Addenda and Corrigenda to
The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide
Revised and Enlarged Edition (2017)
Vol. 1: Chronology · Arranged by Date

p. 1, entry for January 1870: For ‘January’ read ’29 January’.

p. 1, entry for 1889: For ‘1889’ read ‘22 May 1889’ and relocate entry. Arthur Tolkien sailed on this date for Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province). In line 2 of this entry, for ‘Cape colony’ read ‘Cape Colony’.

p. 1, entry for 21 January 1889: As Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays point out in The Gallant Edith Bratt (2021), on Edith’s birth certificate (reproduced in that book on p. 2) there is only a slash in the box in which her father’s name should be stated. In a footnote on their p. 1, Bunting and Hamill-Keays object to ‘the entry in the Chronology, which states “Frederick” is written, seems to refer to a signature in the Methodist church’s baptismal registry’ on our Chronology p. 2. We make it clear on p. 2, in our entry for 13 February 1889, that ‘the register records . . . father’s name as Frederick’; there is no confusion. In the present entry (21 January) we stated that Alfred Warrillow was Edith’s father because that fact was known, and from this one should not assume that we took the information from Edith’s birth certificate.

p. 2, entry for 13 February 1889: Bunting and Hamill-Keays (The Gallant Edith Bratt, p. 1) suggest that the name ‘Frederick’ in the chapel baptismal registry ‘seems to refer to a signature’ which could belong to one of ‘the principals, witnesses and the officiating clergymen’. We have not seen the physical register, but the corresponding record in the online Gloucestershire Archives (http://ww3.gloucestershire.gov.uk/genealogy) states that the name of Edith’s father was Frederick (‘Frederick Bratt’, presumably on the assumption that Frances Bratt was using a married surname, but Frederick nonetheless).

p. 2, add entry for 22 May 1889, the printed entry for 1889 more precisely dated (see addendum for 1889 above).

p. 2, add entry:

p. 2, entry for 31 January 1892: Holly Ordway has observed that George Edward Jelf ‘provided a solid connection to the Church of England and to one particular strand within it’ as the son of Canon G.E. Jelf, ‘a well-known author of sermons and devotional works and a friend of the great Edward Bouverie Pusey, one of the key members of “the Oxford Movement,” a Catholicizing movement within Anglicanism that featured among its other leading lights John Keble and John Henry Newman’ (Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023), pp. 14–15).

p. 2, add entry:

p. 3, add entry, following that for Autumn 1893:

p. 3, entry for Summer (southern hemisphere) 1893–1894, l. 7: For ‘suffers in the heat’ read ‘suffers from heat or altitude’. His father guessed that either could be true. At 4,577 feet (1,395 metres) above sea level, Bloemfontein nevertheless is below the elevation considered the minimum for a ‘high’ altitude, and its average temperature is moderate. All climate factors are relative, of course, and individuals respond to them differently. Mabel Tolkien thought Bloemfontein a wilderness and waste, hot and dusty, and unlike England’s green.

p. 7, entry for Late 1899 or early 1900: St Anne’s was established by John Henry Newman as a mission church; by the time Mabel and her sons attended services, it was located in a red brick building in the English Gothic style, in a poor district of Birmingham and with a congregation mainly of Irish immigrants. Also associated with the church was Canon Arthur Villiers who wrote articles promoting the Catholic cause. Holly Ordway speculates that ‘Villiers’ newspaper writings might well have caught Mabel’s attention and suggested that St. Anne’s was a place where her inquiry into the faith would be taken seriously’ (Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography, p. 24).

p. 7, entry for Spring 1900: Mabel took instruction in the Catholic faith from an elderly Irish priest, Father John Dowling.

p. 7, add entry:

p. 7, entry for Autumn term 1900, l. 2: For ‘the the’ read ‘the’.

p. 9, entry for 14 April 1903, l. 13: Here we state: ‘The net value of Frances’ estate is £3,797 2s 11d.’ In The Gallant Edith Bratt Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays comment that ‘this figure is about £1,500 less than the £5,269 the estate was valued at after being “Resworn” from the original listing of £4,394. The figure of £3,797 2s 11d may be the result of the 3% death duties, funeral and burial expenses, debts, and/or legal costs. Scull and Hammond give no documentation about or explanation of the source of this lesser amount’ (p. 31). Bunting and Hamill-Keays give good examples of expenses which could reduce a gross value – their ‘original listing’, stated in the probate document as ‘gross value’, i.e. before costs. We did not feel the need to speculate about this, having clearly stated that the lesser figure was a ‘net value’, again as indicated in the document, which itself gives no particulars. The ‘resworn’ amount is presumably a recalculation of the gross value of the estate.

p. 12, entry for 14 November 1904: Later Tolkien wrote that his mother ‘was a gifted lady of great beauty and wit, greatly stricken by God with grief and suffering, who died in youth (at 34) of a disease hastened by persecution of her faith – died in the postman’s cottage at Rednal’ (letter to Michael Tolkien, 18 March 1941, Letters, p. 54). She was worn out, he believed, by ‘the effort to hand on to us small boys [her sons Ronald and Hilary] the Faith’, and ‘died alone, too ill for viaticum’ (letter to Michael Tolkien, 9–10 January 1965, Letters, p. 354). As we note (relying on Humphrey Carpenter’s account in Biography), Father Francis and May Incledon were present when Mabel died. Holly Ordway (Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography, 2023) wonders if, perhaps, Mabel passed away while Mabel’s priest and sister were sleeping, or if it only seemed to Tolkien as an imaginative boy that his mother had been abandoned to her death, or if Tolkien, ‘reflecting on this childhood trauma, was using slightly hyperbolic language to convey his sense of the abandonment of his mother not by her sister May in particular but by her family in general’ (p. 58), there having been nearly a week in which Mabel lay in a coma but, as far as there is any evidence, without other members of her (Protestant) family coming to visit. More helpfully, Ordway explains that Mabel could not receive viaticum (the Blessed Sacrament) because she was unconscious, and therefore not capable of swallowing the Host. She would have received Extreme Unction (preparation for death) as well as a conditional absolution of sins and, finally, the Apostolic blessing.

p. 12, entry for 17 November 1904: Among the Oratory fathers buried in the Bromsgrove cemetery is Cardinal Newman.

p. 12, entry for Late 1904: According to Gerard Tracey (‘Tolkien and the Oratory’, 2011), Father Francis paid Beatrice Suffield £4 16s per month for lodging the boys, and ‘continued to pay varying amounts to her even after the boys had moved on’. Holly Ordway (Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography, 2023) points to this as an example of Father Francis’s characteristic generosity.

p. 13, entry for Autumn term 1905: Many years later, following Tolkien’s death, Bede Harrower recalled him as a fellow pupil in the Fifth Class (though he places the date as 1902/3): ‘Tolkien was a shy boy, but good in Latin and Greek. . . . A difficulty about getting to know J.R.R. Tolkien in schooldays or at Oxford [which Harrower also attended] was that if he played games or swam or dived, he was not very keen on these activities’ – which does not seem to accord with Tolkien’s prowess in rugby. ‘As O.E.’s [fellow Old Edwardians, i.e. alumni of King Edward’s School; Harrower graduated in 1910] Tolkien and I exchanged breakfast or tea invitations sometimes during residence at Oxford, but I cannot remember either one of those occasions.’ Harrower suggests, probably misstating dates again (‘between 1901 and 1904’) that for a time Ronald and Hilary Tolkien were among ‘the “scruffiest” little boys in the School’. ‘I would say’, he continued, ‘that J.R.R. Tolkien was a late starter, or the ugly duckling that became a swan, and throughout most of his career was like Kipling’s “Cat that walked by himself and all things were alike to him”’ (Old Edwardians Gazette, January 1974, p. 32).

p. 22, entry for 2 March 1910, l. 3: For ‘in greater comfort’ read ‘in greater comfort at the home of two elderly family friends, Charles and Anne Jessop, at 2 Lyefield Lawn in the suburb of Charlton Kings’.

pp. 22–3, entry for 11 March 1910: In a letter published in the Old Edwardians Gazette for July 1975, Christopher Wiseman recalled that ‘Tolkien and I seem to have descended to some tomfoolery at that Latin debate, probably in the private language Tolkien had invented on philological principles at the time’. (The Gazette mislabels the School debates described as occurring in 1909.)

p. 23, entry for 26 March 1910: For ‘(Easter Saturday)’ read ‘(Holy Saturday)’. 26 March 1910 was the Saturday before Catholic Easter that year, Sunday 27 March. Holly Ordway (Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography, 2023) reminds us that the Saturday before Easter is properly called Holy Saturday, while ‘Easter Saturday’ is used for the Saturday after Easter, comparable to ‘Easter Monday’ etc.

p. 28, add entry:

p. 36, add entry:

p. 39, add entry:

p. 41, add entry:

p. 43, entry for 20 January 1913: ‘Mr Price’ was possibly H.S. (Harry Sibree, or Sibrey) Price.

p. 43, entry for 1 February 1913: Although the postmark on Tolkien’s card reads 2 February, his handwritten message is dated at its head to ‘Sat’ (Saturday), which was 1 February.

p. 44, entry for 17 February 1913: Add at end: ‘Edith Bratt performs in a programme for the Charlton Kings Habitation of the Primrose League, held at St. Clair–Ford Hall. She plays a pianoforte solo, ‘Valse des fleurs’, presumably Tchaikovsky’s ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ from The Nutcracker.’

p. 44, entry for March 1913: Among notes and drafts for his 1959 valedictory address, Tolkien wrote: ‘I spent far too much of the endowed time assigned to the study of Latin and Greek on the learning, or attempt to learn, any other European language but these two’ (quoted in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2022), p. 24). Garth has suggested, in Tolkien and the Great War and Tolkien at Exeter College, that Tolkien was bored with Classics. In addition to his interest in other languages, Tolkien also spent too much time with extracurricular activities than was healthy for his studies. In both published versions of the valedictory address, he mistakenly says that he first joined the Oxford English School in 1912 (see further, Chronology for 17 April 1913), and admits that he had been ‘up to then an unprofitable exhibitioner [in Classics]; if he learned anything at all, he learned it at the wrong time; I did most of my undergraduate work on the Germanic languages before Honour Moderations; when English and its kindred became my job, I turned to other tongues, even to Latin and Greek . . .’ (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 231).

p. 45, entry for 7 April 1913: ‘Tolkien’s name is in the Second Class’ is redundant, as we said so already in the entry for March 1913.

p. 48, entry for 28 April 1913: Add at end: ‘ – Edith Bratt performs a pianoforte solo in a programme during the annual parish tea of St Mary’s, Charlton Kings.’

p. 48, add entry:

p. 57, entry for 23 February 1914: According to a copy of the invitation to the meeting, a printed form completed in manuscript by Tolkien, public business was to include Mr W.F.T. James proposing to debate the opinion that ‘Mr W.F.T. James is more decorative than Mr C.C. Burdon’.

p. 60, entry for August 1914: Here we should have included information given in our Reader’s Guide entry for Cornwall: that Tolkien and Father Vincent Reade stayed at the home of the priest’s mother. In his Tolkien and the Lizard: J.R.R. Tolkien in Cornwall, 1914 (2021) David Haden states that he has not been able to discover the location of this house, but ‘judging by the topography in Tolkien’s letters they [Tolkien and Father Vincent Reade] were staying in or very near to the village of Lizard itself. A guidebook of the time warns that “the miserable village of Lizard Town is uninteresting”’ (footnote 13). In footnote 14 Haden states that he is unaware of any Mrs Reade listed in the 1911 Census of the Lizard, ‘or [John] Garth would have found her’, i.e. in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020). In the latter work, Garth states that the travellers ‘stayed at a guesthouse named Bermejo. Father Vincent Reade was going to serve mass at a priestless chapel there with the extraordinary name of Our Lady of the Lizard. Father Vincent knew the area well from before his conversion to Catholicism, when he had been curate at Porthleven [a town some thirteen miles north-west of Lizard Town by current roads]’ (p. 62). In regard to Tolkien’s comment to Edith Bratt about ‘weird wind-holes’ and ‘trumpety noises’, Garth suggests that ‘Tolkien had been marvelling over the Devil’s Bellows, described in a contemporary guidebook as “an immense chasm” in the cliffs, into which the sea at high tide “rushes with such impetuosity as to force the water out at an opening above”, making the cavern boom like thunder’ (p. 63).

p. 63, entry for 11 November 1914: For ‘11 November’ read ‘14 November’.

p. 76, entry for ?20 June 1915, l. 5: ‘Sam Browne’ is the name of the kind of belt referred to in this paragraph.

p. 76, entry for 30 June 1915, l. 3: For ‘has to wait’ read ‘will have to wait’.

p. 86, entry for April 1916: As Priscilla Tolkien wrote, her parents

p. 87, entry for ?Late April 1916: For ‘?Late’ read ‘11’, and relocate entry to follow that of 6 April 1916.

p. 87, entry for 3 June 1916: The Plough and Harrow (today the Best Western Plough and Harrow Hotel, built in 1704) is across the road from the Birmingham Oratory.

p. 103, ll.1–2: For ‘[?from matter] near Lichfield Sep[tember] 1915 insp[ired]’ read ‘f[ounded] on matter n[ea]r Lichfield Sep[tember] 1915 Insp[ired]’.

p. 104, entry for End of 1916–first half of 1917: Also written in this period is The Music of the Ainur (previously thought to have dated probably from the first half of 1919).

p. 110, entry for 16 November 1917, ll. 9–11: Delete ‘At some point . . . medical care’. This belongs more properly, and is repeated, in the entry for c. 22 November 1917.

pp. 110–11, entry for c. 22 November 1917: Tolkien will later describe his financial situation during the war in a letter to his son Michael (then a soldier),:

p. 112, entry for Late July–August 1918: This was a serious loss in weight for a man of slim build, caused by the gastritis reported on 29 June, accompanied by vomiting and diarrhoea. (Reports preserved at the Public Record Office, i.e. between medical authorities and the War Office, do not indicate Tolkien’s actual weight before, during, or after his illness.)

p. 114, entry for ?January–?June 1919, ll. 1–2: Delete the reference to The Music of the Ainur, now thought to date from the period of the end of 1916 and the first half of 1917.

p. 120, add entry:

p. 121, entry for 1 October 1920: Tolkien will later describe his post at Leeds as his first ‘real permanent job’ (letter to Michael Tolkien, 6–8 March 1941, Letters (2023 edn.), p. 74), thus discounting his time on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary.

p. 130, add entry:

p. 134, entry for 15 May 1924: Add following the first sentence: ‘Sisam replies on the same date that Tolkien is wise to give up the Chaucer, which is needed and should not be delayed.’

p. 139, l. 12: For ‘“aegrotat’’ read ‘“aegrotat”’ (double quotation mark at right as well as left).

p. 141, entry for 1 October 1925: Tolkien will later write, in regard to his first Oxford chair, that ‘no amount of merit not accompanied by extraordinary chances and luck would have landed me here as Oxford’s youngest professor in 1925’ (letter to Michael Tolkien, 6–8 March 1941, Letters (2023 edn.), p. 74).

p. 143, entry for ?1926–?1930: Probably in this period Tolkien also makes a prose translation of the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon.

p. 147, add entry:

p. 147, entry for 21 October 1926: Delete; this duplicates the correct entry for 21 October 1927.

p. 152, entry for 21 December 1927, l. 2: For ‘Aslaug’ read ‘Áslaug’.

p. 153, add entry:

p. 155, add entry:

p. 161, add entry:

p. 170, entry for September 1931, ll. 7–9: Tolkien had promised Father Francis Morgan that his sons, if any, would be educated at The Oratory School. Michael and Christopher Tolkien followed their brother John to the School; their sister Priscilla could not do so, as the School was only for boys.

pp. 170–1, entry for 4 October 1931: The Franciscan friary was known as Greyfriars (*Oxford and environs) from this point, after the original Greyfriars church and priory founded in Oxford in 1224.

p. 171, add entry:

p. 171, entry for 30 October 1931: Add at end: ‘ – R.W. Chapman of Oxford University Press writes to George S. Gordon, asking if Gordon could complete the ‘Clarendon Chaucer’, Tolkien having been dilatory in his contribution to the project.’

pp. 175–6, entry for Late August–?early September 1932: Priscilla Tolkien tells us that Carola Wrenn, aged twelve and a keen swimmer, was sucked among the rocks by an undertow, but Tolkien caught her by the hand in the nick of time.

p. 178, entry for ?1933–?1936: In the heading, for ?1936 read ?August 1937. In the same line, delete ‘a substantial part of’. We have a separate entry for August 1937 for Tolkien writing that date on a page of notes for the poem, and evidently meant the period ?1933–?6 to cover the writing of most of The Fall of Arthur, and the ‘August 1937’ entry to indicate that Tolkien continued to work on it in 1937 – awkward.

p. 178, add entry:

p. 179, add entry:

p. 183, entry for 28 November 1933, l. 4: For ‘the Spirants’ read ‘the Spirants and W’.

p. 185, add entry:

p. 186, add entry:

p. 189, entry for 1935, ll. 3–4: At this time, Rye St Antony School was located at 84 Woodstock Road in North Oxford. It had been founded in 1930 by Oxford teachers Elizabeth Rendall and Ivy King, after visiting St Anthony’s of Padua Church in Rye, East Sussex. The School would move to Headington in 1939, at the outbreak of war and the end of Priscilla’s time there. Priscilla reportedly flourished at the School, while her close friend *Elizabeth Jennings did not.

p. 190, add entries:

p. 191, add entry:

p. 199, add entry:

p. 199, entry for 10 August 1936: The complete letter has been published in the 2023 edition of Letters. Christopher is on holiday in Exeter, Devon, with family friends Dorothy and Charlie Moore. Tolkien misses him; he had travelled to London with Christopher, from whence Christopher left for Devon, while Tolkien spent time with another family friend, John Binney. Priscilla has caught a cold from her brother John. Phoebe Coles, the Tolkiens’ cook and house maid, returned to their home this morning.

p. 199, entry for ?Summer 1936: In the Old Edwardians Gazette for 18 December 1936, Tolkien is said to be devoting his Leverhulme Research Fellowship to ‘Old and Middle English with Special Reference to the Western Alliterative Tradition’ (p. 4).

p. 199, add entry:

p. 200, add entry:

p. 205, add entry:

p. 208, entry for 15–?17 April 1937: The walking holiday in the Quantocks is mentioned by Humphrey Carpenter in The Inklings, p. 57, where he dates it to April 1937 on the basis of a postcard Tolkien wrote to his daughter Priscilla. The text of what we presume is the postcard in question, or else another postcard Tolkien sent during the holiday, is printed in the 2023 edition of Letters on p. 19, noted as postmarked April 1937. According to an editorial note, it was sent by Tolkien from Dunster in Somerset (north-west of the Quantocks). It is in fact addressed to his sons as well as Priscilla; Tolkien hopes to see them the following day. He has just arrived, and looked at the local church but not the castle (Dunster Castle, now a country house and National Trust property); he is writing from the Yarn Market, a picture of which was evidently on his postcard, as he has marked an X at his location. He will probably stay the night at Minehead (a town and rail terminus not far to the west of Dunster) and catch a train home from there.

p. 210, entry for June 1937: Add at end: ‘ – Perhaps during this month, Tolkien sees a film adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, which had its U.K. release on 17 June 1937.’

p. 211, entry for ?9 July 1937, l. 2: For ‘at far’ read ‘as far’.

p. 215, entry for 27 September 1937: Add following the second sentence: ‘Sometime this term, he gives two talks at the School on the dawn and development of poetry in England, illustrating them on the chalkboard with examples of Old English.’

p. 215, add entry:

p. 216, entry for 2 October 1937: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien, Edith, and Priscilla take a car ride, to Abingdon, Culham, Appleford, Wallingford, Shillingford, Dorchester, and Nuneham before returning to Oxford. – Later, Tolkien writes to his son Christopher, telling him of the car ride and advising him that he will have much to get used to at the Oratory School. Tolkien plans to visit the School on 14 October.’

p. 220, add entry:

p. 220, entry for 27 November 1937: Change the date to 22 November 1937 and relocate.

p. 225, entry for January 1938, l. 3: For ‘Lovelace Society’ read ‘Lovelace Club’. We seem not to have noticed, when looking at archival sources at Worcester College, Oxford, that the official name of the organization was ‘Lovelace Club’. Tolkien consistently called it ‘Lovelace Society’ in his letters, and even in the club’s minutes recording Tolkien’s appearance on 14 February 1938 the secretary calls it ‘the society’.

p. 227, entry for 14 February 1938, l. 2: For ‘Lovelace Society’ read ‘Lovelace Club’. The story will be recorded in the club’s minutes as ‘The Legend of Worming Hall’.

p. 228, entry for 5 March 1938, l. 2: For ‘return them to him’ read ‘return them to Tolkien’.

p. 230, entry for 25 May 1938: The Old Edwardians Gazette for 30 June 1938 notes that Tolkien succeeded, as a Governor (on behalf of the University of Oxford) of King Edward’s School, Birmingham, Dr. A.E.W. Hazel, Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, who resigned due to ill health.

p. 235, entry for 26 September 1938: Move to p. 236, before entry for 28 September.

p. 242, add entry:

p. 257, add entry:

p. 260, entry for 18 October 1940: Add at end: ‘ – Several bombs fall in Oxford just before 11.00 p.m., one near the Tolkiens’ home.’

p. 260, add entries:

p. 262, add entry:

p. 263, entry for 20 January 1941: For ‘informs Tolkien, the governor for King Edward’s School appointed by Oxford University,’ read ‘informs Tolkien’, and for ‘governors’ read ‘Governors’. He was evidently still on the governors’ mailing list despite his resignation from the board of Governors on 1 January.

p. 263, add entries:

p. 263, entry for 6–8 March 1941: In speaking of love, Tolkien recommends ‘the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament’ (Letters, p. 53). He also remarks on his fears about the war, the burden of which has fallen heaviest on Michael among the Tolkien children – i.e., John was exempt from military service as a priest, Christopher was then still too young to enlist, and Priscilla was a young girl relatively safe at home (barring bombs or invasion). Michael is afraid that he will not survive; but ‘none of us may’, writes his father, ‘not even Priscilla. I often have a sudden horrible fear that we [the Tolkien family] shall all perish’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 71). Tolkien’s long letter is published at greater length in the second edition of Letters.

p. 263, entry for 12 March 1941: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to his son Michael about disagreements between a man and his wife or lover.’

p. 270, entry for ?April 1942: In private correspondence, Andrew Ferguson has suggested that Tolkien wrote Leaf by Niggle in 1938–9 as he later recalled, but completed it only in April 1942.

p. 275, entry for 1943: Relocate ‘Ronald and Edith Tolkien are almost the only guests at the wedding of Gabriel Turville-Petre and Joan Blomfield, both former B.Litt. students of Tolkien’ to a separate entry on this page, dated 7 January 1943.

p. 278, add entries:

p. 279, add entry:

p. 279, entry for 8 September 1943: Add at beginning: ‘Tolkien writes to Christopher. He is organizing the next Royal Navy cadets course, and has no time to write The Lord of the Rings. He remarks that apples are plentiful, and pears will soon be in season; he asks Christopher if he would like some when he reaches his next billet.

p. 279, add entries:

p. 280, entry for 3 November 1943: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Christopher, sending him a pipe and commenting on war and character.’

p. 280, add entry:

p. 280, entry for 10 November 1943: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Christopher Tolkien. He is busy setting Section Papers in addition to his regular programme, but heard Williams read from his new novel that morning.’

p. 281, entry for 9 December 1943: Change date heading to 9–10 December 1943.

p. 281, add entries:

pp. 281–2, entry for 6 January 1944: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Christopher, in reply to a letter received this morning. Christopher had leave at home during the holidays, returning to his duties on 1 January.’

p. 282, entry for 8 January 1944: Add at end: ‘Tolkien “can’t write Russian and find[s] Polish rather sticky yet. I expect poor old Poptawski will be wondering how I am getting on, soon [i.e. with reading Polish]. It will be a long time before I can be of any assistance to him in devising a new technical vocabulary!!!” (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 97).

p. 282, entry for 19 January 1944: Replace the second sentence with: ‘Between now and the end of February, Tolkien writes four more letters to Christopher.’

p. 282, replace entry for ?24 or 25 January 1944 with:

p. 284, add entries:

p. 284, entry for 1 April 1944: King Edward’s School had invited Old Edwardians (alumni) to visit on this date to see the School’s new buildings, since it had moved from New Street. According to a report by the School, some 200 accept the invitation; Tolkien will write to his son Christopher on 3 April that ‘there were about 120 Old Boys (out of 220 asked): many of my vintage’ (Letters, p. 70). A speech is given by the headmaster, Charles Morris, and attendees are able to tour the buildings, though their architect, Holland Hobbiss, is absent due to illness. On returning from Birmingham that evening, Tolkien’s train is forty-five minutes late, and as it is raining in Oxford he is forced to wrap his new hat in a newspaper while riding home on his bicycle.

p. 284, entry for 3 April 1944: Add at beginning: ‘At 10.30 a.m. Tolkien attends Mass at St Gregory’s. There he reads the Matthew Passion, which he finds a strain even with the aid of a throat lozenge. His friend Gwyn Jones has invited him to visit in Aberystwyth during Easter Week, but Tolkien cannot do so.

p. 285, add entry:

p. 285, entry for ?7 April 1944: Remove the query from the date heading. Tolkien reads the Passion again at early Mass. Partly due to chores, he does not get to church again, for a brief visit, until after 11.00 a.m.

p. 285, entry for 8 April 1944: Change date heading to 8–10 April 1944. A long extract from this letter is published in the 2023 edition of Letters.

p. 285, add entries:

p. 288, entry for 6 May 1944: Add to the first part: ‘Tolkien also comments the war in relation to The Lord of the Rings: “We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is . . . to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs. Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Orcs on our side.” In the first war, his need to express his feelings and to rationalize them “generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes”, i.e. “The Silmarillion” (Letters, p. 78). He notes that Christopher is studying for an exam, and recalls that when he took exams to become a Signals officer he ‘was astounded at the utter lack of experience in that difficult art of examining in the people who did it’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 113). Now such examinations include psychological elements which Tolkien finds questionable.’

p. 293, entry for 23 June 1944: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien receives a royalty cheque for nearly £140 for The Hobbit, and a letter from Stanley Unwin telling him that the R. Unwin in Tolkien’s Naval Cadets course is the Rayner Unwin who approved the manuscript of The Hobbit as a boy.’

p. 292, entry for 27 June 1944: In his letter to Christopher, Tolkien writes that he is exhausted by the day, perhaps so much that he calls it Wednesday (27 June was a Tuesday), or it may be that he began to write the letter late on Tuesday and it was now the next morning.

p. 293, add entry:

p. 293, entry for 7 July 1944: Before writing his letter on the typewriter, Tolkien writes another airgraph to Christopher, giving him news of C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams.

p. 295, add entry:

p. 300, entry for 1 November 1944: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Christopher. He describes Rayner Unwin and his elder brother, and his father Stanley who looks like one of Tolkien’s dwarves. He sends Christopher best wishes for his twentieth birthday on 21 November.

p. 301, add entry:

p. 302, entry for 24 November 1944: Tolkien’s General Board meeting occurs between 2.00 and 3.15, and is ‘very stuffy’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 146). He returns home at 3.40, exhausted until tea.

p. 302, entry for ?27 November 1944: Replace with the following, relocated in chronological sequence, and delete the associated note on p. 850:

p. 302, add entry:

p. 302, entry for 29 November 1944: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes a second letter to Christopher (the main letter of the day, in addition to the one sent with two typescripts), giving news of the day before. He has at last discovered that 29 November is C.S. Lewis’s birthday.

p. 302, add entry:

p. 302, add entries (in part, see above, addendum for ?27 November 1944):

p. 303, add entry:

p. 304, entry for 28 December 1944: Add at end: ‘The weather in Oxford has been extraordinarily cold, though displays of hoarfrost are ‘one of the most lovely events of Northern Nature’ (Letters, p. 107).’

p. 304, add entries:

p. 304, entry for 9 January 1945: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Christopher, still taken with the story of Bernadette. Today he had a pleasant fifty minutes with C.S. and Warren Lewis, Dr Havard, and Charles Williams.

p. 304, add entry:

p. 304, add entry:

pp. 305–6, entry for 13 February 1945: Add at end: ‘ – The day is rainy. Tolkien ‘arrived to lecture, soaked to skin, laden with a mass of wet fish, late and hot . . . and the hall got slowly so dark I could not see’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 161). At noon he meets C.S. Lewis and other friends for beer.’

p. 306, add entries:

p. 309, add entry:

p. 312, add entry:

p. 312, entry for 11 October 1945: Add: ‘ – Tolkien thanks the Director of the Students Department of the British Council, for his reply of 4 October in regard to Simonne d’Ardenne, and hopes for a favourable decision.’

p. 318, add entry:

p. 324, entry for 3 September 1946, l. 13: For ‘Lovelace Society’ read ‘Lovelace Club’.

p. 333, add entry:

p. 360, add entry:

p. 372, entry for 13 July 1949: Tolkien’s letter of this date was addressed to Ronald Eames.

p. 373, add entries:

p. 373, entry for 9 October 1949: As soon as term began, Tolkien left Oxford – we do not know where he went – and did his best to not see correspondence for a fortnight. He returned home on 28 October.

p. 374, add entry:

p. 376, entry for 31 December 1949, ll. 11–12: The parenthetical phrase ‘(but did not’) is ours, but derives from Tolkien’s opinion expressed in a part of his letter to Stanley Unwin of 24 February 1950. See Letters, pp. 135–6, new edn. pp. 192–3, and our addendum to 24 February 1950 below.

p. 387, add entry:

p. 390, add entry:

p. 395, add entry:

p. 397, entry for 2 June 1951: An extant invitation card for the Ad Eundem dinner of Saturday, 2 June (evidently 1951) indicates that the Club was to dine with Lord David Cecil at New College, Oxford, at 7.30 p.m. Replies are directed to Tolkien at Merton College. Another card, blank except for the title ‘Ad Eundem Club’, contains, in Tolkien’s handwriting, notes on the previous meeting: Sir Richard Livingstone (classical scholar and educationist) was invited to remain as a non-resident member of the Club on his retirement; and two vacancies were announced, to be filled from a list of three candidates (H.V.D. Dyson of Merton; Isaiah Berlin of All Souls, philosopher and history of ideas; and historian Edgar Trevor Williams of Balliol), the election to be held at the meeting of 2 June.

p. 401, entry for ?Late 1951: Tolkien’s long letter to Milton Waldman is published in its fullest form in the 2023 edition of Letters, pp. 201–33.

p. 404, entry for 15 January 1952: Line 4, for ‘Lecturership’ read ‘Lectureship’ (the former is a common Oxford form, the latter used in Glasgow for the W.P. Ker Lecture series). The committee agreed to invite, should Tolkien not accept the honour, either Professor Sigurður Nordal of Reykjavik University or Professor Fernand Mossé of the Collège de France. Among the committee members was Tolkien’s former Oxford colleague Norman Davis.

p. 405, add entry:

p. 412, add entry:

p. 416, add entries:

p. 417, add entry:

p. 418, entry for 30 March 1953: In his letter to Norman Davis of 11 March, Tolkien wrote of a pending ‘two-day move 30–31 March’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 242).

p. 420, entry for 15 April 1953: Tolkien spoke in the Lecture Theatre of the New Chemistry Building, at 3.00 pm. Admission was by ticket only.

p. 420, entry for ?16 or 17 April 1953: Change heading to ‘18 April 1953’. In his letter to Norman and Lena Davis of 21 April, Tolkien will write that he ‘did not arrive home till about 7.30 p.m. on Saturday’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 246).

p. 421, add entries:

p. 423, entry for 22 June 1953: The Controller of the BBC Third Programme was P.H. Newby; see Letters (2023 edn.), p. 248.

p. 439, entry for 2 December 1953: Add to existing text: ‘Tolkien expects that a large part of the support he receives for The Lord of the Rings, if any, will be from Catholic circles. He hopes to be able to send Murray proofs for him or others to look at in advance of publication. Katharine and Austin Farrer presently are reading a proof of the first volume; he has just received galleys of the second.’ Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to ‘Mrs’ F.L. Perry, thanking her for a letter. She had enjoyed reading The Hobbit, and apparently was looking forward to The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien comments that he has been very busy in 1953, and often ill that October and November, which have contributed to a delay in the publication of the first volume of his new work. He apologizes that The Lord of the Rings includes so much ancient history and geography, and that he has no proof copy to spare. He warns that it will take a very long time to read.’

p. 441, entry for 10 December 1953: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Katharine Farrer, commenting on the ‘awful’ broadcast of the first part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 259). He had not been able to go to its rehearsal due to illness, but thinks he had some effect on the second and third parts. He has a set of galley proofs of The Two Towers for Mrs Farrer to read.’

p. 460, add entry:

p. 460, entry for 7 August 1954: Add after first sentence: ‘He has had to ‘endure’ Lambert’s review of The Fellowship of the Ring in the Sunday Times, ‘just the sort of thing I feared, and fully expected, since piecemeal publication so increases the risk of it’ – presumably, the risk of a critic misunderstanding The Lord of the Rings as a ‘bizarre enterprise’ before being able to read the whole of it (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 274). Since Lambert’s review was published on 8 August, it seems that Tolkien received an advance copy.’

p. 460, add entries:

p. 463, entry for 18 September 1954: Add at end: ‘He was against publishing The Lord of the Rings piecemeal. ‘The work is certainly not a “trilogy”’ as Allen & Unwin called it ‘while my eye was off the ball, being in Ireland and immersed in exams’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 278). He is grateful to Brogan for mentioning the poems in The Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien has seen only one review which mentions them.

p. 463, entry for 20 September 1954: Add: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Miss F.L. Perry, replying to a letter of 10 August. He is pleased that J.W. Lambert, reviewing The Fellowship of the Ring for the Sunday Times (8 August 1954), was ‘enthusiastic and civilized’ compared with, especially, Peter Green in the Daily Telegraph. He cannot complain about some reviews, such as that by C.S. Lewis in Time and Tide, though none mentions that his book contains verse. He hopes that Miss Perry will write to tell him what she thinks of the remainder of The Lord of the Rings once it appears, and warns her that she cannot have an inkling of what to expect, as at the point she has reached (the end of Book II) Tolkien himself had none. The process of writing The Lord of the Rings was for him more like deciphering the disordered pages of a history than of ‘invention’.’

p. 463, entry for 22 September 1954: Change date heading to ’23 September 1954’. The date is incorrect in the original edition of Letters.

p. 465, entry for 11 October 1954: Add: ‘ – The folklorist Katharine M. Briggs writes to Tolkien. Having read The Fellowship of the Ring, she is held in suspense to learn what happens next in the story. She queries Tolkien’s implication that Bilbo thought of the Ring as a gift, which seems to her unlikely. (The reference is to Bilbo’s first account of his encounter with Gollum, retold in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings. Briggs may not have been aware that this was the story in the first edition of The Hobbit, before its revision of 1951.) She also seems to have misinterpreted Tolkien’s description of Bilbo’s escape from Gollum as indicating that the hobbit ran with his hands in his pockets, which Briggs says one would never do when pursued by ‘a furious adversary’ (‘An Unexpected Discovery’, University College London blog, 23 November 2023).

p. 465, add entry:

p. 465, entry for 21 October 1954: Add: ‘ – Katharine Briggs writes to Tolkien. She has purchased a new edition of The Hobbit and agrees that the full account it contains of Bilbo’s escape from Gollum is clearer than Tolkien’s summary in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings (see entries for 11 and 13 October 1954).’

p. 468, entry for 22 November 1954: Add: ‘ – Tolkien writes to F.L. Perry in reply to a letter, following publication of The Two Towers. He was anxious that the second volume of The Lord of the Rings not disappoint, especially with the return of Gandalf to the story, and its decrease in ‘hobbitry’ and ‘elvishness’, but reviews have been good, even by Edwin Muir in the Observer, who was less patronizing than in his review of The Fellowship of the Ring. Tolkien has been unable to include in his book as much history of Middle-earth as he has written or sketched, but stray information appears here and there. He comments about the amount of verse included in The Lord of the Rings, and mentions other poems, such as Aotrou and Itroun.’

pp. 478–9, entry for 12 May 1955: We neglected to cite our source for our brief quotations from Tolkien’s letter to Rayner Unwin, the catalogue of the 19 March 2014 sale by the London auctioneer Bonhams. The complete letter has since been reproduced online for the 23 September 2023 sale by RR Auction, Boston, Massachusetts.

p. 479, entry for 14 May 1955: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien replies to a letter from a Mrs Frost in Ravello, Italy, who had praised The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. The Return of the King is now in press, delayed by Tolkien’s promise of subsidiary materials (i.e. the Appendices). He hopes that Mrs Frost will not be disappointed by the final volume. Given literary comparisons she has made to The Lord of the Rings, he suggests that it is as if Homer had left extensive commentary on The Iliad and The Odyssey as well as the poems themselves.’

p. 483, entry for 28 June 1955: For ‘Presumably Tolkien travels by train to London’ (l. 1), read ‘Tolkien travels to London, presumably by train’. Add: ‘ – Tolkien writes to F.L. Perry, recounting his visit to London the previous Friday (24 June). Final proofs of The Return of the King were supposed to reach him on 28 June but have not. He has asked for an extra set of page proofs to send to Miss Perry. He will need to lend another to Terence Tiller to use in preparing his BBC scripts. Tiller wants information about how to pronounce names and differentiate characters. Tolkien finds him very pleasant, and has fewer misgivings about his production of The Lord of the Rings than he had with Rayner Heppenstall in regard to The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son on the BBC the previous year. It was a bad production, Tolkien thinks, and Heppenstall was rude (see Chronology entry for 13 December 1954).’

p. 487, entry for 28 July 1955: Add at end: ‘ – W.H. Auden writes to Tolkien, praising The Return of the King which he has read three times, but questioning why no one in The Lord of the Rings seems to care for domestic animals or pets other than horses and dogs, and wondering what happened to the wizard Radagast, who is not met again after The Fellowship of the Ring. Auden’s laudatory review of The Return of the King will appear in The New York Times Book Review for 22 January 1956.’

p. 500, entry for 8 September 1955: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Katharine Farrer. He is tired, brought on by his holiday in Italy rather than relieved. Needing manual work, he has shifted and cleaned furniture. But he must write his O’Donnell Lecture soon. Like Farrer, he is very fond of the Welsh people, and has tried many times to master their modern colloquial language, with little result, chiefly from ‘lack of opportunity’. ‘It is not really any harder than French (and much better spelt)’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 327).’

p. 500, entry for 9 September 1955, l. 2: For ‘Ad Eundem club’ read ‘The Society’.

p. 506, entry for 2 December 1955: Tolkien’s letter to Elizabeth Jennings should be included in the following entry, for 3 December 1955. The misplacement is our fault, but it is interesting to note that Tolkien first wrote the date on the letter as 2 December, then emended the ‘2’ to ‘3’. He either mistook the day, or began the letter on the 2nd and completed it on the 3rd.

p. 508, add entries:

p. 509, entry for 1956: Add: ‘ – Tolkien gives his wife Edith a copy of Blue Moon in Portugal by William and Elizabeth Younger (1956).’

p. 512, entry for 18 March 1956: Mr Gamgee’s letter to Tolkien was dated 15 March. It is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 95.

p. 515, entry for 3 April 1956: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Hugh Brogan, noting that he will be in at least all afternoon and will be delighted to see Brogan on a visit.’

p. 516, entry for 12 April 1956, l. 1: For ‘Mr Earle’ read ‘Mrs Earle’.

pp. 516–17, entry for 16 April 1956: Tolkien’s final letter to H. Cotton Minchin, of which the text in Letters is a draft, was sent on this date; since he would have written the draft earlier than the 16th, this entry should more logically begin ‘Tolkien sends a letter in reply to one from a reader, H. Cotton Minchin’, and might have been headed, rather, ‘April 1956’, but we needn’t relocate the entry on that account.

In addition to the content described in the existing Chronology entry, the 2023 edition of Letters includes comments on Tolkien looking ahead to retirement from Oxford in July 1957, when he could then apply himself ‘to the one branch of history and philology which I am especially devoted to’. But ‘in lieu of a pension my University has merely elongated my professorial life’, and his colleagues and critics are pressing him about unfinished professional work. ‘They cry: “now we know what you have been doing all these years! Why the edition of this, and the commentary on that, and the grammars and glossaries, have all remained “promised” but unfinished. You have had your fun and you must now do some work (!).” So stricken in conscience, and caught in several actually binding commitments, I find myself shorter of time than ever’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 355; compare Tolkien’s letter to Anne Barrett, ?Late June or July 1956).

Evidently in response to a question about maps in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes that ‘maps take a great deal of time. It is, of course, impossible to make a map to an “invented” story; the story must be made to a map’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 355; compare Tolkien’s letter to Naomi Mitchison, 25 April 1954). He desires to put in order his tales of the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth, and regrets that they could not have been included with The Lord of the Rings, which they would have ‘lightened’. Even so, his book is selling well, considering its price. ‘H.M. [Her Majesty’s] Treasury will naturally pocket most of the proceeds (unearned), since the fact that I have laboured and sacrificed other emoluments for 18 years unremunerated in the production of this work moves them not at all’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 357).

He comments on the names Cotton and Minchin, and on his character Sam Gamgee, ‘a reflexion of the English Soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 358).

p. 524, entry for 6 November 1956: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to his son Michael. He complains about deficiencies in the Catholic Church, but it is the only one there is, and in the last resort it is only a tabernacle for the Blessed Sacrament. ‘For myself I find that only concentration on the immutable, indelible, and unsulliable sanctity of the Real Presence keeps one in hope and charity’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 366). Many in Oxford are outraged about ‘Suez’, i.e. the international conflict in Egypt centred on operation of the Suez Canal, rather than about ‘Hungary’, i.e. the violent Soviet intervention in that country. He refers to agitation to remove the British Prime Minister (Anthony Eden, who resigned in January 1957), and admits a selfish concern. ‘A Socialist government will pretty well reduce me to penury on retirement! As it is socialist legislation is robbing me of probably ¾ of the fruits of my labours, and my “royalties” are merely waiting in the bank until the Tax Collectors walk in and bag them’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 367). And yet, he has had a fan letter from a worker in the Siemens factory who has read The Lord of the Rings and was most interested in the ‘elvish’ parts. Tolkien advises Michael not to worry about his son, Michael George’s performance in English in school. Tolkien himself loathed it: pupils, he thinks, should not be made to write essays, but taught elementary metres and set to write poetry. And if they like facts, why not teach them linguistic history, and that of the English language in particular?’

p. 524, add entry:

pp. 525–6, entry for 14 December 1956: Priscilla Tolkien recalls that when her father went to Deddington he also visited the secondary school. There he was entertained to tea by the domestic science department, and brought home some of their cakes. On Tolkien’s visit, see further, Morgan Thomsen, ‘Professor Tolkien’s Whimsical Talk’, Mythoi, 30 April 2012.

p. 526, entry for 16 December 1956: Add after second sentence: ‘– Tolkien sends a postcard to B.T. Britten. He does not have time to reply to Britten’s letter at length, but agrees with whatever comment Britten made about a portrait of King Richard III at King’s College, Cambridge.’

p. 527, entry for 15 January 1957: Relocate ‘Tolkien is interviewed . . . then smudge it.’’ to 12 September 1956. The date we used for the taped interview was that entered by the Library of Congress for their copy of the recording, either in error or for an administrative purpose.

p. 533, entry for 3 May 1957: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien replies to a letter from Charles Blackwood, who has asked about the runes used in The Hobbit. Tolkien explains that these were not his invention, but a selection of old English runes applied to Modern English. He advises that the Angerthas described in The Lord of the Rings are more adaptable to modern English spelling (as opposed to sounds).’

p. 540, entry for 11 September 1957: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to the author Clemence Dane, to thank her for her generosity and sympathy during the International Fantasy Award luncheon. He wishes that they could have had more conversation.’

p. 546, entry for 19 December 1957, replace existing addendum: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to Patricia Kirke. He has been ‘harassed’ (busy) all year, and cannot cope with the correspondence he receives.’ with ‘– Tolkien writes to Patricia Kirke. He has been ‘harassed’ (busy) all year, and cannot cope with the correspondence he receives. He seldom leaves home except on urgent business, mainly in regard to his wife’s health. Among other matters, he is concerned to keep track of translations of The Lord of the Rings, and seems never to have a moment to give to the next ‘great work’ (i.e. ‘The Silmarillion’).’

p. 555, entry for 26 May 1958: For ‘26 May’ read ‘25 May’. The event was on Whitsunday, the 25th. It has been suggested that the television interviewer on this occasion was rude to both Tolkien and Coomer, hence the former’s remark, written on a label sent to Coomer to place in his copy of The Lord of the Rings (see entry for 1 June 1958), about ‘suffering shared’. See further, Christina Scull, ‘Sophisticated Tolkien or, The Integrity of the Book’, Tolkien Collector 23 (July 2000).

p. 561, entry for 24 September–7 October 1958, ll. 7–8: In his letter to Marjorie Incledon of 23 October, Tolkien will note that ‘three good wallops of Irish whiskey soon mitigated’ his lumbago (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 410).

p. 562, add entries:

p. 567, entry for 4 February 1959: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Alex Jones. He still wishes to be concerned with The Jerusalem Bible when he retires, though work may be frustrated by domestic matters.’

p. 568, add entry:

p. 568, entry for ?Mid-March–25 March 1959: In his letter to Michael of 4 March, Tolkien hoped to leave for Bournemouth on 6 March.

p. 572, add entry:

p. 580, add entry:

p. 587, add entry:

p. 590, entry for 14 July 1960: For ’14 July’ read ’13 July’. Walter Hooper’s Lewis Companion and Guide, probably our source, gives (in different parts of the book) both 13 and 14 July as the date of Joy Lewis’s death, but Lewis’s letters leave no doubt that his wife died (very late) on the 13th.

p. 596, entry for 1961: Lewis’s nomination was made in a letter dated 16 January 1961. The present entry should be combined with the existing entry for 16 January 1961 on p. 597.

p. 599, entry for 13 February 1961: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Alex Jones. He will send Jones his translation of the Book of Jonah for The Jerusalem Bible as soon as possible. He has been busy writing notes on Ker’s introduction to Ancrene Wisse, with a deadline of the end of the month.’

p. 612, entry for November 1961: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to his granddaughter Joan Anne (Joanna), complaining about changes to Oxford, once ‘a little old university town’, now sprawling, ‘jammed with noise and smell’ and ‘hideous buildings’, though improved by having cleared away ‘a slum-fringe’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 438).’

p. 615, entry for 28 December 1961: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien replies to a letter from a young fan from Lancashire, Christopher Howard, who has heard The Hobbit read aloud. He comments that he has written other books with Hobbits (the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings), with Bilbo himself though not as a chief character. These are expensive, Tolkien warns, but can be found at a public library; some libraries, Tolkien hears, keep several copies to satisfy demand. The work begins with comical Hobbits but turns grim and frightening, making the dragon Smaug of The Hobbit seem almost harmless. Tolkien adds that it was cold in Oxford the previous night, as cold as in Sweden, and freezing the present day: he put water out for the birds at half past ten in the morning, in bright sunshine, and it was soon frozen.’

p. 620, entry for 26 February 1962: Add at beginning: ‘Tolkien writes to P.C. Buiter in reply to a letter. Buiter has expressed pleasure at reading Tolkien’s work, presumably The Lord of the Rings, and evidently has asked about obtaining a copy of The Hobbit. Tolkien informs him that a cheap edition of The Hobbit has been published by Puffin books. – ’

p. 626, entry for 18 July 1962: Add after the first sentence: ‘He apologizes for not replying to her letter at once; he has been kept busy by fan mail, as well as enquiries by Edmund Fuller, who intends to devote a chapter of a book to Tolkien (Books with Men behind Them, published later in 1962; other chapters are concerned with C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams).’

p. 632, entry for 9 November 1962: Line 11: For ‘Allen & Unwin. Rayner Unwin’ read ‘Allen & Unwin. Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin’; line 16, For ‘Dictionary’ read ‘Dictionary]’.

p. 634, entry for 16 December 1962: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Austin and Katharine Farrer. He has ‘derived profit and encouragement’ from a booklet on the Rosary Austin gave him. He began to use the Rosary after hearing Msgr. Ronald Knox say that he personally did not like the Rosary, but felt that Our Lady did.’

p. 642, add entry:

p. 645, add entry:

p. 650, add entry:

p. 652, entry for 6 June 1964: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to Susan Parman of Yellow Springs, Ohio, acknowledging receipt of a tape recording (Parman had set some of Tolkien’s poems to music) and lamenting that he did not then have a machine for playing it.’ See further, Sue Parman, ‘A Song for J.R.R. Tolkien’, Antioch Review (Winter 2015), pp. 34–44.

p. 655, add entry:

p. 657, add entry:

p. 660, add entry:

p. 676, entry for 12 September 1965: Also in his letter to Richard Plotz, Tolkien comments on the legality and ethics of Ace Books’ edition of The Lord of the Rings, and complains that they are ‘putting it about’ that their edition was ‘pioneering’ and that they had offered Tolkien an honorarium to which he had not replied. He has never received such an offer, or any communication, nor has he even been sent a complimentary copy of the edition. The need to revise The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, due to copyright concerns, was ‘dropped on me out of the blue like a bomb’ and ‘had to be carried on under severe pressure of time’. For The Lord of the Rings he has corrected minor errors and mended some discrepancies, and has added an index he hopes is complete but has few references. The Hobbit as published by Ballantine Books has not been changed; its cover, with a lion and emus, is ‘lunatic’. Tolkien has made a minimal revision of the text for the Longmans edition in Britain, and it may be used in a reprinting of the paperback, ‘if any is called for’ (Letters (2023 edn.), pp. 502, 503).

p. 677, add entry:

p. 685, add entry:

p. 692, entry for 11 March 1966: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Nan C. Scott. Ace Books have at last contacted him directly, a polite offer of a four per cent royalty on all copies of their edition of The Lord of the Rings sold, with an undertaking not to reprint once their stock is exhausted. Tolkien accepted these terms, but notes that ‘this situation would never have been reached if it had not been for the pressure exerted by friends and well-wishers’ such as Scott (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 514).’

p. 693, add entry:

p. 706, entry for 9 August 1966: Add at end: ‘ – Possibly late this day, Tolkien writes to Rayner Unwin about his interview with Philip Norman. He now wishes that he had followed his instinct and refused it, and that he could be relieved of its publication. ‘I have not been disturbed by reviews, pro (often silly), or anti- (often interesting) but this kind of slush I find disheartening and undermining’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 517).’

p. 707, add entry:

p. 711, entry for 14 October 1966: Tolkien also wrote, concerning Errantry, that he had been given a version of the poem through ‘oral transmission’ (cf. his letter to Rayner Unwin, 22 June 1952), one ‘curious feature’ of which was that it preserved the word sigaldry.

p. 711, entry for 18 October 1966: Add at end: ‘Tolkien writes to Alex Jones. He has received a copy of The Jerusalem Bible, more than he deserves ‘for the little work that I did’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 518). Attendance at Mass is now ‘an exhausting exercise in patience and humility (in which I am deficient)’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 519). He is irritated by Ronald Knox’s translation of the Bible he hears used in services.’

p. 713, entry for 26 October 1966: Tolkien’s reading was announced as ‘a fairy story with some preliminary remarks’.

p. 718, add entry:

p. 726, add entry:

p. 755, entry for 3 March 1968: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien continues his unfinished letter to Christopher of 8 February 1964, which he still does not send, offering rambling thoughts on sex and marriage (‘Humanity hovers perpetually between disgust and lust’), the attitude of the Christian Church towards lust, and ‘the dark thread of body-hating’ (Letters (2023 edn.), pp. 481, 482).’

p. 758, entry for 13 April 1968: Correct ‘13 April’ to ‘15 April’.

p. 768, add entries:

p. 768, entry for 8–20 September 1968: Tolkien’s surgeon is Robert Duthie, Nuffield Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Oxford.

p. 774, entry for 29 December 1968: Add at beginning: ‘Tolkien writes to his son Michael. Priscilla visited her parents at Christmas. Tolkien is still easily tired, and has not managed to reorder his rooms and books, while work is ever more pressing. Sales of The Lord of the Rings in paperback have been ‘colossal’, and those of The Hobbit have also ‘rocketed’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 557). With this income, Tolkien is now faced with a large tax bill, after having spent much of his surplus on the Poole bungalow. Edith, he thinks, was affected by extra burdens placed on her by his accident. – ’

p. 777, add entries:

p. 786, entry for ?12 (received 13) April 1970: For ‘?12 (received 13)’ read ‘13’. Tom Shippey has confirmed that Tolkien’s letter is dated 13 April.

p. 787, add entries:

p. 788, entry for 24 October 1970: Tolkien will draft a reply to the Princess in January 1971.

p. 790, add entry:

p. 792, entry for 10 June 1971: Mrs Robertson’s given name is Phyllis (see Letters, 2023 edn.).

p. 792, entry for 17 July 1971: Add: ‘Tolkien sends thanks to A.I. Mackay of Canberra City, Australia, in reply to a long letter and chart concerned with dating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on the basis of words for armour (see entry for 20 June 1971). He notes that he completed his work on a translation of the poem but set it aside in order to finish writing The Silmarillion.’

p. 794, entry for 16 October 1971, l. 2: For ‘Inokunia’ read ‘Inokuma’.

p. 795: The two entries for 28 October 1971 should be combined.

p. 795, entry for 8 November 1971: Add at beginning: ‘Tolkien writes to his son Michael. He gets little time to work on ‘The Silmarillion’, and if he were to bring it to publication the tax bill would be ruinous. United Artists are paying for film rights to his works in instalments, but since they are presently ‘broke’ there is no immediate prospect of a film being made – Tolkien is pleased.

p. 796, add entries:

p. 800, add entry:

p. 801, add entry:

p. 802, entry for 6 June 1972: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Sir Alan Bullock, Vice Chancellor of Oxford University, expressing gratitude at the honour given him on 3 June.

p. 802, entry for 13–20 June 1972: During this time Tolkien stayed with his son John at the Redesdale Arms, Moreton-in-Marsh.

p. 803, entry for 27 June 1972: Tolkien is treated to a luncheon at Rules restaurant in Covent Garden.

p. 803, add entry:

p. 805, add entries:

pp. 807–8, entry for 23 November 1972: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Donald Glover, who will be visiting England for research. For personal reasons, Tolkien will not discuss the work of C.S. Lewis or his relations with him. Glover has written speaking kindly of Tolkien’s work; Tolkien replies that he needs all his time and energy to try to complete it.’

p. 808, add entry:

p. 809, add entry:

p. 809, addendum for 24 January 1973: Add at end: ‘Because of Edith’s death and his return to Oxford, Tolkien’s books and files are in confusion, and he is only now able to work again on The Silmarillion. Lanier has noted (presumably from references in appendices to The Lord of the Rings) that those legends are ‘largely mythological, mostly grim, and without any tinge of comedy’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 600).’

p. 809, add entry:

p. 810, add entries:

p. 812, entry for 14 June 1973: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien replies to a Mr. Tolkin, who has written to express pleasure in reading his books. Tolkien regrets that he cannot meet him in Oxford, and remarks that ‘Tolkin’ is probably in origin the same as ‘Tolkien’. He thinks that some Tolkiens, tired as he is himself in seeing the name spelled Tolkein, must have dropped the e to make it more English. He has also seen the shortened form of name in Ireland.

p. 838, notes entry for ?1926–?1930, l. 1: For ‘Sigriður Þórarinsson’ read ‘Sigriður’.

p. 845, notes entry for 14 February 1938, ll. 4, 11: For ‘Lovelace Society’ read ‘Lovelace Club’.

p. 846, notes entry for 27 March 1939: In the published On Fairy-Stories Tolkien remarks that ‘the roof of Bletchley Station’ was not more ‘real’ to him ‘than the clouds’, and its ‘bridge to platform 4’ was ‘less interesting than Bifröst guarded by Heimdall with the Gjallarhorn’ (Tree and Leaf (1988), p. 57). In a draft of the essay, Tolkien wrote of Paddington Station, changing the location to Bletchley for print. In her note ‘The Dragon and the Railway Station’ (2023) Verlyn Flieger suggests that this change was connected with Tolkien’s ‘own travel history’, positing that he was thinking of Bletchley Station, through which one reached Bletchley Park, having been enrolled in a course pursuant to joining the Government Code and Cypher School (as the code-breaking operation was called at the time of the Second World War). As we note in this Chronology entry, Tolkien did take such a course, but it was in London, not in Bletchley Park, to which the GCCS moved only later that year. Tolkien probably would not have had any knowledge of the latter location, and if for some reason he had subsequent dealings with the operation there, he would have been obliged to keep them confidential under the Official Secrets Act. More prosaically, Bletchley Station was the midpoint of the railway linking Oxford and *Cambridge, which Tolkien would have used when examining the Cambridge *Ancrene Wisse manuscript for the Early English Text Society.

p. 849, notes entry for ?April 1942: A date of 1942 for the origin of Leaf by Niggle seems confirmed by doodled writing by Tolkien within the second manuscript of the story, which includes ‘1942’ and ‘Java’, the latter perhaps referring to the Battle of Java, fought from 28 February to 12 March 1942.

p. 14, entry for Spring and summer terms 1906: Tolkien is also in Section II for English.

p. 15, entry for Autumn term 1907: Will Sherwood, quoting from reports of Board of Education inspectors, speculates that Tolkien in 1907 followed the lead of boys in the First Class at King Edward’s School in 1905 and 1906, who wrote essays on Patriotism and ‘took a rather provincial patriotic tone about England, as if there were no other countries in the scale of civilisation’ (‘Tolkien and the Age of Forgery: Improving Antiquarian Practices in Arda’ (2020) , p. 5).

p. 53, entry for Michaelmas Term 1913, ll. 1–2: In ‘Tolkien and the Age of Forgery: Improving Antiquarian Practices in Arda’ (2020), pp. 7–8, Will Sherwood includes details from notes Tolkien took in Nichol Smith’s lectures. (Sherwood’s emphasis is on mentions of James MacPherson, author of Ossian, and Thomas Chatterton.)

p. 85, entry for 3 February 1916, ll. 9–10: Although much of this quotation is in Biography, p. 86, we quoted directly from the Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, and our citation should have been to that source. It will be seen that Carpenter edited Smith’s letter, omitting without ellipses the sentence ‘Death is so close to us . . .’ and Smith’s advice that Tolkien publish his poems (‘Make haste . . .’).

p. 86, entry for 31 March 1916, l. 1: For ‘rejects’ read ‘reject’ (treating Sidgwick & Jackson as a corporate plural entity).

p. 114, entry for 19 November 1918, l. 1: For ‘St John’s’ read ‘St John’.

p. 114, add entry:

p. 156, add entry (text moved from entry for 1929):

p. 158, entry for 1929, ll. 2–4: Delete ‘Hilary Tolkien . . . Ronald and Edith’ (moved to new entry for 5 July 1928).

p. 305, entry for 13 February 1945, l. 5: For ‘impossible from him’ read ‘impossible for him’.

p. 311, entry for 2 June 1945: Tolkien’s correspondent was Brian Gilmore Maegraith (1907–1989), a native of Australia who went to Magdalen College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1931. He became a medical fellow and tutor in physiology at Exeter College, Oxford, a lecturer in pathology, and dean of the Oxford faculty of medicine. In 1944 he was appointed chair of tropical medicine at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Maegraith is said to have distributed among his friends a collection of his poems and short stories, which he wrote as ‘Patrick Gilmore’.

p. 360, l. 14 from bottom: For ‘Homeward Bound’’ read ‘‘Homeward Bound’’ (i.e. add an initial quotation mark).

p. 381, l. 16: For ‘was been sent’ read ‘has been sent’.

p. 406, entry for 27 May 1952, l. 3: For ‘Paradiso, Cantos 27, 30, 100, and 114’ read ‘Paradiso Canto XXVII, lines 30, 100, and 114’. Chapter 4 of the second treatise of the Convivio and the twenty-seventh canto of the Paradiso are concerned with the heavens and their order (within the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic model, with a central Earth).

p. 426, entry for 5 August 1953, l. 2: For ‘calligraphic’ read ‘typescript’

p. 499, entry for 14 August 1955, l. 13: For ‘finds’ read ‘find’.

p. 523, entry for 19 September 1956, l. 2: For ‘The Two Towers’ read ‘The Two Towers’.

p. 537, add entry:

p. 540, entry for 26 September 1957, l. 4: For ‘preferable’ read ‘preferably’.

p. 542, entry for 17 November 1957, l. 1: For ‘Professor’ read ‘Przemysław’. Łukasz Neubauer points out in ‘The “Polish Inkling”: Przemysław Mroczkowski as Tolkien’s Friend and Scholar’, Mythlore 39, no. 1, whole no. 137 (Fall/Winter 2020), p. 155, n. 27, that Mroczkowski was not made a full professor (at Jagiellonian University) until 1967.

p. 546, entry for 19 December 1957: Add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to Patricia Kirke. He has been ‘harassed’ (busy) all year, and cannot cope with the correspondence he receives.’ [Replaced in addenda and corrigenda for 12 June 2024.]

p. 548, entry for 20 February 1958, l. 2: For ‘of German Hobbit’ read ‘of the German Hobbit’.

p. 570, entry for 6 April 1959, l. 9: For ‘a error’ read ‘an error’.

p. 583, entry for 21 January 1960, l. 2: For ‘Rings’ read ‘Ring’.

p. 595, l. 1: For ‘Professor’ read ‘Przemysław’.

p. 606, entry for 16 May 1961, l. 2: Delete ‘asked’.

p. 610, entry for ?Early October 1961, l. 7: For ‘proportion’ read ‘proportion)’.

p. 617, final line: For ‘Oxford’ read ‘Oxford]’.

p. 698, entry for 10 May 1966, l. 2: For ‘look at’ read ‘look at it’.

p. 799, entry for ?Mid-March 1972, l. 10: For ‘1 Merton’ read ‘21 Merton’.

p. 810, entry for ?Late April 1973, l. 7: For ‘send’ read ‘sends’.

p. 844, entry for 16 January 1936: This entry is in the wrong location; it should precede that for 8 December 1936.

p. 3, entry for 1895: Arthur Tolkien was not sure if it was the heat or the altitude of Bloemfontein which disagreed with Ronald. Arthur and Mabel planned that Arthur would join his wife and sons in Birmingham in time for Christmas, then all would return to Bloemfontein the next year.

pp. 3–4, entry for Beginning of April 1895: For ‘Beginning of April 1895’ read ’29 March–20 April 1895’. According to John Garth, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020), the Guelph left port in the evening of 29 March, sailed for two weeks along the west coast of Africa, then made three stops in three days, at Tenerife, Madeira, and Lisbon, before arriving at Southampton at 7.00 p.m. on 20 April.

p. 11, entry for 27 April 1904: Edwin Neave lived at 20 St Catherine’s Terrace, Hove.

p. 17, entry for Summer term 1909, l. 1: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’ (with an apostrophe; the latter form is used in the King Edward’s School Chronicle, and presumably therefore authoritative; see l. 6 of this entry).

p. 18, entry for 7 July 1909, l. 4: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 18, entry for 27 July–4 August 1909, l. 2: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 22, entry for 18 February 1909: For ‘1909’ read ‘1910’.

p. 24, entry for 28 July–6 August 1910, l. 2: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 24, entry for Autumn term 1910, l. 3: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 29, entry for 15 March 1911, l. 1: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 30, entry for Summer term 1911, l. 2 from bottom: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 30, entry for 15 June 1911, l. 1: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 31, entry for 21 June 1911, l. 2: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 31, entry for 2 July 1911, l. 2: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

pp. 33–4, entry for August–early September 1911: Replace the heading with ?Late July–early September 1911. See note, pp. 820–1.

p. 34, add entries:

p. 34, entry for End of the second week in October 1911, ll. 7–8: Family history to the contrary, Tolkien’s rooms were not in the ‘Swiss Cottage’. John Garth has examined the records and can find no mention of Tolkien in that building, but he is duly recorded in the ledgers for staircase no. 8 for 1911–12 and no. 7 for 1912–13 (see p. 41).

p. 34, add entry:

p. 35, add entry:

p. 36, entry for 28 November 1911, l. 2: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 36, add entry:

p. 39, add entry:

p. 41, entry for Michaelmas Term 1912, l. 1: Delete ‘within “Swiss Cottage”’.

p. 43, add entries:

p. 49, add entry:

p. 53, entry for 3 November 1913: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Edith about his experience taking the oath to become a reader in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. (For the previous two years, he had used the library at Exeter College or his personal collection.) He was received better than he expected, without the rudeness he says other applicants have been given. The Radcliffe Camera, then the location of the Bodleian Public Reading Room, is “an awesome and splendid place’ with ‘wonderful manuscripts and books” (quoted in Maker of Middle-earth (2018), p. 152).’

p. 56, add entry:

p. 57, add entries:

p. 59, add entries:

p. 60, entry for August 1914: According to John Garth, Tolkien and Father Vincent Reade stayed at a guest house named Bermejo in Lizard Town. Father Vincent ‘was going to serve mass at a priestless chapel there with the extraordinary name of Our Lady of the Lizard’. He ‘knew the area well from before his conversion to Catholicism, when he had been curate at Porthleven’ (The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020), pp. 62–3).

p. 61, add entry:

p. 61, entry for 11 October 1914: Tolkien writes to Edith about conditions in Oxford. He joined the Officer Training Corps one day after he returned to the university, where (as Catherine McIlwaine has written, Maker of Middle-earth (2018), p. 139) his college was empty, the Examinations Schools had been converted into a military hospital, and wounded soldiers filled the streets. He was issued a uniform, and would then spend part of his time drilling, going on field days, and attending lectures.

pp. 61–2, entry for Michaelmas Term 1914: According to a manuscript different from the one mentioned here, in addition to his coursework Tolkien is scheduled for drill with the Officer Training Corps Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9.00 to 10.00 a.m. and Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday from 2.00 to 4.30 p.m. Tolkien entered into this timetable the lectures on the Volsunga Saga in ink as from 5.00 to 6.00 p.m. on Thursday, but in pencil as from 2.00 to 4.00. There is no mention in this other manuscript of lectures on Welsh by Rhys.

p. 62, add entry:

p. 62, entry for Mid-October 1914–June 1915, ll. 4–5: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officer’. In the Companion and Guide we were not consistent in writing the name of the Corps (or that of the Officers’ Training Corps, thus, of King Edward’s School, Birmingham). The current name of the Corps has the apostrophe, and Oxford University's own website uses the apostrophe when referring to the Corps in the First World War. The apostrophe is also present with the name in various print and online references. Corps records for 1914–15 in the Bodleian Library use ‘Officers Training Corps’, plural and without an apostrophe, on printed orders, but elsewhere ‘Officer Training Corps’ (singular) or ‘Officers’ Training Corps’. Then there are other references, including John Garth in Tolkien and the Great War, Malcolm Graham in Oxford in the Great War (2014), and Catherine McIlwaine in Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (2018), which prefer ‘Officer Training Corps’. We have had to make a choice, and decided to follow the latter form (singular, no apostrophe).

p. 62, entry for c. 23 October 1914: For ‘c. 23’ read ‘22’.

p. 65, entry for December 1914, l. 9: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officer’.

p. 66, entry for 25 January 1915, l. 8: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officer’.

p. 66, add entry:

p. 71, entry for 3 May 1915: William Hunt’s service was also known as the Oxford Copying Office. (This appears not to be the same as the Academic Copying Service cited later in the Chronology, which was located at 21, The Turl in Oxford.)

p. 72, add entry:

p. 76, entry for 28 June 1915, l. 3: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officer’.

p. 76, entry for 30 June 1915, l. 1: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officer’.

p. 77, entry for 9 July 1915, l. 7 from bottom: For ‘de Parys’ read ‘De Parys’.

p. 80, entry for 14 September 1915: Add at end: ‘ – Edith writes to Tolkien, declaring A Song of Aryador her favourite and wondering how Tolkien can compose poetry in camp.’

p. 85, add entry:

p. 111, add entry:

p. 120, entry for June 1920, ll. 3–6: Tolkien’s application to Leeds must predate Henry Bradley’s letter of recommendation for his candidacy, written on 7 June.

p. 120, entry for June 1920: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien receives two guineas for writing a report on a book on Chaucer’s predecessors, which has been submitted to Oxford University Press. This was probably Medieval Skepticism and Chaucer: An Evaluation of the Skepticism of the 13th and 14th Centuries of Geoffrey Chaucer and His Immediate Predecessors by Mary Edith Thomas, not published until 1950, and not by Oxford University Press.’

p. 125, add entry:

p. 137, add entry:

p. 141, entries from 30 or 31 August 1925 through Mid-September 1925: Properly, we should have included an endnote for these, which describe the Tolkien family’s holiday in Filey, to repeat the argument for dating we made in our introduction to Roverandom. Tolkien had written in his diary, months after the fact, that the visit to Filey occurred from 6 to 27 September. The first date is recorded as a Saturday, but in fact was a Sunday. Since John Tolkien recalled seeing the full moon shining upon the sea, we noted that event on 2 September as the date of the nearest full moon; and if that was correct, Tolkien’s belated diary entry was not. We felt on firmer ground recording the severe storm that struck Filey on 5 September, which was reported in newspapers, and that too was earlier than 6 September. We fitted in other events around these in our Chronology. In The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020) John Garth, attempting to fit the events of the holiday within the dates Tolkien recorded, suggests that the great storm ‘seems to be [on the date] 19 September, when “wind rose to gale force on exposed parts of the southern and eastern coasts”’ and heavy rain fell on Filey, and that the moon on 6 September was ‘still near enough full’ (p. 192, n. 45). But the storm of 5 September notably caused destruction of a sort recalled by John Tolkien (speaking to us over dinner), reported in newspapers, and described in Roverandom, while John’s vivid memory of the moon seemed to us to require it to be more than ‘near enough full’.

p. 160, add entries:

p. 163, entry for April 1930: The British Library now indicates the recording date of ‘At the Tobacconist’s’ to be July 1929.

p. 179, add entry:

p. 197, entry for 13 May 1936: Correct date to 18 May 1936 and relocate entry following that for 17 May 1936.

p. 228, entry for 5 March 1938: Add: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Ferris Greenslet at the Houghton Mifflin Company. He is sorry that the publisher did not select Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves for the American edition of The Hobbit, the artist having caught the scene closely. (In fact, Bilbo is shown arriving in sunlight, but in the story he arrives at night. Tolkien evidently means that he caught the spirit of the event.) – Tolkien attends the annual dinner of the Mermaid Club in Oxford. The menu includes Saumon Côlettes Meunière and Faisan Rôti.’

p. 235, entry for 31 August 1938, l. 13: This appears to be the earliest public reference to the title of the Hobbit sequel. In the Marquette University Tolkien papers there is a manuscript leaf with the title The Magic Ring, but this is struck through and replaced with ‘? The Lord of the Rings’. On the same sheet is a manuscript note by Tolkien, ‘Prisca [Priscilla] & Chris [Christopher] say The Lord of the Rings’. See Catherine McIlwaine, Maker of Middle-earth (2018), pp. 330–1.

p. 240, entry for 2 February 1939: By now, following on his reference to ‘The Lord of the Ring’ (sic) on 31 August 1938, in writing about his sequel to The Hobbit Tolkien uses The Lord of the Rings.

p. 254, entry for April 1940: Probably during this visit to Somerset, Tolkien stops at Wells, where he sees the astronomical clock in the cathedral and the swans trained to ring a bell for food. This will inform his 1963 poem Rosalind Ramage.

p. 268, add entries:

p. 295, add entry:

p. 316, entry for 20 January 1946: J.M. Ryan (‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Formal Lecturing and Teaching at the University of Oxford, 1929–1959’, p. 57) notes that Tolkien ‘encouraged’ the thesis of K.M. Briggs of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Folk Lore in Jacobean Literature, begun in Hilary Term 1946 but supervised by Mary Ethel Seaton, Fellow and Tutor at Lady Margaret Hall.

p. 372, entry for 22 June–5 July 1949: One of the papers Tolkien set with Professor Diarmuid Murphy is concerned with Shakespeare: how he creates atmosphere in his plays, particularly King Lear; the character of Ophelia in Hamlet; and the creation of Historical Drama within the Elizabethan tradition. Another paper asks questions about John Milton (and the theme and scope of Paradise Regained versus Paradise Lost), Gorboduc as a stage play, and the Jacobean dramatist John Webster.

p. 376, entry for 31 December 1949, final two lines: Delete ‘(but did not)’, and see further, addendum for pp. 379–80.

p. 377, entry for Early January 1950: For ‘Early January 1950’ read ‘4 January 1950’.

pp. 379–80, entry for 24 February 1950: Possibly from a desire to conserve space, we omitted from this letter – but they are published in Letters, pp. 135–6 – Tolkien’s comments on the letter from G.E. Selby received by Stanley Unwin and mentioned in his letter of 31 December 1949 (Chronology, p. 376): ‘I cannot imagine and have not discovered what Mr Selby was referring to. I have, of course, not written an “Authentic history of Faery” (and should not in any case have chosen such a title); nor have I caused any prophecy or rumour of any such work to be circulated. . . . It seems hardly likely that he can have come across some literary chat . . . in which somebody has referred to my Silmarillion (long ago rejected, and shelved).’ But Timothy Fisher has reminded us that Tolkien referred in his letter to Selby of 14–15 December 1937 (Chronology, pp. 221–2) to ‘a complete & heroic history of the Elves’ he had written and offered to Allen & Unwin, i.e. ‘The Silmarillion’. This is undoubtedly what Selby was referring to in his letter of 31 December, and Tolkien also undoubtedly (and not surprisingly) forgot after twelve years that he had written to Selby about a ‘history’. It was of course Selby who made it ‘authentic’ and ‘of Faery’. Our comment for 31 December 1949 (p. 376, now emended) that Tolkien ‘did not’ write such a history was based on his own comment to Unwin on 24 February.

p. 394, add entry:

p. 456, entry for 1 June 1964: For ‘1964’ read ‘1954’.

p. 468, add entry:

p. 481, add entry:

p. 487, entry for 28 July 1955: Add at end: ‘ – W.H. Auden writes to Tolkien, commenting that it was an unforgettable experience for him, as an undergraduate, to hear Tolkien recite Beowulf. “The voice was the voice of Gandalf”’ (quoted in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 92).’

p. 507, entry for 8 December 1955, l. 8: Add after ‘p. 229).’: ‘He hopes that To the Chapel Perilous is selling well, and makes a comparison with Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Both books, he points out, contain anachronisms, which he does not like, preferring that satire arise from material rather than being inserted; but then there are umbrellas in the Shire. Whereas Mark Twain was vulgarly romantic, Mitchison, Tolkien feels, undermines or transforms her Arthurian subject (she tells the main events of the Grail story by means of reporters working for the Camelot Chronicle and the Northern Pict).’

p. 509, add entry:

p. 510, entry for 14 January 1956: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien replies to a fan letter from Godfrey Nicholson, Conservative Member of Parliament for Farnham, who has invited him to dine in the House of Commons. Praise, such as Nicholson has sent on completion of The Lord of the Rings, is ‘a comforting antidote to the pains of certain kinds of rather patronizing reviews or the sneers of those who dislike the “noble” (especially in women) . . .’ (quoted in Peter Harrington, London, Catalogue 147, November 2018, item 172). Tolkien suggests that they meet in London in the first week of February. (We have no evidence that they met or dined, in February or otherwise.)’

p. 520, add entry:

p. 522, entry for 26 July 1956: Tolkien rewrote his letter to Miss Burn, at a much shorter length, before sending it on 22 September, having apparently misplaced it. In the final letter he comments that he would need an autobiography to explain how The Lord of the Rings grew, presumably meaning that it could not be done except at great length and probably with reference to the long history of ‘The Silmarillion’.

p. 525, entry for 8 December 1956: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to a Mr Roberts (possibly A.F. Roberts) in reply to a letter. He explains that he is busy with work (at Oxford) and does not see any hope of preparing the “Silmarillion” legends for publication before autumn 1957. He is doubtful of their reception since they have no hobbits and are not set in the “every-day”; the story of Aragorn and Arwen in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings gives some idea of the earlier stories.’

p. 540, entry for 16 October 1957: John M. Bowers recounts in Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer (2019) recollections of Tolkien by V.A. Kolve (Bowers’ American doctoral adviser). ‘He well remembers the ritual for relieving shyness on both sides when he arrived for these sessions [with his B.Litt. supervisor] at eleven o’clock and Tolkien would ask, “Do you think it’s too early for gin?” Two glasses, neither very clean but each with a splash of gin, relaxed them both and moved the conversation forward.’ Tolkien gave Kolve ‘rolls of handwritten notes’ he thought his student might find useful. ‘One-on-one, in the intimate setting of a supervision, he was generous and could be quite wonderful’ (pp. 10, 11).

p. 549, entry for 22 February 1958: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Anthony D. Wood, who seems to have asked to meet Tolkien in the company of David A. Smith (later the author of British Bee Books, 1500–1976), presumably for tea. Tolkien would like to meet them, but will be visiting his wife in hospital  every day at tea-time for what he expects will be the immediate future.’

p. 558, entry for ?Late August–?early September 1958, l. 1: For ‘sends writes’ read ‘writes’.

p. 622, entry for 1 May 1962, l. 2: For ‘read though’ read ‘read through’.

p. 645, add entry:

p. 646, entry for 18 December 1963: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Jonathan Hepworth, who has sent him a card with an illustration of the destruction of Mount Doom. Tolkien describes his unused dust-jacket designs for The Lord of the Rings, and replies to Jonathan’s message in runes with one of his own. Tolkien also writes a covering letter to Jonathan’s father.’

p. 661, entry for 5 or 6 January 1965: Iris Murdoch’s letter is dated 2 January; see Maker of Middle-earth, p. 98.

p. 684, l. 5 from bottom: For ‘1982’ read ‘1983’.

p. 693, add entry:

p. 741: The two entries for 28 August 1967 should be a single entry.

p. 741, add entry:

p. 746, entry for 24 November 1967: Terry Pratchett’s letter to Tolkien is dated 22 November; see Maker of Middle-earth, p. 103.

p. 750, entry for 1968: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien is photographed at the Hotel Miramar by John Loengard.’ In his book As I See It (2005), in which his portrait of Tolkien appears (p. 148), Loengard wrote that Tolkien was ‘stuffy’ about having his picture taken. After lunch they went to Tolkien’s ‘workroom’ on the top floor of the hotel under the eaves, which was so sparsely furnished that Loengard found it uninteresting, and could manage only ‘a basic headshot’. Loengard did not admit that he had tried to read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings but did not like them.

p. 765, add entry:

p. 778, l. 13: For ‘Sotheby’s’ read ‘Christie’s’.

p. 778, entry for 10 April 1969: Extracts from what appears to be Tolkien’s reply to the Mroczkowska daughter (Maria Anuncjata Mroczkowska) were published in Tygodnik Powszechny in 1973 (‘Uczoność a wyobraźnia w Oxfordzie’), translated into Polish by Prof. Mroczkowski, and re-translated into English on the Tolkniety website in April 2020. Ms. Mroczkowska evidently asked Tolkien about writing The Lord of the Rings, and his reply was similar to others he had written. He did not intend the work consciously to be a summary or examination of English culture, and did not deliberately model the work on any literary genre, but calls it a heroic romance. He does not have an analytical or allegorical mind. He recalls that from the age of seven or eight he had two dominant interests, elves and orcs, in which was the embryo of The Lord of the Rings (this seems to be a correct re-translation from the Polish text, but we wonder if something was not lost in the original translation into Polish, as there is no suggestion of these interests, at least stated in this way, in any other statement by Tolkien or biographical source).

p. 784, entry for 25 November 1969: Add at end: ‘ – In the afternoon, Father Louis Bouyer visits Tolkien and Edith.’

p. 790, add entry:

p. 795, add entry:

p. 795, entry for ?Early November 1971: For ‘?Early November 1971’ read ‘?Late October 1971’.

p. 800, entry for 27 April 1972: Add at end: ‘ – Tolkien writes to Lord Halsbury, describing his meeting with the Queen at Buckingham Palace during the award ceremony in March.’

p. 803, add entry:

p. 810, add entry:

pp. 820–1, note for August–early September 1911: Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Currie propose in their Tolkien’s Switzerland: A Biography of One Special Summer (2019) a detailed itinerary of Tolkien’s visit. They assume that he began to pack for the trip on 21 July, and left on his journey with fellow travellers from the Brookes-Smiths’ home at Hurst Green on 27 July, immediately after 26 July when he is known to have been in Birmingham. They conclude that it was ‘not possible’ for the party to travel to Innsbruck before reaching Switzerland, as Colin Brookes-Smith recalled, because, in the authors’ view, there would not have been enough time to do so. They suggest that Colin, twelve years old in 1911 and recalling the visit after a great distance of time, confused his family’s 1911 trip to Switzerland with earlier visits (he himself admitted that he was not certain on all points). In general, Lewis and Currie describe the party’s itinerary according to assumptions of travel time (and that Sunday was always a day of rest), the sights tourists typically saw in 1911, and many features the authors see reflected in Tolkien’s fiction. They have attempted to follow the Brookes-Smith party’s route in Switzerland themselves, or rather the route they conclude that the party most likely took. In their proposed timeline, the travellers returned to England on 12 September, with the following two days devoted to rest at Hurst Green. Much of the book is conjecture, with many suggestions as to what Tolkien and company ‘would have’ done, or ‘possibly’ or ‘probably’ did.

Lewis and Currie do, however, locate Tolkien precisely on two dates, for each of which his name appears in a guest book. That of the Ober Steinberg Berg-Gasthaus in the Inner Lauterbrunnenthal, south of Interlaken, dated 5 August 1911, records only the five Brookes-Smiths, Jane Neave, Dorothy Le Couteur, and the Tolkien brothers, as well as a family friend, C.G. Robson. (The names are written all in the same hand, probably that of James Brookes-Smith.) A guest book of the Cabane de Bertol, a high-altitude hut south of Arolla on the Col de Bertol (Bertol Pass), signed on 25 August, includes the same ten names (individually written), as well as those of Jane Neave’s friend H.A. (Helen) Preston; a friend of the Brookes-Smiths, Geraldine Roberts; and a local guide, J.G. Mahler. The Reverend and Mrs Hunt of Hurst Green, and young Tony Robson and his nurse Jeanne Swalen, known to have been with the party at other times, were not present at the hut; Lewis and Currie suggest that they remained in Arolla rather than undertake the ascent to the Col de Bertol (10,722 feet).

The dating of Tolkien’s visit to Switzerland remains uncertain, but Lewis and Currie are right to suggest that it could have begun in late July, and therefore this note should be headed ?Late July–early September 1911.

p. 824, note for 28 June–1 July 1913, l. 13: For ‘1912 or 1913 (taking into account Tolkien’s December birthday)’ read ‘1911 or 1912 (taking into account Tolkien’s January birthday)’. (How could we say that Tolkien was born in December?)

p. 827, note for 16 June 1915, l. 1: The note refers, of course, to dates in July and not June 1915. For the heading, ‘16 June 1915’, read ‘16 July 1915’, and the note should be relocated following that for 8–9 July 1915. Also, for ‘17 June’ read ‘17 July’.

p. 836, note for ?Early June 1917: In ‘Tolkien in East Yorkshire, 1917–18: A Hemlock Glade, Two Towers, the Houses of Healing and a Beacon’, in Janet Brennan Croft and Annika Röttinger, eds.,‘Something Has Gone Crack’: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War (2019), Michael Flowers notes that John Garth and Dinah Hazell (the latter in Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation, 2016) concur that Tolkien’s ‘hemlocks’ are Queen Anne’s Lace or Cow Parsley, while Walter Judd and Graham Judd, Flora of Middle-earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium (2017), believe that Cow Parsley is the more likely of the two. Flowers attempts to estimate the date of Tolkien and Edith’s visit to the wood based on the flowering period of Cow Parsley at Dents Garth in spring 2004–2018, from which he extrapolates back to 1917, concluding that the event occurred in June 1917, most likely the first ten days of the month. Flowers also looks at elements within the ‘Tale of Tinúviel’ as possible clues to the real-world landscape that may have served as Tolkien’s inspiration. One hundred years, of course, can make a difference both to landscape and to climate.

p. 837, note for Mid-November 1917: Because the village of Kilnsea was considered vulnerable to attack by the Germans, a powerful battery was built there, as well as a star-shaped fort (Fort Godwin) with a well-equipped hospital. Tolkien received medical treatment in the latter.

p. 840, note for April 1930: Either we or the British Library have been confused at some point. The website currently (May 2020) indicates the recording date for ‘Wireless’ as April 1930, and that for ‘At the Tobacconist’s’ as July 1929. We have emended our Chronology entry for April 1930 and entered one for July 1929, to accord with the information as it now stands.

p. 3, add entry:

p. 64, add entry:

p. 82, entry for November 1915, l. 2: G.B. Smith’s service record dates his entry into France as 21 November 1915.

p. 110, entry for Mid-November 1917: The second sentence should read: ‘Although he is billeted at or near Easington, his post is addressed via Kilnsea, two miles still further south, where he receives medical care.’

p. 162, add entry:

p. 164, entry for Summer 1930: It is now known that Tolkien began to write The Hobbit by the end of 1929; see addendum for The Hobbit in the Reader’s Guide.

p. 166, entry for Christmas 1930, final sentence: Tolkien began The Hobbit no later than 1929; see Chronology addendum for Summer 1930, and Reader’s Guide addendum for The Hobbit.

p. 263, add entry:

p. 268, add entry:

p. 278, add entry:

p. 512, entry for 8 March 1956: Galbraith had asked about the omission of the promised index from the first edition of The Return of the King, about Tolkien’s future works, parallels between The Lord of the Rings and the ‘Space Trilogy’ of C.S. Lewis, whether The Lord of the Rings was a response to the atomic bomb, and the relationship of locations in the work to actual places. Tolkien replied to each point. His work on the index delayed the publication of The Return of the King, and proved too long to include. His ‘mythical’ writings, i.e. ‘The Silmarillion’, seem less attractive to readers because it lacks ‘hobbitry’. Although he and Lewis undoubtedly influenced each other, at least superficially, they have different ideas. Tolkien’s original idea of relating fictional land masses to historical or prehistorical lands proved too difficult to sustain, but there is supposed to be a relation in a general way. (Parts of the letter were quoted or reproduced in the catalogues of two sales at Sotheby’s New York, 11 December 2017 and 18–28 June 2018.)

p. 516, entry for 12 April 1956, add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes a note to William Galbraith, apologizing for his delay in replying to Galbraith’s letter of 7 March. With this he will enclose the letter he wrote on 8 March.’

p. 572, entry for 19 May 1959: In his letter, Tolkien tells Zettersten that his edition of Ancrene Wisse is in press, but its publication date will depend upon how quickly he can pass proofs. After his illness earlier in the year he is behind with tasks, and now will be busy with examinations.

p. 664, add entry:

p. 664, entry for 6 May 1965, add at beginning: ‘Tolkien writes to a Mr Brookes. He will be pleased to see him and to autograph books for him, perhaps around the end of May. Tolkien is very busy with urgent  and difficult matters, and will be going away again, but he hopes that this will not be until after 30 June. – ’

p. 902, col. 2, l. 19, index entry for Lord of the Rings, The: Add ‘235’ before ‘425’.

p. 920, col. 2, index entry for Scott, Walter: For ‘537’ read ‘536’.

p. 148, add entry at beginning of section for 1927:

p. 187, add entry:

p. 197, entry for 13 May 1936: John R. Holmes has commented on Tolkien’s work on the ‘Our Father’, describing a study, or essay, which ‘in the Bodleian consists of a large volume of notes made in blue fountain pen in 1936, transferred to typescript sometime in the 1940s, and covered in red ballpoint emendations dating from 1966’ (‘Pope Francis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Lord’s Prayer’, 2018). We have not ourselves seen all of this material, but have examined the preserved correspondence between Tolkien and Morey.

p. 202, add entry following that for Late 1930s:

p. 242, add entry:

p. 242, entry for 6 May 1939, add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to the poet and Oxford graduate Alan Rook, suggesting that a planned meeting (evidently for the following day) should be postponed. Edith is not well today, and the Tolkiens do not have the benefit of a servant.’

p. 243, add entry:

p. 269, entry for 25 January 1942, l. 2: For ‘common room’ read ‘Common Room’.

p. 281, entry for 1944, add at end: In his book Public Opinion and the Last Peace, published this year, R.B. McCallum acknowledges Tolkien’s assistance in suggesting a connection between pacifist and passive-resistance.

p. 284, add entry following that for 30 March 1944:

p. 304, add entry at beginning of section for 1945:

p. 377, entry for Early 1950s, add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes a sixth version of his description of the orthographic practice of Ælfwine (*On Ælfwine’s Spelling). – In this period he also writes the earlier of two versions of an account of changes of the Eldarin sounds that produced Quenya, entitled Quenya: Outline of Phonetic Development (*Quenya: Outline of Phonology).

p. 378, entry for 15 January 1950: A document for this (Hilary) term lists Tolkien as an ‘Extra Member’ of the Exeter College Senior Common Room. Full Members included Fellows of Exeter and Lecturers living in College; Extra Members included those with the Masters of Art degree from the College, and others as elected. ‘Old Members of the College who are members of other Common Rooms [such as Tolkien] may be elected as Extra Members without Entrance Fee’, normally 3 guineas. Hall Dinner was scheduled at 7.30 p.m., and ‘notice to dine on week-days may be given up to 1.15 p.m. on the same day’. The notice also gave times for the closing of lists for Sunday dinner and for lunch on weekdays and Sundays. ‘Evening dress with black tie is worn on Sundays during Term.’ Because seating at High Table was limited, ‘and many of the large number of Fellows now resident in College dine on Sunday nights’, Extra Members were asked to consult the President of the Common Room (the Sub-Rector) before bringing a guest to dine on Sundays.

p. 503, entry for 24 October 1955, l. 6: Tolkien’s letter to Joyce Biddell was in reply to one she sent to him.

p. 509, add entry at beginning of section for 1956:

p. 527, add entry at beginning of section for 1957:

p. 589, entry for 21 June 1960: Add at end: ‘– He writes to the American writer, editor, and sculptor Sterling Lanier, commenting that he had not, wittingly or willingly, begun a “cult” based on his writing, and that the Appendices in The Lord of the Rings add background and “reality” to the tale. He shows interest in figurines based on The Lord of the Rings that Lanier has made, or will make (by 1965).’

p. 651, add entry following that for 31 May 1954:

p. 662, entry for 11 February 1965: Add at end: ‘Edith Tolkien writes to American writer and artist Sterling Lanier, confirming receipt of a letter and a package of figurines based on The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien will neglect to reply to Lanier’s letter until later this year.’

p. 672, entry for August 1965, add at end: ‘– Sterling Lanier, an editor for Chilton Books, sends Tolkien a copy of Dune by Frank Herbert (published 1 August, on Lanier’s recommendation). Tolkien will receive it just before his trip to Ireland around the start of September.

pp. 673–4, entry for 19 August 1965: The ‘second letter’ was from Sterling Lanier, received by 11 February.

p. 674, ll. 1–2: The figurines were indeed inspired by The Lord of the Rings. We saw a set of them in March 2018.

p. 677, entry for 29 September 1965, add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to Sterling Lanier, thanking him for the copy of Dune. He has not yet read it, being occupied with the Ace Books affair.’

p. 684, entry for Mid-1960s, add at end: ‘– Tolkien adds documents dealing with Elvish etymologies to his (ultimately unfinished) commentary on words and phrases in his invented languages found in The Lord of the Rings (*Words, Phrases and Passages in The Lord of the Rings).

p. 685, entry for January 1966: A copy of the SFWA Bulletin will be sent to Tolkien by Sterling Lanier.

p. 685, add entry:

p. 689, entry for 14 February 1966, add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to Sterling Lanier, noting that he has received reasonable terms from Ace Books.’

p. 755 , entry for 1 March 1968, add at end: ‘– Tolkien writes to Evelyn Byrne, in response to a request for information about books he read in his teenage years. He cannot name a book which influenced him deeply at that time, when for the most part he was not interested in ‘literature’, but was reading, in his early teens, mainly books dealing with science. (See entry for 25 December 1971.)’

p. 772, entry for 18 October 1968: The date of Mary Fairburn’s letter is given from the postmark, referred to by Tolkien in his letter to her of 4 November.

p. 772, entry for 4 November 1968: To give further details from an autograph dealer’s reproduction of the complete letter (seen September 2017), Tolkien has been occupied with slowly bringing order to his house while only very gradually improving in health. He has had to dispose of pictures for lack of wall space. He is grieving after the death of Stanley Unwin.

p. 775, add entry at beginning of section for 1969:

p. 785, add entry at beginning of section for 1970:

p. 809, add entry:

p. 813, add entry: