Addenda and Corrigenda to
The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide
Revised and Enlarged Edition (2017)
Vols. 2 & 3: Reader’s Guide

p. 1, entry for Lascelles Abercrombie: See further, The Georgian Poets: Abercrombie, Brooke, Drinkwater, Gibson and Thomas by Rennie Parker (1999).

p. 6, entry for Ace Books Controversy: The Ace Books affair was also covered extensively in the fan journal Niekas. In no. 15 (12 March 1966) editor Ed Meskys quotes (p. 48) a letter by Donald A. Wollheim which had appeared in another fan publication, Yandro. In this Wollheim comments that both Tolkien and his publishers complained about the Ace Books edition on the basis of courtesy, that there had been no advance notice of the edition, rather than about the lack of payment to Tolkien or Allen & Unwin. This, Wollheim concludes, ‘is a British upper class gimmick’, and adds: ‘Of course, behind this scream of discourtesy lies the fact that had we told Tolkien in advance, they would have acted to rush out an edition of their own (presumably through Ballantine) a lot earlier and quite probably have beaten us to the draw with the second and third volumes (since we did not start production of these until a month after our first was on sale).’ Much ruder comments follow, including a statement of Wollheim’s mistaken belief that Tolkien had been forced to underwrite publication of The Lord of the Rings by Allen & Unwin with his own money, thus making the publisher into ‘the lowest type . . . a vanity house’. In fact, Tolkien had done nothing of the sort, but agreed with Allen & Unwin that he would not receive royalties until his book made back its costs, after which he would receive royalties at fifty per cent, in the event a very lucrative deal. Wollheim felt that Tolkien, whom he thought was out of touch in an academic ivory tower, would have done better if he had had ‘a tough American-type literary agent’.

Meskys also summarizes statements that Donald Wollheim made at a party in San Francisco in 1965. Wollheim had never read The Lord of the Rings, but only dipped into one volume which he did not find exciting. Ace Books did not expect to make money selling the book, but hoped to use it to sell their line in places such as college bookstores, where they had not been able to break in. (At that time in the United States, paperback genre fiction, such as science fiction, often with ‘lurid’ covers, was considered by some to be ‘inappropriate’ literature, and if not outright banned, at least disapproved.) Distribution of The Lord of the Rings was in fact limited, concentrated on university towns. Meskys recounted some of these points earlier, in Niekas 12 (15 June 1965), p. 77, where it is said that Ace Books expected to keep The Lord of the Rings in print indefinitely, as a ‘prestige’ title, supported by sales of their other publications; but there Wollheim is reported to have said that the edition would eventually, after many years, turn a profit by itself.

Ed Meskys’ comments in Niekas 12 and Niekas 15 reflect the confusion and mixed emotions Lord of the Rings enthusiasts must have felt in 1965–6 during the Ace Books affair. Donald Wollheim’s argument, that The Lord of the Rings had fallen into the public domain in the United States due to oversights by Tolkien’s publisher, was more or less accepted as fact, but Ace Books, Allen & Unwin, and Houghton Mifflin were criticized for ‘posturing’ in their public statements. It was a pity, Meskys thought in Niekas 12, that Tolkien was receiving no payment for the Ace Books edition, but he seems to have accepted Wollheim’s argument that Ace had no obligation to pay, and praised them for publishing The Lord of the Rings in paperback so that it would be available in a broader market. By Niekas 15, however, Meskys came to the conclusion that whatever the circumstances, Ace Books’ actions were morally wrong, because they had taken Tolkien’s creation without permission and deprived him of legitimate income. Even so, he also took to task Allen & Unwin and Houghton Mifflin for their failure properly to deal with copyright, thus allowing the situation to develop.

For comments on Jack Gaughan’s covers for the Ace Books edition, see p. 563 in the article for ‘Illustration’.

pp. 11–17, entry for Adaptations: On the 1955–6 BBC Lord of the Rings, see further, Stuart D. Lee, ‘A Milestone in BBC History?: The 1955–56 Radio Dramatization of The Lord of the Rings’ (2022).

p. 23, third paragraph, entry for Adaptations: In connection with his 2021 documentary on The Beatles (Get Back), Peter Jackson asked Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr about The Beatles’ planned film of The Lord of the Rings. From their memories, such as they are at this distance of time, Jackson has pieced together an account in which the idea for making the film came from their producer Denis O’Dell, and The Beatles were exposed to Tolkien’s work by the Maharishi in India, who sent them ‘the books’. ‘I expect because there are three,’ Jackson states in an article on bbc.com (Colin Paterson, ‘Peter Jackson on How Tolkien Stopped a Beatles LOTR Film’, 25 November 2021), the Maharishi ‘sent one book to each of the Beatles. I don’t think Ringo got one, but John, Paul and George each got one Lord of the Rings book to read in India. And they got excited about it.’ Ultimately, however, again according to Jackson, Tolkien personally withheld the rights from The Beatles, ‘because he didn’t like the idea of a pop group doing his story’. Jackson believes it to be the case that The Beatles would have approached Stanley Kubrick to direct; but Paul merely does not refute this suggestion, and ‘Ringo doesn’t remember much’ about the plans altogether. It strikes us that if John, Paul, and George each got one volume of The Lord of the Rings – which must be what Jackson meant by ‘there are three’, volumes rather than copies – two of them would have been confused, and none would have had the full story. And although Tolkien did loathe The Beatles, and (as Joy Hill reported to Rayner Unwin) was furious that they planned a film adaptation of his book, there is no evidence that Tolkien directly prevented The Beatles from obtaining the rights, which were already being negotiated with United Artists.

pp. 23–4, entry for Adaptations: The paper quoted here by Janet Brennan Croft has been published in Fantasy Fiction into Film: Essays, ed. Leslie Stratyner and James R. Keller (2007). The quotations, with one trivial difference in text, appear on p. 11.

pp. 24–5, entry for Adaptations: To the list of critical works (beginning at the foot of p. 24), add: Kristin Thompson, ‘Film Adaptations: Theatrical and Television Versions’ (2014).

p. 27, entry for Adaptations: Russian (Soviet) television also made a live-action, folk-rock film of The Lord of the Rings, broadcast a single time in 1991 but in 2021 resurrected on YouTube.

p. 30, l. 19: The citation to Tolkien’s letter of 11 October refers to ‘interim amusement’ on l. 16, that of 2 November (by Rayner Unwin) to the quotations in the final sentence of this paragraph.

p. 44, l. 12 from bottom: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’ (with an apostrophe; the latter form is used in the King Edward’s School Chronicle, and therefore presumably is authoritative).

pp. 44–9, entry for Allegory: See further, Riley McGuire, ‘The Place of Allegory in Tolkien’s Understanding of the Old English Exodus’ (2020).

pp. 52–8, entry for Ancrene Riwle: In 2005–8 the Early English Text Society published a new ‘corrected edition’ of the MS CCCC 402 text, by Bella Millett in collaboration with Richard Dance. As described by Roger Dahood in Notes and Queries for September 2009, it is not a critical edition, but a corrected version of the Cambridge text set in the context of the textual evolution of the work. ‘In short Millett incorporated in her main text or supplies in notes and the apparatus criticus important manuscript variants, especially those attributed to the original author. . . . Millett’s transcription, which uses modern punctuation and capitalization, is highly accurate, and indeed Millett has corrected a number of errors in Tolkien’s 1962 edition’ (p. 448).

pp. 63–5, entry for Appearance: As a newborn, Tolkien was described by his father as having ‘beautiful hands and ears (very long fingers) very light hair, “Tolkien” eyes and very distinctly a “Suffield” mouth’, i.e. the latter taking after his mother’s side of the family (letter to his mother, 4 January 1892, quoted in Biography, p. 12). At a few months old, he was described by his mother in a letter to her parents-in-law: ‘Baby does look such a fairy when he’s very much dressed-up in white frills & white shoes. I wish you could all see him – or even when he’s very much undressed I think he looks more of an elf still . . .’ (4 March 1893, quoted in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 116). At age two, he was said to have ‘golden hair blue eyes & rosy cheeks’ (Arthur Tolkien to his father, 6 August 1894, quoted in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 118).

For photographs of Tolkien, by himself or with his family, see also numerous pages in Maker of Middle-earth. Numerous photos of Tolkien by Pamela Chandler are reproduced in Tolkien: Uomo, Professore, Autore (2023).

pp. 65–8, entry for Art: When Tolkien entered Oxford as an undergraduate in 1911, he purchased for his rooms reproductions of four watercolour landscapes by William Russell Flint, illustrations for Matthew Arnold’s The Scholar Gipsy & Thyrsis (1910). In Maker of Middle-earth Catherine McIlwaine suggests a resemblance between Flint’s pictures and some of Tolkien’s art of the time, and that there is ‘something of the Shire’ in them (p. 284). According to McIlwaine, the prints hung in Tolkien’s rooms wherever he lived for the rest of his life.

p. 65, final paragraph, entry for Art: Catherine McIlwaine comments that ‘rapidity seems to be a feature of the “Ishnesses” and may have been central to the artist’s intention to capture a true or honest impression of a particular feeling, without the intrusion of the intellect’ (Maker of Middle-earth, p. 168).

pp. 68–73, entry for Arthur and the Matter of Britain: John Garth comments in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020) that Tolkien ‘underpinned The Lord of the Rings with the idea of the king who will return, cented it on a fellowship on a perilous quest, and ended it by sending the wounded hero to Faërie for healing. For a long time, he called Beleriand Broseliand, recalling Broceliande, the enchanted forest in Arthurian tales’ (p. 35).

p. 75, l. 20: Regarding the Tale of Adanel, see further, Kristine Larsen, ‘Beware Melkors Bearing Gifts: The “Tale of Adanel” as Gothic Fiction’ (2024).

p. 80, l.13: For ‘Atlakaviða’ read ‘Atlakviða’.

p. 102, ll. 25–6, entry for Arthur Owen Barfield: A photograph of Barfield is also reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 26.

p. 103, l. 2, entry for Thomas Kenneth Barnsley: Barnsley entered King Edward’s School in January 1908.

p. 110, ll. 9–10, entry for The Battle of Maldon: Tolkien’s translation of the poem, in prose, was published in 2023 in the volume entitled The Battle of Maldon, edited by Peter Grybauskas; see addendum below.

p. 110, third paragraph, entry for The Battle of Maldon: Also see Thomas Honegger, ‘Scholarly Heroes, Heroic Scholars’ (2016).

p. 110, add entry:

p. 113, second paragraph: The printed map of Middle-earth removed from The Lord of the Rings and annotated by Tolkien and Baynes was reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, pp. 382–3, and in Catherine McIlwaine, Tolkien Treasures (2018), pp. 138 (complete), 139 (detail). The finished poster-map, A Map of Middle-earth, was reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 385, and in Tolkien Treasures, pp. 136 (complete), 137 (detail). Baynes’s original art for her Map of Middle-earth and for There and Back Again is held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; both works were displayed in the Bodleian Library’s Tolkien exhibition in 2018.

p. 130, final paragraph: Also see further, Andy Orchard, ‘Found in Translation: Tolkien’s “Beowulf”‘, Oxford English 3 (2014), pp. 16–19.

p. 132, entry for Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics: On Tolkien’s points regarding the pagan and the Christian in the Anglo-Saxon world, Tolkien wrote to his colleague Bruce Mitchell: ‘I think we fail to grasp imaginatively the pagan “heroic” temper, the almost animal pride and ferocity of “nobles” and champions on the one hand; or on the other the immense relief and hope of Christian ethical teaching amidst a world with savage values’ (quoted in the introduction by Bruce Mitchell to an edition of Beowulf, translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland (1968)).

p. 133, ll. 7–8 from bottom, entry for Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics: In regard to its first publication, we should have mentioned that the lecture was distributed in its booklet form to all members of the British Academy, in advance of its printing in the annual Proceedings.

p. 138, entry for Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics: Add at end: ‘John Garth observes in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020) that when Tolkien lectured to Oxford undergraduates about Beowulf in the early nineteen-thirties he included an allegory related to his lament about critics interested in the poem not as a poem, but for historical or other data it might contain. In that story, the “critics” turn over the stones of a rock garden. When, however, he included a similar allegory in his British Academy lecture, the stones had been used to build a tower. Garth suggests that Tolkien was inspired to make this change by the widely-publicized construction of an intentionally useless folly in Faringdon, west of Oxford, opened in 1935.’

p. 150, l. 11 from bottom, entry for Beren and Lúthien: For ‘over a long period’ read ‘over a long period, with illustrations by Alan Lee’.

p. 151, l. 2: For ‘(1930) (*The Shaping’ read ‘(1930; *The Shaping’.

pp. 155–7, entry for Bibliographies: In 2019 Oronzo Cilli published Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist. He includes ‘books we know with absolute certainty Tolkien read, consulted, bought or borrowed’, those ‘he read as cited by scholars’, and ‘any text he read, studied, or simply was aware of’ (p. xxiii). Cilli documents these by reference to holdings in institutional and private libraries, to Tolkien’s own writings, and to information gleaned from secondary works (such as the Companion and Guide). It is a long list, including even those works cited as source material for words in the Oxford English Dictionary on which Tolkien worked, though Tolkien may not have known those sources beyond a quotation written on a dictionary slip. Cilli’s scope is wide, perhaps subjectively so, perhaps not; at any rate, his checklist is not exhaustive, and could not be, as one could never know of every work of which Tolkien was ‘aware’. See further, Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, ‘Tolkien's Library: An Annotated Checklist (2019) by Oronzo Cilli’, a review in the Journal of Tolkien Research (2019); and Cilli’s reply to our review, ‘The Leaves Were Long, the Cover Was Green’, on academia.edu. A second edition of Tolkien’s Library, revised and expanded, was published in 2023.

p. 155, first paragraph: The focus of Holford’s tolkienbooks.net is on U.K. publications. Another online supplement to Hammond, by Devon Press, tolkienbooks.us, is devoted to U.S. publications. Listings of Tolkien’s works published in languages other than English are also to be found online.

p. 156, l. 16 from bottom: The database by Drout, et al. seems to be no longer available.

pp. 162–3, entry for Biographies: A second edition of Carpenter’s biography was published in 1987. Already by 1978, however, in the first paperback edition, his statement originally on p. 145, that Tolkien was amused by Lewis’s mock-scholarly critique of the Lay of Leithian (‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’) ‘but he did not accept any of Lewis’s suggested emendations’, was itself corrected to read ‘but he accepted few of Lewis’s suggested emendations’ (p. 149).

Holly Ordway (Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth beyond the Middle Ages, 2021) has criticized Carpenter’s biography for numerous faults, in particular for having conveyed the impression that Tolkien had no interest in modern literature (defined by Ordway as post-1849). Many have accepted this as fact, though ample evidence to the contrary has appeared since the Biography was published in 1977. In 2019, Nicole M. duPlessis wrote in Mythlore (‘On the Shoulders of Humphrey Carpenter: Reconsidering Biographical Representation and Scholarly Perception of Edith Tolkien’) that the Biography gives a ‘highly mediated’ portrait of Tolkien’s wife, which has led to her positioning ‘in Tolkien scholarship as a controversial figure – an elf-maid, a shy, mousy figure, a non-intellectual, an aspiring pianist with thwarted ambitions, a victim of spousal neglect, an invalid, a shrewish, nagging wife . . .’ (p. 40). Similar remarks in this vein appear also in ‘Edith Tolkien in the Eye of the Beholder’ by Maria Artamanova (2021) and, very extensively, in The Gallant Edith Bratt: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Inspiration by Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays (2021). (See also addenda to our article for Edith Tolkien, below.)

In 2023 Holly Ordway published Tolkien’s Faith, subtitled A Spiritual Biography. This encompasses the events of Tolkien’s life (if sometimes very briefly), but is focused in particular on Tolkien as a Roman Catholic and on how his faith influenced his thoughts, actions, reading, and writings. It is an essential contribution to Tolkien biography, which historically has treated his religion as incidental (or at least less significant than other aspects of his life), and is especially valuable as it explains doctrines and practices of Catholicism, as well as terminology and prayers, which may be mysteries to non-Catholic readers. Ordway’s book is also notable for its examination of the First World War from a Catholic point of view and of Tolkien’s contributions to Catholic education at Oxford and more broadly.

p. 165, third paragraph: On Edwards’ biography, see further, Nelson Goering’s perceptive review in the Journal of Inklings Studies (2017).

pp. 170–1, entry for Birmingham and environs: Commenting in ‘The Notion Club Papers: An Inklings Blog’, Bruce Charlton identifies the meteorite described by Ramer in The Notion Club Papers with a popular boulder in Cannon Hill Park, Edgbaston. The fictional rock is in ‘Gunthorpe Park’, where Ramer (a Tolkien analogue) lived as a boy. Charlton compares gun and cannon in the two names; we pointed out that thorpe ‘hamlet, village, (remote) farm or settlement’ is etymologically related to terp ‘mound, hillock’ (as the site of a village), thus Gunthorpe also contains the ‘hill’ element of Cannon Hill.

pp. 172–3, entry for Birmingham Oratory: The Oratory complex in Birmingham includes the Parish Church of the Immaculate Conception (the Oratory Church).

In ‘Priests, Prophets, and Kings: Ecclesiology in Newman and Tolkien’ (2011), John Kezel has suggested (more expansively than may be warranted) influences on Tolkien’s philosophy and writings by Cardinal Newman. For the Oratory in general, see further, Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023).

p. 175, second paragraph, entry for Bombadil Goes Boating: Tom’s boat is taken back up the Withywindle by the otters, the swan, and the kingfisher, but also the willow-wren.

pp. 176–89, entry for The Book of Lost Tales: The history of the writing of the ‘Lost Tales’ given here was necessarily based on the materials published by Christopher Tolkien in The History of Middle-earth, and on his father’s later comments. From these, we concluded that Tolkien first wrote among the tales either The Fall of Gondolin or The Cottage of Lost Play; but as we noted, The Music of the Ainur was the first tale told to Eriol, and it was always curious that its composition should have been relatively late in the sequence, as it seemed. More recently, John Garth has been allowed to explore the early ‘Silmarillion’ papers in the Bodleian Library and concluded, based in part on the evolution of name-forms, that The Music of the Ainur in fact belongs with Tolkien’s period of initial composition of the ‘Lost Tales’ – with The Cottage of Lost Play and The Fall of Gondolin. It is now ‘reasonably clear’, Garth feels, that The Cottage of Lost Play ‘was the very first thing’ that Tolkien wrote in The Book of Lost Tales, and the writing of The Music of the Ainur and The Fall of Gondolin were ‘a product of just two months or so’ in 1917 (p. 103). Garth describes the importance of this conclusion as follows:

See further, John Garth, ‘The Chronology of Creation: How J.R.R. Tolkien Misremembered the Beginnings of His Mythology’ (2022), from which the words above have been quoted, and our earlier addendum for p. 179, below.

p. 179, third paragraph, entry for The Book of Lost Tales: John Garth argues in ‘Ilu’s Music: The Creation of Tolkien’s Creation Myth’, in Fimi and Honegger, Sub-creating Arda: World-building in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work, Its Precursors and Its Legacies(2019), that The Music of the Ainur was composed in 1917, earlier than Tolkien stated in 1964, indeed that ‘he may have created more of his mythology [while on duty at Withernsea] than previously realised’ (p. 119). Garth’s argument is that ‘Tolkien’s writings about his invented languages . . . suggest The Music of the Ainur predated Tolkien’s Gnomish Lexicon’ (p. 119), the primary manuscript layer of which is dated to Withernsea, 1917; and that Tolkien had a greater opportunity to write in 1917, while in hospital or on leave, than when he had ‘a day job [with the Oxford English Dictionary] and a busy family life’ after he left the army (p. 120). Garth comments that ‘if The Music of the Ainur was indeed written in early 1917 it would make abundant sense in terms of Tolkien’s creative ambitions’ (p. 120), and that the work ‘is a consolatory myth in response to the war, written partly for . . . Christopher Wiseman’ (p. 117). He also discusses the Music as ‘fugal’, and finds close parallels with a Babylonian creation narrative translated from the Akkadian by Henry Fox Talbot.

p. 194, entry for Bournemouth (Hampshire): According to Priscilla Tolkien, her father visited his godfather (George Edward Jelf, 1865–1934) in Bournemouth in the early years of the twentieth century.

p. 196, fourth paragraph, entry for Henry Bradley: Bradley’s original letter of recommendation for Tolkien’s Leeds candidacy, dated 7 June 1920, is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 87.

p. 199, entry for Denis Hugh Vercingetorix Brogan, l. 1: For ‘b. 1936’ read ‘1936–2019’.

p. 204, ll. 1–3, entry for Robert William Burchfield: In her foreword to the 2023 edition of the Ormulum, Helen Leith Spencer states that Burchfield

pp. 204–5, entry for Calligraphy: Eduardo B. Kumamoto has explored the extent to which Tolkien adopted not only Edward Johnston’s ‘foundational hand’ but also Insular script, or Anglo-Saxon bookhand; see ‘“Written in a Fair Hand”: The Living Tradition of Medieval Scripts in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Calligraphy’ (2020).

p. 205, ll. 5–8, entry for Calligraphy: We should have said more explicitly that Tolkien owned a copy of Johnston’s Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering, which was inherited by Christopher Tolkien. Although he may well have used other manuals or instruction sheets, Tolkien certainly used Johnston’s book. The design for the decorative title border of The Front Door, an illustration for The Hobbit (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 135; Art of The Hobbit, fig. 76), is adapted from Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering, fig. 87.

p. 223, ll. 26–8: Sisam’s suggestion was made in fact on 29 May 1946, in a letter to A.L.P. Norrington of the Clarendon Press. Sisam did, however, keep in touch with events, writing to Davin on 18 June 1953: ‘Tolkien is a rogue. He has had Middle English studies held up for 20 years waiting for an assented[?] text of Ancrene Riwle which he is to edit; and his time is given to fairy stories’ (quoted in Gilliver, Weiner, and Marshall, ‘The Word as Leaf: Perspectives on Tolkien as Lexicographer and Philologist’, p. 69).

p. 223, ll. 13–15 from bottom, entry for Geoffrey Chaucer: Bowers’ Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer was published in 2019. It does not include the edition of selected works by Chaucer planned by Tolkien and George Gordon, but rather is an extended exploration of the ‘Clarendon Chaucer’, of Tolkien’s knowledge of Chaucer as a subject of research and teaching, and of Chaucer ‘as a major influence upon Tolkien’s literary imagination’, as the dust-jacket blurb reads. Bowers pleads that an edition of Selections from Chaucer’s Poetry and Prose would have been ‘a hefty volume’ entailing much puzzling out of Tolkien’s sometimes difficult handwriting, and that Tolkien himself, Bowers feels, ‘would have objected to having his . . . unfinished edition published’ in the fashion of Furnivall’s posthumous Hali Meidenhad (p. 4). Bowers’ ‘approach takes into respectful account what Tolkien did accomplish in his edited text, glossary, and notes, drawing into discussion his ancillary publication “Chaucer as a Philologist” and highlighting this editorial project’s contributions to his career as a fiction-writer as well as a scholar and teacher’ (p. 5). In this he succeeds, though one may quibble with his connections between Chaucer and Tolkien’s fiction, and with his frequent criticisms of Tolkien’s working method. The latter is echoed in the title of an excerpt from Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer published online on lithub.com: ‘Did Tolkien Write The Lord of the Rings because He Was Avoiding His Academic Work?: How a Literary Icon Always Felt Guilty about His Failings with Chaucer’ (2019) . Our short answer to the excerpt title’s question is: No. See also Nelson Goering’s review, ‘Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer (2019) by John M. Bowers’, in the Journal of Tolkien Research (2020).

pp. 229–32, entry for Children: In his blog post ‘Tolkien, Trains and Two Discoveries: Meccano and Hornby’, Tolkieniano, 25 November 2017, Oronzo Cilli deduces that the toy trains owned by the Tolkien boys were in the Hornby line made by Meccano, long a popular brand. ‘Hornby’ is mentioned in the ‘Father Christmas’ letter for 1932, in wording which suggests that the brand of trains, or accessories, was not always available for ‘Father Christmas’ to bring as gifts.

Cilli notes a classified advertisement in the March 1933 number of Meccano Magazine placed by ‘Tolkien, 20, Northmoor Road, Oxford’, offering ‘cash for four C.C.B. Red or Yellow “Break”’; other notices in the same magazine spell out ‘C.C.B.’ as Clark’s Creamed Barley, a popular cereal advertised as the ‘all-British breakfast’. The request appears to refer to reproduction hoardings to be added to a realistic model train layout. Cilli also comments that ‘M. Tolkien’ is listed in the June 1933 Meccano Magazine as a winner of a consolation prize in a ‘Popular Photo Contest’. Michael Tolkien was evidently member number 30992 of the ‘Hornby Railway Company’ fan club. Several local chapters of the club existed in Oxford during Michael’s boyhood; Cilli speculates that Michael joined in 1932 or 1933.

p. 226, second paragraph, entry for Cheltenham (Gloucestershire): Our mention of Zeppelin raids may be opaque: Edith and her cousin Jennie Grove had been living near Tolkien in Yorkshire, which was subject to raids. Priscilla Tolkien recalls her mother describing how Jennie went out in Cheltenham in the early morning to queue for meat, waiting for two hours before the butcher opened, but the supply would run out before she took her turn.

pp. 226–8, entry for Gilbert Keith Chesterton: According to Clyde S. Kilby, Tolkien ‘did not care for the detective stories of G.K. Chesterton’ (Tolkien and The Silmarillion (1976), p. 26).

pp. 242–4, entry for Classical influences: Four essays in the collection Tolkien and the Classics (2019), ed. Roberto Arduini, Giampaolo Conzonieri, and Claudio A. Testi, consider parallels between Tolkien’s fiction and that of Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes, Euripides, and Vergil, but the connections are largely tangential and speculative. (The word ‘classics’ in the collection title is applied widely, beyond the Greek and Latin classics with which we are concerned in our article.) See also Hamish Williams, ed., Tolkien and the Classical World (2021).

p. 247, final two lines, entry for Nevill Henry Kendal Aylmer Coghill: A photograph of Coghill is also reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 26.

pp. 249–52, entry for Robin George Collingwood: Giovanni Carmine Costabile discusses Collingwood at length, relative to Tolkien’s ideas regarding fairy-stories, in The Road of Fair Elfland (2022, an extended commentary on Flieger and Anderson’s Tolkien on Fairy-Stories). Costabile argues that although there is no explicit evidence of influence between Collingwood and Tolkien, ‘the convergence and complementarity’ of their texts, in particular Tolkien’s On Fairy-Stories and Collingwood’s Philosophy of Enchantment, ‘warrants close comparison’ (pp. 23–4). In doing so, Costabile refers to the essay ‘The Expression of Faërie’ (2020), in which Simon J. Cook concludes ‘from comparison of printed material composed after Collingwood left Pembroke’ that Collingwood and Tolkien ‘had previously engaged in some extremely interesting conversations about magic. . . . Tolkien’s essay [On Fairy-Stories] reveals a critical engagement with Collingwood’s ideas about fairy stories, while Collingwood’s subsequent work on the philosophy of art [The Principles of Art] provides a key that unlocks Tolkien’s impossible essay’ (pp. 51–2).

p. 251, l. 16 from bottom: Giovanni Carmine Costabile, conveying a private communication by Simon J. Cook, has pointed out that J.N.L. Myres was not R.G. Collingwood’s ‘collaborator’ for Roman Britain and the English Settlements, and indeed, if one turns to the book’s ‘Preface to Books I–IV’ (as we clearly did not) the first sentence reads: ‘This volume is not a work of collaboration. It consists of two independent studies of two distinct, though interlocking, subjects’ (p. v). For ‘collaborator’, then, read ‘fellow contributor’.

p. 263, l. 12: For ‘Lovelace Society’ read ‘Lovelace Club’.

pp. 270–1, entry for Cornwall: See further, David Haden, Tolkien and the Lizard: J.R.R. Tolkien in Cornwall, 1914 (2021). In his footnote 13 Haden cites ll. 3–4 of our entry and comments: ‘I have been unable to discover he location of the house. . . . 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”.’ 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). David Haden also observes that ‘in “The Lost Road”, Tolkien fictionalises the stay using the phrase “a little house in Cornwall”, suggesting something smaller than a mansion but perhaps with enough spare room to house two visitors for a long stay’ (footnote 14).

p. 271, third paragraph, entry for Cornwall: Priscilla Tolkien tells us that the ‘carefree holiday’ in 1932 may have been carefree from the children’s point of view, but at one point Carola Wrenn, age twelve and a keen swimmer, was nearly drowned when caught in an undertow among he rocks. Tolkien caught her by the hand in the nick of time.

p. 288, entry for Colin Cullis: Like Tolkien, Cullis took only a second class in Honour Moderations. He continued to read Classics, failed Divinity Mods (passages for translation from the Greek New Testament) due to ill health in 1913 and 1914, and was excused both from the university Officer Training Corps and from living in college his final year (when he took rooms with Tolkien in St John Street). Severely ill during his last term, much of which he spent away, Cullis took only a third class in his final exams in 1915. After his work in Foreign Trade (as we describe), he held a staff position at the Federation of British Industries in London. See further, a long article about Cullis, ‘Tolkien’s Last Friend in Oxford When the World Went to War’, by John Garth on his blog, 29 July 2019.

p. 290, ll. 12–13: Somerville College Chapel Addresses and Other Papers includes a memoir of Helen Darbishire and a list of her published writing.

p. 290, entry for Martin Cyril D’Arcy: A volume of Father D’Arcy’s reminiscences, Laughter and the Love of Friends, was edited by William S. Abell and published in 1991. It includes an account of a talk by Hilaire Belloc at the Oxford chaplaincy, at which Tolkien was present. Belloc ‘came out with one [of] his pet themes: that the Anglo-Saxons were utterly unimportant in the history of England’. On this point ‘Tolkien disagreed profoundly’. D’Arcy recalls that Tolkien

pp. 290–2, entry for Simonne Rosalie Thérèse Odile d’Ardenne: A page of d’Ardenne’s notes from a lecture by Tolkien on Chaucerian grammar is reproduced in Tolkien: Uomo, Professore, Autore (2023), p. 103.

p. 298, add cross-reference: Death of St Brendan, The see Imram.

p. 318, l. 6 from bottom, entry for James Harold Dundas-Grant: A photograph of Dundas-Grant is also reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 26.

pp. 322–5, entry for Éalá Éarendel Engla Beorhtast: It is interesting, though in regard to Tolkien probably irrelevant, to note that Charles William Stubbs, then Dean of Ely Cathedral and later Bishop of Truro, published a poem in 1899 (in his Byrhtnoth’s Prayer and Other Poems, London: T. Fisher Unwin), ‘The Carol of the Star’, in which Earendel is mentioned throughout in refrains: ‘Hail Earendel, / Brightest of Angels!’ and ‘Godlight be with us, / Hail Earendel!’ The first verse reads:

T.A. Shippey suggests in The Road to Middle-earth that Tolkien ‘no doubt’ looked for ‘Earendel’ in the 1900 edition of the Crist by A.S. Cook, and in Jacob Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology. The latter would have told him that an analogue of the name, ‘Aurvandill’, appears in the Prose Edda, and that ‘Orendel’ in the German poem of that name (c. 1200) is a king’s son, shipwrecked in the Holy Land, who returns home ‘to convert his heathen countrymen’, ‘a messenger of hope’ (pp. 218, 219). John Garth points out in ‘“The Road from Adaptation to Invention”: How Tolkien Came to the Brink of Middle-earth in 1914’, Tolkien Studies 11 (2014), however, that Tolkien had at hand when he read of Earendel in the Crist an article by Barend Symons on Heldensage (hero-sagas) in volume 2 of Grundriss der germanischen Philologie (1893), edited by Hermann Paul, which Tolkien had borrowed for the summer from the Exeter College Library. Symons writes of the ‘Orendelsage’ in which the hero is ‘a wanderer upon the waters, a seafarer, the central figure in a Germanic mariner myth, now lost, corresponding to (but not deriving from) the classical myth of Ulysses/Odysseus; he certainly belongs among the oldest Germanic heroes’ (Garth, p. 14).

In the same essay (and more directly in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, 2020), Garth suggests an influential connection between Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha and Tolkien’s ‘Earendel’ poem, and that Tolkien was familiar with Hiawatha beyond the latter having been inspired by the Kalevala and enjoying popularity in the early twentieth century. It is an intriguing analogue, but tenuous. Garth himself comments that ‘despite the similarities in overall idea and certain specifics of the imagery, it can be seen that if indeed The Song of Hiawatha helped to give Tolkien the impulse for “The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star,” he made a sterling effort to avoid echoing Longfellow’s phrasing too closely’ (p. 21).

See further, David Llewellyn Dodds, ‘“Tolkien’s Narnia”?: Lit., Lang., Saints, Tinfang, and a Mythology – or Two – for Christmas’, in Kuijpers, Vink, and van Zon, Tolkien among Scholars (2016).

p. 325, ll. 1–7: John Garth also points out that Tolkien had at hand, when he read of Earendel in the Crist, an article by Barend Symons on Heldensage (hero-sagas) in Grundriss der germanischen Philologie (vol. 2, 1893), which he had borrowed from the Exeter College library. Symons writes there of the ‘Orendelsage’ in which the hero is ‘a wanderer upon the waters, a seafarer, the central figure in a Germanic mariner myth, now lost, corresponding to (but not deriving from) the classical myth of Ulysses/Odysseus; he certainly belongs among the oldest Germanic heroes’ (Garth, p. 14). Tolkien had borrowed as well Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie, edited by Christian W.M. Grein and Richard Paul Wülcker (1883–98), which contains the Crist.

pp. 326–7, entry for Thomas Wade Earp: In a blog post, ‘In Search of T.W. Earp and the Origin of “Twerp”’ (2022), Peter Gilliver quotes a letter to Christopher Tolkien in 1944, in which Tolkien calls Earp ‘the original twerp’ (and see Letters, p. 95), and proceeds to explore whether Earp’s  name had anything to do with the word twerp. He finds that the word seems to predate Tolkien meeting Earp – both matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford in 1911 – as ‘a piece of pre-existing American slang, which at some point made its way across the Atlantic, to be picked up by some Oxford wit who noticed how it could be made to fit Earp’s name, and thus become a stick with which the University’s sporting hearties could beat him’. In 1957 Roy Campbell commented that Earp ‘gave the English language the word twirp [an alternate spelling], really twearp, because of the [Hermann] Goering-like wrath he kindled in the hearts of the rugger-playing stalwarts at Oxford, when he was president of the [Oxford] Union, by being the last, most charming, and wittiest of the “decadents”’ (quoted by Gilliver). The post expands upon Earp’s life (beyond our entry), noting for example that he contrived to continue his Oxford studies throughout the war, indeed remained an undergraduate for nearly a decade, as well as his contributions to Exeter College’s social and literary societies. After finally leaving Oxford, Earp became ‘a darling of London café society’, helped by substantial wealth; he also established himself in Paris. Although he continued to write poetry, ‘it was as an art critic that Earp truly found his métier’.

p. 333, entry for Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals: In the title, for ‘&’ read ‘and’. Three texts from this work were later published, in slightly different edited form, in *The Nature of Middle-earth (2021), pp. 177–85.

pp. 345–52, entry for Environment: See also *Power, into which come related issues regarding the Machine.

p. 348, ll. 10–11 from bottom, entry for Environment: In relation to Gandalf’s comment about Isengard (‘whereas it had once been green and fair, it was now filled with pits and forges. . . . Over all [Saruman’s] works a dark smoke hung and wrapped itself about the sides of Orthanc’) is a further description in bk. III, ch. 8: ‘Shafts were driven deep into the ground; their upper ends were covered by low mounds and domes of stone. . . . The shafts ran down by many slopes and spiral stairs to caverns far under; there Saruman had treasuries, store-houses, armouries, smithies, and great furnaces. Iron wheels revolved there endlessly, and hammers thudded.’

pp. 348–51, entry for Environment, section for ‘The Environment in Tolkien’s Created World’: See further, Amber Lehning, The Map of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections on Tolkien’s Myth of Wilderness (2022), and Anahit Behrooz, Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Cartographies (2024).

p. 354, l. 5, entry for Eriol and Ælfwine: For ‘the second version’ read ‘a preceding version’.

pp. 377–8, entry for Fairy-stories: Haukur Þorgeirsson suggests in Notes and Queries for March 2023 that Tolkien’s conception of elves was influenced by the 1862 book by Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri (‘Icelandic Folklore and Fairy-tales’). This ‘contains a large collection of elf stories collected in the 19th century’ but also ‘introductory material . . . which reviews Icelandic information on elves and their characteristics, using 18th and 17th century sources as well as contemporary tales’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the Ethnography of the Elves’, p. 6). It is ‘a far more extensive and concrete source of elf lore than the medieval material’, presenting elves as ‘a class of physical beings who have much in common with humans’, and the ‘quasi-ethnographic approach taken by the introduction recalls Tolkien’s portrait of a fleshed-out elvish society with its own culture and politics’ (p. 7). Most specifically between Tolkien’s works and the Icelandic sources, Þorgeirsson argues, there are similarities in the description of Elvish writing: he points in particular to the ‘moon-letters’ or elf-runes on Thror’s Map in The Hobbit. In the course of his note, Þorgeirsson refers to a 2015 essay in Folklore by Ármann Jakobsson which also mentions the Árnason volume in relation to Tolkien’s elves: these, Jakobsson says, were based on Tolkien’s ‘interpretation of the medieval and later English material’, ‘taller than humans and infinitely superior to them, much like the elves in Jón Árnason’s álfasögur, who for him [i.e. Tolkien], as for other scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provided the lens through which he viewed the Old Norse elves’ (‘Beware of the Elf! A Note on the Evolving Meaning of “Álfar”’, p. 219).

p. 385, l. 18 from bottom: For ‘enteres’ read ‘entered’.

p. 385, l. 16 from bottom: For ‘tht’ read ‘that’.

p. 387, third paragraph, entry for The Fall of Arthur (poem): Replace this paragraph with:

p. 388, add cross-reference: The Fall of Gondolin (story) see ‘Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin’.

p. 388, add entry:

pp. 388–9, entry for The Fall of Númenor: See further, Lorenzo Carrera Bloise, ‘The Composition of The Downfall of Númenor’ (2022).

p. 389, add entry:

p. 389, entry for Fandom and popularity: A selection of fan letters written to Tolkien is included in Maker of Middle-earth, pp. 98–111.

p. 400, ll. 29–30, 36: For ‘Lovelace Society’ read ‘Lovelace Club’.

p. 402, l. 3: For ‘Lovelace Society’ read ‘Lovelace Club’.

p. 408, entry for ‘Fate and Free Will’: See also ‘Fate and Free Will’ in *The Nature of Middle-earth (2021), pp. 226–31.

p. 421, first paragraph, entry for The ‘Father Christmas’ Letters: A de luxe edition, issued by HarperCollins in 2019, contain a few images not published earlier.

p. 423, fifth paragraph, entry for The ‘Father Christmas’ Letters: The commercial recording first issued in 1997 included almost all of the texts omitted from printed editions to that date.

pp. 432–3, entry for Filey (Yorkshire): A photograph of Tolkien and his three sons on the beach at Filey, 1925, is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 180, and another, dated September 1925, on p. 262.

p. 433, entry for Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode: The Allen & Unwin edition was officially published in January 1983, but is dated ‘1982’ in the book.

p. 433, ll. 10–11: Delete ‘(though, like her husband, of Jutish origin)’. This is a problematic statement, apparently without scholarly consensus. We seem to have accepted wholly C.L. Wrenn’s statement in A Study of Old English Literature.

p. 437, l. 3 from bottom: For ‘c. 1968’ read ‘c. 1968’.

pp. 449–50, entry for Hugh Reginald Freston: Like Tolkien, Freston was a contributor to the collection *Oxford Poetry 1915, with the poems ‘A Girl’s Song’ and ‘Sometimes I Wonder’.

p. 450, l. 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 Maker of Middle-earth, which prefer ‘Officer Training Corps’. We have had to make a choice, and decided to follow the latter form (singular, no apostrophe).

p. 451, entry for Gawain’s Leave-Taking: A manuscript of the poem, reproduced in the de luxe edition (2020) of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, includes part of an early draft of the opening canto of the Lay of Leithian (see Reader’s Guide, p. 649), evidently preceding the earliest text published in The Lays of Beleriand. Since Tolkien began to write the Lay during the summer examinations of 1925, and the reproduced manuscript of Gawain’s Leave-Taking is a fair copy (implying an earlier version or versions), the latter can also be dated to no later than summer 1925.

p. 453, final paragraph, entry for Robert Quilter Gilson: Gilson joined the 11th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment, recruited entirely in the city and county of Cambridge and known as the Cambridgeshire Pals, or Cambridgeshires. His commission as second lieutenant is dated 28 November 1914.

p. 454, l. 4: Gilson was promoted to full lieutenant as of 8 January 1916. Accounts vary as to whether the 11th Suffolk departed for France on 7 or 8 January; John Garth states the latter, and we are inclined to accept that date.

p. 458, second paragraph, entry for Goblin Feet: Tolkien’s poem has been often reprinted, as far afield as the 2 July 1934 number of the School Magazine of Literature for Our Boys and Girls, issued by the Department of Education of New South Wales, Australia.

p. 464, first paragraph, entry for Good and Evil: Also see Perry Neil Harrison, ‘Tolkien, Augustinian Theodicy, and “Lovecraftian” Evil’ (2024).

pp. 464–6, entry for Eric Valentine Gordon: Jean Barman writes in Sojourning Sisters: The Lives and Letters of Jessie and Annie McQueen (2003; Annie McQueen was E.V. Gordon’s mother) that Gordon and Tolkien ‘shared personal attributes that may have drawn them together’ at Oxford and especially Leeds, besides ‘their common interest in philology, or linguistics’. ‘They were colonials’, Gordon having been born in Canada, Tolkien in South Africa. ‘They lost their fathers when young . . . and were thereafter managed by strong women. They were men of small stature and had been largely home schooled, being thereby, more than usually, left to their own devices. All of these factors may explain their escape into languages existing only in the imagination [i.e. not currently spoken or written], including Old and Middle English’ and Old Norse (Old Icelandic). Barman puts Gordon’s life into an interesting family context, though her comments on Tolkien are drawn largely from existing accounts.

In the mid-1930s, Gordon was in conversations to oversee and participate in the publication of translations for the English-speaking market of Icelandic sagas, to be published by Levin & Munksgaard of Copenhagen (in which Tolkien was to translate Egil’s Saga); this does not seem to have survived Gordon’s death, and in any case would have been affected by the arrival of war.

p. 467, l. 4: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officer’.

p. 469, l. 6: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officer’.

p. 479, fourth paragraph, entry for Henry Rider Haggard: Also see Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth beyond the Middle Ages (2021), ch. 8.

p. 481, l. 4 from bottom, entry for Colin Graham Hardie: A photograph of Hardie is also reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 26.

pp. 482–3, entry for Robert Emlyn Havard: A photograph of Havard, with his son Peter, is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 26.

p. 491, third paragraph, entry for Historical and cultural influences: Thijs Porck comments in ‘New Roads and Secret Gates, Waiting around the Corner: Investigating Tolkien’s Other Anglo-Saxon Sources’, in Kuijpers, Vink, and van Zon, Tolkien among Scholars (2016), that it seems likely that Tolkien’s depiction of the Dragon-helm of the house of Húrin, with its distinctive visor, was influenced by a description of the Sutton Hoo helmet in the September 1947 number of Antiquity (‘its visor, embellished with gilded nose and mouth, is unique’, p. 61).

pp. 495–501, entry for The History of Galadriel and Celeborn and of Amroth King of Lórien: See also ‘Galadriel and Celeborn’ and ‘The Rivers and Beacon-Hills of Gondor’ in *The Nature of Middle-earth (2021), pp. 346–55 and 376–97.

pp. 501–6, entry for The History of Middle-earth: At the end of her essay ‘The Text of The Hobbit: Putting Tolkien’s Notes in Order’ (English Studies in Canada, Summer 1981), a modest textual history since eclipsed by the work of John D. Rateliff (The History of The Hobbit), Constance B. Hieatt predicted: ‘it is very clear indeed that we shall never be able to see the progressive steps of authorial thinking behind The Silmarillion in the way which is possible in the case of The Hobbit’ (p. 222). She did not reckon with the industry of Christopher Tolkien beginning only two years later with The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, and not ceasing for more than a decade.

In 2002, Christopher Tolkien’s indexes to the twelve volumes were compiled by Helen Armstrong and published as a separate volume, The History of Middle-earth Index. The original index entries remain distinct, as originally published, but appear in sequence. A list of corrigenda to the index was published by Morgan Thomsen on his blog Mythoi, 26 March 2012.

pp. 511–13, entry for The Hobbit: According to Catherine McIlwaine in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 290, Tolkien’s son John ‘recorded in his diary for New Year’s Day 1930, “In the Afternoon we played in the Nursery. After tea Daddy read ‘The Hobbit’.”‘ From this evidence it is clear that Tolkien’s memory of writing the first words of The Hobbit in 20 Northmoor Road, to which the Tolkien family moved (from no. 22) on 14 January 1930, cannot be correct, and that his story was already in development by the end of 1929. Thus, Christopher Tolkien’s 1937 remarks on The Hobbit to Father Christmas, that his father ‘read it to John, Michael, and me in our winter “reads” after tea in the evening’, and his brother Michael’s contention that The Hobbit was begun (as a story told to the Tolkien sons) no later than 1929 (see p. 513), are now confirmed; but also, we are now able to account better for Tolkien’s various comments that after writing the first line of the story, ‘for some years I got no further than the production of Thror’s Map’ (p. 511), that the story ‘unfolded itself gradually’ (p. 512), and that as it was told in serial form, his youngest sons ‘had to grow up to it successively’ (p. 512). It still cannot be certain, however, precisely when Tolkien wrote the first words of The Hobbit, and when he completed the story in its published form.

p. 528, fourth paragraph from bottom: In the seventh (1984) of the Woodfield Lectures on Children’s Literature, BBC radio personality David Davis recounts that the Children’s Hour broadcasts of The Hobbit ‘used as theme music part of Holst’s marvellous music to the ballet The Perfect Fool: a great blast on the brass followed by strange sinister swirls on the strings going down to a tympani roll. You couldn’t fail to sit up when you heard it. It sent a tingle down the spine – just the right feeling you wanted for that horrible slimy creature, the Gollum, and his first encounter with the Hobbit, poor little Bilbo Baggins’ (‘Only the Best Is Good Enough’: The Woodfield Lectures on Children’s Literature, 1978–1985, ed. by Margaret Fearn, London: Rossendale, 1986, p. 87 of 81–93). Davis admits that he took thought before reading The Hobbit, worried that listeners, particularly parents, would complain that it was too frightening; but there was little or no response of this sort. ‘A child listening by itself in the dark would be in a very different position from a child, full of tea and toast, surrounded by family or parent, in a warm lamp-lit room. But you never know, and I think on the whole it was better to play fairly safe in your choice of stories over the air. The Hobbit was a bit of an exception’ (p. 88).

p. 536, ll. 5–6: Holly Ordway explores a possible connection between hobbit and Babbit in Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth beyond the Middle Ages (2021), observing that, besides a similarity of sound between the names, there are ‘a linguistic debt, a parallel with his protagonist’s personality [i.e. between Bilbo and George F. Babbitt], and a parallel with the constrained home life of Hobbiton’. The latter refers to Babbitt’s ‘discontent with his life of small-town social-climbing [which] leads him to have an extramarital affair’, eventually to return to his wife and to accept ‘a stultifying routine’, compared with Bilbo’s ‘reaction against “smugness” that allows him to embrace his Tookish, romantic side and to go off on adventures’ – with, however, a ‘more morally sound’ motivation and a happy return home (p. 250).

pp. 545–50, entry for The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son: Anna Smol has argued, in ‘Bodies in War: Medieval and Modern Tensions in “The Homecoming”’, published in Croft and Röttinger, ‘Something Has Gone Crack’: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War (2019), that Beorhtnoth was influenced by Tolkien’s experiences in the First World War, in particular its ‘setting filled with dead bodies’ (p. 271). She acknowledges that as the work was presented as a radio play, and is ‘a drama for two voices’, ‘the bodies have to be imagined by the listener’ (p. 271). We would observe that dead bodies are part of the historical account of the Battle of Maldon and unavoidable in any adaptation, and a feature of any field of battle in any war.

p. 550, fourth paragraph, entry for The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son: Also see Peter Grybauskas, ‘A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Man: Noteworthy Omission in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son (2020), and Grybauskas’s comments in his edition of Tolkien’s translation of *The Battle of Maldon, including Beorhtnoth, published in 2023.

p. 563, second paragraph, entry for Illustration: In Niekas 13 (15 September 1965) Jack Gaughan commented that it was his error alone that the cover to the Ace Books Two Towers depicted a Nazgûl on a flying horse rather than a ‘pterodactyl’. He had had to read the second and third volumes of The Lord of the Rings and lay out the covers on a short deadline, and therefore could not read them carefully. Ed Meskys had noted in Niekas 12 (15 June 1965) that most fan artists depicted the Nazgûl beasts ‘as impossibly large Pterodactyls’ (p. 78). Tolkien commented in a 1958 letter that he did not intend these creatures to be actual pterodactyls, though they were pterodactyl-like.

In ‘The Ace Tolkien Covers’, Niekas 16 (late June 1966), Gaughan described at length his process for making the Ace Book covers. Commissioned to illustrate a cover for The Fellowship of the Ring, he borrowed a copy from a neighbour and also read The Hobbit in a public library copy, neither of which he had read previously. He had only a weekend to produce art for the first cover, and later only two weeks to produce the second and third covers. ‘I decided that Tolkien fans would buy it if it were printed upside down and backwards, but how were we to get this book to people who were not Tolkien fans? So it was ME who eliminated the hairy Hobbits from the covers and the fairy forests. I was afraid that should I have illustrated the stories as I think they should be illustrated, we’d miss the market . . . the S.F. [science fiction] and fantasy reader who hadn’t read the books. So I chose scenes wherein I could minimize the fairy-tale visual qualities and play up those which related to S.F. as it is now being sold’ (p. 47). Because he could not possibly have read The Two Towers and The Return of the King as quickly as needed, he consulted his friend Lin Carter, who summarized and advised, but was not able to show the finished paintings to Carter before they had to go to the publisher.

‘I shall not say I have no opinions on the morals involved in this business [the Ace Books affair] (which made themselves known to me as this whole thing blossomed after the production of the first volume),’ Gaughan writes (Niekas 16, p. 49), ‘but I intend to keep my unlettered opinions thereon to myself. But I rather doubt I could have passed up the opportunity to work on books like those were it handed to me by the devil himself. (Incidentally, in spite of what some people tell me they think, it was not handed to me by the devil himself.)’

p. 567, l. 11: For ‘Bendani’ read ‘Brendani’.

pp. 569–76, entry for The Inklings: See further, David Bratman, ‘“Gifted Amateurs”: C.S. Lewis and the Inklings’, in Bruce Edwards, ed., C.S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (2007), vol. 3, pp. 279–320.

Don W. King’s 2020 essay, ‘When Did the Inklings Meet?: A Chronological Survey of Their Gatherings, 1933–1954’, takes a broad view, in which an Inklings meeting is one between three or more members of the Inklings. Whether a casual gathering of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Warren Lewis constituted a formal or ‘official’ ‘Inklings’ is a matter of debate; nonetheless, King provides a long list of documented meetings, scattered among a much greater number of ‘possible meetings’.

p. 569, l. 10 from bottom: For ‘Tangye-Lean’ read ‘[Edward] Tangye-Lean’.

p. 579, l. 17: For ‘in 1953 or 1954’ read ‘in 1954’.

pp. 580–2, entry for Italy: On 28 June 1955 Tolkien wrote to Miss F.L. Perry of his pending visit to Italy, commenting that as he is a romantic, ‘colour, distant views, foreign-ness of landscape, voices, and smells is all that I require; and I am not to be dragged into galleries and museums. . . . Unfortunately I cannot speak Italian, though I can read it after a fashion’ (Bonhams, New York sale of 22 June 2023, lot 152). Photographs from Tolkien’s visit to Italy are reproduced in Tolkien: Uomo, Professore, Autore (2023), pp. 68, 70–1.

pp. 583–4, entry for Elizabeth Joan Jennings: Elizabeth and Priscilla Tolkien, three years apart in age, were also both pupils at Rye St Antony School in the Woodstock Road, Oxford, as was Elizabeth’s older sister, Aileen; among these, only Elizabeth is said to have been unhappy there. Also like Priscilla, Elizabeth ultimately went on from Rye St Antony to Oxford High School, where she thrived.

On Elizabeth Jennings more generally, see Dana Greene, Elizabeth Jennings: “The Inward War” (2018).

pp. 593–8: For Tolkien’s work The Story of Kullervo see further, Iwona Piechnik, ‘Finnic Tetrameter in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo in Comparison to W.F. Kirby’s English Translation of the Kalevala’ (2021). On the influence of The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on The Story of Kullervo, see John Garth, ‘“The Road from Adaptation to Invention”: How Tolkien Came to the Brink of Middle-earth in 1914’ (2014).

p. 594, third paragraph: By ‘the writing of The Story of Kullervo . . . to mid-October 1914’ we mean that Tolkien appears to have been writing it at that time, and to have begun to write it not long before.

p. 600, entry for King Edward’s School, Birmingham: The urban environment in which the school was situated while on New Street, and which Tolkien experienced as a pupil, is expressed in the final verse of the school song (by Alfred Hayes and A. Somervell):

pp. 600–2, entry for King Edward’s School, Birmingham: We should have mentioned that Tolkien also attended classes on the Greek New Testament conducted by the Head Master. This required special permission from his guardian, Father Francis, because, as Holly Ordway has said, ‘it could be argued that the class was a form of Protestant religious education and therefore forbidden for a Catholic’. King Edward’s School ‘had an ecumenical and indeed inter-religious character’, and the Oratorians ‘were not afraid of Protestantism’ (Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023), p. 47).

p. 602, l. 17 from bottom: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 603, penultimate paragraph: A corridor from the original King Edward’s School building was preserved in the new building as the school chapel.

pp. 604–9, entry for Lancashire Fusiliers: See further, Tom Shippey and John Bourne, ‘A Steep Learning Curve: Tolkien and the British Army on the Somme’, in Croft and Röttinger, ‘Something Has Gone Crack’: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War (2019).

p. 608, l. 3: For ‘April’ read ‘April 1916’.

p. 608, l. 14: For ‘was eventually sent home’ read ‘a few days later was sent home’.

p. 608, l. 18: For ‘June’ read ‘June 1917’.

p. 608, l. 20: For ‘August’ read ‘August 1917’.

p. 608, l. 30: For ‘August’ read ‘August 1918’.

p. 608, l. 31: For ‘August’ read ‘August 1914’.

pp. 613–14, entry for Languages: Tolkien stated in one of his Oxford lectures on Chaucer: ‘I cannot myself read the Oriental languages required for a first-hand investigator [i.e. of an Asian source for Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale”]: Pali [a liturgical language of the Indian subcontinent], nor Persian nor Arabic nor Chinese, to name the most important’ (quoted in John M. Bowers, Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer (2019)).

p. 616, entry for Languages: Under ‘Dutch’, on 19 July 1957 Tolkien wrote to Max Schuchart, apologizing that his command of Dutch is not sufficient to fully appreciate Schuchart’s achievement in translating The Lord of the Rings, but making numerous suggestions for translation of Appendix D (‘The Calendars’).

p. 616, final line: For ’11 November’ read ‘14 November’.

pp. 617–18, entry for Languages, sub-entry French: In a letter of 8 September 1955 to Katharine Farrer, Tolkien remarked that Welsh ‘is not really any harder than French [to learn] (and much better spelt)’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 327).

In spite of his expressed feelings towards the French language, Tolkien sometimes used French loanwords in English; see Paul J. Smith, ‘French Connections in Middle-earth: The Medieval Legacy’, in Kuijpers, Vink, and van Zon, Tolkien among Scholars (2016).

pp. 622–3, entry for Languages, sub-entry Old Icelandic (Old Norse): By the summer of 1935 Tolkien was in conversation with E.V. Gordon and Sigurður Nordal to translate the Icelandic Egil’s Saga into English, as one of a series of translations for the English-speaking market to be published by Levin & Munksgaard of Copenhagen. Nordal was already general editor of the Íslenska fornritafélag (Old Icelandic Text Society), which produced critical editions of the sagas in the original language, and had himself edited Egil’s Saga for the Society (1933). If Tolkien did any work on his proposed translation, and we have seen no evidence of it, it could not have reached very far. The publishing project does not seem to have materialized, probably due to the death of E.V. Gordon in 1938 and, perhaps even before, to the approach and eventual arrival of war. Tolkien, moreover, by the mid-1930s was already committed to several other projects apart from his duties at Oxford.

pp. 623–4, entry for Languages, sub-entry Italian: In a letter of 28 June 1955 to Miss F.L. Perry, Tolkien wrote of his pending visit to Italy: ‘Unfortunately I cannot speak Italian, though I can read it after a fashion. But then I cannot speak any language but English – not even Elvish – though I once could make a shot at Spanish (which attracted me very much, as being so much more like Latin than any other surviving “Romance” language)’ (Bonhams, New York sale of 22 June 2023, lot 152).

pp. 626–8, entry for Languages, sub-entry Welsh: In a letter of 8 September 1955 to Katharine Farrer, Tolkien wrote that he had tried many times to master modern colloquial Welsh, ‘with small results, alas! . . . But that is chiefly lack of opportunity. It is not really any harder than French [to learn] (and much better spelt)’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 327).

p. 632, final paragraph, second sentence, entry for Languages, Invented: To correct and clarify, the Gnomish Grammar, called Lam na nGoldathon, is distinct from the Gnomish Lexicon, but cross-referenced from the latter. Gilson, et al. in Parma Eldalamberon 11 (1995), in which the Lexicon and Grammar are published, note that the Elvish title of the Lexicon, i·Lam na·Ngoldathon, ‘may be intended as the overall title for the grammar and lexicon considered as two parts of a single work’ (p. 4). The Lexicon is dated 1917, establishing at least when its main ink layer was completed; it is possible that the work was begun in late 1916.

p. 640, fourth paragraph, entry for Languages, Invented: Also see Carl F. Hostetter, ‘Inventing Elvish’ (2018), and Christopher Gilson, ‘“He Constructed a Language L and Another LL”: Diachronic Aspects of Tolkien’s Early Philology’ (2020).

p. 641, entry for The Last Ark: In The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020) John Garth suggests that one possible source of influence on The Last Ark was Barzaz Breiz, an anthology of Breton ballads edited by Hersart de la Villemarqué from which Tolkien also adapted The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun.

p. 645, l. 12: For ‘(Breton ‘lady)’ read ‘(Breton ‘lady’)’.

p. 645, l. 13 from bottom: For ‘does not appear’ read ‘does not appear physically’.

p. 645, l. 11 from bottom: For ‘on a potion’ read ‘of a potion’.

p. 658, entry for Kathleen Marguerite Lea, ll. 8–9: For ‘send her a calligraphic manuscript of a revision’ read ‘sent her a revised typescript’.

pp. 658–63, entry for Leaf by Niggle: A separate edition of Leaf by Niggle was published by HarperCollins, London, in July 2016, subsequent to the debut of a popular stage adaptation of the work by the Puppet State Theatre Company, created and performed by Richard Medrington. Its debut was at the Festival Theatre Edinburgh in April 2016.

p. 659, entry for Leaf by Niggle: A date of 1942 for the origin of Leaf by Niggle, as we suggest here, 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. 679, l. 13: For ‘Odham’s’ read ‘Odhams’.

p. 680, third paragraph, entry for The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún: Also see Renée Vink, ‘A Poet’s Choices: Tolkien, Heusler and the Gap in the Poetic Edda’, in Kuijpers, Nathalie, Renée Vink, and Cécile van Zon, eds. Tolkien among Scholars (2016).

pp. 681–2, entry for The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: On 9 November 2023 HarperCollins, London, published a ‘revised and expanded edition’ of Letters; an American edition, by William Morrow, was published on 14 November 2023. In this editor Chris Smith restored the letters and parts of letters excised from the 1981 edition to reduce its length, and added or amended a few editorial notes. 154 letters were added and 46 expanded, and a new index was prepared by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. The first printing of the new edition contains a number of errors, from the use of optical character recognition scanning to produce an electronic text from the 1981 typesetting; some of these were corrected in the second printing.

pp. 682–90, entry for Clive Staples Lewis: The Fame of C.S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and America by Stephanie L. Derrick (2018) is an important contribution to Lewis biography. It is a closely detailed study, drawn from a wide range of sources, of how Lewis was seen on both sides of the Atlantic, and how his reputation influenced sales and criticism. Derrick argues that the public Lewis was a manufactured image, ‘a mitigated commercial product, a platform. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that Lewis often employed rhetorical devices that encouraged his readers to associate the texts they were reading with him as an individual’ (p. 182).

p. 684, second paragraph, entry for Clive Staples Lewis: On the influence of ‘The Silmarillion’ on Lewis, see further, David Bratman, ‘C.S. Lewis, Númenórean’ (2022).

p. 690, ll. 1–2, entry for Clive Staples Lewis: Photographs of Lewis are also reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, pp. 20, 26.

p. 704, l. 18 from bottom: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

pp. 710–19, entry for The Lord of the Rings: Reproductions of manuscripts related to The Lord of the Rings appear in the catalogue J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript by William M. Fliss and Sarah C. Schaefer (2022).

p. 713, second paragraph, entry for The Lord of the Rings: Add following the first sentence: ‘This letter refers to the Hobbit sequel as ‘The Lord of the Ring’ (sic), a title Tolkien would come customarily to use for “the new story”’, in the plural, by 2 February 1939 (again in a letter to Furth, see Letters, p. 41).’ This appears to be the earliest public reference to the title, if in a singular form. In the Marquette University Tolkien papers 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 Maker of Middle-earth, pp. 330–1.

p. 735, l. 3: For ‘BBC Channel 4’ read ‘Channel 4’.

pp. 744–53, entry for The Lost Road: See further, David Bratman, ‘C.S. Lewis, Númenórean’ (2022), and Tom Shippey, ‘“King Sheave” and “The Lost Road”’ (2022).

pp. 754–5, entry for Lyme Regis (Dorset): A photograph of Tolkien and his family, with Father Francis Morgan, at Lyme Regis in August 1928 is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 226.

p. 755, entry for Ronald Buchanan McCallum: To McCallum’s writings, add: Public Opinion and the Last Peace (1944). In this he acknowledges Tolkien’s assistance in suggesting a connection between pacifist and passive-resistance.

pp. 761–2, entry for Josef Madlener: Stefan Borgschulze informs us that the postcard series Gestalten aus Märchen und Sage includes reproductions of Madlener’s Der Frühling (‘The Spring’), Waldmärchen (‘Forest Fairy-tale’), Die Bergfee (‘The Mountain Fay’), Der Berggeist, Rübezahl, and Hubertushirsch (‘Hubertus’ Stag’), and that it was published in 1935. There were, however, earlier postcard series which featured art by Madlener, and it is evident that, if Der Berggeist was truly the inspiration for Gandalf, Tolkien must have acquired a reproduction somewhat earlier than 1935. See further, Joseph Kiermeier-Debre and Fritz Franz Vogel, Josef Madlener: Mein Kosmos (2007).

Madlener’s painting Der Berggeist is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 65.

p. 760, second paragraph, entry for George MacDonald: Also see Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth beyond the Middle Ages (2021), ch. 5.

p. 762, third paragraph: Der Berggeist is best reproduced on p. 65 of Maker of Middle-earth.

pp. 773–7, entry for Maps: See further, Sally Bushell, ‘Mapping Worlds: Tolkien’s Cartographic Imagination’, ch. 6 of her Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text (2020); Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, ‘“I Wisely Started with a Map”: J.R.R. Tolkien as Cartographer’ (2022); and Anahit Behrooz, Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Cartographies (2024).

Maps for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion were ‘reimagined’ by illustrator John Howe and published, with text by Brian Sibley, in 2009–10 in three parts, and in updated form in one volume in 2024.

pp. 773–7, entry for Maps: For reproductions of maps, see also Maker of Middle-earth.

p. 776, l. 18: For ‘which as’ read ‘which was’.

p. 785, l. 5, entry for A Middle English Vocabulary: Peter Gilliver has commented that ‘the “mole-hill glossary” commissioned to accompany Sisam’s fourteenth-century anthology . . . was a good example of Tolkien’s ability to make a task take longer than expected. In this case the glossary which resulted is a very fine piece of scholarship, and one whose enduring value arguably justifies the time it took’ (in Gilliver, Weiner, and Marshall, ‘The Word as Leaf: Perspectives on Tolkien as Lexicographer and Philologist’ (2008), p. 64).

p. 790, l. 6 from bottom: For ‘in the former’ read ‘in the former (*Oxford Poetry 1915)’.

pp. 792–4, entry for Francis Xavier Morgan: José Manuel Ferrández Bru has published a book-length biography of Father Francis, ‘Uncle Curro’: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Spanish Connection (2018), in part incorporating earlier writings we cite in our article. He describes Father Francis as one of Tolkien’s ‘leading guides’ in both his faith and his studies; ‘indeed, he was primarily responsible for ensuring that Tolkien attended Oxford University, thanks to his financial support and, indirectly, giving his initial opposition to Tolkien’s relationship with the woman who later would become his wife’ (p. xii). ‘Uncle Curro’ (‘Curro’ was a family nickname, the Andalusian colloquial equivalent of ‘Francis’) expands our knowledge of the background and early years of Father Francis, demonstrating that Humphrey Carpenter’s description of him as ‘half Welsh and half Anglo-Spanish (his mother’s family were prominent in the sherry trade)’ (Biography, p. 27) is inadequate. Born Francisco Javier Morgan-Osborne, his father was of Welsh ancestry, but English for all intents and purposes, of a family of wine merchants who had close ties to producers in Spain. His mother’s parents were Spanish and English; like his mother, young Francisco was raised Roman Catholic. In time, his name would be shortened (omitting his maternal surname) and anglicized, as he attended the Oratory School in Birmingham and pursued Catholic studies in London and Louvain. He became an Oratorian novitiate in 1877 and was ordained a priest in 1883, joining the Community of the Birmingham Oratory shortly afterward.

Ferrández Bru sees ‘a covert and unjust animosity’ towards Father Francis among Tolkien biographers because the priest had taken a ‘firm stance against a young love with poor prospects (at that moment) for Tolkien’s career and, in general, for his future’ (p. xii). This is certainly the attitude of Joseph Pearce in Tolkien: Man and Myth (1998) and of Michael White in Tolkien: A Biography (2001), but not by Humphrey Carpenter in Biography or Raymond Edwards in Tolkien (2014); the latter especially defends Father Francis against any charge of tyranny. Ferrández Bru also asserts that the perceived image of Father Francis as unpleasant, petty, and shortsighted is more stereotype than reality, though even in his own account it seems to have a basis in truth. He suggests that Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings have parallels with Spanish Historical Romanticism, and makes a comparison between one of Tolkien’s riddles in The Hobbit, “Voiceless it cries, / wingless flutters,” and a very similar riddle composed by Father Francis’s great-aunt, the novelist Cecilia Böhl de Faber.

‘Uncle Curro’ includes previously unpublished memories of Father Francis by Priscilla Tolkien, two family trees, and a selection of photographic portraits and reproductions. Photographs of Father Francis are reproduced also in Maker of Middle-earth, pp. 137, 226, and in Tolkien: Uomo, Professore, Autore (2023), pp. 56, 58.

p. 793, third paragraph: Father Francis continued to support Tolkien through the latter’s undergraduate years at Oxford. In the second edition (2022) of Tolkien at Exeter College John Garth records, from an account book held at the Birmingham Oratory, that Father Francis sent Tolkien a substantial payment in each of his four years as a student, as well as a direct payment to Exeter College in October 1911, when Tolkien matriculated.

p. 802, second paragraph, entry for William Morris: Ordway considers The House of the Wolfings as a source for Éowyn also in Tolkien’s Modern Reading, pp. 171–3. In The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020) John Garth disputes Ordway’s conclusions about The Roots of the Mountains relative to The Lord of the Rings, stating that the similarities she examines ‘are too slight to bear the strain. The wide tracks of the Dead Marshes and their ancient spectral armies cannot be equated with a boggy patch and a brace of recent murder victims in Morris’ (p. 188).

p. 803, third paragraph, entry for William Morris: Also see Tom Shippey, ‘William Morris and Tolkien: Some Unexpected Connections’, in Arduini, Conzonieri, and Testi, Tolkien and the Classics (2019), and Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth beyond the Middle Ages (2021), ch. 7.

pp. 803–14, entry for Mortality and immortality: Anna Vaninskaya devotes one-third of Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien (2020) to a dense exploration of death, memory, and sensucht, or wistful yearning, in Tolkien’s fiction and scholarship. She observes that his ‘human beings [in his fiction] – clinging to life, rebelling against death, and yet mysteriously attracted to it; goaded by “a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it” (Letters, 145) – are one of the greatest “fantasy” creations of the twentieth century’ (p. 213).

Also see further, Amy Amendt-Raduege, ‘The Sweet and the Bitter’: Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (2018).

pp. 814–15, entry for Robert Patrick Ruthven Murray: For ‘(b. 1925)’ read ‘(1925–2018)’. The son of Congregationalist missionaries, Father Murray spent his childhood in China, then attended Eltham College and Taunton School. He entered Oxford after a year’s intensive study of Persian. His conversion to Roman Catholicism came after a period in which he observed the Anglican faith. Before entering the Society of Jesus novitiate he taught for a year at Beaumont College; and during his Jesuit studies he taught Classics at St Ignatius College, Stamford Hill. He was skilled in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, as well as in many European languages, and was a specialist in Syriac. At Heythrop College, ‘when he gave the first lecture in the brand-new post-Vatican II theology course . . . he offered to read the essays of a remarkably international gang of students in whatever language they preferred – and then added, sheepishly, that he could manage “a little Romanian”, if necessary’ (Michael Barnes S.J., ‘Robert Murray S.J.’, The Tablet, 5 May 2018, p. 29). He is remembered as a conscientious and influential teacher, who if he had been less so, might have published more. ‘For years he was working on a book on prophecy, a topic that touched him deeply; if he had not been so thorough in his scholarship and less daunted by the enormity of the enterprise, it might have seen the light of day. Nevertheless, with his extraordinary command of the sources, he kept up a steady trickle of scholarly studies, many of which have been the basis for others to build on’ (Barnes, p. 29).

p. 821, first paragraph, entry for Music: Also see further, Music in Tolkien’s Work and Beyond, ed. Julian Eilmann and Friedhelm Schneidewind (2019), most notably the essay ‘Laments and Mercy: Tolkien and Liturgical Music’ by Michaël Devaux and Guglielmo Spirito, pp. 29–58. Devaux and Spirito aim ‘to offer an overview of Tolkien and the liturgical music of his time [that he would have heard in Birmingham, Oxford, and elsewhere], with a focus on its possible influence on the Tolkienian conception of Elvish music’ (p. 29).

p. 822, add cross-reference: Music of the Ainur see Ainulindalë.

pp. 822–3, entry for Mythopoeia: A correspondent once suggested to us that Tolkien did not write Mythopoeia as a result of his talk with C.S. Lewis in September 1931, but began it before Lewis’s conversion to Theism in summer 1930 (a date now accepted rather than Lewis’s own recollection of 1929); and that since phrases and ideas from the poem appear in Lewis’s own poetry and fiction, it may be supposed that Mythopoeia, at least in a nascent form, served to motivate the friends’ discussion at Magdalen. In part, this idea stemmed from a distrust of Carpenter’s imagined reconstruction of the September 1931 evening (based on Lewis’s letters and on the arguments in Tolkien’s poem), and in consequence, uncertainty about Carpenter’s assertion that Tolkien wrote Mythopoeia as a response to the event. Although the concepts Tolkien explored in the poem were already familiar to him, and to Lewis, in 1931, there seems to be no reason to doubt this particular conclusion by Humphrey Carpenter.

pp. 827–30, entry for Names: At his First Confirmation in 1903, Tolkien took an additional name, Philip, after the name of the founders of the Oratorians (*Birmingham Oratory), Philip Neri. Later he would acknowledge it but rarely refer to it. Holly Ordway has suggested (Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023), p. 35) that a P for ‘Philip’ appears within Tolkien’s otherwise ‘JRRT’ monogram, comprising the bowl and vertical stroke of the right-hand R and distinguished at its base by a ‘spur’ near the lower curve of the J. It could be argued alternatively, however, that the ‘spur’ represents the lower right serif of the capital T.

pp. 827–30, entry for Names: This seems an appropriate place in which to say a few words about Tolkien’s monogram. He produced many variations of this device, a stylized combination of three or four initials, which he sometimes used to sign his art instead of his straightforward initials or name. An early example of a ‘JRT’ combination is on Tolkien’s drawing of Lyme Regis harbour (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 8), August 1906, and an early ‘JRRT’ combination, a prototype of the monogram often included on Tolkien’s published works, appears on his drawing of a keystone and gargoyles in Lambourn (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 13), 31 August 1912.

The ‘JRRT’ monogram most familiar to Tolkien’s readers was registered as a trademark by the executors of his estate in 1990, the year that Unwin Hyman, successor to George Allen & Unwin, was acquired by HarperCollins (see *Publishers). This combines the vertical capital J with the crossbar of the capital T, and has the R and R back to back (i.e. one reversed in direction) against the stroke of the J. Two ornaments, each composed of four dots, appear at lower left and upper right, and above the combined letters, immediately above the J/T, is a mark like a flame.

The first use of this monogram in print seems to have been on the half-title of the booklet that accompanied Drawings by Tolkien in 1976 and 1977 (see *Art), though this was reproduced in mirror reverse, with the J curving to the right and the ornaments at upper left and lower right. Allen & Unwin used the monogram first in 1978 on the slipcase of their set The Tolkien Library; in 1980 on the binding of Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien; in 1981 on the front of the dust-jacket of (their edition of) The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien; and from The Book of Lost Tales, Part One in 1983, on the front panel of the dust-jacket of each volume of The History of Middle-earth. Allen & Unwin at first seem to have thought it appropriate for the covers of their more serious publications – The History of Middle-earth was not expected to have a wide market, and to appeal to only the most serious Tolkien readers. In 1990, Unwin Hyman began to use the monogram on spines: for example, on a paperback Lord of the Rings with new cover art by Ted Nasmith.

Since their acquisition of Unwin Hyman, the monogram has been reproduced on the spine of many, but not all, of HarperCollins' Tolkien publications, chiefly those which include primary material. Tolkien’s other publishers, such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S.A., use the monogram more widely, and despite its protected legal status, some have reproduced it indiscriminately, such as on craft goods.

p. 828, third paragraph, entry for Names: According to Ryszard Derdzinki on the Tolknięty website for 17 April 2019, the surname Tolkien was used before members of the family emigrated to England from Gdańsk in Polish Prussia. The form of name was used concurrently with Tolckien, Tolkiehn, Tollkühn, and Tollkien. The oldest form was Tolkyn or Tolkin, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

p. 829, ll. 8–10 from bottom, entry for Names: Sarah Ogilvie notes in Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary (2013) that Tolkien was called ‘Jirt’ (after his initials JRRT) by members of the family of C.T. Onions.

p. 842, add entry:

p. 843, l. 11: For ‘Brak’ read ‘Brae’.

p. 864, sixth paragraph, entry for Northerness: Also see Richard Z. Gallant, Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives of Tolkien’s Legendarium (2024), and Tom Shippey, ‘Tolkien and “That Noble Northern Spirit”’ (2018).

p. 864, add entry:

p. 866, entry for ‘Notes on Óre’: This text was also published, in a different form, in *The Nature of Middle-earth (2021), pp. 219–25.

pp. 866–74, entry for The Notion Club Papers: A manuscript page for this work is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 31.

pp. 874–89, entry for Númenor: See further, Jan van Breda and Renée Vink, eds., Lembas Extra 2022: Númenor (2022).

p. 891, second paragraph from bottom, entry for The Old English Exodus: Also see David Lavinsky, ‘Tolkien’s Old English Exodus and the Problematics of Allegory’, Neophilologus 101 (2017), pp. 305–19.

p. 893, add entry (promised in our 2017 edition, by asterisk-references to O’Loughlin, but we forgot to include it):

pp. 893–902, entry for On Fairy-Stories: In ‘The Expression of Faërie’ (2020), Simon J. Cook argues that Tolkien is engaging in his essay with ideas about fairy-stories expressed by his late colleague at Pembroke College, Oxford, *R.G. Collingwood, ‘while Collingwood’s subsequent work on the philosophy of art [The Principles of Art (1938)] provides a key that unlocks Tolkien’s impossible essay’ (p. 52).

p. 896, l. 2: W.H. Auden adopted, with credit to On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien’s term ‘Secondary World’ in his T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, Secondary Worlds (1968). At the start of the second of his four essays, ‘The World of the Sagas’, Auden wrote: ‘Present in every human being are two desires, a desire to know the truth about the primary world, the given world outside ourselves in which we are born, live, love, hate and die, and the desire to make new secondary worlds of our own or, if we cannot make them ourselves, to share in the secondary worlds of those who can’ (p. 49).

p. 898, ll. 9, 13 from bottom: For ‘Lovelace Society’ read ‘Lovelace Club’.

p. 899, entry for On Fairy-Stories, ll. 20–4: In regard to the account of the lecture in the St Andrews Citizen and its emphases, see Matthew Thompson-Handell, ‘Some Observations on the Newspaper Reports of Tolkien’s Andrew Lang Lecture in 1939’ (2024).

p. 900, entry for On Fairy-Stories, ll. 2–4 from bottom: Giovanni Carmine Costabile has published an ‘extended commentary’ to Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, The Road to Fair Elfland (2022), expanding upon the Flieger–Anderson volume especially in regard to ideas similar to Tolkien’s written by *R.G. Collingwood. See also Simon J. Cook, ‘The Expression of Faërie’ (2020).

p. 903, l. 12 from bottom: For ‘70–72’ read ’70–2’.

p. 907, ll. 21–2: For ‘Tolkien Fantasy’ read ‘Tolkien and Fantasy’.

pp. 907–8, entry for Charles Talbut Onions: Sarah Ogilvie explains in her Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary (2013) that Tolkien and Onions were firm friends, and that Onions frequently entertained Tolkien. The youngest of Onions’ children, Giles Onions,

p. 912, final paragraph, entry for Oxford and environs: The Tolkiens’ house at 1 Alfred Street (Pusey Street) no longer exists.

p. 914, final paragraph, entry for Oxford and environs: Tolkien wrote to Stanley Unwin on 5 May 1947 that the move from Northmoor Road had been ‘forced on me by taxation, and lack of all domestic aid’ (that is, the impossibility of engaging domestic staff).

pp. 915–16, entry for Oxford and environs: The Tolkiens had renovations made to their Sandfield Road house in autumn 1958 (see Chronology and addenda for 6 and 7 October 1958). Tolkien needed space for the most useful of his books when he retired and had to give up his rooms at Merton; Edith needed conveniences on the ground floor as she was not able to take stairs without pain; and there was an urgent need for a room for their granddaughter Joanna, who was living with them when not away at school.

p. 921, entry for Oxford and environs, sub-entry for Eastgate Hotel: Tolkien also put guests up at the hotel when he lived in Merton Street (1972–3).

pp. 921–2, entry for Oxford and environs, sub-entry for Exeter College: A photograph of Exeter College in 1914 is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 142.

p. 923, add sub-entry:

p. 926, entry for Oxford and environs, sub-entry for Mitre Hotel: Tolkien lunched there on the day in 1911 he came up to Oxford, and thought it a privilege to do so. – According to the Lincoln College, Oxford website, the college has owned the building since 1475. Other sources, however, give the date (as we have done) as 1450. – As of this writing (October 2023), the Grade II listed building combines a hotel, the Turl Street Mitre, and the chain restaurant Gusto Italian.

p. 929, entry for Oxford and environs, sub-entry for University Parks: According to Priscilla Tolkien, the Parks were very important to her family, as they were in walking distance of the Tolkien home in Northmoor Road. In the nineteen-thirties the family were frequently on the river – Tolkien was an accomplished punter – or took picnics.

p. 930, ll. 18–19: For ‘Lovelace Society’ read ‘Lovelace Club’.

pp. 936–44, entry for Oxford, University of: It may be useful to add to this section (‘University Institutions and Officials’) an explanation of common room as it applies to Oxford (and more generally to universities). The term is applied both to a physical space, as in ‘a meeting was held in the Common Room’, and to a group of members who gather to dine or otherwise to meet for a purpose. In both senses, as a named space or a named group, it is commonly capitalized, and we have intended it to be so in the Companion and Guide, though Tolkien did not always do so in letters. An Oxford college typically has a Junior Common Room, for undergraduates, and a Senior Common Room, for academics and graduates. Each may have its own rules and criteria for membership. For example, a January 1950 printed notice issued by the Exeter College Senior Common Room included as Full Members ‘Fellows of the College, past or present, Honorary Fellows, and Lecturers living in College’, while Extra Members included ‘Masters of Arts of the College, and others [who] may be elected’, and ‘Old Members of the College who are members of other Common Rooms may be elected as Extra Members without Entrance Fee’, normally 3 guineas. In January 1950 Tolkien (then attached to Merton, previously attached to Pembroke, and with a B.A. from Exeter) was listed as an Extra Member of the Exeter Senior Common Room.

p. 946–9, entry for Oxford English Dictionary: A draft manuscript OED slip by Tolkien for the word walrus is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 86.

p. 947, l. 26, entry for Oxford English Dictionary: The manuscript of Tolkien’s draft definition of walrus is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 86.

p. 949, third paragraph, entry for Oxford English Dictionary: Also see further, Sarah Ogilvie, Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary (2013).Ogilvie’s book is especially interesting in its proof that the original editors of the OED were less conservative about including words from English usage beyond British English than generally thought, compared with Burchfield as editor of the Supplement.

pp. 962–6, entry for Oxford English School: The Polish scholar Przemysław Mroczkowski commented that

pp. 968–9: A note written by Tolkien probably early in September 1944 refers to papers to be sat by the cadets on 11 and 12 September on the History of the English Language. These included extracts and texts from Old and Middle English. Passages from Chaucer’s ‘Reeve’s Tale’ (ll. 170–206) and from Sir Orfeo (ll. 234–64) were set for translation. The printed text of a three-hour ‘Special Examination for R.N. and R.A.F. Cadets’ has also come to light, on ‘Use of English’, i.e. Modern English, with questions such as: ‘Define the following words and write short sentences to illustrate their correct use: – venal; venial; specific (both noun and adjective); correspondent (both noun and adjective); incontrovertible; hybrid; species; specie.’

p. 972, l. 5: For ‘more popular being preferred’ read ‘more popular, being preferred’.

p. 974, entry for Ralph Stuart Payton: According to the King Edward’s School online Roll of Honour, Payton enlisted in the Birmingham Pals already in 1914, along with his friend *T.K. Barnsley. He rose first to the rank of sergeant, then was commissioned as a second lieutenant and machine gun officer. He was sent to France as a full lieutenant in November 1915. His death on the Somme on 22 July 1916 was between High Wood and Delville Wood.

pp. 974–80, entry for Pearl: See further, Stefan Ekman, ‘Echoes of Pearl in Arda’s Landscape’ (2009).

pp. 989–94, entry for Pity and mercy: See further, Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023), ch. 23 (‘Charity and Forgiveness’), and Thomas P. Hillman, Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many (2023).

p. 996, l. 13: For ‘Oxford Poetry 1915’ read ‘*Oxford Poetry 1915’.

pp. 1006–7, entry for Poole (Dorset): See further, Rodney Legg, ‘Tolkien in Bournemouth and Dorset’, The Dorset Magazine, November 2009.

pp. 1009–13, entry for Power: Jonathan S. McIntosh writes in his wide-ranging discussion of Tolkien and St Thomas Aquinas that ‘the difference between true art and the tyranny of domination is that the one seeks to shepherd things as they are, cultivating and adorning those properties already inherent in them by virtue of their createdness, whereas the other imposes upon things one’s own godlike order and purposes’ (The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faërie (2017), p. 240). Referring to Tolkien’s letter to Milton Waldman, McIntosh submits that the use of Machine or Magic to transcend natural limitations ‘is the relevant mythological, theological, and metaphysical context for Tolkien’s whole polemic against modern industrialization: its lust after “devices” and “apparatuses” for the more efficient control of nature is nothing less than a continuation of what for both Tolkien and St. Thomas was the primeval and diabolical quest for the creational power of God, whereby one might “bring into Being things of his own”’ (p. 241). This is the ‘theological subtext to Sauron’s Ring, which is in its own turn a symbol of all forms of tyrannous technology’, and ‘helps make further sense of Tolkien’s claim that the central conflict in The Lord of the Rings, a book that never mentions the Creator, is nevertheless “about God, and His sole right to divine honour” (Letters, p. 243). The question posed by the Ring, in essence, is the question of who among creatures has the right to “play God,” to which the entire quest of the Fellowship to destroy the Ring is the implicit answer, namely, that only God has the right to play God’ (p. 241).

pp. 1016–26, entry for Prejudice and racism: Patrick Curry provides, in the early chapters of his Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity (1997), a useful discussion of criticism of Tolkien’s works through contemporary lenses such as classism and racism. By and large, he defends Tolkien against such attacks, arguing for the primacy of the story (chiefly The Lord of the Rings) rather than what a reader may bring to it. Curry writes, for example:

Following on the Peter Jackson film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, which gave the work a broader exposure in popular culture, Anderson Rearick III felt it important in his essay ‘Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc?: The Dark Face of Racism Examined in Tolkien’s World’ (Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 4, Winter 2004) to examine claims of racism in Tolkien’s work, such as those put forward by John Yatt in the Guardian newspaper and by Stephen Shapiro of the University of Warwick. Both arguments, Rearick notes, are weakened by making claims primarily based on the authors’ experiences of the films. He replies to these from different angles, finally arguing in respect to Tolkien’s faith:

‘Beyond Black and White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Films’ by Sue Kim, also in the Winter 2004 Modern Fiction Studies, is another example of a critic conflating the experiences of a viewer with those of a reader. Kim takes the Jackson adaptations to task for ‘racial coding’ – for example, ‘the Easterlings have kohl-rimmed, almond-shaped eyes and dark skin and, they wear turbans’, while the Southrons ‘are large, muscular, face-painted, and black’ (p. 879) – noting that this aspect is ‘more striking’ in the visual medium but nonetheless is generally drawn from Tolkien’s text (p. 876).

In ‘Diversity and Difference: Cosmopolitanism and The Lord of the Rings’ (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21, no. 3, 2010) Helen Young argues that The Lord of the Rings ‘is ultimately a cosmopolitan work because it provides a model of society in which common ground and a united purpose not only allow diversity, but require it’ (p. 352). She demonstrates Tolkien’s presentation of different species and their interactions, as they ‘need to join together with a common purpose to resist a common foe’ (p. 354), and maintains that ‘The Lord of the Rings may be read as a vision of a modern racially and culturally diverse world’ (p. 362).

p. 1028, l. 3 from bottom: For ‘Hell’ read ‘Hel’.

p. 1035, entry for Quantock Hills (Somerset): It was on this walking holiday, perhaps, when Tolkien was ‘in the neighbourhood of Minehead’, as he told Clyde S. Kilby (see p. 1337). He also remarked on a ‘really long walk’ from Lyme Regis to Minehead in a letter to his grandson Michael George Tolkien (see p. 755).

pp. 1036–7, entry for Quendi and Eldar: See also Ósanwe-kenta in *The Nature of Middle-earth (2021), pp. 204–18.

p. 1052, entry for Francis Vincent Reade: According to David Haden in Tolkien and the Lizard: J.R.R. Tolkien in Cornwall, 1914 (2021), Father Vincent served as a curate in the Cornish town of Porthleven from 1898 to 1903, and then as Curate of St Clement’s Church in Cambridge.

pp. 1053–62, entry for Reading: Lists of books owned by Tolkien are included in a blog post by Jason Fisher, ‘Scattered Leaves’, 21 October 2015.

See further, Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth beyond the Middle Ages (2021) by Holly Ordway. Ordway demonstrates at length that Tolkien did not restrict his reading to early literature, but read widely among modern works (defined by Ordway as works of fiction, poetry, and drama in the English language published no earlier than 1850). Her book is meant to be a corrective to the impression given by Humphrey Carpenter in his writings that Tolkien was not interested in modern literature. In The Inklings (1978), for example, Carpenter wrote that Tolkien’s ‘roots were buried deep in early literature, and the major names in twentieth-century writing meant little or nothing to him’ (p. 158). Carpenter’s 1977 biography of Tolkien suggests this also. For those of us who read Carpenter’s books at or soon after publication, there was little else in print at that time which might call Carpenter into question, and the views of Tolkien’s authorized biographer carried special weight. More than forty years later, much has been added to our knowledge of Tolkien’s life and interests, as more resources have come to light or been opened for use, and one can now see how Carpenter’s statements may be flawed – as, indeed, we ourselves have showed, if in a limited way, in the present article. Ordway’s argument, that Tolkien read more modern works than is generally known, is made with impressive industry, though chiefly in support of (the main thrust of her book), the identification of literary sources and influences in Tolkien’s Middle-earth fiction other than the medieval works on which critics have tended to focus.

Ordway identifies several books visible in a photograph of Tolkien’s study, in addition to others already noted in this entry: To the Land of Far Delight: Three Victorian Tales of the Imagination (1960), containing Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy (1869), G.E. Farrow’s The Little Panjandrum’s Dodo (1899), and George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871); The Welsh Fairy Book by William Jenkyn Thomas (1907), The Irish Fairy Book by Alfred Perceval Graves (1909), Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens (1920), and Stories of King Arthur by Blanche Winder (1925).

On 4 December 1944 Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher that Charles Lamb was ‘an author that I find no use for, I fear’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 149). On 20 August 1948 he wrote to a J.G. Riewald that he was amused by Max Beerbohm’s satirical cartoons but not by his literary work.

p. 1055, ll. 9–11: In regard to Longfellow, Holly Ordway expands upon Tolkien’s familiarity with that author in Tolkien’s Modern Reading (pp. 251–2), pointing out that Tolkien knew both Hiawatha and its poet ‘well enough to reference them in his talk on the Kalevala’ in 1914, and that he mentioned Hiawatha yet again in a draft of his *Valedictory Address of 1959.

p. 1055, ll. 9–10 from bottom: The separate publication of Anna Livia Plurabelle was in the journal Transition for November 1927, followed by (separate) book publication in 1928. Margaret Hiley, having examined the short manuscript in the Bodleian Library containing Tolkien’s notes about Finnegans Wake, comments on his interest in Joyce’s use of language and of word sounds, and suggests that both authors introduce in their works ‘patterns of disruption’ (‘“Bizarre or Dream Like”: J.R.R. Tolkien on Finnegans Wake’ (2015), p. 119). In Tolkien’s Modern Reading Holly Ordway gives a helpful summary of Hiley’s thesis, in addition to her own comments on Tolkien and Joyce (pp. 254–7).

pp. 1056–8, entry for Reading: Tolkien was twice sent a copy of Dune by Frank Herbert, a science fiction novel often compared (more for its scope than content) to The Lord of the Rings. He wrote to one of the donors, John Bush, that he disliked it intensely.

pp. 1057–8: Further in regard to Tolkien and Lord Dunsany, see Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Modern Reading, pp. 226–30.

p. 1058, fourth paragraph: Tolkien owned a copy of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror, edited by Dorothy L. Sayers (1960).

p. 1058, l. 5 from bottom: In regard to Agatha Christie, Edith Tolkien gave her husband a copy of Christie’s novel At Bertram’s Hotel (1965).

p. 1058, ll. 2–3 from bottom: For ‘find that he disliked *Naomi Mitchison’s To the Chapel Perilous (1955)’ read ‘find that *Naomi Mitchison’s To the Chapel Perilous (1955) was not to his taste’. In a letter to Mitchison of 8 December 1955, he compared it to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, pointing out that both books contain anachronisms, which he did not like, preferring that satire arise from material rather than being inserted (see our Chronology addendum for p. 507). We wrote ‘disliked’ originally because Tolkien had referred in a letter to Rayner Unwin (also Mitchison’s publisher) to ‘the intensity of my distaste’ for To the Chapel Perilous, but on reflection ‘dislike’ seems unfair, or at least imprecise, and we had written that ‘Tolkien found [it] not to his taste’ in the Reader’s Guide article on Mitchison (p. 790).

p. 1061, l. 3, entry for Reading: We took Joanna Tolkien’s reference to The Borrowers in her 1994 address to the Tolkien Society to mean the series (except for The Borrowers Avenged, which was not published until 1985), not only the first of the ‘Borrowers’ titles; and although this seems most likely in context, we must allow that we were working from a transcription of her talk and not a recording. As published, her words read: ‘I was handed from his [Tolkien’s] bookshelf the Narnia books – C.S. Lewis – The Borrowers – Mary Norton – and Andrew Lang Fairy Stories’ (Armstrong, ed., Digging Potatoes, Growing Trees, vol. 2, p. 34).

p. 1063, first paragraph, entry for Recordings: The British Library website now (noted May 2020) dates the recording of ‘At the Tobacconist’s’ to July 1929, and of ‘Wireless’ to April 1930.

p. 1069, entry for Religion: Holly Ordway makes the interesting point that since Tolkien was above the ‘age of reason’ when his mother converted to Catholicism, he was not automatically received into the Church when Mabel entered the faith. ‘Rather, he would have to be formally received as an “adult” at the time of his First Holy Communion, which at that time was around the age of twelve’ (Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023), p. 23. Tolkien made his First Communion at Christmas 1903, not long before his twelfth birthday. The Catholic ‘age of reason’ was seven, or thereabouts, and depended on when the person actually attained reason, which could be earlier or later than seven. In 1900, Hilary Tolkien was below the ‘age of reason’.

p. 1069, l. 18 from bottom: Tolkien’s father, Arthur himself seems to have been inclined towards ‘high’ Anglican worship, and received the Eucharist on his deathbed (see p. 1300).

p. 1071, second paragraph: When Tolkien became an undergraduate, the Catholic chaplaincy was based in rooms hired from Pembroke College in St Aldate’s. From 1913 to 1915 a temporary ‘iron chapel’ at 7 St Cross Road, Oxford was used for Mass and lectures. Holly Ordway explains that ‘Catholic students at Oxford were required to attend weekly lectures, called “conferences”, in order to educate and strengthen them in their faith. These were usually given by the chaplain himself, but in the Trinity Term of Tolkien’s first year, these were handled by two guest speakers, the Jesuit priests Fr. Alban Goodier and Fr. Joseph Rickaby’ (Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023), p. 95). The Catholic chaplain when Tolkien matriculated was Father Algernon Lang, a convert to Catholicism who had been a priest for only two years; he was removed from his post by the chaplaincy board in spring 1913, leaving the post vacant until Hilary Term 1914. Ordway speculates that the lack of a chaplain and an ‘unstable environment for Catholic students’ may have contributed to Tolkien’s admitted slackness in religious observance (such as failing to attend Mass regularly) during his early years as a student and before he was reunited with Edith Bratt (p. 96).

pp. 1075–83, entry for Religion: See also Giuseppe Pezzini, ‘The Lords of the West: Cloaking, Freedom and the Divine Narrative in Tolkien’s Poetics’ (2019). On the question of Christianity and The Lord of the Rings, see also Verlyn Flieger, ‘But What Did He Really Mean?’ (2014) and ‘The Arch and the Keystone’ (2019). More generally, see Holly Ordway’s essential biography Tolkien’s Faith.

p. 1079, ll. 23–4, 39: In Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography Holly Ordway calls attention to the words ‘of course’ in Tolkien’s remark that ‘The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work’, and to another statement that his faith ‘can be deduced from my stories’. In both of these, he suggests that the fact that he is a Christian, and a Roman Catholic, must be self-evident from his writings. Ordway makes an important point that these qualities are not obvious to many of his readers who are not Christian (or Catholic) – a lack her ‘spiritual biography’ is meant to remedy.

p. 1082, entry for Religion: In Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faërie (2017) Jonathan S. McIntosh studies in depth the influence of St Thomas Aquinas on Tolkien. ‘Structuring my discussion around Tolkien’s creation-myth, the Ainulindalë’, he writes,

p. 1083, second paragraph: Claudio A. Testi’s 2013 essay has been superseded by his book-length study of paganism and Christianity in Tolkien’s works, Pagan Saints in Middle-earth (2018).

p. 1090, l. 11 from bottom: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

pp. 1090–1, entry for Richard William Reynolds: In the article title on p. 1090, and in the running heads on these pages, for ‘William’ read ‘Williams’.

p. 1092, ll. 15–16: For ‘(with Tolkien)’ read ‘(*Oxford Poetry 1915, with Tolkien)’.

pp. 1096–9, entry for The Rivers and Beacon-Hills of Gondor: See also the chapter by this title in *The Nature of Middle-earth (2021), pp. 376–97.

p. 1110, add entry:

p. 1113, l. 9 from bottom: For ‘Artamomova’ read ‘Artamanova’.

p. 1126, entry for Sarehole (Warwickshire): A photograph of Gracewell Road, c. 1900, is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 126. A photograph of the view across the yard of the mill, c. 1890, is on p. 131 of Maker of Middle-earth.

p. 1127, l. 23, entry for Sarehole (Warwickshire): In Black and White Ogre Country: The Lost Tales of Hilary Tolkien (2009) the Dell is called more fully ‘Bumble Dell’, after the dialect word bumble for ‘blackberry’.

pp. 1130–1, entry for Science: For Tolkien’s interest in botany, see also Walter Judd and Graham Judd, Flora of Middle-earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium (2017).

pp. 1145–6, entry for Donald William Edward Shakespeare: A photograph of Anthony Shakespeare is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 151.

p. 1157, l. 17: For ‘may written a little’ read ‘may have written a little’.

pp. 1171–86, entry for The Silmarillion: On problems Tolkien encountered when attempting to complete The Silmarillion for publication, see Renée Vink, ‘Tolkien the Tinkerer: World-building versus Storytelling’, in Fimi and Honegger, Sub-creating Arda: World-building in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work, Its Precursors and Its Legacies (2019), and John D. Rateliff, ‘The Flat Earth Made Round and Tolkien’s Failure to Finish The Silmarillion’, Journal of Tolkien Research 9, no. 1, article 5 (2020).

pp. 1172–77, entry for The Silmarillion: Douglas A. Anderson has summarized in a blog post when and how the public learned that Tolkien was preparing a book called The Silmarillion: see ‘When Did the Public Learn to Expect “The Silmarillion” as an Actual Forthcoming Book?’ (2021).

p. 1173: The running head is missing. It should read the silmarillion (book) as on the facing page.

p. 1177, l. 8 from bottom: For ‘squence’ read ‘sequence’.

pp. 1197–9, entry for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: In 1961 a small portion of Tolkien’s Modern English translation of the poem, with differences from the same lines in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (1975), was published in A Short History of English Poetry, 1340–1940 by James Reeves (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 7.

p. 1199, third paragraph, entry for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (W.P. Ker Lecture): The lecture is also included in the de luxe edition (2020) of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo.

p. 1199–1200, entry for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (W.P. Ker Lecture): In a letter of 11 March 1953, Tolkien told his Glasgow host, Norman Davis, that he proposed ‘to lecture on the Confession of Sir Gawain ([lines] 1874–1888) and considerations that arise from it, but I don’t think that need be specified’ (Letters (2023 edn.), p. 241). He would not, however, be able to say all he would like to say in an hour. On the lecture, see further, Andoni Cossio and Dimitra Fimi, ‘“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1953 W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture: An Updated Chronology and Related Findings’ (2024).

pp. 1203–5, entry for Sir Orfeo: Numerous critics have suggested Sir Orfeo as an influence on The Hobbit. A useful summary of their opinions is ‘Sir Orfeo as the Source for the Medieval Romance Topoi of Abduction and Otherworld Rampant within The Hobbit’s Mirkwood’ by Andoni Cossio (2021).

p. 1213, final paragraph, entry for Geoffrey Bache Smith: The photograph is reproduced also in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 159.

p. 1210, penultimate paragraph: Smith had joined the Oxford University Officer Training Corps in October 1914. The 19th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers was also known as the 3rd Salford Pals.

p. 1211, l. 6: For ‘Oxford Poetry’ read ‘Oxford Poetry (*Oxford Poetry 1915)’.

p. 1213, l. 7 from bottom: G.B. Smith’s elder brother, Roger, had also attended King Edward’s School.

p. 1218, third paragraph, entry for Smith of Wootton Major: In regard to the Flieger edition, see also Christopher Crane, ‘Early Drafts and Carbon Copies: Composing and Editing Smith of Wootton Major’ (2020).

p. 1224, fourth paragraph: A tin of Player’s Gold Leaf Navy Cut was displayed with some of Tolkien’s pipes in the 2018 Bodleian Library exhibition Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth.

p. 1225, l. 15: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

pp. 1227–8, entry for Societies and clubs: The Stapeldon Debating Society was Exeter College’s version of the Oxford Union Society, of which Tolkien was also a member, though there seems to be no record of him participating in a debate in the latter. According to John Garth in Tolkien at Exeter College (2014, p. 5; 2022, p. 7): ‘At the end of [his first] week [as an Oxford undergraduate] Tolkien . . . paid out a substantial 2 5s (five shillings) to join Oxford’s own prestigious debating society, the Oxford Union.’

p. 1229, ll. 14–16: Of these five papers, four were presented while Tolkien was an undergraduate, but ‘Bull-roarers and High Gods’ was not presented until October 1919, by ethnologist R.R. Marett of Exeter College.

p. 1231, ll. 1–2: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officer’.

p. 1231, ll. 5–6 from bottom: For ‘seems to have been’ read ‘was’.

pp. 1231–7, entry for Societies and clubs: At Oxford Tolkien was also associated with the Mermaid Club, a small society (founded 1902) whose aim was to promote the reading and study of Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan drama. Tolkien was a guest at the Club’s annual dinner held on 25 February 1933, and present at the annual dinner on 5 March 1938. His friend H.F.B. Brett-Smith was a Life Member and frequently President, and Tolkien himself appears as an Honorary Member in a list of life and honorary members dated 1936–7.

p. 1234, entry for Societies and clubs: In regard to the Kolbítar, see also Andrew Lazo, ‘Gathered Round Northern Fires: The Imaginative Impact of the Kolbítar’ (2004).

pp. 1239–40, entry for Societies and clubs: According to Holly Ordway, ‘in adulthood, Tolkien was involved both with the Newman Society in Oxford [see p. 1242] and with the national Newman Association. The latter group invited Catholic university professors to serve as Honorary Vice-Presidents, and the Annual General Meeting reports and minutes show that Tolkien accepted this invitation at least once between 1942 and 1947, and then continuously from 1949 through 1955. He was also involved to some extent in the Oxford Circle of the Newman Association, as the 1955–1956 report names Tolkien as one of three speakers in a ‘Brains Trust’ question-and-answer event for the local group’ (Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth beyond the Middle Ages (2021), p. 33).

p. 1240, final paragraph: The inaugural meeting of the Society for the Study of Mediæval Languages and Literature was on 15 February 1932, as we neglected to say here.

p. 1242, l. 5: For ‘Lovelace Society’ read ‘Lovelace Club’.

pp. 1242–3, entry for Some Notes on ‘Rebirth’: See also ‘Elvish Reincarnation’ in *The Nature of Middle-earth (2021), pp. 246–66.

p. 1247, final line: For ‘secondhand’ read ‘second-hand’ (this is the form in the Oxford Concise Dictionary).

pp. 1247–8, entry for Source criticism: John Garth’s Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020) is devoted to source-hunting, identifying not only real and imaginary places, but also literature and art, which Garth suggests were influences, or possible influences, on Tolkien’s Middle-earth fiction. In the introduction to his book he gives its rationale, in effect a defence of source-hunting and of the theory that Tolkien needed something to fuel his writing, however extraordinary his imagination. At the same time, however, Garth comments that, ‘properly conducted, the search for inspiration can enrich our appreciation of Tolkien’s extraordinary creative powers’. His method was to ‘observe Tolkien’s footsteps closely, consider the context and try to enter sympathetically into his creative thoughts and feelings. . . . Although my intuition will inevitably err at times, everything is weighed on the scales of fact and likelihood, drawing on rich published resources as well as my own extensive researches.’ The result is a book which ‘advances many theories of my own about what inspired the Middle-earth “legendarium”, alongside a few of the most cogent and interesting claims made by others’ (p. 6). Some of the inspirations he puts forward are qualified by ‘surely’, ‘clearly’, ‘must have’, ‘it is tempting to think’, ‘it can hardly be doubted’, and the like, which to the critical reader should serve always as cautionary labels. Garth himself sounds a valid caution in addressing a claim, made by Seamus Hamill-Keays, that Buckland in The Lord of the Rings is based directly on a Buckland estate in South Wales. Indeed, there are remarkable similarities between a map of the Welsh Buckland and Tolkien’s map of the Shire (as drawn by Christopher Tolkien), but as Garth writes, ‘the claim for inspiration depends on the idea that Tolkien visited this private estate as a child, which is not known’, and Hamill-Keays has shown only that ‘the necessary social connections . . . may have existed for such a visit. Coincidence cannot be ruled out’ (p. 19).

p. 1248, l. 5: For ‘consciously or nor’ read ‘consciously or not’.

p. 1249, l. 3: For ‘Tolkien and His Sources’ read ‘Tolkien and the Study of His Sources’.

p. 1249, l. 12 from bottom: For ‘paricularly’ read ‘particularly’.

p. 1249, l. 5 from bottom: For ‘inversigating’ read ‘investigating’.

pp. 1250–2, entry for South Africa: At least seven other Old Edwardians (alumni of King Edward’s School, Birmingham) were in South Africa when Arthur Tolkien lived there (1889–96), though no others, it seems, were resident in Bloemfontein. In July 1883, an Old Edwardian styling himself ‘Vasconian’ contributed ‘Notes on South Africa’ to the King Edward’s School Chronicle, which Arthur may have found alluring. This describes a pleasurable voyage south from England, Cape Town with its white houses gleaming in the moonlight, groups of people to be seen of ‘all grades of colour’ (p. 62), the Christian churches of Cape Town, and (presumably to suggest protection for British citizens) the soldiers quartered there and the warships which continually call. In fact, ‘Vasconian’ said little about South Africa in general, but promised a further essay (apparently never sent to the Chronicle) detailing ‘one or two of my adventures on the Cape peninsular, including a journey on foot across Table Mountain’ (p. 63). Nor did ‘Vasconian’ mention the career opportunities the Cape Colony presented to bold young Englishmen, which would have become known to Arthur Tolkien through other means.

p. 1250, l. 20: For ‘Cape colony’ read ‘Cape Colony’.

p. 1256, l. 5 from bottom: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 1275–8, entry for Switzerland: Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Currie propose in their Tolkien’s Switzerland: A Biography of One Special Summer (2019) a detailed timeline of Tolkien’s visit to Switzerland, from the day the authors imagine that he began to pack for the trip (on 21 July 1911) to its supposed conclusion at the Brookes-Smiths’ home on 14 September. They conclude that it was ‘not possible’ for the party to travel to Innsbruck before reaching Switzerland, as recalled by Colin Brookes-Smith, because in the authors’ view there would not have been enough time to do so. At other points, 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. The result is largely conjecture, based on what Lewis and Currie think the party ‘would have’ done and on their own visits to Switzerland. They do, however, usefully locate Tolkien precisely on two dates, for each of which his name appears in a guest book: at the Ober Steinberg Berg-Gasthaus in the Inner Lauterbrunnenthal, south of Interlaken, on 5 August 1911, and that of the Cabane de Bertol, on the Col de Bertol (Bertol Pass) south of Arolla, on 25 August.

The latter is presumably the high-altitude hut recalled by both Tolkien and Colin Brookes-Smith, located at 10,722 feet, not Mont Collon as we guess on p. 1277. Denis Bridoux, who has also investigated Tolkien’s visit to Switzerland extensively, made this point to us in 2015, but at the time we felt that it was too tentative to include in the second edition of the Companion and Guide. He identified the Cabane de Bertol more firmly in a slideshow in 2016, but we overlooked this in a lengthy PowerPoint file Denis shared with us. (His presentation, made at the Tolkien Society’s Oxonmoot gathering in 2016, may be seen on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=A--NE6B3UBM&t=1974s.) He doubts that the party visited Zermatt, though Tolkien recalled an evening there. In regard to the beginning of the journey as recalled by Colin Brookes-Smith, Bridoux wonders why the party went via Innsbruck if they did not intend to visit the area, as otherwise they could have taken a train direct to Zurich. He has also taken a keen interest in their river journey, assuming that this occurred. Like Lewis and Currie, Bridoux has had sometimes to rely on conjecture, and has suggested numerous connections between the Swiss landscape and Tolkien’s pictures.

In his recollection of the Swiss journey, Colin Brookes-Smith refers to a ‘map of the tour’ kept by Dorothy Le Couteur, but it is not clear if this covered only the part of the visit after Brig, or the entire visit; in any case, it is not known to survive.

p. 1262, entry for The Stone Troll, l. 12: For ‘1926’ read ‘c. 1924’. Tolkien had left Leeds for Oxford in 1925.

pp. 1264–6, entry for Sub-creation: See further, Michael Tomko, Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien (2016).

p. 1295, fourth paragraph, entry for Francis Thompson: Also see Megan Fontenot ‘“No Pagan Ever Loved His God”: Tolkien, Thompson, and the Beautification of the Gods’ (2018), and Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth beyond the Middle Ages (2021), pp. 230–4.

p. 1296, l. 19, entry for Tidworth (Wiltshire): For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 1297, entry for Bernard Joseph Tolhurst: A photograph of B.J. Tolhurst is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 151.

pp. 1297–9, entry for Tolkien family: On 30 March 1951 Tolkien replied to a letter from Florence Tolkien, whose husband, Charles Embury Tolkien, had been born in Canada but whose family was English. Florence had found a copy of The Hobbit and was curious to know more about the Tolkiens. J.R.R. Tolkien thought that he was probably a third cousin, but it was now difficult to learn about Tolkien family history due to destruction during the war and to the fact that, his father having died when he was four, the chief sources of information about the Tolkiens, his father’s sisters, had died without setting down what they knew. Family tradition held that the Tolkiens had been minor nobility in Saxony (Leipzig), and that the surname passed also into Poland, perhaps at the union of the crowns of Poland and Saxony. His immediate ancestors escaped to England around 1746, after the Prussian invasion. The emigrants lived in London, except for his grandfather, John Benjamin Tolkien, who moved to Birmingham. ‘Tolkien’ clocks and pianos, he noted, were once renowned. J.B. Tolkien, however, was a rigid Baptist and would not deal with music halls or theatres; as a result, he became a poor man by the time Tolkien knew him. The family has a tradition of naming the eldest son Johann or John, which passed to Tolkien himself because his eldest uncle, John Tolkien (i.e. John Benjamin Tolkien, 1845–1883, his father’s half-brother), whom he calls a sailor, had no sons. It was also this uncle John, Tolkien says, who had the tradition of a family coat of arms, described as two gold chevrons and five gold stars on a blue shield, with a half-griffin as a crest and the motto Fest und Treu (‘firm and faithful’).

Commenting on this letter, which is transcribed on the Tolknięty website, Ryszard Derdzinski writes that the Tolkiens ‘were minor nobility from Teutonic Prussia and earlier (in the 13th century) from Wernigerode in Saxony’, and that he has found no Tolkiens from Leipzig. Tolkien relatives (Tolkien, Tollkeihn, Tollkühn) lived in East Prussia up to 1945. The tradition of naming the eldest son Johann or John, he says, ‘belonged only to the descendants of the younger brother from Gdańsk, to Johann Benjamin Tolkien’s (1752–1819) branch. J.R.R. Tolkien’s uncle, John Benjamin Tolkien . . . had only one daughter, Beatrice Emily Louise Tolkien (1868–1935).’ As for the Tolkien family arms, according to Derdzinski’s research they were not as described by Tolkien, and Fest und Treu ‘is probably a false motto’.

p. 1298, l. 12: For ‘Richard’ read ‘Ryszard’. Ryszard wrote to us as ‘Richard’, but online has used the Polish spelling, and we used it elsewhere in the Reader’s Guide in preference to ‘Richard’, e.g. p. 828.

p. 1299, entry for Arthur Reuel Tolkien: In regard to his attendance at King Edward’s School, Arthur was Secretary of the Literary Section for three years, and had interests also in lawn tennis and gymnastics. A notice of his death in the School’s alumni magazine called him ‘a standing reproach to the “slack” Edwardians’, due to his enthusiasm and personal drive (‘Notes’, Old Edwardians Gazette, 1 July 1896, p. 226).

p. 1300, l. 10, entry for Arthur Reuel Tolkien: For ‘Orange Free State.’ read ‘Orange Free State. There he finds himself suited to the high, dry climate.’

p. 1301, third paragraph, entry for Arthur Reuel Tolkien: The photograph of Arthur Tolkien with his staff at Bank house is reproduced also in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 124, and that of Arthur with his family on p. 115.

pp. 1301–4, entry for Christopher Reuel Tolkien: See further, The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien, edited by Richard Ovenden and Catherine McIlwaine (2022), which includes (inter alia) McIlwaine’s biographical introduction, ‘A Personal Memory’ by Priscilla Tolkien, a bibliography of Christopher Tolkien’s works, and many previously unpublished photographs of the subject. Also see Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, ‘Christopher Tolkien, 1924–2020’ (2020).

In his rambling memoir Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises (2022) A.N. Wilson writes of Christopher Tolkien as his tutor at New College, Oxford, which Wilson attended between 1968 and 1972. A lengthy description of Christopher, included in chapter 28, is often insulting and at odds with the man we ourselves knew, admittedly under different circumstances. Wilson does, however, allow that Christopher’s lectures at Oxford were ‘legendary’, requiring ever larger halls to accommodate his audiences:

We cannot confirm Wilson’s views on Christopher’s personality, dress, or religion, or his relationships with women, including details regarding his first wife Faith and his second wife, Baillie; some passages have a distinct taste of rumour. Baillie, who appears with Christopher in a photograph on p. 209, herself receives a few barbs from Wilson, as do Christopher’s father and the Inklings. One could, at least, successfully dispute several statements by Wilson about the elder Tolkien’s life and works.

p. 1301, l. 17 from bottom, entry for Christopher Reuel Tolkien: For ‘(b. 1924)’ read ‘(1924–2020)’.

p. 1302, entry for Christopher Reuel Tolkien: Line 23, for ‘1949’ read ‘January 1949’. Lines 26–8, replace ‘During the 1950s . . . Old Icelandic at Oxford’ with ‘He received his B.Litt. in October 1953. In April 1954 he was named a Common University Fund Lecturer attached to New College, Oxford, and through the early 1960s he taught Old and Middle English and Old Icelandic; on the title-page of his published thesis, he is styled “Lecturer in Old English, New College, Oxford”. (In regard to the CUF Lecturer programme, see Reader’s Guide, pp. 943–4.)’ Line 32, for ‘1963’ read ‘October 1963’.

p. 1303, l. 9: For ‘edited’ read ‘issued’.

p. 1303, ll. 12–13: For ‘and *Beren and Lúthien (2017)’ read ‘*Beren and Lúthien (2017), and *The Fall of Gondolin (2018). The latter served as the valedictory to his long labours as the central figure in Tolkien studies.’

p. 1303, l. 21: For ‘Mythpoeic’ read ‘Mythopoeic’.

p. 1303, ll. 5–7 from bottom: A photograph of the bronze bust of Tolkien in the English Faculty Library is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 19.

p. 1304, entry for Edith Mary Tolkien: Line 2, for ‘Frances (‘Fannie’) Bratt’ read ‘Frances (‘Fannie’) Janney Bratt’. Line 11 from bottom, for ‘£5,827’ read ‘£5,837’.

pp. 1304–5, entry for Edith Mary Tolkien: In regard to Frances Bratt’s will, we should have mentioned here (as in Chronology, p. 9) that the probate document issued after her death, dated 15 July 1903 and under the name of her solicitor and co-executor, Stephen Gateley, indicates that her residence at that time was 22 Linwood Road, Handsworth, Staffordshire, and that her personal estate was said to have a net value (presumably after debts and costs) of £3,797 2s 11d, against a gross value of £4,394. Also noted on the document is another value, ‘resworn’, £5,269 14s 9d, which we take to be a revised gross value for the estate.

pp. 1304–9, entry for Edith Mary Tolkien: Nicole M. DuPlessis (‘On the Shoulders of Humphrey Carpenter: Reconsidering Biographical Representation and Scholarly Perception of Edith Tolkien’, 2019), Maria Artamanova (‘Edith Tolkien in the Eye of the Beholder’, 2021), and Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays (The Gallant Edith Bratt, 2021) have criticized Humphrey Carpenter’s portrayal of Edith in Biography, which has influenced her picture in general Tolkien scholarship as ‘an elf-maid, a shy, mousy figure, a non-intellectual, an aspiring pianist with thwarted ambitions, a victim of spousal neglect, an invalid, a shrewish, nagging wife’ (DuPlessis, p. 40). As we state in an online review of Bunting and Hamill-Keays (Journal of Tolkien Research, 2022):

Our use of Carpenter in writing the present article on Edith Tolkien was, we hope, judicious, and not uncritical; but DuPlessis et al. have a point, and as more material from the private Tolkien family papers becomes available – for example, in the quotations from letters published in Maker of Middle-earth – our view of Edith no doubt will become clearer.

Bunting and Hamill-Keays reveal more details about Edith’s early life through their research for The Gallant Edith Bratt, in particular concerning her birth out of wedlock, her stay in foster care, and her time at the Dresden House school (as an historical account, the book concludes in 1917, fifty-four years before Edith’s death in 1971). They are prone, however, to presumption and interpretation on poor evidence, concluding (for example) that Edith was an ‘heiress’ with significant inherited wealth, and that she and Tolkien were sexually intimate when both were boarding at the Faulkners’. We refer readers to our review of The Gallant Edith Bratt listed in our supplemental bibliography. Also see ‘Edith Tolkien in the Eye of the Beholder’ by Maria Artamanova (2021).

Holly Ordway discusses the relationship between Tolkien and Edith, especially in regard to Edith not being a Catholic in earlier years, in Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023).

p. 1305, entry for Edith Mary Tolkien: Penultimate paragraph: The Jessops’ home was in a suburb of Cheltenham, Charlton Kings, at 2 Lyefield Lawn. Final paragraph: Notices in Gloucestershire newspapers show that Edith had an active life in Cheltenham playing the piano as a soloist and accompanist for local public entertainments.

p. 1309, ll. 7–8: Photographs of Edith Tolkien are reproduced also in Maker of Middle-earth, as are many photographs of the Tolkien parents and children.

p. 1309, fifth paragraph, entry for Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien: According to Colin Brookes-Smith’s memoir, Hilary attended a ‘horticultural college’ between his visit to Switzerland (1911) and starting to work on the farm at Gedling (1913?), but we have not been able to verify this from another source.

p. 1310, l. 6, entry for Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien: For ‘thirty-five’ read ‘thirty-four’, and for ‘Magdalen’ read ‘Annie Madeline (called Magdalen)’. Hilary and Magdalen were married on 5 July 1928.

p. 1313, l. 3, entry for Mabel Tolkien: At the end of the first paragraph on this page, add: ‘On 24 May 1891 Mabel, previously a Unitarian, was baptized as an Anglican in the Anglican Cathedral of St Andrew and St Michael in Bloemfontein.’ Holly Ordway notes (Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023), p. 14) that ‘presumably, [Mabel’s] father’s Unitarianism meant that she had never received baptism in the Triune Name’, and that ‘Mabel’s decision to be baptized as an adult indicates a conscious rejection of Unitarianism and affirmation of Trinitarian theology’.

p. 1313, ll. 15–17 from bottom: Mabel was baptized as a Roman Catholic on 28 June 1900, her second baptism as an adult (after that in the Anglican Church in 1891). The baptismal record notes ‘Conversa ab heresi’, i.e. ‘converted from heresy’ (Anglicanism, in the Catholic view).

p. 1314, ll. 11–12, entry for Mabel Tolkien: The photograph is of Mabel and Arthur Tolkien, with baby Ronald at ten months and household servants. This is also reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 115. Another portrait photograph of Mabel is on p. 127 of Maker of Middle-earth.

p. 1315, ll. 9–10: For reasons not known to us, Joanna lived with Tolkien and Edith for a time, at least in 1958. Provision for a room for her at 76 Sandfield Road was made as part of renovations that autumn.

p. 1316, l. 1: For ‘b. 1929’ read ‘1929–2022’.

p. 1327, l. 3: For ‘E II’ read ‘E I’.

p. 1336, l. 9: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 1381, l. 17: For ‘Oxford Poetry 1915 (*Goblin Feet)’ read ‘*Oxford Poetry 1915’.

p. 1393, l. 18: For ‘of coal trucks’ read ‘on coal trucks’.

pp. 1402–5, entry for War: In ‘Scholarly Heroes, Heroic Scholars’, in Kuijpers, Vink, and van Zon, Tolkien among Scholars (2016), Thomas Honegger examines ‘how and to what extent Tolkien’s experiences in WW I . . . influenced his “reading” of the depictions of war and violence in medieval texts’ and more generally queries ‘what is a hero and what constitutes “right” heroic action?’ (p. 18). Also see further, Janet Brennan Croft and Annika Röttinger, eds., ‘Something Has Gone Crack’: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War (2019). On the First World War, see also Paul Golightly, King Edward’s School and the Great War (2016).

p. 1403, third paragraph: The first line is indented too far.

p. 1404, l. 19: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officer’.

p. 1404, l. 22: For ‘Officers’ read ‘Officers’’.

p. 1413, ll. 10–11, entry for Warwick (Warwickshire): Warwick Castle Seen from under the Bridge is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 15.

p. 1415, entry for Weston-super-Mare (Somerset): Priscilla Tolkien recalls that she and her family had a holiday there, perhaps in 1930 or 1931, and that she and her mother visited there in January soon after the war.

p. 1416, l. 1: For ‘Officers’’ read ‘Officer’.

p. 1416, ll. 4–5: For ‘Lovelace Society’ read ‘Lovelace Club’.

p. 1417, l. 18: For ‘The Inklings’ read ‘the Inklings’.

p. 1420, ll. 21–2, entry for Charles Walter Stansby Williams: A photograph of Williams is reproduced in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 26.

p. 1421, l. 10: For ‘Officers Training Corps at both Blundell’s and’ read ‘Officer Training Corps at both Blundell’s and at’.

p. 1421, ll. 22–3: For ‘verses Tolkien had written for an American fan’ read ‘a poem Tolkien had written for a young fan’.

pp. 1421–3, entry for Christopher Luke Wiseman: We should have mentioned here Christopher Wiseman’s sister Margaret, who converted to the Roman Catholic faith and became Mary St John, a Benedictine nun and later Reverend Mother at Oulton Abbey (St Mary’s Abbey at Oulton) in Staffordshire. In 1937 she asked Tolkien to send her a copy of The Hobbit, for which she would pay with prayers as she had taken a vow of poverty; he did so, and subsequently sent her copies of Farmer Giles of Ham, The Lord of the Rings, Tree and Leaf, Smith of Wootton Major, and The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle, inscribed to ‘Margaret’ or ‘M’. Mary St John also served as headmistress of a school at the Abbey, which was attended by Tolkien’s granddaughter Joanna.

p. 1421, l. 11 from bottom: For ‘the son of a minister’ read ‘the son and grandson of ministers’.

p. 1422, entry for Christopher Luke Wiseman: Wiseman later served, in 1918, as an instructor on the battleship HMS Monarch.

p. 1440, entry for Women and marriage: Lisa Coutras includes chapters pertinent to this subject in her book Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty (2016), ‘Tolkien and Feminist Criticism’ and ‘The Transcendental Feminine’. Among other comments, she notes

p. 1455, fifth paragraph, entry for Yorkshire: Also see further, Michael Flowers, ‘Tolkien in East Yorkshire, 1917–18: A Hemlock Glade, Two Towers, the Houses of Healing and a Beacon’, in Croft and Röttinger, ‘Something Has Gone Crack’: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War (2019).

p. 1455, l. 9: For ‘Humber River’ read ‘River Humber’.

p. 1455, l. 10: For ‘earlier in 1917’ read ‘on 31 July 1917’. The hospital held a maximum of seventeen officers.

p. 1455, l. 18: For ‘Winthernwick’ read ‘Withernwick’, and for ‘town’ read ‘village’.

p. 1455, ll. 25–6: For ‘a few miles’ read ‘about two miles’.

p. 1455, ll. 27–9: Remove the sentence ‘Tolkien resided . . . medical officer at Easington’, and replace with the following at the end of the paragraph (after ‘Lost Tales.’): ‘He was given medical treatment two miles south of Easington, at Fort Godwin in the village of Kilnsea.’

p. 1462: For the birth date of Joanna Tolkien, for ‘1945’ read ‘1944’.

p. 1466, add entry in section II:

p. 1467, add entries:

p. 1468, entry for Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: An expanded edition, restoring material removed from the 1981 edition for space, was published by HarperCollins, London, and William Morrow, New York, in 2023, with a revised index by Scull and Hammond.

p. 1468, add entry:

p. 1469, entry for The Story of Kullervo: We neglected to note here the earlier transcriptions and comments by Flieger, ‘“The Story of Kullervo” and Essays on Kalevala’, Tolkien Studies 7 (2010), pp. 211–78.

p. 1474, penultimate entry: A de luxe edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo was published by HarperCollins, London, in 2020, which includes Tolkien’s W.P. Ker Lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and an editorial note by Chris Smith.

pp. 1483–1503, ‘Published Art by J.R.R. Tolkien’: A revision of this section, accounting for art published in newer works such as Maker of Middle-earth and the de luxe edition (2019) of Letters from Father Christmas, is on our website as a PDF, at http://www.hammondandscull.com/addenda/Tolkien_art_list_revised_July_2020.pdf.

p. 1483, l. 19 after titling: Delete the extraneous comma after ‘bit’.

p. 1483, third paragraph: In our Addenda and Corrigenda we have added reproductions in Maker of Middle-earth, referred to more briefly as Maker, and with reference to page numbers.

p. 1486, ll. 13–14 from bottom: For ‘1920’ read ‘1923’.

p. 1505, l. 10 from bottom: For ‘226–7’ read ‘227–8’.

p. 1512, l. 17: For ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ read ‘The Lord of the Rings’.

p. 1517, bibliography entry for The Nameless Land, l. 4: Before ‘were published in’ add ‘with The Nameless Land itself,’.

p. 1519, add entry: One spring afternoon. Rosalind Ramage, in Maker of Middle-earth, p. 97.

p. 1520, add entry: Rosalind Ramage. Maker of Middle-earth, p. 97.

p. 1521, l. 13 from bottom: For ‘]The’ read ‘The’.

p. 1526, l. 1: For ‘Atlakaviða’ read ‘Atlakviða’.

p. 1530, l. 12: For ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ read ‘The Lord of the Rings’.

p. 1533, ll. 5–6: The entry for ‘The Lonely Troll he sat on a stone’ should not run on after that for ‘Lo! young we are and yet have stood’. A line break was omitted.

p. 1538, l. 1: For ‘Atlakaviða’ read ‘Atlakviða’.

p. 1562, add: Christopher, Joe R. ‘J.R.R. Tolkien, Narnian Exile’. Mythlore 15, no. 1, whole no. 55 (Autumn 1988), pp. 37–45; 15, no. 2, whole no. 56 (Winter 1988), pp. 17–23.

p. 1583, add: Hazell, Dinah. The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006.

p. 1589, l. 7 from bottom: For ‘Tolkien & the Silmarillion’ read ‘Tolkien and The Silmarillion’.

p. 1601, add: Ordway, Holly. ‘Tolkien, Morris, and the Dead Marshes: An Unrecognized Connection’. 19 November 2015. http://www.hollyordway.com/2015/11/19/tolkien-morris-connection

p. 1603, l. 20 from bottom: For ‘31–3’ read ‘31–2, 35’.

p. 1605, add: Rateliff, John D. ‘The Missing Women: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lifelong Support for Women’s Higher Education’.  Croft and Donovan, Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, pp.  41–69.

p. 1606, add: Reid, Robin Anne. ‘The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliographic Essay’. Croft and Donovan, Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, pp.  13–40.