and J. Gwenogvryn Evans (Oxford, 1887); Iolo Manuscripts, translated with notes by Taliesin Williams (2nd edn., Liverpool, 1888); The Text of The Bruts from the Red Book of Hergest, edited by Rhŷs and Evans (Oxford, 1890); Glossaire moyen-breton by Émile Jean Marie Ernault (Paris, 1895); The Tribal System in Wales by Frederic Seebohm (2nd edn., London, 1904); and L’ancien vers breton by É.J.M. Ernault (Paris, 1912)
p. 120, entry for 1923: Add at end: ‘– He inscribes the date ‘1923’ in his copy of Barddas, or A Collection of Original Documents, Illustrative of the Theology, Wisdom, and Usages of the Bardo-Druidic System of the Isle of Britain, vol. 2, translated with notes by John Williams ab Ithel (London, 1874).’
p. 124, entry for 1924: Add at end: ‘– He inscribes the date ‘1924’ in his copy of A Glossary of Mediaeval Welsh Law Based upon the Black Book of Chirk by Timothy Lewis (Manchester, 1913).’
p. 134, add entry:
1926 Tolkien inscribes ‘1926’ in his copy of Introduction to Early Welsh by John Strachan (Manchester, 1909).
p. 145, add entry:
6 June 1928 A dinner is held in Goldsmiths’ Hall, London, to mark the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary. Tolkien is among the 150 men invited to the event. See Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (2003), pp. xix–xxv.
p. 148, entry for 28 January 1929: Excerpts from what seems to be draft material for Tolkien’s lecture is printed in Carl Phelpstead, Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), p. 15.
p. 157, add entry:
6 March 1931 Tolkien attends the sixtieth anniversary dinner of the Johnson Society of Pembroke College. He and the Society’s Secretary, E.V.E. White, give the toast to ‘The College’.
p. 167, entry for End of 1932–Beginning of 1933, l. 1: For ‘End of 1932’ read ‘?End of 1932’. Tolkien lent The Hobbit to C.S. Lewis by the beginning of Hilary Term 1933, possibly already in December 1932.
p. 176, add entry:
23 December 1934 Tolkien sends Christmas greetings to his former Leeds colleague G.H. Cowling, now chair of English at the University of Melbourne. He apologizes for his tendency to procrastinate when it comes to writing letters, and acknowledges a dependence on his wife and Cowling’s to keep up a correspondence. He thanks Cowling for having sent an ‘admirable Chaucer’ (an edition of the Prologue and three tales from the Canterbury Tales, 1934), proof of Cowling’s ability to ‘get things done’ (online listing, Bay East Auctions, Sydney, 27 November 2011, lot 390). Tolkien sends in return a small ‘study’ of Chaucer of his own, evidently *Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale (1934), while noting his own relative lack of publications due to the press of teaching and of steering and shaping the Oxford English School. He thanks Cowling also for other gifts, including a toy koala for Priscilla Tolkien.
p. 186, entry for 5 October 1936, l. 2: For ‘presumably Thror’s Map’ read ‘probably one of the maps Tolkien has drawn to accompany the story’. The Allen & Unwin record book indicates only an ‘illustration’, but Rayner Unwin’s report will mention that The Hobbit needs maps.
p. 211, entry for 1938: Add: ‘– Sometime during this year, Prof. and Mrs. G.H. Cowling of Melbourne visit the Tolkiens in Oxford during Cowling’s sabbatical leave in England.’
p. 211, entry for January 1938: Add: ‘– The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation, edited by T.F. Higham and C.M. Bowra, is published. In their preface, p. viii, the editors thank Tolkien for ‘valuable help . . . in the second part of the Introduction’, i.e. Higham’s lengthy essay ‘Greek Poetry in Translation’. It is not apparent what it was in this part with which Tolkien assisted.
p. 224, entry for January 1939: According to a press report in September 2009 (on the occasion of a private exhibition of papers related to British cryptography operations in the Second World War), Tolkien was one of fifty Oxford and Cambridge dons earmarked for service under the Foreign Office in the event of war. He was not necessarily considered for work as a codebreaker – experts in languages were needed as well as in ciphers – and certainly would not have been a ‘spy’ as some headline writers would have it.
p. 226, entry for 27 March 1939 [REVISED]: According to a press report in September 2009, Tolkien spent three consecutive days, 27–29 March, on a ‘tester’ at the Government Code and Cipher School headquarters in London (GCCS was moved to Bletchley Park in August 1939 in advance of expected bombing). Our entry was based on a note to Letters (p. 436, for letter 35) by Humphrey Carpenter, who calls this ‘a four-day course of instruction at the Foreign Office beginning on 27 March’. The difference in days, if not the result of error, may be due to Carpenter including time for Tolkien to travel to London and return.
The event was, presumably, an aptitude test of some sort. It followed his agreement to work in cryptography for the Foreign Office in the event of war (see entry for January 1939). For some months after this, he assumed that he could be called into service at any time, a condition he mentioned to Philip Unwin in his letter of 15 September 1939 – a remark we unaccountably passed over in our Chronology entry for that date. On 19 December 1939 he wrote to Stanley Unwin (Letters, p. 44) that he was ‘uncommandeered . . . and shall now probably remain so, as there is (as yet) far too much to do [in the Oxford English School], and I have lost both my chief assistant and his understudy’. In the same letter, he comments on his accident ‘just before the outbreak of war’, on his wife’s illness, and that he was now the virtual head of his department, all of which would have been good reasons for the Foreign Office not to call him to work in cryptography at that time – assuming that he was suited to that work in the first place. His words give no indication that he was offered a position and turned it down, nor that he was trained as a ‘spy’ or ‘earmarked to crack Nazi codes’ (besides cipher analysts, the government also hired experts on languages), as was said in the media in September 2009, inspired by an exhibition by the Government Communications Headquarters, Cheltenham.
The notation ‘keen’ reportedly beside Tolkien’s name on one of the official papers connected with his test or course most likely refers to the pronunciation of his surname (as opposed to ‘-kine’), not to an indication of his eagerness to be employed by GCCS.
p. 241, entry for 19 June 1940: Due to the war, ‘Encaenia this year will be shorn of most of its ceremonial. It is understood that no honorary degrees will be conferred, and that there will be neither the usual All Souls luncheon nor the Vice-Chancellor’s garden-party. But to preserve continuity there will be the usual gathering in the Sheldonian, at which the Public Orator will pronounce the Creweian Oration, summarizing the events of the year’ (‘“War Degrees” at Oxford: Requirements of Residence’, Times (London), 22 April 1940, p. 11).
p. 261, entry for 22 September 1943, ll. 3–4: Although we did receive this quotation from Christopher Tolkien in private correspondence, we now notice that it was already published in a note in Letters, p. 440.
p. 296, add entry:
22 December 1945 Gwyn Jones inscribes as a gift to Tolkien a copy of his collection The Buttercup Field and Other Stories.
p. 312, add entry:
1947 Probably in this year, Tolkien acquires a second-hand copy of Gwaith Lewis Glyn Cothi = The Poetical Works of Lewis Glyn Cothi. (Carl Phelpstead notes in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011) that the volume, preserved in the English Faculty Library, Oxford, contains a leaf from a Blackwell’s book catalogue for 1947 with a listing for this book circled.)
p. 343, add entries:
27 November 1948 T.K. Penniman, Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, writes to Prof. Braunholtz, asking for the support of the Committee of Comparative Philology in regard to the Honour School of Anthropology. By 9 December, the Committee will appoint Braunholtz, C.L. Wrenn, and Tolkien to meet with a committee of the Honour School.
14 December 1948 The Secretary of the Pitt Rivers Museum sends Tolkien (among others) a proposed syllabus for the Honour School of Anthropology, to be discussed at a meeting.
p. 344, entry for 28 January 1949: Add: ‘– Tolkien is a signatory to a letter which appears in the London Times on this date, sent ‘on behalf of the Newman Association, composed of some 1,500 Catholic professors and other Catholic graduates of the British universities’, to protest the arrest of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary.’
p. 376, entry for Late July–15 August 1951, l. 2: For ‘North Wales’ read ‘south-west Wales’.
p. 402, entry for 15 July 1953, l. 4: By this date, P.H. Newby had already written to Dylan Thomas, who replied on 15 July that he would be delighted to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, if he could do so before October. Also, Thomas asked if it was Tolkien who had written ‘a very good children’s book, The Hobbit’ (The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas (1985), p. 904).
p. 504, entry for 24 April 1957: A long passage from Tolkien’s letter of this date, especially concerning Hebrew and The Jerusalem Bible, is transcribed by Michael Tolkien on his website, section 15, in a lecture originally delivered at the University of St. Andrews. (We included part of the same passage in Reader’s Guide, p. 468.) A few more words are given in section 28.
p. 514, add entry [REVISED]:
9–10 November 1957 Tolkien writes to Professor Przemyslaw Mroczkowski, proposing changes to an essay the latter has written on Chaucer. Mroczkowski’s style uses too many abstract nouns for Tolkien’s taste.
p. 514, add entry:
17 November 1957 Tolkien writes to Przemysl Mroczkowski (see entry for 2 June 1958), regretfully declining an invitation from Mroczkowski and his wife, to Tolkien and his wife, to dine with them Tuesday. It is a busy week, and Edith cannot do many things in succession. Tolkien addresses Mroczkowski as a colleague, by his surname, and asks him to do the same in return.
p. 576, add entry:
June 1961 Arne Zettersten calls on Tolkien at home ‘in order to discuss my dissertation and above all to get ideas about solving some intricate etymologies’ (Zettersten, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life (2011), p. 5). His dissertation is concerned with the ‘AB language’, or literary Middle English of the 13th century, on which Tolkien was a leading expert. Zettersten will visit, correspond with, or telephone Tolkien ‘fairly often for a large part of the 1960s’ (Zettersten, p. 191) and in 1972–3.
p. 627, entry for 6 January 1965: A few additional words in Tolkien’s letter of this date are transcribed by Michael Tolkien on his website, section 14, in a lecture originally delivered at the University of St. Andrews.
p. 641, entry for Early September 1965: For ‘use of Numinor’ read ‘use of the name Numinor in That Hideous Strength’.
p. 644, entry for 16 September 1965: Part of Tolkien’s letter of this date, concerning his grandson’s work and tastes, is transcribed by Michael Tolkien on his website, section 14, in a lecture originally delivered at the University of St. Andrews. See also his ‘autobiographical essay’, also on his website, section 13.
p. 645, entry for 30 October 1965: Additional words in Tolkien’s letter of this date, concerning (separately) female dons and the Middle English Pearl, are transcribed by Michael Tolkien on his website, section 14, in a lecture originally delivered at the University of St. Andrews.
p. 660, entry for ?20 March 1968: For ‘1968’ read ‘1966’.
p. 671, entry for 1 August 1966: For ‘One of his sons (?John or Christopher)’ read ‘His son John’.
p. 748, entry for 7 January 1970: Part of Tolkien’s letter of this date, concerning the name Catharine – so spelled as ‘the liturgical form’, as opposed to the ‘slovenly form’ Catherine – is transcribed by Michael Tolkien on his website, section 15, in a lecture originally delivered at the University of St. Andrews.
p. 748, entry for ?April 1970: Move the first sentences, regarding Edith Tolkien’s injury, to a separate entry headed March 1970.
p. 748, add entry:
5 April 1970 Magdalen Tolkien, wife of Tolkien’s brother Hilary, dies after suffering an injury on Good Friday. Father John Tolkien will conduct the requiem and burial.
p. 759, entry for 30 January 1972: A few words in Tolkien’s letter of this date are transcribed by Michael Tolkien on his website, section 26, in a lecture originally delivered at the University of St. Andrews.
p. 764, add entry:
July 1972 Tolkien entertains his granddaughter Catherine by quoting from his ‘Tom Bombadil’ poems during a visit by Michael George Tolkien and his family to the garden of Priscilla Tolkien’s house in Oxford.
p. 770, add entry:
?February 1973 Tolkien writes to Arne Zettersten in reply to a letter enclosing a cutting from the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter for 7 February 1973.
p. 771, add entries:
13 March 1973 Tolkien writes to Arne Zettersten.
August 1973 Tolkien meets ‘a few times’ with Arne Zettersten, including a lunch at Merton College (Zettersten, p. 197).
pp. 874–6, list of Translations of Tolkien’s Works:
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics: For ‘Polish’ read ‘*Polish’.
Bilbo’s Last Song, add: Spanish.
English and Welsh: For ‘Polish’ read ‘*Polish’.
The Hobbit, add: Bengali, Marathi.
The Lord of the Rings, add: Frisian (The Fellowship of the Ring only), Georgian.
Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of ‘Beowulf’: For ‘Polish’ read ‘*Polish’.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (lecture): For ‘Polish’ read ‘*Polish’.
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, add: German, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (European).
pp. 66–7, entries for 10 June 1915 through 15 June 1915: Further details of Tolkien’s examination papers are given by J.S. Ryan in ‘The Oxford Undergraduate Studies in Early English and Related Languages of J.R.R. Tolkien (1913–1915)’, first published in Minas Tirith Evening Star 20, no. 1 (Spring 1991).
p. 367, add entry:
15 September 1950 Jean Poindexter Colby, editor of children’s books for the Houghton Mifflin Company, writes to Tolkien. She has sent him twelve copies of the American edition of Farmer Giles of Ham (it is not clear if these are in addition to the ten copies sent by Allen & Unwin on 19 October). Colby hopes that Tolkien will approve of the American binding and dust-jacket, which she feels are more cheerful than those for the British edition. She complains that Houghton Mifflin often do not have enough sheets of The Hobbit (printed by Allen & Unwin) to meet demand in the U.S.A.
p. 431, entry for 13 May 1954, l. 3: The original ‘page of suggested improvements’, and the original draft dust-jacket (flaps) blurb for the American Fellowship of the Ring, survive in the Houghton Mifflin Company archive at Harvard University, though in separate folders. The text suggested for the first and final paragraphs was printed with only one minor change (the omission of an extraneous pronoun). Tolkien hoped, however, that the second paragraph could be altered, and wrote a substantially longer replacement, incorporating some of the ideas and phrasing of the original. He wished especially, as we have said, to correct an erroneous statement that the One Ring had been taken by Bilbo from the hoard of Smaug in The Hobbit, but also to omit the word trilogy as inapplicable to The Lord of the Rings – a single work, whose parts (as issued due to its size) cannot each stand on its own – and to remove certain information which would give away some of the story. In the event, he provided three paragraphs, altogether about double the length of the text Houghton Mifflin had provided, with portions marked for deletion if the whole proved too long for the space. Houghton Mifflin replaced their own paragraph on the printed jacket with Tolkien’s first two, omitting his ‘optional’ words as well as his final sentences.
p. 432, entry for 25 May 1954: Add: ‘– Austin Olney, of the Houghton Mifflin Company, writes to Tolkien, thanking him for his suggestions for the Fellowship of the Ring blurb and sending him a new text incorporating most of his revisions.’
p. 443, add entry:
2 November 1954 Paul Brooks writes to Tolkien. He expresses his vast pleasure in reading The Fellowship of the Ring and pride in having it on Houghton Mifflin’s list of publications. He feels that a respectable number of copies of the book have been placed in shops, and is pleased by reviews it received, some of which he sends to Tolkien. He has recently spent a fascinating hour with Milton Waldman discussing The Lord of the Rings.
p. 454, entry for ?May 1955: Harvey Breit asked Tolkien a series of questions, to which he gave terse answers. These were converted misleadingly into continuous text for the published article.
p. 457, add entry:
June 1955 Anne Ford, of the Houghton Mifflin Company, writes to Tolkien, asking that he supply biographical material for the use of the critic Gilbert Highet, but which also could be used generally by Houghton Mifflin for publicity purposes. She asks for something bright, brief, and quotable (presumably, given Tolkien’s words at the end of his letter of 30 June 1955; see Letters, p. 220).
Highet seems to have been the ‘another enquirer wanting information’ mentioned by Humphrey Carpenter in his note on p. 218 of Letters, preceding Tolkien’s autobiographical statement.
p. 457, entry for 10 June 1955: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes to Paul Brooks, apparently a belated reply to Brooks’s letter of 2 November 1954. He thanks Houghton Mifflin for sending (through Allen & Unwin) copies of their edition of The Two Towers and reviews. He has heard from Milton Waldman lately but not seen him; W.H. Auden, however, recently paid Tolkien a visit. Tolkien warns that his replies to the questions put to him for Harvey Breit’s ‘Oxford Calling’ (see entry for ?May 1955) have been jumbled in the finished article, but supposes that he should be grateful to be thought of interest. He objects, however, to Breit’s use of the word ‘Gothic’ (The Lord of the Rings is described as a ‘Gothic masterpiece’), which in its literary sense represents an air Tolkien has tried to avoid.’
p. 458, entry for 22 June 1955: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes briefly to the Houghton Mifflin Company, thanking them for sending a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, which, however, has missing leaves.’
p. 459, entry for 30 June 1955, l. 1: For ‘writes to Houghton Mifflin’ read ‘replies to Anne Ford’s request for biographical material’.
p. 460, add entry:
8 July 1955 Anne Ford writes to Tolkien, enclosing proposed copy for the lower dust-jacket panel of the Houghton Mifflin Return of the King.
p. 460, entry for 14 July 1955: Add: ‘– Tolkien replies to Anne Ford. He approves the quotations from reviews suggested for the Houghton Mifflin dust-jacket. He has not seen some of them before.’
p. 461, entry for 18 July 1955: Add: ‘– Anne N. Barrett, of the Houghton Mifflin Company, writes to Tolkien, expressing deep appreciation for his books. She was the first reader for all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings.’
p. 484, add entry:
18 January 1956 Austin Olney, of the Houghton Mifflin Company, writes to Tolkien. He trusts that the critic Michael Straight has sent Tolkien a copy of his review of The Lord of the Rings in the New Republic; if not, Olney will do so. He and his colleague Anne Barrett think that it is one of the best they have seen.
p. 485, add entry:
28 January 1956 Tolkien replies to Austin Olney. He was very pleased with Michael Straight’s review, in particular that he related The Lord of the Rings to On Fairy-Stories. He has also read Auden in the New York Times Book Review, and will vote for him as Professor of Poetry at Oxford though he does not agree with his analysis of The Lord of the Rings. The best reviews of his book, he feels, have been in less widely-read newspapers, but even those critics who disparage him do him the favour of publicity. All of his extensive fan-mail expresses pleasure at reading his work, which is seldom found even in the most sympathetic reviews. Belatedly, and politely (cf. entry for 5 January 1956), he thanks Houghton Mifflin for their gift of a carol book.
p. 486, entry for 18 March 1956: Add: ‘– Tolkien, at the Hotel Riviera in Sidmouth, replies to Paul Brooks. Brooks, who is in England for a short time on business for Houghton Mifflin, has written (apparently via Merton College) to arrange a meeting with Tolkien, but his letter arrived just as Tolkien was leaving Oxford on holiday. Illness, Tolkien explains, kept him from college before his departure. His ‘recuperation’ at Sidmouth has not done him much good. He suggests possible dates when he and Brooks might meet in Oxford, and supplies his home address and telephone number. Having noted that The Two Towers sells fewer copies than The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King, he wonders why this should be so, and what people who do not buy The Two Towers do about the middle part of the story.’
p. 490, add entry:
25 April 1956 Paul Brooks writes to Tolkien. He is disappointed to have had to leave England without meeting Tolkien in Oxford, but there was no time between his London appointments.
p. 492, entry for 20 June 1956: Add: ‘– Anne Barrett writes to Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin have received a query from a bookshop owner who would like to know how soon Tolkien’s next book will be ready. She sends a copy of a review of The Return of the King from Astounding Science Fiction, with which she disagrees almost in its entirety.’
p. 494, add entries:
1 August 1956 Anne Barrett writes to Tolkien. She lives in hope of seeing parts of The Silmarillion. Checking references to the Silmarils in The Lord of the Rings has sharpened her appetite. Referring to Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis, she wonders if Tolkien has ever been tempted to write a story about extraterrestrials, emphasizing their language and communication with another race.
29 August 1956 Anne Barrett sends Tolkien a collection of reviews of The Two Towers and The Return of the King.
p. 494, entry for ?Autumn 1956: Change the date heading to Late June or July 1956 and relocate entry to p. 492. This letter was probably in reply to that from Anne Barrett of 20 June 1956, and precedes hers of 1 August (see below).
p. 551, add entry:
2 December 1959 The Houghton Mifflin Company seem to have been asked if they would be interested in publishing a collection of scholarly work by Tolkien – possibly following on Rayner Unwin’s discussions with Tolkien about On Fairy-Stories, etc. earlier this year. Anne Barrett believes that such a book would be hard to sell except to Tolkien ‘cultists’ in the United States. If Allen & Unwin were to initiate the project, Houghton Mifflin probably would take sheets for their own edition, but would not initiate it themselves.
p. 554, entry for 4 February 1960: Add: ‘– Anne Barrett writes to Tolkien. She wonders if Tolkien has had the time or inclination to work on The Silmarillion, and mentions that Henry Thoma, of Houghton Mifflin’s Education Department, has been doing his best to persuade Tolkien to translate Beowulf. Thoma will later recall to Anne Barrett that he had a brief correspondence with Tolkien about translating Beowulf for Houghton Mifflin’s Riverside Editions series, and that a colleague, Richard N. Clark, visited Tolkien in England for the same purpose. Tolkien (possibly not mentioning his existing work on the Old English poem) told Thoma that he might like to translate Beowulf at some time, but could not do so for at least several years as he was at work on another ‘novel’.’
p. 558, add entries:
18 May 1960 Anne Barrett writes to Philip Unwin. She asks when George Allen & Unwin plan to publish The Silmarillion, and whether it will be in one, two, or three volumes. These questions are frequently asked by readers, leaving bookshop owners and Houghton Mifflin staff no peace until they are answered.
24 May 1960 Rayner Unwin replies to Anne Barrett, confirming that Tolkien is at work on The Silmarillion, but does not dare to predict a publishing date. He expects that it will be published in a single volume of about the size of one volume of The Lord of the Rings, and will be written to the same high standard.
pp. 716–17, entry for 5–9 February 1968: In his article ‘Tolkien’s World’ (Guardian Weekly, 22 January 1972), John Ezard recalled that when he helped interview Tolkien for the film Tolkien in Oxford, they were taken to lunch ‘handsomely’ by the BBC at the Eastgate Hotel.
p. 770, entry for 8 February 1973: The prize referred to here is the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger, awarded to the first volume of Le Seigneur des anneaux, translated by Francis Ledoux (1972).
p. 773, entry for ?August 1973: Add: ‘– Tolkien speaks with Richard L. Greene of New Haven, Connecticut. Greene will later write, in a letter to Time magazine that ‘barely a month before his death’ Tolkien told Greene ‘with emphasis how much he disliked the overused word creative, saying “There is only one Creator.”’ Greene remarked that in his fiction writing course “there was only one forbidden word”, creative, at which point Tolkien “left his station by the fireplace, darted to my chair, and wrung my hand in approval” (Time, 8 October 1973).’ Dr. Richard Leighton Greene was a scholar of medieval literature, an expert in early English carols, and an emeritus professor of English at Wesleyan University. He retired from active teaching in 1972.’
p. 797, note for ?December 1955: In his letter to Austin Olney of 28 January 1956, Tolkien comments that he was unable to answer Michael Straight’s questions in time for his New Republic review. Thus the drafts in Letters, dated by Humphrey Carpenter to ‘January or February 1956’, cannot have been written in February, and it seems likely that Tolkien would have ceased to work on them as soon as he sent, as we argue, a briefer reply to Straight, which does appear to have been received before the review was due.
p. 30, add entry:
16–19 December 1911 Tolkien stays with the Gilson family at their home, ‘Canterbury House’, at Marston Green near Birmingham.
According to a reminiscence written late in life by Marianne Caroline Gilson, stepmother to Rob Gilson, Tolkien was a frequent visitor to the family home. John Garth, ‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Fairies’, Tolkien Studies 7 (2010), p. 284, notes three occasions on which Tolkien signed the family visitors’ book, and suggests that he ‘seems only to have signed when he stayed overnight’.
p. 33, add entry:
28 June–1 July 1912 Tolkien stays with the Gilson family at Marston Green.
p. 43, entry for 28 June–1 July 1913: Replace with:
Tolkien takes up Gilson’s invitation of 12 June that they attend the King Edward’s School Sports. He spends these days with the Gilson family at Marston Green.
Tolkien wrote his signature and the inclusive dates of his stay in the visitors’ book of the Gilson home, ‘Canterbury House’: these are reproduced in John Garth, ‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Fairies’, Tolkien Studies 7 (2010), p. 282. In this article, Garth recounts a story told by Tolkien in drafts of On Fairy-Stories of ‘walking in a garden with a small child’ when he himself was ‘only nineteen or twenty’. Playfully asking the child to say who lived in a certain tall poppy, he expected a reply on the order of ‘fairies’, only to be told that the flower contained only stamens and a pistil. Garth also includes a very late memory by Marianne Caroline Gilson, stepmother of Rob Gilson, who recalled Tolkien (‘a frequent visitor’) telling her the same story in regard to her son Hugh when he was about three. Tolkien’s memory of being nineteen or twenty would date the incident to 1912 or 1913 (taking into account Tolkien’s December birthday and the time of year when poppies are in bloom), but Mrs Gilson’s recollection would date it to 1913 or 1914, Hugh having been born in June 1910. If Tolkien was indeed a frequent visitor to Canterbury House, his encounter with Hugh Gilson could have occurred at almost any date within a narrow range (at the earlier end, assuming for Hugh a remarkable precocity); but we mention it here for convenience. John Garth thinks it possible to date the event to 1913 or 1914, but gives more weight to it having occurred in summer 1915, when Tolkien ‘began his first lexicon of Qenya’ and ‘fairies were very much on his mind’ (p. 285), provided (with no supporting evidence) that Tolkien visited Marston Green on 17 July 1915, when Gilson was home on leave from military training, or at the time of the ‘Council of Lichfield’ in September 1915 (but, p. 284, ‘would poppies have been in flower so late?’). It seems to us that it would have been perfectly natural at that time to talk to a very young child about flower fairies, regardless of whether one was writing about fairies in poetry or an incipient mythology.
p. 119, entry for 28 July 1922: Replace with: ‘By this date Tolkien has agreed to review for G.N. Clark, editor of the English Historical Review, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem by *R.W. Chambers. He will make several pages of notes, but either does not complete the task or his review is not published.’ See Douglas A. Anderson, ‘R.W. Chambers and The Hobbit’, Tolkien Studies 3 (2006), p. 144, n. 4.
p. 139, entry for 20 December 1926, ll. 2–3: For ‘Aurora Borealis’ read ‘aurora borealis’. With solar magnetic storms in 1926 notably strong, spectacular auroral displays were seen in many places in the northern hemisphere.
p. 162, add entry:
?1932–1938 Tolkien and E.V. Gordon (but primarily Gordon) work to produce student editions of the poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer for the series Methuen’s Old English Library, intended as joint efforts. By 1933, and at least as late as 1937, these will be advertised as forthcoming in books published in the series, The Wanderer to be edited by Tolkien and Gordon, and The Seafarer by Gordon and Tolkien – the order of names perhaps indicating the senior editor for each. Tolkien’s other commitments, however, leave him time to do no more than advise and consult. The edition will still be unfinished when Gordon dies in 1938.
According to Douglas A. Anderson, for both works ‘Tolkien and Gordon soon found that they had problems over length. Eventually they decided to do both poems in a single volume, probably in order to allow themselves a slightly larger glossary. These editions were essentially complete by the mid-1930s, but Gordon passed away while the manuscripts awaited reduction and final review’ (‘“An Industrious Little Devil”: E.V. Gordon as Friend and Collaborator with Tolkien’, in Tolkien the Medievalist, ed. Jane Chance (2003), p. 19). Ida Gordon wrote in the preface to her edition of The Seafarer (1960) that when her husband ‘died in 1938 he left an uncompleted draft of an edition of The Wanderer and The Seafarer, on which he had been working in collaboration with Professor J.R.R. Tolkien’ (p. vii) – thus, from this language, a single volume containing both works, though this seems contrary to the aim of Methuen for its Old English Library, which with few exceptions (and none in its early years) was to produce inexpensive student editions of individual poems. In the event, Ida Gordon edited The Seafarer as a separate work, and for Methuen’s Old English Library which was still an active series.
p. 164, add entry:
24 May 1932 R.W. Chambers sends Tolkien an inscribed copy of the second edition of his Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem, published that month.
See Douglas A. Anderson, ‘R.W. Chambers and The Hobbit’, Tolkien Studies 3 (2006), p. 141.
p. 226, entry for 27 March 1939: Tolkien’s ‘training course in cryptography’ – Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, calls it a ‘course of instruction’; possibly it was less a course than an aptitude test – followed his agreement to work in cryptography for the Foreign Office in the event of war (see entry for January 1939). For some months after this, he assumed that he could be called into service at any time, a condition he mentioned to Philip Unwin in his letter of 15 September 1939 – a remark we unaccountably passed over in our Chronology entry for that date. On 19 December 1939 he wrote to Stanley Unwin (Letters, p. 44) that he was ‘uncommandeered . . . and shall now probably remain so, as there is (as yet) far too much to do [in the Oxford English School], and I have lost both my chief assistant and his understudy’. In the same letter, he comments on his accident ‘just before the outbreak of war’, on his wife’s illness, and that he was now the virtual head of his department, all of which would have been good reasons for the Foreign Office not to call him to work in cryptography at that time – assuming that he was suited to that work in the first place. His words give no indication that he was offered a position and turned it down, nor that he was trained as a ‘spy’ or ‘earmarked to crack Nazi codes’ (besides cipher analysts, the government also hired experts on languages), as was said in news articles published in September 2010, inspired by an exhibition by the Government Communications Headquarters, Cheltenham.
p. 257, entry for 1943, l. 1: For ‘Old English Verse’ read ‘Old English verse’. The talk to the Oxford High School for Girls was a reworking of Tolkien’s BBC broadcast of 14 January 1938, and is entitled in manuscript ‘The Beginnings of English Poetry’. Seven interconnected versions of the talk survive in the Tolkien Papers at the Bodleian Library: four of these are associated with the 1938 broadcast. Altogether, the papers contain evidence of revision by Tolkien (the changing number of years he states to have passed since the Battle of Brunanburh in 937) in 1940, 1942 (the year also directly noted in the manuscript in added pencil), 1943, 1945, and 1948. It is not known if Tolkien delivered the talk as many times as it was emended. (Our apologies to Stuart Lee, who kindly wrote to us in 2007 about the several manuscripts of the talk, which he had examined, but whose message we set aside during major renovations to our house and have only now taken up again. We now see that we ourselves looked at the relevant folders at the Bodleian on three occasions in 1999–2000 and made copious notes, but somehow failed to elaborate on this question in the published Chronology.)
p. 310, add entry:
November 1946 In his Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney (2006), p. 223, historian Paul Johnson recalls ‘a puzzled and inconclusive discussion’ about T.S. Eliot ‘after dinner on a foggy November evening’ in 1946, when he was in his first year at Oxford. On this occasion, ‘C.S. Lewis played the exegete on “Little Gidding” [the final poem of Eliot’s Four Quartets], with a mumbled descant from Professor Tolkien and expostulations from Hugo Dyson, a third don from the English faculty, who repeated at intervals, “It means anything or nothing, probably the latter.”’ Johnson read history at Magdalen College, where Lewis was a Fellow.
p. 324, entry for 23 October 1947, l. 9: For ‘C.E. (‘Tom’) Stevens’ read ‘C.E. (‘Tom Brown’) Stevens’.
p. 364, entry for 26 July 1950, l. 18: For ‘the Houghton Mifflin’ read ‘Houghton Mifflin’.
p. 474, add entry after that for Late August 1955 [REVISED]:
22 August 1955 Tolkien replies to John Roberts, who had written to ask when The Return of the King would be completed. Although it was finished long ago, publication has been delayed by the need to compress ‘a selection of matter not included in the main narrative’ (the Appendices). The third volume will also contain a map of Gondor and Mordor: ‘except for names of districts (countries, or areas) such as Enedwaith there are not supposed to be any names in the maps (other than those of the Shire) which do not appear somewhere’. An index is needed, but he has failed to produce one after making ‘a lot of fruitless effort’, the result of which would have been ‘too large and too costly to print’. He hopes soon to begin to put in order his legends of the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth. Roberts evidently has described Smeágol-Gollum as ‘detestable’ (or a word to that effect), but is, writes Tolkien, ‘all the more an object for pure pity, a pity unalloyed (and unaided) by any liking’ (Bonhams, Printed Books, Maps, Manuscripts and Photographs, auction sale, London, 4 November 2008).
p. 486, entry for c. 13–20 March 1956: Change heading to c. 13–21 March 1956.
p. 486, entry for 22 March 1956, ll. 1–2: For ‘Ruby Wedding Anniversary’ read ‘Ruby (i.e. fortieth) Wedding Anniversary’.
p. 494, add entry:
19 September 1956 Tolkien replies to Terence Tiller, giving his permission in principle for the suggested adaptation of The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Tolkien imagines that Tiller will have to cut all or most of Book III (the first half of The Two Towers), given his time constraints. He plans to be away from Oxford between 24 September and 8 October.
p. 509, entry for 30 July 1957, l. 3: For ‘boxed’ read ‘boxed set’.
p. 530, entry for ?Late August–?early September: Add ‘1958’ to the date heading. Line 1, for ‘sends writes’ read ‘writes’.
p. 555, add entry:
18 February 1960 Tolkien writes to a former student regarding an exchange of drawings. In Catalogue No. 27 by the London bookseller Peter Jolliffe, item 487 (p. 40), this letter was offered together with an ‘ink sketch by J.R.R. Tolkien, a cartoon of himself sitting in a chair, beneath which he has written “But which of them, Madam? He has several in Oxford.”’ This is said to have been drawn in response to the student’s ‘cartoon of herself sitting in a chair, beneath which she has written “But Professor, I’ve been introduced to Grendel’s mother!”’
p. 602, entry for 10 December 1962: For ‘for a BBC television’ read ‘for BBC Television’.
p. 602, entry for 12 December 1962: The John Bowen interview with Tolkien is listed in the British Film Institute database.
p. 604, add entry [REVISED]:
12 February 1963 Tolkien replies to a letter of appreciation from a Mr Elliott-Howard. He comments on Pauline Baynes’s illustrations for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book and for Farmer Giles of Ham, thinking the latter more successful than the former. He apologizes for not writing more, but is hard pressed ‘and as reluctant to work as a dormouse prematurely wakened’ (offered by Maggs Bros. booksellers).
p. 607, add entry:
August 1963 Producer Denys Gueroult suggests to Terence Tiller at the BBC that Tolkien should be recorded speaking about his work before, given his age, it is too late to do so.
p. 625, entry for 26 November 1964: Tolkien was under the impression that the visit by Irene Slade and Denys Gueroult on this date was to be only for the sake of discussion, but they arrived with an engineer and recording equipment, and stayed for about an hour and a half. In the event, Slade’s interview was not successful, and may not have lasted for longer than the three minutes that survive in the Sound Archives.
p. 628, entry for 20 January 1965: Tolkien’s interview with Denys Gueroult took place on the top floor of an office set in Beaumont Street.
p. 664, entry for 3 May 1966: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes to William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, acknowledging receipt on this date of their edition of Essays Presented to Charles Williams.’
p. 712, add entry:
4 December 1967 Tolkien writes to Roger Verhulst of Wm. B. Eerdmans, thanking him for a letter and for the copies of Letters to an American Lady by C.S. Lewis, received a few days earlier, which he has now read.
p. 745, add entry:
August 1969 Tolkien sends a wedding wish in Quenya, written in Tengwar, to Henry St J. Hart, Queen’s College, Cambridge.
The greeting and various trials are reproduced in Vinyar Tengwar 49 (June 2007), pp. 43–4. For Hart, cf. Reader’s Guide, p. 145.
p. 746, add entry:
13 September 1969 Tolkien writes to Dr and Mrs F. Neil Johnson, Department of Psychology, University of Birmingham. Dr Johnson had written to Tolkien after having his and his wife’s copy of The Lord of the Rings specially rebound. Tolkien encloses a label with his signature and an inscription in Quenya.
See further, ‘Five Late Quenya Volitive Inscriptions’, Vinyar Tengwar 49 (June 2007), pp. 47 and 54, in which Carl F. Hostetter includes the inscription and gives a rough translation: ‘may (a) golden light fall on your book at the times of your reading’, your in each case indicating the dual possessive (by two persons).
p. 752, entry for ?1971: Add: ‘– Rayner Unwin proposes Tolkien for national honours. He writes to W.H. Auden, Poet Laureate C. Day-Lewis, and ‘a very few other names of consequence, and co-ordinated their responses’ (George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer, p. 133). He thinks that Tolkien deserves to become a Companion of Honour, a member of an Order of chivalry very limited in numbers and awarded for pre-eminence in the arts, sciences, medicine, or government. (The CBE awarded to Tolkien in the 1972 Honours List is, in comparison, a lesser distinction than the Companion of Honour in the hierarchy of U.K. national honours, though still denotes achievement of a prominent or distinguished contribution in a field. It takes precedence over the OBE and MBE.) One of the ‘names of consequence’ was apparently Maurice Bowra at Oxford; but according to his biographer Leslie Mitchell (Maurice Bowra: A Life (2009), p. 166), ‘when consulted about the possibility of Tolkien being offered the Companion of Honour, [Bowra] wrote “a forceful letter” against the proposal. No recognition should be given to someone who had published so little academic work, “but only children’s tales”.’ To Bowra, ‘to squander talent in idleness or superficiality was intolerable’.’
p. 756, add entry:
?Autumn 1971 Tolkien writes to his brother Hilary concerning the celebration, current and past, of Bonfire Night (Guy Fawkes Night, 5 November). He hopes that the domestic use of fireworks will not be banned. (See further, Hilary Tolkien, Black & White Ogre Country: The Lost Tales of Hilary Tolkien (2009), pp. 70–1.)
p. 764, add entry:
11 June 1972 Tolkien writes to Robert Burchfield, returning a book he had borrowed, Kentish Place-names by J.K. Wallenberg (1931). Burchfield had lent him the volume years earlier, but it was inadvertently packed for moving to Poole in 1968 while Tolkien was in hospital, and he has just now discovered it after his return to Oxford. (After writing this note, Tolkien neglects to send either it or the book. Christopher Tolkien will post them to Burchfield at last in June 1974.)
p. 830, ll. 15–16: For ‘Three do not appear in the 1999 or 2004 editions: parts of the letters for 1930, 1933, and 1937.’ read: ‘Two further facsimile pages and the verso of an envelope with a non-Tolkien ‘Father Christmas’ seal are reproduced very much reduced on the lower cover. Four items in the 1995 volume do not appear in the editions of 1999, 2004, or 2009: parts of the letters for 1930, 1933, and 1937, and the envelope with the ‘Father Christmas’ seal.’
p. 830, add following the third paragraph:
Letters from Father Christmas (2009) contains the same reproductions as the edition of 1999, except for the omission of the verso of the 1927 envelope, an undated envelope placed between 1937 and 1938, and the verso of the 1943 envelope with three seals; and the addition of four items not previously reproduced, the last page of the 1937 letter (only part published in the edition of 1995), and all three pages of the 1941 letter. Because of the smaller, trade paperback format, most of the reproductions are considerably reduced in size. The quality of colour reproduction is similar to that in the 1999 edition.
p. 845, l. 15 from bottom: Delete the entry for ‘Farewell sweet earth and northern sky’. This is not a discrete poem, but part of the Lay of Leithian, and as such should be noted in the entry for that work on p. 850.
p. 850, ll. 4–5: For ‘A slightly emended section was published in The Silmarillion, p. 171’ read ‘Two slightly emended portions were included in The Silmarillion, pp. 171 and 178’.
pp. 874–6, list of Translations of Tolkien’s Works:
The Hobbit. For ‘Portuguese (Brazilian)’ read ‘Portuguese (Brazilian)*’.
Leaf by Niggle, add: Portuguese (Brazilian).
Letters from Father Christmas (2004 edn.), add: French.
Mr. Bliss, add: French.
On Fairy-Stories, add: Portuguese (Brazilian).
The Silmarillion, add: Thai.
Add to list of translations:
Etymologies (section from The Lost Road, incorporating addenda and corrigenda published in Vinyar Tengwar 45 and 46 (November 2002, July 2004).
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, add: Catalan, Danish, French, Greek.
p. 422, entry for 29 January 1954, ll. 5–8: Tolkien’s letter to the Rector of the University of Liège was published in Johan Vanhecke, ‘Tolkien and Belgium’, Lembas Extra (2007), p. 56.
p. 439, entry for 9 September 1954, end of final paragraph: Tolkien’s letter to the Rector of the University of Liège was published in Johan Vanhecke, ‘Tolkien and Belgium’, Lembas Extra (2007), p. 56.
p. 442, entry for 18 October 1954: Tolkien’s letter to the Rector of the University of Liège was published in Johan Vanhecke, ‘Tolkien and Belgium’, Lembas Extra (2007), p. 57.
p. 542, add entry:
19 May 1959 Tolkien replies to a letter by Arne Zettersten, a graduate student at the University of Lund, Sweden, who was preparing a doctoral thesis on the ‘AB’ variant of Middle English, about which Tolkien had written in Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. See further, Arne Zettersten, ‘Discussing Language with J.R.R. Tolkien’, Lembas Extra (2007), pp. 16–25. Zettersten and Tolkien will continue to be in contact in subsequent years.
p. 617, entry for ?Late April or (probably early) May 1964, l. 4: Cor Blok has recalled that after correspondence in 1962, he renewed contact with Tolkien ‘only once, in 1964, when I was preparing a large scale exhibition . . . at the Gemeentemuseum. The theme of the exhibition was the use of languages and symbols, both verbal and visual, in various cultures, and I wrote to Tolkien asking about his experiences as an inventor of Middle-earth languages. He politely declined to respond, however, begging to be excused because of being already “a much harassed man”’ (‘Pictures to Accompany a Great Story’, Lembas Extra (2007), p. 9). Cf. entry for 22 August 1964, p. 622.
p. 756, entry for Autumn (before 29 October) 1971: Delete as a separate entry, add contents to the entry for 9 September 1971.
p. 20, entry for Autumn term 1910, ll. 10–13: Maggie Burns informs us that Tolkien’s gift of two books to the school library is recorded in the King Edward’s School List for July 1912, covering the period 1911–1912. Tolkien’s final year at King Edward’s School ended in July 1911, but he returned for the Open Debate in April 1912. ‘Also during this year . . . Boer War).’ therefore should become a separate, later entry for 1911–1912 at the start of the section ‘1911’.
p. 36, entry for First part of 1913, final line: For ‘Father Murphy’ read ‘Father William J. Murphy’.
p. 43, entry for ?Late July 1913: Add after third sentence: ‘A third drawing of Phoenix Farm by Tolkien, Lamb’s Farm, Gedling, Notts (its title referring to the farmer who worked the land for years before Jane Neave), may date from 1913 as well.’
p. 57, entry for 22 November 1914, ll. 1–2: For ‘The Finnish National Epic’ read ‘On ‘The Kalevala’ or Land of Heroes’, the title given in the surviving manuscript. The minutes of the Sundial Society meeting of 22 November note that Tolkien read a paper ‘on “The Finnish National Epic”’.
p. 79, entry for 22 March 1916: Add after first sentence: ‘The witnesses are Anna M. Johnson (presumably a local friend) and Jennie Grove.’ A photograph of the register page recording Ronald and Edith’s marriage is reproduced on the Elendilion website.
p. 130, entry for 12 June 1925: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes to Mr Ashton, the father of an exceptionably able student at Leeds who has been unable to sit the final examination. Tolkien assures Ashton that if his son is unable to take the examination the following year, he could still be granted ‘an “aegrotat’ degree without class’, which together with recommendations from himself and Professor Gough (i.e. C.E. Gough, Professor of German Language and Literature at Leeds) ‘will be worth nearly as much to him conceivably as a first class without such strong recommendations’ (Swann Galleries, Autographs, auction catalogue, New York, 25 September 2008, lot 253).’
p. 140, add entry:
12 March 1927 Tolkien replies to a letter from Ronald Ashton, a former student at Leeds. He offers to write a testimonial. Oxford, he says, is not Paradise; ‘there are still lingering vestiges of civilisation’ there, but it is also ‘a centre of the motor industry: that fantastic lunacy’. He doubts that he would have torn himself away from Leeds if he had been single and ‘able to disregard small differences in salary. The English School here is a battle-ground and there is small peace and little sense in it’ (Michael Silverman, Catalogue Twenty-Seven, London, 2009, item 112).
p. 153, entry By June 1930: Change the date heading to July 1929 and relocate the entry to p. 150. The two Linguaphone segments have been mounted as streaming audio files on the British Library archival sound recordings website, where they are dated ‘1929–07’.
p. 186, add entry:
27 September 1936 Tolkien replies to a letter from the Reverend Professor Dr A. Pompen in Nijmegen, Holland, who has asked if the Tolkien family would be willing to take a paying guest. Although Tolkien would welcome additional income to offset the cost of accidents this year to himself and one of his sons, and of another son about to enter university, the family are not in a position suitably to entertain a guest. Edith is in poor health, and for help they ‘are reduced to the brief appearances of a daily maid’ (Tolkien Library website).
p. 216, add entries:
28 May 1938 Tolkien writes to Kenneth Sisam at Oxford University Press about E.O.G. Turville-Petre’s edition of Viga-Glúms Saga. Turville-Petre is sailing for Iceland on 5 June. Even if proofs are not produced by then, Tolkien thinks that it would be good to have an estimate of the number of pages, and if any reduction is necessary, Tolkien should discuss it with Turville-Petre before he leaves. He expects to see Turville-Petre early the following week.
Late May–early June 1938 Tolkien probably sees E.O.G. Turville-Petre before he leaves for Iceland, and discusses his forthcoming edition of Viga-Glúms Saga.
p. 304, add entry:
2 August 1946 Tolkien receives a second letter from a Polish scholar, Przemyslaw Mroczkowski, who wishes to pursue a course of study at Oxford and has probably sought support from the British Council. Tolkien has attempted to contact the Censor (Head) of St Catharine’s College (an association of non-collegiate students) and the British Council by telephone to make enquiries, but could get no reply. He begins a letter to Mroczkowski, apologizing for not taking any action in response to an earlier letter other than speaking on his behalf to C.S. Lewis and explaining that his whole attention has ‘been immersed in a most tiresome and difficult affair’. Also he was not clear whether Mroczkowski wanted him to take any action or to only add his support to anything approved by the British Council. He discusses the cost of studying in Oxford and the problem of finding accommodation, adding: ‘As far as I can judge, from the experience of my own sons, residence in Oxford together with all fees would cost you at least £50 a term . . .’ (R.R. Auction online listing, retrieved 22 November 2009). Later in the day, he successfully contacts the Censor and the British Council and adds a long postscript to the letter. All British Council scholarships for ‘the coming year’ (presumably the academic year 1946–7) were allotted the previous spring, and even if Mroczkowski had one of these, St Catherine’s has no vacancies. Mroczkowski had apparently mentioned the possibility of a scholarship to the University of Notre Dame in America: Tolkien advises him to accept this if offered, since there is no certainty of anything at Oxford.
p. 457, entry for 13 June 1955: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes to probationer B.Litt. student D.C. Levinson that he will expect her at noon the following day.’
p. 457, entry for 14 June 1955: Add: ‘– D.C. Levinson visits Tolkien at noon, probably in his room at Merton College. Since she will be accepted as a full B.Litt. student at the English Faculty Board meeting of 17 June, the meeting presumably is concerned with her chosen topic and course of research.’
p. 474, add entry after that for Late August 1955:
22 August 1955 Tolkien writes to John Roberts, apologizing for the long wait for The Return of the King. He has been selecting and compressing material for the Appendices, not completing the story, which was finished long ago. He regrets that space and cost have prevented inclusion of the promised index. He hopes soon to begin to put in order his legends of the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth.
p. 486, add entry:
8 March 1956 Having received a letter from William Galbraith dated 7 March with questions about The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien immediately writes a reply, but mislays it and does not send it until 13 April. He hopes that it may be possible to publish the index he had begun, as well as other things omitted from The Lord of the Rings for reasons of space and cost. All that now impedes the publication of The Silmarillion is his finding time to prepare it.
p. 490, add entry:
28 April 1956 Tolkien writes to his B.Litt. student D.C. Levinson, asking if she can see him in his room at Merton College at 11.30 the following Thursday morning (3 May). The only other times he can offer are 10.15–11.15 on Monday (30 April) or 11.00–12.00 noon on Friday (4 May). On two of these occasions, another student would also be present. Tolkien presumably is finding it difficult to schedule sessions for the nine post-graduate students he is supervising this term.
p. 498, entry for 24 December 1956: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes to Patricia Kirke on a Merton College Christmas card that work and correspondence prevented him from writing any Christmas cards or letters until the previous week. He mentions also that his daughter Priscilla is spending a year at the London School of Economics for a diploma.’
p. 499, add entry at head of page: See revised, redated entry for 9–10 November 1957, above.
p. 518, add entry following the divisional date heading:
1958 Tolkien writes twice to Przemyslaw Mroczkowski, offering £30 financial support, then expressing his pleasure when it is accepted. The money is conveyed as ‘a little of the proceeds of The Lord of the Rings’. Tolkien guesses that it will ‘be an answer to prayer, for on the way from church on Sunday I had a sudden clear intuition that you were worried and in difficulties’ (Christie’s, Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts, auction catalogue, London, 1 June 2009, lot 77).
p. 551, add entry:
December 1959 Tolkien writes to Przemyslaw Mroczkowski that he finds ‘compulsory retirement both distressing, and extremely laborious’, and with an inadequate pension (Christie’s, Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts, auction catalogue, London, 1 June 2009, lot 77).
p. 576, add entries:
1 June 1961 Tolkien replies to a request for an interview from the Swedish writer Jan Broberg. He will be away from Oxford from 19 June to 15 July, but is willing to give Broberg a brief interview during his stay at the Hotel Miramar in Bournemouth from 4 to 15 July.
19 June–4 July 1961 Tolkien may be away from Oxford (see entry for 1 June), but in his letter to Robert Burchfield of c. 20 August he will write that he does not know why Burchfield should think he has been in Ireland; rather, he had had ten days in Bournemouth at the beginning of July.
p. 576, entry for 5 or 6–15 July 1961: Change the date heading to 4–15 July 1961.
p. 608, add entry:
28 September 1963 Baronne A. Baeyens of Germany writes to Tolkien a letter of appreciation of The Lord of the Rings, rejecting an allegorical interpretation.
p. 613, add entry [REVISED]:
?16 December 1963 Tolkien replies to Baronne A. Baeyens, sending with an autograph letter a covering (secretarial) typewritten note dated 16 December. Tolkien is pleased that Baeyens rejects an allegorical interpretation of The Lord of the Rings. He wanted to write a story which ‘would give me scope for my personal pleasure in history, languages, and “landscape”’. He chose ‘deeply rooted “archetypal” motifs’ which he put ‘into an entirely new setting’. He discusses how characters arise ‘out of the necessities of narrative’ and gradually reveal themselves to him. In regard to Aragorn, Tolkien had been ‘astounded as slowly the revelation of the majesty of his lineage, and the weight of his doom unfolded’ (Simon Finch Rare Books, online listing, retrieved 22 November 2009).
p. 613, entry for Late 1963: For ‘taken ill’, read ‘taken ill with enteritis’.
p. 615, entry for Early 1964: Change the date heading to Soon after Christmas 1963 and relocate the entry between the sections for 1963 and 1964, p. 615.
p. 615, add entry:
20–26 January 1964 Tolkien replies to a letter from Przemyslaw Mroczkowski. 1963 had been ‘a dreadful year of loss and frustration’: C.S. Lewis died, Tolkien and Edith fell ill, and soon after Christmas ‘disaster’ struck the marriage of Faith and Christopher Tolkien, an event which Tolkien does not understand fully, though ‘there are on neither side any of the all too common reasons’. Responding to comments made by Mroczkowski on The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien notes his own feeling that ‘there is always something left over that demands a different or larger construction to “explain” it’ (Christie’s, Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts, auction catalogue, London, 1 June 2009, lot 76). Tom Bombadil is an example of this.
p. 632, entry for 20 May 1965: Add: ‘– Tolkien sends a stock reply to a letter of appreciation from an American reader, Nan C. Scott. To this he adds a note that his work on The Silmarillion is hindered by the need for him to revise The Lord of the Rings to combat the Ace Books pirate edition, from which he receives no payment. He asks Scott to pass this information on to others.’
p. 637, entry for 16 July 1965: For ‘When Scott had received a letter from Tolkien in which he complained about the Ace piracy’ read ‘When Scott received Tolkien’s letter of 20 May 1965’.
p. 638, entry for 21 July 1965, l. 5: For ‘p. 273’ read ‘p. 358’.
p. 647, entry for 30 November 1965: Add ‘– Tolkien writes to John Wakeman, editor of the book Midcentury Authors, declining to participate as he has no time to produce a suitable text.
p. 661, entry for Spring 1966: Delete; replaced by new entries or parts of entries for 19 April, 9 May, ?10–13 May, and 30 May 1966.
p. 662, entry for 19 April 1966: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes to Nan C. Scott, who is making an extended stay in England while her husband is on sabbatical leave; she herself is attending acting classes in London. Tolkien suggests dates in early May on which the Scotts might visit him.’
p. 664, entry for 6 May 1966: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes to Martin M. Snapp, Jr. He is pleased to hear of the interest in his work by undergraduates at Yale University, which Snapp has communicated along with a proposition. Tolkien will forward the latter to his publishers, who deal with such matters on his behalf.’
p. 664, entry for 9 May 1966: Add: ‘– Tolkien is unexpectedly obliged to be out of Oxford for the day.’
p. 664, add entry after that for 9 May 1966:
?10–13 May William O. and Nan C. Scott visit Tolkien. They talk with Tolkien in his garage-study. When Nan Scott tells Tolkien that she has just begun to read Charles Williams’ books, he describes them as ‘dreadful’. William Scott takes a photograph of his wife and Tolkien standing in the back garden at 76 Sandfield Road: this will be first published with the article ‘A Visit with Tolkien’ by Nan C. Scott in The Living Church, 5 February 1978. The photograph and article (retitled ‘Tolkien: Hobbit and Wizard’) will be reprinted in Eglerio!: In Praise of Tolkien, ed. Anne Etkin (1978).
p. 666, entry for 30 May 1966: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes to Nan C. Scott, thanking her for sending a photograph of them together. In response to a query, he acknowledges that the wife of Meriadoc should appear in the Brandybuck genealogy in The Lord of the Rings.’
p. 670, entry for 29 July 1966: Add: ‘– Tolkien replies to Max Rouslin, who has written from the United States that he would like to obtain an edition of The Lord of the Rings that will stand up to hard use. Tolkien recommends the hardcover edition, from either England or America; ‘the minor corrections and alterations made in the Ballantine edition could then be put into it by hand’. He notes, however, that a new edition will be out in England in the autumn, ‘more carefully revised’ and with ‘a revised index’. Rouslin has written Tolkien’s address as ‘Sandfilled Road’ which he likes better than ‘Sandfield’ though he does not think that ‘the Post Office would recognise this improvement’ (offered by manuscript dealer kenneth w. rendell).’
p. 670, add entry after that for 29 July 1966:
?Late July or early August Nan. C. Scott and her husband visit Tolkien again, taking some books for him to sign. Mrs Scott takes a photograph of Tolkien leaning against the gate of 76 Sandfield Road: this will be published in Eglerio!: In Praise of Tolkien, ed. Anne Elkin (1978).
p. 741, add entry:
10 April 1969 Tolkien replies to a letter from Mrs Mroczkowska (the wife of Przemyslaw Mroczkowski), who apparently is on a visit to Britain. He tries to keep his address secret ‘from the Press and other intruders who have made it impossible for me to do any more writing especially as I am now beginning to feel my age’ and is still rather lame from his accident the previous summer. Mrs Mroczkowska having enclosed a letter from her daughter asking about a thesis she has to present later in April, Tolkien wishes that the daughter had written to him sooner, allowing time for him to offer useful help and advice. He will do his best to send replies to reach Mrs Mroczkowska by 20 April so that she can take them back, but ‘it is unfortunate that the next few days are already much occupied. My three sons, my lawyer, and my publisher are all descending on me to settle urgent affairs’ (R.R. Auction, sale of 12 August 2009, lot 602).
p. 745, entry for 1 August 1969: Add: ‘– Tolkien signs a Hobbit dust-jacket sent to him by a Mr Burrows. In his covering letter he apologizes for his delay in providing the signature, partly due to his ill health and partly because Burrows’ letter had to be forwarded by the Post Office from Tolkien’s former address in Oxford.’
p. 745, entry for c. 20 August 1969: Change the date heading to 21 August 1969.
p. 746, entry for Late October or beginning of November 1969: Change the date heading to 2 November 1969 and relocate the entry following that for ?Early November 1969. Add: ‘The four have lunch at the Miramar, then go to the Tolkiens’ bungalow.’
p. 746, add entry:
4 November 1969 Tolkien telephones Pauline Baynes and asks that she alter the title of the poster map.
p. 772, add entries:
30 May 1973 Tolkien replies to Philip Brown of Merton College, who has asked if Tolkien would sign his set of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien gives the work’s title in Quenya, agreeing to sign his ‘copy of i Túrin i Cormaron (in the C[ommon]. S[peech]. The Lord of the Rings)’ (eBay auction, ending 13 April 2009). He asks Brown to keep this secret, as he has to refuse so many requests, and suggests dates when the two might meet.
31 May 1973 Philp Brown writes to Tolkien, settling on one of the suggested dates if it is still free. Tolkien will confirm the date and time on the verso of the card and return it.
6 June 1973 Philip Brown visits Tolkien in his 21 Merton Street flat at about 4.30 p.m., and Tolkien signs all three volumes of his second edition Lord of the Rings.
p. 807, George William Tolkien family tree: See replacement (PDF).
p. 808, John Benjamin Tolkien family tree: See replacement (PDF).
p. 809, Suffield family tree: See replacement (PDF).
p. 828, add to list of Topographical and Family Art: Lamb’s Farm, Gedling, Notts. Sotheby’s, English Literature, History, Children’s Books & Illustrations. Auction catalogue, London, 17 December 2009, lot 178.
pp. 874–6, list of Translations of Tolkien’s Works:
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, add: *Portuguese (Brazilian), Ukrainian.
Farmer Giles of Ham, add: Thai, Ukrainian.
The Hobbit, add: Arabic, Frisian, *Vietnamese. For ‘Norwegian’ read ‘Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk)’; for ‘Ukrainian’ read ‘*Ukrainian’. In earlier addenda, for ‘Georgian’ read *Georgian’.
Leaf by Niggle, add: Ukrainian.
Letters from Father Christmas (2004 edn). In earlier addenda, for ‘Portuguese’ read ‘Portuguese (European)’.
Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, add: Finnish.
The Lord of the Rings, add: Arabic, Belarusian. For ‘Chinese’ read ‘*Chinese’.
The Lost Road and Other Writings, add: French.
Mr. Bliss, add: Norwegian, Polish.
On Fairy-Stories, add: Ukrainian.
Roverandom, add: Korean, Ukrainian. For ‘Chinese’ read ‘*Chinese’.
The Silmarillion, add: Croatian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian.
Sir Gawain, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, add: Italian.
Smith of Wootton Major, add: Ukrainian.
Unfinished Tales, add: Croatian, Romanian, Slovak.
Add to list of translations:
The Children of Húrin, add: *Chinese, Estonian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Lithuanian, Portuguese (European), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Ukrainian.
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. Dutch, Italian, Polish, Spanish.
p. 4, entry for Summer 1896, l. 12 [REVISED]: Delete ‘John Benjamin Tolkien, Ronald’s paternal grandfather, dies’ and make a new entry immediately following:
1 August 1896 John Benjamin Tolkien dies.
p. 65, entry for 28 May 1915, ll. 4–5 [REVISED]: For ‘Freston . . . probably one or two years senior to Tolkien’ read ‘Hugh Reginald Freston, known as Rex, . . . one year junior to Tolkien’.
p. 68, entry for ?20 June 1915, l. 18: For ‘Carpatian Street’ read ‘Corporation Street’.
p. 118, entry for Early 1922, l. 5: For ‘*‘Clarendon Chaucer’’ read ‘‘Clarendon Chaucer’ (see *Geoffrey Chaucer)’.
p. 163, add entry:
8 April 1932 C.S. Lewis recommends to his brother that one day, Warren must read Tolkien’s translation of the Middle English Owl and the Nightingale (Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2 (2004), p. 75). Presumably, therefore, by this date Tolkien has in hand a complete translation, though he will never make it ready for publication.
p. 269, entry for 25 April 1944, ll. 6–7: For the two references to ‘John’, read ‘Christopher’.
p. 285, entry for 18 December 1944, ll. 7–8 [REVISED]: Further in regard to the ‘book in collaboration’ mentioned here, see addendum to our Reader’s Guide entry on Lewis.
p. 332, add entry:
23 April 1948 Tolkien adds a note to the penultimate synoptic time-scheme for The Lord of the Rings.
p. 335, entry for 14 August–14 September 1948, l. 2 from bottom: The sketch of Mount Doom on p. 42 of Sauron Defeated is also reproduced, more clearly, in Pictures, no. 30A.
p. 340, entry for End of September–early October 1948: The range of dates for this entry would be given more precisely as between 29 September and 7 October 1948.
p. 355, entry for 31 December 1949: According to an article by Charlotte Cory, ‘The Woman Who Drew Narnia’, Pauline Baynes visited Tolkien on this date, but found him about to leave to play squash. Correspondence in the George Allen & Unwin archive at Reading and at the Bodleian Library, Oxford suggests either that Tolkien abandoned or delayed his plan, or that Pauline stayed for a brief visit with Edith Tolkien. Pauline wrote to Tolkien on 2 July 1962 that she vividly recalled how sweet Mrs Tolkien was to her, on a visit to the Tolkiens one afternoon some years earlier, and how nervous Pauline was of meeting Tolkien. Also in June 1962, in a letter to Pauline Baynes, Ronald Eames of Allen & Unwin referred to a visit by Pauline to Oxford during the production of Farmer Giles of Ham, to discuss her illustrations with Tolkien: this would suggest a date earlier than December 1949, Farmer Giles having been published in October, but contemporary letters do not indicate any face-to-face meeting between Tolkien and Baynes in the preceding spring or summer.
p. 430, entry for 8–15 May 1954: An expansive account of the efforts to bring C.S. Lewis to the Cambridge chair is Brian Barbour, ‘Lewis and Cambridge’, Modern Philology 96, no. 4 (May 1999), pp. 439–84; see especially pp. 459–65, in which Tolkien figures.
p. 431, entry for 17 May 1954: A portion of Tolkien’s letter to Sir Henry Willink was published in Brian Barbour, ‘Lewis and Cambridge’, Modern Philology 96, no. 4 (May 1999), pp. 463–4. A shorter, slightly edited extract appears in C.S. Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 3 (2006), p. 475, misdated 18 May.
p. 476, add entry:
4 October 1955 George Allen & Unwin commission Pauline Baynes to draw, for a newspaper advertisement of The Return of the King, the standard of the King described in The Lord of the Rings, Book VI, Chapter 4, on which ‘a white tree flowered upon a sable field beneath a shining crown and seven glittering stars’.
p. 743, entry for ?Early Summer 1969: Replace with the following, moved to its correct place in the chronology:
9 May 1969 Rayner Unwin writes to Pauline Baynes, proposing that Allen & Unwin publish a poster-map of Middle-earth, with art by Baynes, to compete with a map of Middle-earth issued in the United States (presumably that drawn by Barbara Remington and published by Ballantine Books).
p. 747, add entry:
Between late October or the beginning of November 1969 and November 1970 Tolkien writes a private memorandum including, among other things, notes on the relative heights of Hobbits and of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring.
We made extensive use of these notes in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion (2005), pp. 3–4, 107, 229, 244–5, 265, 272, 447, and 493. Christopher Tolkien had earlier published part of the same material in Unfinished Tales (1980), pp. 286–7.
p. 751, add entry:
Between 11 and 27 November 1970 Tolkien apparently discusses with Rayner Unwin Pauline Baynes’s Map of Middle-earth and the proposed Hobbit poster-map to be drawn by Baynes.
p. 2, entry for 15 November 1892: The Christmas greetings photograph, inscribed and hand-tinted by Mabel Tolkien, may also be seen on the ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Childhood in Birmingham’ page of the Birmingham City Council website.
pp. 687–8, entry for 29 January 1967: Change the date heading to 21 March 1967 and add the contents of the entry to the existing entry for that date, p. 693. Tolkien’s letter to Humphrey Carpenter has been listed for sale by George Houle Autographs on abebooks.com since at least 2001, always with the date ‘29 January 1968’. We knew, however, from other evidence that the year of the letter had to be 1967, and for the sake of its Chronology entry assumed that ‘1968’ was a misprint for ‘1967’ but that the day and month were correct. This too was wrong, as we now see in an eBay listing of the letter by the same dealer, still with the incorrect date in the description but including a reproduction of the typed letter signed which clearly shows that it is dated 21 March 1967.
p. 767, add entry:
28 October 1972 Tolkien is in Cambridge visiting J.A.W. Bennett. While there he autographs a copy of The Hobbit and inscribes it with the address of Bennett's home (10 Adams Road) and the date.
p. 217, entry for 29 June 1938: Add: ‘– At the University of St Andrews, the Faculty of Arts recommends that Tolkien be invited to deliver the Andrew Lang Lecture for 1941. (In the event, Tolkien will be invited to give the 1939 Lecture instead, the original nominees for 1939 and 1940 having declined the honour.)’
p. 222, add entry [REVISED]:
8 October 1938 Andrew Bennett, Secretary of the University Court at the University of St Andrews, writes to Tolkien, inviting him to deliver an Andrew Lang Lecture (i.e. On Fairy-Stories). (In the published Chronology, the lecture is first mentioned in the entry ‘1938–early 1939’.) Tolkien will quickly send a positive reply.
p. 222, entry for 14 October 1938: Add: ‘– Andrew Bennett of the University of St Andrews acknowledges Tolkien’s letter sent on or after 8 October.’
p. 225, entry for 18 January 1939: Add: ‘– Andrew Bennett of the University of St Andrews, having heard nothing from Tolkien since October concerning arrangements for the 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture, writes to him again.’
p. 225, add entry:
1 February 1939 Tolkien replies to Andrew Bennett’s letter of 18 January, suggesting 8 March as the date for his lecture at St Andrews and giving its topic as ‘fairy-stories’.
title-page, verso, 13-digit ISBN: For ‘978-261-10381-8’ read ‘978-0-261-10381-8’.
p. 462, entry for 28 July 1955, l. 7: For ‘Lossarnach, i.e. Italy: Venice and Assisi’ read ‘Lossarnach’, i.e. ‘Italy: Venice and Assisi’’ (three quotation marks added).
p. 779, entry for 8–9 July 1915, l. 8: For ‘fig. 4’ read ‘fig. 45’.
p. 283, entry for 14 November 1944: Add: ‘– At a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society (*Societies and clubs), Tolkien is one of three men proposed for membership.’
p. 287, entry for 20 February 1945: With the addition, above, to the entry for 14 November 1944, delete here, l. 2, ‘(*Societies and clubs)’. Also delete, l. 3, ‘*Father Martin D’Arcy’, who resigned his membership in the Society before Tolkien attended his first meeting on 13 November 1945.
p. 295, add entry:
13 November 1945 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Wadham College by Maurice Bowra, Professor of Poetry and Warden of Wadham. Twelve members are present. Bowra reads a paper on the Provençal poet and troubadour Arnaud Daniel.
p. 299, add entry:
19 February 1946 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Exeter College by R.M. Dawkins. Twelve members and a guest are present. B.H. Sumner, University Lecturer in eastern European history and Warden of All Souls, reads a paper on ‘Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto nell’opera di Dante’.
p. 301, add entry:
28 May 1946 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Trinity College by C.N. (later Sir Cyril) Hinshelwood, Dr Lee’s Professor of Chemistry. Eleven members are present. Professor Alfred Ewert, a scholar of early French literature, reads a paper, ‘Technicalities’.
p. 310, entry for 15 November 1946: Add: ‘– Tolkien hosts a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society at Merton College. Ten members are present. Colin Hardie reads a paper, ‘Virgil in Dante’.’
p. 313, add entry:
18 February 1947 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Magdalen College by Professor A.P. d’Entrèves, the Serena Professor of Italian Studies at Oxford. Eleven members are present. Professor d’Entrèves reads Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII, and Colin Hardie reads a note on Dante’s Matilda.
p. 316, add entry:
27 May 1947 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Wadham College by Maurice Bowra. Thirteen members are present. Professor C.N. Hinshelwood reads a paper on Dante’s use of allegory.
p. 325, entry for 11 November 1947: Add: ‘– Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Exeter College by Professor W.J. Entwistle, a scholar of Spanish and Portuguese studies. Eleven members and a guest are present. Tolkien reads a paper on lusinga, referring to Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto I, and Inferno, Canto XVIII.’
p. 333, entry for 25 May 1948: Add: ‘– Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Magdalen College by Clement C.J. Webb, a philosopher and theologian. Eleven members and a guest are present. The latter, His Excellency the Italian Ambassador, Duke Gallarati-Scotti, reads a paper on Dante’s Pietra poems.’
p. 343, add entry:
9 November 1948 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Magdalen College by Colin Hardie. Nine members are present. C.S. Lewis reads a paper on the imagery of the last ten cantos of Dante’s Paradiso.
p. 345, add entry:
15 February 1949 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Trinity College by Professor Alfred Ewert. Ten members are present. Colin Hardie reads a paper, ‘Dante and the Virgilian Bucolic’.
p. 349, add entry:
24 May 1949 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at All Souls College by Professor E.F. Jacob, a historian. Eleven members are present. Professor Jacob reads a paper on the feudal hierarchy in Dante’s Paradiso.
p. 353, add entry:
8 November 1949 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Exeter College by R.M. Dawkins. Nine members are present. Professor W.J. Entwistle reads a paper, ‘Quante Commedie: The Epistle (X) to Con Grande’.
p. 357, entry for 14 February 1950: Replace with: ‘Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Exeter College by Professor Sir Cyril Hinshelwood. Twelve members are present. Colin Hardie reads a paper on Dante’s interpretation of classical mythology in the Divine Comedy.’ The entry as given in Chronology was based on a handwritten notice of the meeting then forthcoming, retained in the Tolkien Papers at the Bodleian Library. ‘Hushwood’ is a misreading of ‘Hinshelwood’. The corrected entry reflects information given in the Society’s minutes. The location of the meeting was changed from Magdalen College, where Professor d’Entrèves was to be the host. Professor Hinshelwood’s paper was not presented until 19 February 1952.
p. 362, add entry:
23 May 1950 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Keble College by historian J.E.A. Jolliffe. Nine members are present. Colin Hardie reads a paper on Dante’s first mention of Virgil in Canto 25 of La Vita nuova.
p. 370, entry for 8 November 1950: Add: ‘– Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Bailliol College by Sir Maurice Powicke, the Regius Professor of History. Twelve members are present. Powicke reads a paper on the Bull Pastoralis Cura and King Robert of Naples.’
p. 372, entry for 13 February 1951: Add: ‘– Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Magdalen College by C.S. Lewis. Nine members are present. Professor A.P. d’Entrèves reads a paper on Dante’s political theory.’
p. 375, add entry:
22 May 1951 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Wadham College by Sir Maurice Bowra. Ten members are present. Bowra reads a paper on Sordello (in Dante’s Purgatorio). A proposal to increase the number of regular members to fourteen is narrowly rejected. Professor Powicke, having resigned in November 1950, is elected an honorary member.
p. 379, add entry:
13 November 1951 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Exeter College by R.M. Dawkins. Ten members are present. Professor Alfred Ewert reads a paper on Dante’s ‘De Vulgari Eloquentia, l. II, c. 7’. Tolkien offers to entertain the Society at Merton at its next meeting; in the event, it will meet at Magdalen, hosted by Professor d’Entrèves.
p. 383, add entry:
19 February 1952 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Magdalen College by Professor A.P. d’Entrèves. Ten members are present. Professor Sir Cyril Hinshelwood reads a paper on the quality of Dante’s visual imagination. Tolkien again offers to entertain the Society at Exeter College at its next meeting, and this time will do so. It is agreed that no paper would be read on that occasion, but members might produce short notes, and a canto of the Divine Comedy should be read.
p. 384, entry for 27 May 1952: Replace with: ‘Tolkien hosts a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society at Merton College. Ten members are present. Professor W.J. Entwistle reads a note on Dante’s Convivio II.iv, on his Paradiso, Cantos 27, 30, 100, and 114, and on his letter to his patron, Cangrande della Scala on the motion (in medieval astronomy) of the sphere of the fixed stars. Professor A.P. d’Entrèves reads Dante’s Paradiso, Canto XXXIII.’
p. 395, add entry:
10 February 1953 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at All Souls by E.F. Jacob, Chichele Professor of Modern History. Twelve members are present. C.S. Lewis reads a paper, ‘Statius and Dante’.
p. 399, add entry:
26 May 1953 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Magdalen College by C.S. Lewis. Ten members are present. Professor A.P. d’Entrèves reads Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXVIII, and Dr. Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Philosophy at Oxford, reads Dante’s Paradiso, Canto III.
p. 423, add entry:
16 February 1954 Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Trinity College by Professor Alfred Ewert. Nine members are present. Dr. Lorenzo Minio-Paluello reads a paper on the philosophical background of Dante’s Monarchia.
p. 432, entry for 25 May 1954: Add: ‘– Tolkien attends a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society hosted at Keble College by J.E.A. Jolliffe. Eleven members are present. Professor A.P. d’Entrèves reads Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto VIII, and Dr. Lorenzo Minio-Paluello reads from Dante’s Vita nuova.’
p. 449, entry for 15 February 1955: Replace with: ‘At a meeting of the Oxford Dante Society, Tolkien’s resignation is accepted with regret.’
p. 20, entry for Summer 1910, ll. 1–3: Two of Tolkien’s drawings of Whitby, Whitby and Ruins at West End of Whitby Abbey, are reproduced in Artist and Illustrator, figs. 9–10. Another, ‘Sketch of Whitby’, is reproduced in Life and Legend, p. 19.
p. 61, entry for Easter Vacation 1915: In the date heading, for ‘Vacation’ read ‘vacation’.
p. 64, entry for 30 April 1915, l. 4: For ‘Easter Vacation’ read ‘Easter vacation’.
p. 113, entry for Summer 1920, l. 1: For ‘Trywn’ read ‘Trwyn’.
p. 116, entry for March 1921, l. 2: The address ‘5 Holly Bank’, in the Headingley section of Leeds, is given in the University of Leeds official staff list published in 1921. Although Tolkien wrote to Ingrid Pridgeon, in a letter postmarked August 1968, that he ‘lived for a while in Leeds in a Hollin Lane’ (Bloomsbury Auctions, London, sale of 13 March 2008), there is no evidence that this was so. Hollin Lane, in Far Headingley (just north of Headingley proper), connects to Weetwood Lane in which Tolkien’s colleague and mentor at Leeds, George S. Gordon, lived at No. 35.
p. 145, entry for Late March–early April 1928, l. 8: For ‘1928’ read ‘1929’.
p. 146, entry for July–August 1928, l. 10: For ‘The Vale of Tol Sirion’ read ‘The Vale of Sirion’.
p. 178, entry for 9 August 1935, l. 12: For ‘buiness’ read ‘business’.
p. 403, entry for ?August 1953–?first half of 1954: In his introduction to Unfinished Tales Christopher Tolkien comments on the planned index of names in The Lord of the Rings: ‘it seems that my father began to work on it in the summer of 1954, after the first two volumes had gone to press’ (p. 12). We have dated the beginning of this work instead roughly to August 1953, on the basis of Tolkien’s remark to Rayner Unwin on 31 August 1953 that he had found The Lord of the Rings to need ‘the making of a rough index of place-names (and distances)’ (see p. 407). In the present entry, we should have added that the essay The Istari is related by Christopher Tolkien to the unfinished Lord of the Rings index, though it is ‘wholly uncharacteristic of the original index in its length, if characteristic of the way in which my father often worked’ (Unfinished Tales, p. 12). The Istari material, in fact, was not included with the copy of the unfinished index provided us for use when writing The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion.
p. 450, entry for 2 March 1955: Add: ‘– Tolkien writes to Derrick Parnum, belatedly in reply to a letter. He is not concerned that Parnum had omitted his title “Professor” in correspondence, as he has been one for so long that it no longer seems important to him, and until recently in Oxford it was not used as a form of address. Parnum apparently having given the first volumes of The Lord of the Rings as birthday presents, Tolkien comments on presents, mentioning in particular that he had once received a pair of binoculars after making a casual remark about a “blackbird friend”. In regard to The Lord of the Rings, the book was meant primarily as “a good tale of its kind, written first of all for my own satisfaction, there being very little of that kind of literature available, and I need more”. Although it is not an allegory, Tolkien has found that the more one puts into a story “the more capable it becomes of being generally or particularly applied to other matters” (Sotheby’s, English Literature, History, Private Press, Children’s Books and Illustrations, auction catalogue, London, 13 December 2007, p. 230).’
p. 489, entry for 16 April 1956, l. 11 from bottom: For ‘provide a quite a large’ read ‘provide quite a large’.
p. 566, entry for 5 January 1961, l. 7: For ‘probably’ read ‘probable’.
p. 575, entry for 19 May 1961, l. 4: In regard to ‘300 pictures’, according to Cor Blok himself, he painted ‘about 140 pictures’ for The Lord of the Rings (‘Pictures to Accompany a Great Story’, Lembas Extra (2007), pp. 4–15).
p. 581, entry for ?December 1961: According to the artist himself, Cor Blok’s visit to Tolkien took place not at the end of 1961, but by the end of August of that year. On 23 August he visited Rayner Unwin, who made an appointment for Blok to see Tolkien. ‘A selection of my pictures had been forwarded to Tolkien beforehand. All I took with me on that occasion was a small number of Barbarusian miniatures [paintings related to an imaginary country, Barbarusia], to show how it all came about. . . . The interview lasted for about an hour and a half, and the discussion, of course, ran mainly on the subject of illustrations. Tolkien showed me some of his own drawings, and I remember some remarks being made on matters of language’ (‘Pictures to Accompany a Great Story’, pp. 8–9).
p. 584, add entry:
1962 Tolkien and Rayner Unwin assist the artist Cor Blok in arrangements to have some of his pictures shown at Oxford. The plan is ultimately abandoned.
p. 615, entry for 1964: Add: ‘– The Dutch artist Cor Blok writes to Tolkien. As Blok is preparing an exhibition, Taal en Teken (“Language and Sign”), on the use of languages and symbols, he asks Tolkien about the latter’s experiences as an inventor of languages for Middle-earth. Tolkien replies, but only to beg to be excused a longer letter as he is very busy.’
p. 834, l. 6: The title ‘Plan of Shelob’s Lair’ should be in quotation marks. The entry belongs with the list ‘Maps and Plans’ on p. 835.
p. 834, l. 7: The entry ‘Plan of tunnel at Kirith Ungol’ belongs with the list ‘Maps and Plans’ on p. 835.
p. 834, l. 12: For ‘Sketches of Dunharrow’ read (in quotation marks) ‘Dunharrow’.
p. 834, l. 20: For ‘Orodruin, Mount Doom’ read ‘Orodruin, Mt Doom’.
p. 835, l. 10: ‘Plan of Bree’ should be in quotation marks.
p. 835, ll. 13–14: ‘The Earliest Map . . . in The Hobbit’ should be in quotation marks.
p. 835, l. 15: For ‘Sketch-plan of the scene of the Breaking of the Fellowship’ read (in quotation marks) ‘Sketch-plan of the Scene of the Breaking of the Fellowship’.
p. 835, l. 19: For ‘Map of Minas Morghul and the Cross-roads’ read (in quotation marks) ‘Minas Morghul and the Cross-roads’.
p. 835, l. 23: For ‘Map of the White Mountains and South Gondor’ read (in quotation marks) ‘The White Mountains and South Gondor’.
p. 835, l. 17 from bottom: ‘Minas Tirith and Mindolluin’ should be in quotation marks.
p. 835, l. 15 from bottom: ‘Plan of Minas Tirith’ should be in quotation marks.
p. 835, l. 14 from bottom: ‘Harrowdale’ should be in quotation marks.
p. 835, l. 13 from bottom: For ‘Starkhorn, Dwimerberg and Irensaga’ read (in quotation marks) ‘Starkhorn, Dwimorberg and Irensaga’.
p. 842, l. 16: For ‘Beowulf ’ read ‘*Beowulf ’. For ‘Unpublished’ read ‘Unpublished, except for very brief extracts’.
p. 845, l. 18: For ‘p. 169’ read ‘p. 168’. Cross-reference to *Arthur and the Matter of Britain.
p. 846, l. 10 from bottom: For ‘Sir Gawain . . .’ read ‘*Sir Gawain . . .’
p. 856, l. 19: For ‘Tinfang Warble’ read ‘*Tinfang Warble’.
pp. 874–6, list of Translations of Tolkien’s Works:
Add to list of translations:
The Children of Húrin. French.
[ go to home page ]
[ go to addenda and corrigenda page ]