General comments on The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide may be read here. Addenda and corrigenda to vol. 1, the Chronology, may be read here. Addenda and corrigenda common to the Chronology and Reader’s Guide may be read here. See also here for addenda and corrigenda to the Reader’s Guide added by date (beginning 17 May 2008). In the citations below, article titles are given selectively, usually whenever there is added comment, to set the addition or correction clearly in context.
dust-jacket, front flap: The blurb says that this volume includes checklists of Tolkien’s ‘published works, his poetry, his pictorial art, and translations of his writings’. These are actually in vol. 1. We had intended them to be in vol. 2, but the main text of the Reader’s Guide ran long and we had to shift the appendices into vol. 1 instead. By that point, it was too late to alter the jackets. The correct situation is explained in the preface, p. xiii.
p. ix: On the first page of the Preface in the Reader’s Guide (only), the heading was accidentally not lowered, as is customary for opening pages. This resulted in a slight difference in page breaks between the Preface in the Reader’s Guide and the Preface in the Chronology, which were intended to be identical in presentation as well as content.
pp. 1–7, entry for Ace Books controversy: See note below for pp. 191–8.
p. 5, final paragraph, entry for Ace Books controversy: Ace Books’ public relations efforts following their settlement with Tolkien also included an advertisement for their edition of The Lord of the Rings on the final page of John Myers Myers’ Silverlock, published by Ace in 1966. Within its text was the paragraph: ‘By arrangement with Professor Tolkien, these Ace volumes are the only American editions that are paying full royalties directly to the author. They are authentic, complete, unrevised and unabridged.’ This was true, strictly speaking: the Houghton Mifflin and Ballantine editions paid royalties only indirectly to Tolkien, through the chain of American publishers and George Allen & Unwin; the Ace volumes were ‘authentic’ and ‘complete’ in and of themselves; and they were indeed unrevised (compared to the Ballantine edition) and unabridged (there were, and are, no abridged editions in English). It was also misleading and self-serving – and apparently little-noticed at the time.
p. 21, first paragraph, entry for Adaptations: Further details about William Snyder’s film version of The Hobbit are given by artist-animator Gene Deitch in his online book How to Succeed in Animation (at genedeitch.awn.com). Deitch recalls being handed the task of making a feature-length animated Hobbit in 1964, with Snyder’s rights to the property set to expire on 30 June 1966. Deitch and his friend Bill Bernal developed a screenplay in which they ‘introduced a series of songs, changed some of the characters’ names, played loosely with the plot, and even created a girl character, a Princess no less, to go along on the quest, and to eventually overcome Bilbo Baggins’ bachelorhood!’ After The Lord of the Rings appeared in paperback, Deitch ‘back-spaced elements’ from that book into the film script to allow for a sequel. But with Snyder’s option due to expire, and the property having become more valuable due to the explosion of Tolkien’s popularity in the United States, a film had to be produced quickly, and Snyder’s contract with Tolkien and George Allen & Unwin did not specify either the nature of the film or how long it needed to be. To this end, Deitch abandoned his screenplay and produced a twelve-minute film of The Hobbit within a month’s time. This incorporated art by the Czech illustrator Adolf Born, narration by broadcaster Herb Lass, and music by Václav Lidl. On 30 June 1966, the film was shown in a small room in midtown Manhattan to anyone that Deitch could bring in from the street.
p. 26, ll. 8–9 from bottom, entry for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book: In addition to The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late and Oliphaunt, The Stone Troll was also reprinted from The Lord of the Rings.
p. 32, entry for Ainulindalë: Further to criticism of the Ainulindalë, in his The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision behind The Lord of the Rings (2005) Stratford Caldecott asserts that ‘Tolkien drew upon many legends that were known to him, and upon the Jewish and Christian traditions that he believed to be true. He was trying to write an account that would be complementary to, while not contradicting, the Genesis story. . . . For Tolkien, as a Catholic, God is the Creator of the World ex nihilo (“out of nothing”)’ (p. 71).
p. 38, bottom–p. 39, top: For ‘are sensible’ read ‘as sensible’.
pp. 44–9, entry for Ancrene Riwle: Arne Zettersten states, in ‘Discussing Language with J.R.R. Tolkien’, Lembas Extra (Wapenveld, Netherlands: Tolkien Genootschap Unquendor; Leiden: Tolkienwinkel, 2007), pp. 16–25, that Tolkien gave him ‘splendid advice on the Magdalene College [manuscript] of the Ancrene Wisse’ which Zettersten edited in 1976.
p. 52, first paragraph, entry for Appearance: For photographs of Tolkien as a young man, see also the j.r.r. tolkien pages on the Birmingham City Council web site.
p. 55, ll. 4–5: For ‘Tolkien and the Silmarillion’ read ‘Tolkien & the Silmarillion’. The ampersand is used within the book and on its covers.
pp. 72–4, entry for Arthur Owen Barfield: In an interview conducted in September 1991 Barfield was asked how far he knew Tolkien. ‘I didn’t know him very well’, he replied. ‘I met him a number of times at meetings of the Inklings – I didn’t go always – and also with Lewis. Once we had a short walking tour, Lewis, Tolkien, and I, just when the [Second World] war was threatening, but then we never talked as we [Barfield and the interviewer] are talking now. And I never became an enthusiast for The Lord of the Rings.’ In response to the interviewer’s comment that he ‘got stuck on page 337’ of The Lord of the Rings, Barfield stated that he didn’t think that he ‘got quite as far as that’, but he ‘got The Hobbit, read it to my son’ (p. 30). See further, Elmar Schenkel, ‘Interview mit Owen Barfield’, Inklings Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik 11 (1993), pp. 23–38. – See also Simon Blaxland-de Lange, Owen Barfield: Romanticism Come of Age: A Biography (Forest Row, East Sussex: Temple Lodge, 2006). On p. 54, Barfield is quoted as writing to novelist Saul Bellow: ‘I did get hold of [Bellow’s novel] Humboldt’s Gift and may as well confess that I couldn’t get up enough interest in enough of what was going on to be held by it. If it’s any comfort to you . . . I had very much the same experience with the Lord of the Rings.’
p. 74, l. 13 from bottom: For ‘d. 1917’ read ‘1891–1917’. Barnsley entered King Edward’s School in January 1908.
p. 75, l. 17: For ‘Barrowclough, Sidney’ read ‘Barrowclough, Sidney (b. 1894)’. Barrowclough entered King Edward’s School in March 1905.
p. 76, l. 11: For ‘b. 1922’ read ‘1922–2008’.
p. 79, l. 3 from bottom: For ‘sat night’ read ‘sat nigh’.
pp. 82–3, entry for Belgium: See further, Johan Vanhecke, ‘Tolkien and Belgium’, Lembas Extra (Wapenveld, Netherlands: Tolkien Genootschap Unquendor; Leiden: Tolkienwinkel, 2007), pp. 51–62.
pp. 83–4, entry for Jack Arthur Walter Bennett: A collection of J.A.W. Bennett’s essays, The Humane Medievalist and Other Essays in English Literature and Learning, from Chaucer to Eliot, edited by Piero Boitani, was published in 1982 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura). See further, ‘A List of the Published Writings of J.A.W. Bennett’ by P.L. Heyworthin Medieval Studies for J.A.W. Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
p. 85, l. 10: For ‘verse translation’ read ‘prose translation’.
p. 86, l. 16: In the quotation ‘hringboga heorte gefysed’ the three instances of ‘g’ should be rendered with the Anglo-Saxon yogh.
pp. 110–11, entry for Biographies: In his review of the Companion and Guide, John Garth criticized us for not having made ‘more reference . . . to Daniel Grotta’s deeply flawed biography of Tolkien, notably on matters where Grotta (and no one since) had access to the letters of Tolkien’s American undergraduate friend Allen Barnett’ (Tolkien Studies 4 (2007), p. 265). Garth himself, in fact, does not cite Grotta in his Tolkien and the Great War (2003), which has much to do with Tolkien as an undergraduate, and uses Grotta only briefly in his essay ‘Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War’ (published in print 2008), with the note that ‘while Grotta’s book is far from reliable, his quotations from Barnett’s papers provide a glimpse of Tolkien’s Exeter College experiences and friendships that is absent from Carpenter’s Biography’ (in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, ed. by Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger (2008), p. 19). But Grotta’s reliability is so frequently called into question, as we observe in the Reader’s Guide, that it did not seem safe to trust his transcriptions any more than his facts. If we had, we would have cited two letters from Tolkien to Barnett quoted by Grotta and given precise dates (20 October 1946 and 21 December 1947), among several other, undated quotations. One passage attributed by Grotta to Tolkien, said to survive ‘in a typewritten letter that he sent to Allen Barnett’ and used by Grotta to illustrate Tolkien’s ‘schoolboy wit’ as an Oxford undergraduate, is almost certainly not by Tolkien: the long gloves/underwear joke on pp. 37–8 (first edition; pp. 42–3 later editions). In content and style, it is unlike any demonstrably early correspondence by Tolkien we have read, and includes distinctly American usages. Variants of this text in fact appear to have been in common circulation, perhaps since the late nineteenth century.
pp. 111–12, entry for Biographies: Carpenter’s own (not always favourable) views about his biography of Tolkien may be found in ‘Learning about Ourselves: Biography as Autobiography’, a conversation with Lyndall Gordon, in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 270–2 (in full, pp. 267–79), and probably in one paragraph – the subject may be reasonably inferred – of his ‘Lives Lived between the Lines’ in the Times Saturday Review (London), 27 February 1993, pp. 14–15.
p. 112, l. 17 from bottom: For ‘in present volume’ read ‘in the present volume’.
p. 116, entry for Birmingham and environs: A bird’s eye view of Edgbaston is provided on this page of the Birmingham City Council web site.
p. 117, final paragraph, entry for Birmingham and environs: Additional resources for Tolkien’s Birmingham are Robert S. Blackham, The Roots of Tolkien’s Middle Earth (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2006; see also his ‘Tolkien’s Birmingham’, Mallorn 45 (Spring 2008), pp. 24–7); Michael Byrne, compiler, Hall Green (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 1996); Martin Hampson, compiler, Edgbaston (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 1999); and Christine Ward-Penny, Catholics in Birmingham (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2004).
p. 137, l. 3: For ‘Soon’ ’ read ‘Soon’.
pp. 141–2, substitute for entry on the Brookes-Smith family:
Tolkien and his brother *Hilary came into contact with the Brookes-Smith family through their *Aunt Jane Neave. Early in the twentieth century James Brookes-Smith (1868–1952), his wife Ellen, their son Colin (1899–1982), and their daughters Phyllis (1895–1974) and Doris (b. 1897) lived in Sussex, at The Lodge, Hurst Green, but sent their daughters to school in St Andrews, *Scotland. Jane Neave became Lady Warden of University Hall, St Andrews, in summer 1909, following the death of her husband in May, and met the Brookes-Smiths when they visited their daughters. In Ellen Brookes-Smith she found a kindred spirit. On 11 March 1911 Jane bought Church Farm (renamed ‘Phoenix Farm’) in *Gedling, east of Nottingham, and on 8 July 1911 she and Ellen Brookes-Smith bought Manor Farm in Gedling as well as adjoining parcels of land. They were registered as joint owners of these properties and of Church Farm. Jane resigned her position at St Andrews, and until 1922 the two women managed and worked the farms assisted by other members of the Brookes-Smith family, Hilary Tolkien (who had decided to take up agriculture), and hired labour.
James and Ellen organized several walking tours in *Switzerland. Ronald, Hilary, and Jane Neave joined the Brookes-Smiths in one in 1911, soon after the purchase of the Gedling farms.
According to Humphrey Carpenter, Hilary was already working for the Brookes-Smiths on their ‘Sussex farm’ in 1911 (Biography, p. 50), but in an unpublished memoir (February 1982, Tolkien-George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins) Colin Brookes-Smith refers to The Lodge, Hurst Green as ‘a country house’, and suggests that Hilary joined the family when they moved to Gedling. Writing some seventy years after the events, he also said the farms were bought by his parents rather than by his mother and Jane Neave, and placed the purchase of the two properties not in 1911 but in 1913. This latter date may reflect when the new owners were able to take possession of Manor Farm after notice to the sitting tenant expired.
Colin Brookes-Smith eventually settled in Bloxham, north-west of *Oxford near Banbury. Tolkien corresponded with Colin’s younger daughter, Jennifer Paxman.
See further, Andrew H. Morton and John Hayes, Tolkien’s Gedling, 1914: The Birth of a Legend (Studley, Warwickshire: Brewin Books, 2008).
pp. 147–8, entry for Edward Christian David Gascoyne Cecil: See further, David Cecil: A Portrait by His Friends, edited by Hannah Cranborne (1990), and Essays and Poems Presented to Lord David Cecil, edited by W.W. Robson (London: Constable, 1970).
pp. 156–7, entry for Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale: Tolkien’s essay has been reprinted in Tolkien Studies 5 (2008), pp. 109–71. Its text ‘incorporates a small number of corrections and revisions, as well as a few marginal notations . . . taken from Tolkien’s own copies of the original publication’, all supplied to the journal by Christopher Tolkien.
p. 171, l. 8 from bottom: For ‘that’ read ‘than’.
p. 177, add entry:
A Closed Letter to Andrea Charicoryides Surnamed Polygrapheus, Logothete of the Theme of Geodesia in the Empire, Bard of the Court of Camelot, Malleus Malitiarium, Inclinga Sum Sometimes Known as Charles Williams. Poem, published in The Inklings (1978), pp. 123–6. Composed by Tolkien in ?November 1943, it expresses both the difficulty he had with *Charles Williams’ works (‘I find his prose / obscure at times. Not easily it flows’; ‘beyond my scope / is that dark flux of symbol and event, / where fable, faith, and faërie are blent / with half-guessed meanings to some great intent / I cannot grasp’) and his admiration for Williams the man (‘Your laugh / in my heart echoes, when with you I quaff / the pint that goes down quicker than a half, / because you’re near’). The title given here is from a typescript of the poem held at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois.
pp. 191–8, entry for Criticism: Another important essay to cite under this heading, not known to us until after our book went to press, is ‘Middle America Meets Middle-Earth: American Discussion and Readership of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, 1965–1969’ by Joseph Ripp, in the journal Book History (2005), pp. 245–86. Ripp also discusses the Ace Books affair at length.
pp. 202–4, entry for Simonne Rosalie Thérèse Odile d’Ardenne: See further, Juliette de Caluwé-Dor, ‘Bibliographie de S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne’, Revue des langues vivantes 35 (1969), pp. 456–60, and Johan Vanhecke, ‘Tolkien and Belgium’, Lembas Extra (Wapenveld, Netherlands: Tolkien Genootschap Unquendor; Leiden: Tolkienwinkel, 2007), pp. 51–62.
p. 204, l. 6: For ‘*The Silmarillion’ read ‘*The Silmarillion (1977)’.
p. 213, l. 18: For ‘13 November’ read ‘16 November’.
p. 233, l. 25: For ‘(p. 64’ read ‘(p. 64)’ (with added parenthesis).
p. 234, l. 8: For ‘with his friends the *Brookes-Smith family’ read ‘with his *Aunt Jane Neave and the *Brookes-Smith family’.
p. 240, ll. 6–7: For ‘Fëanor’s seven sons appear in some outlines for the later, unfinished tales’ read ‘Fëanor’s seven sons are named in The Nauglafring: The Necklace of the Dwarves and appear in some outlines for unfinished tales’.
p. 245, l. 6: For ‘12 December’ read ‘25 December’.
p. 248, entry for English and Medieval Studies . . .: The volume includes: ‘A Short Ode to a Philologist’ by *W.H. Auden; ‘The Old English Epic Style’ by *Alistair Campbell; ‘The Appreciation of Old English Metre’ by *A.J. Bliss; ‘King Alfred’s Last War’ by *M.E. Griffiths; ‘Six Questions of Old and Middle English Morphology’ by C.E. Bazell; ‘Studies in Late West-Saxon Labialization and Delabialization’ by Pamela Gradon; ‘The Bodmer Fragment of Ælfric’s Homily for Septuagesima Sunday’ by *N.R. Ker; ‘A Neglected Manuscript of British History’ by *S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne; ‘Ormulum: Words Copied by Jan van Vliet from Parts Now Lost’ by *R.W. Burchfield; ‘Alliterative Phrases in the Ormulum: Some Norse Parallels’ by E.S. Olszewska; ‘The Affiliations of the Manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse’ by *E.J. Dobson; ‘God and Man in Troilus and Criseyde’ by T.P. Dunning; ‘Chaucer’s Translation of the Bible’ by *W. Meredith Thompson; ‘God’s Wenches and the Light That Spoke (Some Notes on Langland’s Kind of Poetry)’ by *Nevill Coghill; ‘The Anthropological Approach’ by *C.S. Lewis; ‘The Textual Transmission of the Alliterative Morte Arthure’ by Angus McIntosh; ‘Thurstable’ by *G. Turville-Petre; ‘Art and Tradition in Skírnismál’ by Ursula Dronke; ‘Two Sixteenth-Century Editions of The Life of St Catharine of Alexandria’ by Auvo Kurvinen; ‘Climates of Opinions’ by *J.A.W. Bennett; ‘Magic in an Anglo-Saxon Cemetery’ by C.L. Wrenn; and ‘Man and Monsters at Sutton Hoo’ by Norman Davis.
pp. 262–4, entry for Errantry: John D. Rateliff has noted an ‘obvious parallel’ between the rhyming-formulas of Errantry and Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Sir Topas’ in the Canterbury Tales (‘J.R.R. Tolkien: “Sir Topas” Revisited’, Notes and Queries 29, no. 4 (August 1982), p. 348). Jason Fisher in three blog posts (September–November 2008) amplifies this association, and suggests similarities as well with Michael Drayton’s Nymphidia (1627).
p. 278, l. 3 from bottom: For ‘1926’ read ‘1986’.
p. 285, second paragraph from bottom, entry for Fandom: The period of widespread popularity of The Lord of the Rings in the United States, encouraged by the Ace Books controversy, is often referred to as the ‘campus cult’ of Tolkien, due to the number of fans at colleges and universities (though it was by no means confined to campuses).
p. 311, ll. 4–5: Delete redundant ‘without dispute’.
p. 334, entry for Gedling (Nottinghamshire), first paragraph: For ‘Apparently early in 1913 . . . occasional visitor’ read:
Tolkien’s *Aunt Jane Neave and her husband Edwin moved to Gedling, a village east of Nottingham, in 1905; Edwin had then recently been promoted to a senior position in the Nottingham branch of the Guardian Assurance Company. Jane left Gedling following Edwin’s death in May 1909, but returned in 1912 after she and Ellen Brookes-Smith (*Brookes-Smith family) purchased Church Farm (renamed Phoenix Farm), Manor Farm, and adjoining parcels of land to manage and work jointly. Tolkien’s brother *Hilary was employed there, and in particular tended a market garden. Ronald Tolkien was an occasional visitor.
p. 335, ll. 9–12: Delete sentence ‘When one of the authors . . . Phoenix Farm.’
p. 336, entry for Robert Quilter Gilson: Gilson entered King Edward’s School in March 1906.
p. 345, l. 9 from bottom: Add closing square bracket after ‘the Rings’.
p. 348, l. 3 from bottom: For ‘President of Magdalen College as well, and in 1933’ read ‘President of Magdalen College, giving up the Merton chair. In 1933 he became’.
p. 354, entry for Jennie Grove: For ‘Grove, Jennie’ read ‘Grove, Mary Jane known as Jennie’. Tolkien’s portrait of Jennie Grove (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 24) is inscribed ‘M.J. Grove’. We should also add, to avoid confusion about her ancestry, that Jennie was born on 5 February 1864 in Kirkdale, West Derby, Liverpool, the only child of Frederick Grove, a clerk/bookkeeper, and Margaret Mounsey Richardson. One of Frederick’s sisters, Jane Grove, was the maternal grandmother of Edith Tolkien (née Bratt); thus Jennie and Edith were first cousins once removed. Jennie was a more distant cousin of Sir George Grove of the famous Grove Dictionary of Music. Priscilla Tolkien has told us that Jennie used to tell stories of how she could watch from her bed in Liverpool big ships sailing up the river Mersey. (Our sources: Priscilla Tolkien; rootsweb.)
p. 385, ll. 6–7 from bottom, entry for The Hobbit: In regard to our statement ‘almost certainly, from the style of handwriting and references to The Lord of the Rings, written after that work (published 1954–5) had appeared’, this is how Tolkien's note struck the author of this essay. But it is also possible that the note was jotted during the composition of The Lord of the Rings, once Sauron had come to play an important role in that story. The handwriting of the note is similar to other, dated examples by Tolkien from the forties and fifties.
pp. 398–401, subsection ‘Criticism’, entry for The Hobbit: The long-awaited History of The Hobbit by John D. Rateliff was published in 2007 (London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin; 2 vols.). Rateliff provides a transcription of Tolkien’s Hobbit manuscripts and typescripts, including later revisions, with copious editor’s notes on textual matters, extensive commentary, notes to the commentary, appended materials, and illustrations. Among numerous points, Rateliff contends that the origin of The Hobbit can be dated to 1930, that the work was complete when read by C.S. Lewis in January 1933, and that Tolkien ab initio intended the work to be part of the main line of his ‘Silmarillion’ mythology.
p. 410: Add cross-reference: ‘Homes see Birmingham and environs; Leeds (Yorkshire); Oxford and environs; South Africa’.
pp. 410–15, entry for Hope and Despair: Further to this article, in ‘Virtue of Hope Illuminates “Lord of the Rings”’ (Star Tribune, 9 January 2002, quoted online) Katherine Kersten summarizes:
In the darkness of the human condition, hope often seems illogical. But Tolkien believed that man, by nature, turns toward the hope and joy of God. In The Return of the King, the character Faramir expresses the vision this way [bk. VI, ch. 5]: ‘The reason of my waking mind tells me that great evil has befallen and we stand at the end of days. But my heart says nay; and all my limbs are light, and a hope and joy are come to me that no reason can deny. . . . In this hour I do not believe that any darkness will endure!’
p. 415, ll. 4–6 from bottom, entry for The Horns of Ylmir: After ‘If the inscription is correct, Tolkien wrote it while visiting St Andrews, *Scotland, probably during the summer vacation but possibly at Easter.’ insert: ‘The date (1912) and the place of writing (St Andrews), however, are open to question, depending upon whether Tolkien visited St Andrews for a reason other than to see his *Aunt Jane Neave. If he did not, then he is not likely to have written The Grimness of the Sea in 1912, by which date his aunt no longer lived in St Andrews; and in that case, the poem may date instead to a visit in 1910 or 1911. Or it could be that the poem dates from 1912 but was not written in St Andrews.’
p. 416, ll. 24–5: For ‘lived with his *Aunt Jane Neave and her husband Edwin’ read ‘lived with Edwin Neave, the future husband of his Aunt Jane (*Jane Neave)’.
p. 416, l. 31: For ‘shows Jane and Edwin in bed’ read ‘shows Ronald and Edwin in bed’.
p. 416, ll. 33–4: The final sentence of his entry should end with ‘socks’, omitting the dash and ‘the forced result . . . to visit her sister’.
p. 422, ll. 3–16, entry for Illustration: On Cor Blok’s illustrations, see further, Cor Blok, ‘Pictures to Accompany a Great Story’, Lembas Extra (Wapenveld, Netherlands: Tolkien Genootschap Unquendor; Leiden: Tolkienwinkel, 2007), pp. 4–15. One reason for Tolkien’s attraction to Blok’s pictures may be that the artist chose ‘to tell the story by means of standardized, simplified elements while focussing strictly on the essentials of the events to be depicted and the mood, or atmosphere, to be conveyed’ (Blok, p. 7).
p. 430, ll. 6–7, entry for The Inklings: Carpenter later wrote about this reconstruction: ‘It was fun to do, but I would not attempt it nowadays, because it seems to me that documentary truth is always stranger and more gripping than anything a biographer can invent, and to pollute it with the imagination is a pity’ (‘Lives Lived between the Lines’, Times Saturday Review, 27 February 1993, p. 15).
p. 431, third paragraph, entry for The Inklings: Diana Lynne Pavlac, now Diana Pavlac Glyer, has enlarged her study of the Inklings (very broadly considered) as The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2007. Another work on the Inklings worth mentioning is The Inklings Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to the Lives, Thought and Writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield and Their Friends by Colin Duriez and David Porter (London: Azure; St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2001), though its contents do not live up to the promise of its lengthy title. In regard to influence between C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, see Lewis’s letter to Francis Anderson, 23 September 1963, in the Lewis Collected Letters, vol. 3 (2006), pp. 1458–60: ‘I don’t think Tolkien influenced me, and I am certain I didn’t influence him. That is, didn’t influence what he wrote. My continual encouragement, carried to the point of nagging, influenced him v[ery] much to write at all with that gravity and at that length. In other words I acted as a midwife not as a father’ (p. 1458). The similarities between their writings, Lewis thought, were due to temperament and common sources.
p. 432, l. 3 from bottom, entry for The Istari: For ‘in 1954’ read ‘apparently in 1953 or 1954’. Although Christopher Tolkien dates this work to, ‘as it appears’, 1954, a more extensive span would seem to be called for, assuming that The Istari is indeed associated with the unfinished glossary-index to The Lord of the Rings as argued in the introduction to Unfinished Tales (pp. 12, 388). On this point, see also our Addenda and Corrigenda for the Chronology, p. 403, entry for ?August 1953–?first half of 1954.
p. 433, l. 17 from bottom: For ‘Curuno’ read ‘Curumo’.
p. 436: Add new entry:
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters to Rhona Beare. Facsimile reproductions of two letters by Tolkien to the scholar Rhona Beare, published from St. Louis, Missouri by the New England Tolkien Society in March 1985 (see further, Descriptive Bibliography Di2). The letters were written on 14 October 1958 and 8 June 1961. Both were printed in Letters with omissions and editorial changes.
p. 441, l. 13: For ‘paper Tolkien that wrote’ read ‘paper that Tolkien wrote’.
pp. 447–51, entry for King Edward’s School, Birmingham: See further, Maggie Burns, ‘John Ronald’s Schooldays’, Mallorn 45 (Spring 2008), pp. 27–31. Burns notes, regarding Tolkien’s years on the School’s board of governors, that ‘signatures in the King Edward’s Governors’ records show that [Tolkien and Leonard Gamgee, Professor of Surgery at Birmingham University and son of the inventor of cotton-wool] were present at the same meetings’ (p. 30).
pp. 448–9, entry for King Edward’s School, Birmingham: As shown in Chronology, but which we neglected to mention in Reader’s Guide, the year at King Edward’s School was divided into three terms, called for convenience ‘autumn’, ‘spring’, and ‘summer’. These were roughly of three months each between September and July inclusive. The School published information booklets four times each year: a Blue Book in January and September, i.e. at the beginning of spring and autumn terms, and a class list in July and December immediately following summer and autumn terms. Transitions of pupils from one class to another, e.g. from Class VI to Class V, occurred only in autumn and spring.
p. 449, entry for King Edward’s School, Birmingham: W.H. Kirkby (l. 19), A.W. Adams (l. 20), R.H. Hume (l. 26), George Brewerton (l. 27), C.H. Heath (l. 29), and A.E. Measures (l. 33) all should have the title ‘Assistant Master’. Delete ‘probably’, l. 30. For ‘R.W. Reynolds in spring or summer term’, ll. 31–2, read ‘Assistant Master R.W. Reynolds in spring term’.
p. 464, l. 6 from bottom: For ‘1968’ read ‘1969’.
p. 491, entry for Lay of Leithian, end of penultimate section: It is worth adding the comment by A.N. Wilson in his C.S. Lewis: A Biography (1990): ‘Though at times the verse [of the Lay of Leithian] is technically imperfect, it is full of passages of quite stunning beauty; and the overall conception must make it, though unfinished, one of the most remarkable poems written in the English in the twentieth century’ (p. 117).
p. 506, entry for Clive Staples Lewis: Add, after the second paragraph:
By late 1944 Lewis and Tolkien began to consider writing a book in collaboration, ‘on “Language” (Nature, Origins, Functions)’ (Tolkien, letter to Christopher Tolkien, 18 December 1944, Letters, p. 105). According to Chad Walsh, who visited Lewis in 1948, the book was to be called Language and Human Nature and published in 1949 by the Student Christian Movement Press; see Walsh, C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 10, and Letters, p. 440. A manuscript fragment by Lewis discovered by Professor Steven Beebe (see lingwe.blogspot.com, entries for 9 and 10 July 2009) appears to be related to the proposed book; an article by Prof. Beebe is scheduled to appear in Seven in 2010. As far as we know, Tolkien wrote nothing specifically for this purpose. On 12 January 1950 C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter that his ‘book with Professor Tolkien – any book in collaboration with that great but dilatory and unmethodical man – is dated, I fear, to appear on the Greek Kalends!’ On this, Walter Hooper comments that ‘by 1948 it had got as far as being called Language and Human Nature in an announcement of forthcoming books from the Student Christian Movement, who expected it to be published in 1949. In the end, it was never written’ (see C.S. Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 3 (2006), pp. 5–6).
p. 506, penultimate paragraph, entry for Clive Staples Lewis: Related to our quotation of Tolkien’s letter to Dick Plotz, that his debt to C.S. Lewis ‘was not “influence” as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement’, Lewis himself wrote to Francis Anderson on 23 September 1963: ‘I don’t think Tolkien influenced me, and I am certain I didn’t influence him. That is, didn’t influence what he wrote. My continual encouragement, carried to the point of nagging, influenced him v[ery] much to write at all with that gravity and at that length’ (Collected Letters, vol. 3, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 1458).
p. 508, l. 21, entry for Clive Staples Lewis: In regard to Tolkien’s ‘commentary’ on Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm, we should have pointed out that this is titled ‘The Ulsterior Motive’. Brief excerpts from this (now restricted) manuscript have been published in The Inklings, pp. 50, 51–2, 216, 232, and in A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (1990), pp. 135–6, 217.
p. 511, entry for Clive Staples Lewis: Add at end of the third full paragraph: An expansive account of the efforts to bring C.S. Lewis to the Cambridge chair is Brian Barbour, ‘Lewis and Cambridge’, Modern Philology 96, no. 4 (May 1999), pp. 439–84; see especially pp. 459–65, in which Tolkien figures.
p. 545, ll. 12–16 from bottom, entry for The Lord of the Rings: Further in regard to the unfinished index, Christopher Tolkien notes in his introduction to Unfinished Tales that from this ‘I derived the plan of my index to The Silmarillion, with translation of names and brief explanatory statements, and also, both there and in the index to [Unfinished Tales], some of the translations and the wording of some of the “definitions”. From it comes also the “essay on the Istari” [*The Istari] . . .’ (p. 12). Portions of the glossary-index were published here and there in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion by Hammond and Scull.
p. 550, ll. 6–16, entry for The Lord of the Rings: In the online thread ‘not everybody loves tolkien’, Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza forum, ‘geordie’ makes the remarkable observation that in 1956 Edmund Wilson collaborated with Louise Bogan to compose a poem of tribute to W.H. Auden, in which Wilson and Bogan wrote alternate lines. One of Wilson’s lines reads: ‘The orc Tolkien usurps Aladdin’s tower’, among things that ‘have gone to pot’. More remarkable still is that the poem was included, as ‘To Wystan Auden on His Birthday’, on p. 43 of the special number of Shenandoah (Winter 1967) which also contained Tolkien’s For W.H.A.
p. 552, l. 16 from bottom: The words ‘fairy-story’ should be within double quotation marks.
p. 553, l. 8 from bottom: For ‘other what’ read ‘other than what’.
p. 571, l. 4: For ‘Tolkien and the Silmarillion’ read ‘Tolkien & the Silmarillion’. The ampersand is used within the book and on its covers
p. 591, penultimate paragraph, final sentence, entry for Mr. Bliss: This would better read:
But he was not eager to revise his art in a more limited colour scheme, only three colours plus black as advised by Furth, nor did he believe that he had the ability to do so. On 17 January 1937 he had remarked to Furth that the pictures for Mr. Bliss ‘seem to me mostly only to prove that the author cannot draw’ (Tolkien-George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). In the event, he had no time to make the attempt, as the war and work at Oxford and on other projects fell hard upon him.
p. 591, final paragraph, entry for Mr. Bliss: ‘By late 1964 the manuscript of Mr. Bliss came to the attention of Clyde S. Kilby of Wheaton, College, Wheaton, Illinois, who proposed that it be published. Tolkien by this time had come to dislike Mr. Bliss except as a private joke. . . .’ This would be better, and more fully, put as follows:
By late 1964 the manuscript of Mr. Bliss came to the attention of Clyde S. Kilby of Wheaton, College, Wheaton, Illinois, who proposed that it be published. Tolkien was willing to consider the idea, depending upon the method of printing to be used and the terms offered. As ever, he had high standards when it came to reproduction of his art, and he had not forgotten the difficulties encountered by Allen & Unwin decades earlier. At the same time, he no longer had the manuscript of Mr. Bliss at hand, having sold it with other papers to Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1957 (see *Libraries and archives), and was uncertain about its quality.
In March 1966 Ballantine Books (*Publishers) suggested, solely on its rumoured existence, that Mr. Bliss be included in their proposed collection *The Tolkien Reader. A request was sent to Marquette University for photostats of the manuscript, which were supplied to Allen & Unwin the following October. Tolkien and his publisher *Rayner Unwin reviewed them, and agreed that Mr. Bliss should not be included in the Ballantine collection. When other publishers began to show an interest in the story, Tolkien and Rayner Unwin decided that the calligraphy of the manuscript was not clear enough to carry the text, but substitution of type for Tolkien’s handwriting would destroy some of the book’s charm, and that the cost of printing was still prohibitive. Also, by now Tolkien had come to see Mr. Bliss as a private joke which, for the sake of his reputation, would be best left unpublished until after his death.
In writing this entry in the Reader’s Guide, as for others, we tried to be as concise as possible, mindful of the growing length of our book, but also attempted not to be too detailed in recounting the publishing history of Mr. Bliss, believing that to be more appropriately covered at length in the Descriptive Bibliography. In the process, at least in this case, we condensed too much. We assigned Tolkien’s dislike of Mr. Bliss to 1964 (‘by that time’) on the basis of Clyde S. Kilby’s remarks in Tolkien & the Silmarillion (1976), p. 15: there he tells of carrying on correspondence with Tolkien following a visit by Kilby in 1964, one item of which concerned Mr. Bliss, which Tolkien concluded ‘would not “enhance” his reputation’. But Kilby does not claim that this comment by Tolkien was made in 1964, and it seems most likely from other evidence that Tolkien came to this conclusion two or three years later, after he had reviewed Mr. Bliss in photostat. (Compare the account in Descriptive Bibliography, pp. 241–2.)
p. 592, following ‘each facing page’ (l. 2), entry for Mr. Bliss: A further paragraph might be included here:
Years later, in his George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer, Rayner Unwin remarked that the technical problems which had prevented Allen & Unwin from printing Mr. Bliss in the 1930s had ‘eased’ by the 1970s, ‘and it proved perfectly possible to make a reasonable lithographic reproduction’ of the book. ‘All the same, in my heart I still wish Tolkien could have been encouraged to re-cast what was never originally conceived as a book for publication: I think at that time [in the 1930s] it might even have rivalled The Hobbit’ (pp. 83–4).
p. 594, l. 1: For ‘1867’ read ‘1857’.
pp. 622–3, entry for The Name ‘Nodens’: Tolkien’s note has been reprinted in Tolkien Studies 4 (2007), pp. 177–83.
p. 624, following the block quotation, entry for Names: At his confirmation in 1903 Tolkien took the additional name ‘Philip’, but used it only rarely.
pp. 637–8, entry for Emily Jane Neave: In *Finn and Hengest Tolkien speculates (p. 52) that the surname Neave ‘probably’ is related to the name Hnæf via Middle English neve (‘nephew’) and modern dialectal neve, neive.
p. 637, ll. 21–3, entry for Emily Jane Neave: For ‘In 1892 Jane . . . 1901 Census).’ read:
In October 1892 Jane was appointed a mistress at Bath Row School, one of King Edward’s Schools for Girls. In 1893–6, concurrent with her teaching duties, she studied geology, botany, and physiology at Mason College, the predecessor of the University of Birmingham, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1895 under the examinations of the University of London. From ?1897 Jane worked in Liverpool, organizing a science school (or the science department of a school; the exact circumstances are not yet known), but returned to Bath Row School in June 1899. From 1900 to 1903 she was a member of the Church Party on the Birmingham School Board. (See further, Maggie Burns’s online exhibition ‘Jane Suffield’; the present addendum was written in consultation with Maggie after the exhibition text was posted.)
p. 637, l. 29: For ‘now or later a clerk for Guardian Fire Insurance’ read ‘the son of a Salford pawnbroker, now or later an inspector for the Guardian Fire Insurance Company (later the Guardian Assurance Company)’.
p. 637, l. 12 from bottom–p. 638, l. 5, entry for Emily Jane Neave: For ‘After 1901 . . . life in agriculture. By 1923’ read:
In 1902 Edwin was promoted to agent in his firm, and moved to *Hove. Ronald Tolkien stayed in Hove with Edwin temporarily while his mother was in hospital.
In summer 1905 Edwin was appointed Resident Secretary (manager) of the Nottingham branch of the Guardian Assurance Company. This further promotion evidently enabled him at last to support a wife. Jane Suffield resigned from her teaching position on 31 May 1905, and she and Edwin were married in Manchester in August of that year. They settled in the village of *Gedling, from which Edwin could commute to Nottingham by train. Their marriage was cut short, however, by Edwin’s death from bronchial pneumonia on 11 May 1909.
Jane subsequently obtained the post of Lady Warden at University Hall, St Andrews, *Scotland. Tolkien visited her there on at least two occasions.
While at St Andrews, Jane became close friends with James and Ellen Brookes-Smith (*Brookes-Smith family), whose daughters attended a school in the city. On 11 March 1911 Jane bought Church Farm, Gedling, and gave the resident farmer the requisite year’s notice to quit. On 8 July 1911 she and Ellen Brookes-Smith jointly purchased Manor Farm, Gedling, together with some adjoining parcels of land, though they were probably unable to take possession until 6 April 1913. In late summer 1911 Jane Neave and her nephews, Ronald and *Hilary Tolkien, joined a walking tour in Switzerland organized by the Brookes-Smith.
Jane resigned her position at St Andrews, and with Ellen Brookes-Smith managed and worked Church Farm (renamed Phoenix Farm) and Manor Farm until 1922. Hilary Tolkien joined them there, having chosen a life in agriculture. In the following years, Ronald visited his aunt and brother and the Brookes-Smiths in Gedling on several occasions and made two drawings of Phoenix Farm.
By 1923 . . .
pp. 638–40, entry for Edith Nesbit: Another work by E. Nesbit possibly worth mentioning in connection with Tolkien is The Enchanted Castle, first published in 1907. Among the treasures of an estate (the ‘castle’ of the title) in England’s West Country is a magic ring which does whatever its possessor declares – sometimes unwittingly, and as always in a Nesbit story, with unfortunate consequences. Most notably, the ring can convey invisibility, but has no effect on the wearer’s shadow (‘In the blazing sunlight that flooded the High Street four shadows to three children seemed dangerously noticeable. A butcher’s boy looked far too earnestly at the extra shadow, and his big liver-coloured lureher snuffed at the legs of that shadow’s mistress and whined uncomfortably’ (ch. 3).) The presence of a shadow cast by an otherwise invisible person recalls the scene in The Hobbit, Chapter 5, in which the goblins see the invisible Bilbo’s shadow as he escapes through the back-gate; while the ability of a dog to detect someone who cannot be seen brings to mind early texts of The Lord of the Rings in which Bingo has put on the Ring at Farmer Maggot’s house, but the latter’s dog ‘remained behind jumping and frisking round Bingo to his annoyance’ (The Return of the Shadow, p. 94) or had ‘halted near Bingo sniffing and growling with the hair rising on its neck, and a puzzled look in its eyes’ (The Return of the Shadow, p. 290).
In another scene, when the invisible Mabel is having tea, ‘it was rather horrid to see the bread and butter waving about in the air, and bite after bite disappearing from it apparently by no human agency; and the spoon rising with apple in it and returning to the plate empty’, or ‘a mug of milk was suspended in the air without visible means of support’ (ch. 3). Compare again, perhaps, invisible Bingo’s (later Frodo’s) visit to Farmer Maggot during which a ‘mug left the table, rose, tilted in the air, and then returned empty to its place’ (The Return of the Shadow, pp. 96, 292).
Christina had read The Enchanted Castle as a child, but remembered it only for its Ugly-Wuglies, creatures made by the children of the novel from found objects and paper masks which are animated by means of the ring. She was reminded of the book’s ring only in February 2008 while reading Worlds Within: Children’s Fantasy from the Middle Ages to Today by Sheila A. Egoff (1988). Since then, we have asked Christopher and Priscilla Tolkien if they had The Enchanted Castle when they were children. Neither recalls having it, though other books by Nesbit were on their shelves.
p. 638, l. 7 from bottom: For ‘Would-be-Goods’ read ‘Wouldbegoods’.
p. 639, l. 21: For ‘1939’ read ‘1938’.
pp. 640–1, entry for A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District: See also ‘Walter E. Haigh, Author of A New Glossary of the Huddersfield District’ by Janet Brennan Croft, Tolkien Studies 4 (2007), pp. 184–8. Croft suggests that ‘Tolkien most likely met Haigh [1856–1931] through the Yorkshire Dialect Society’ (p. 185).
p. 644, l. 1: For ‘*Quenta Silmarillion’ read ‘*‘Quenta Silmarillion’ ’.
pp. 683–9, entry for On Fairy-Stories: In 2008 On Fairy-Stories was published by HarperCollins in an ‘expanded edition’, with commentary and notes by editors Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. The essay was reprinted ‘in its final form as edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays’ (p. 27). With this are partial transcriptions, edited to form ‘a readable text’, of the two manuscript versions we refer to in Reader’s Guide, p. 687 (numerous extracts also appear in the Reader’s Guide and in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion); editors’ introductions and annotations; and a comparison of the essay as published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams with that published in Tree and Leaf (similar to the analysis in Descriptive Bibliography, pp. 184, 186–9).
Flieger and Anderson add to the history of On Fairy-Stories, using information provided by Rachel Hart of the University of St Andrews (cf. addendum below for Reader’s Guide pp. 686–7). On 29 June 1938, the Faculty of Arts of St Andrews recommended that Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, be invited to deliver the Andrew Lang Lecture in 1939, and that Tolkien be invited to do so in 1941. Flieger and Anderson suggest that Tolkien was nominated by T.M. Knox (see Chronology, p. 226), who had ties to Oxford. Murray, however, was not able to accept the invitation for 1939, nor was the man originally suggested for 1940, the Right Honourable Lord Hugh Macmillan. On 8 October 1938 the Secretary to the University, Andrew Bennett, wrote to Tolkien, inviting him to deliver the next lecture in the series: ‘The amount of the stipend is small, being only £30. The Lecturer is supposed to deliver at least one Lecture during his tenure of office, the subject to be “Andrew Lang and his Work” or one or other of the many subjects on which he wrote’ (quoted in On Fairy-Stories (2008), p. 124). Tolkien quickly sent a reply (his letter apparently does not survive), which Bennett acknowledged on 14 October. Having heard nothing further, Bennett wrote to Tolkien again on 18 January 1939. Tolkien replied on 1 February (deduced from another letter from Bennett, on 3 February), suggesting 8 March as the date for his lecture and giving its topic as ‘fairy-stories’. These were approved.
That Tolkien revised On Fairy-Stories in 1943, a conclusion reached both by Flieger and Anderson and ourselves, is almost certain from internal and external evidence. To this we might add the following, more circumstantial point, which we deleted from the Reader’s Guide for the sake of space:
In a letter written to Gerald Hayes on 12 March 1943, C.S. Lewis defended his taste for works such the Morte Darthur, the Faerie Queene, the Arcadia, the High History of the Holy Grail, and the prose romances of William Morris. ‘But ought we not both to defend our tastes more stoutly?’ he wrote. ‘To all this about being “grown up” may we not answer that the desire to be grown up is itself intrinsically puerile but the love of “fine fabling” is not. These books were written neither by children nor for children. Because they are now out of fashion they have gravitated to the nursery as the old furniture has – the same is true of fairy-tales themselves’ (Collected Letters, vol. 2 (2004), pp. 562–3). This strikes us as similar to Tolkien’s statement in his revision of On Fairy-Stories: ‘Actually, the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery”, as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room . . .’ (Essays Presented to Charles Williams, p. 58, identical to the revised manuscript except for punctuation). The earlier (second) manuscript has ‘Fairy-stories have often been relegated to children like battered furniture to the play-room’ (2008 edn., p. 229, italics original). If there was some influence in this regard between Lewis and Tolkien, in which case there is another piece of evidence pointing to 1943, it seems more likely that Lewis was drawing on Tolkien – perhaps Tolkien was reading the essay to the Inklings, hence Charles Williams’ help in getting a typescript made – than vice versa; but who was influencing whom is immaterial. In a letter to his son, Christopher, the following year, Tolkien wrote, after giving an account of a miracle: ‘And all of a sudden I realized what it was: the very thing that I have been trying to write about and explain – in that fairy-story essay that I so much wish you had read that I think I shall send it to you. For it I coined the word “eucatastrophe” . . .’ (7–8 November 1944, Letters, p. 100). This implies more recent work than 1938–9.
On p. 688 of the Reader’s Guide, ll. 13–16, we state: ‘Tolkien felt that the ideas he developed in On Fairy-Stories had influenced the writing of *The Lord of the Rings, and said so in letters at least as early to correspondents including Peter Hastings (September 1954) and Dora Marshall (3 March 1955).’ Apart from an omission – we probably meant to say ‘as early as its first publication’ – the letters cited give poor support to the assertion. The letter to Peter Hastings simply refers to ‘the Essay’ (Letters, p. 188) without particular connection to The Lord of the Rings; and while Tolkien comments in his letter to Dora Marshall that On Fairy-Stories raised the issue of ‘fairy-story’ being ‘really an adult genre . . . a mere proposition – which awaited proof’ (Letters, p. 209), it too is a more tenuous reference than called for. Far better are those cited by Flieger and Anderson: Tolkien’s letter to W.H. Auden of 7 June 1955, in which he wrote:
I was not prepared to write a ‘sequel’ [to The Hobbit], in the sense of another children’s story. I had been thinking about ‘Fairy Stories’ and their relation to children – some of the results I put into a lecture at St Andrews. . . . As I had expressed the view that the connexion in the modern mind between children and ‘fairy stories’ is false and accidental, and spoils the stories in themselves and for children, I wanted to try and write one that was not addressed to children at all (as such); also I wanted a large canvas. [Letters, p. 216]
and the letter to his Aunt Jane Neave on 22 November 1961, in which he describes having thought about fairy-stories and children before giving his Andrew Lang Lecture, ‘and I think the result was entirely beneficial to The Lord of the Rings, which was a practical demonstration of the views that I expressed’ (Letters, p. 310). The question must persist, however, as to how much Tolkien actively thought about an underlying philosophy of fairy-story in writing The Lord of the Rings (as opposed to considering it in retrospect), relative to how the story would have grown, organically, in any event.
pp. 686–7, entry for On Fairy-Stories: We wrote, in regard to On Fairy-Stories as presented at the University of St Andrews: ‘There seems to be no record of when the invitation to lecture was sent to Tolkien’. So we were informed by the Archivist at St Andrews when we corresponded with him at some length in 2000. The current Archivist, Rachel Hart, however, has had more success in locating pertinent files. She writes in ‘Tolkien, St. Andrews, and Dragons’, in Tree of Tales: Tolkien, Literature, and Theology, ed. Trevor Hart and Ivan Khovacs (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007, pp. 1–11):
It was on 8 October 1938 . . . that the University [in the person of Andrew Bennett, Secretary of the University Court] approached Tolkien, requesting that he deliver the Andrew Lang Lecture in the University of St. Andrews on the following terms: ‘The Lecturer is supposed to deliver at least one Lecture during his tenure of office, the subject to be “Andrew Lang and his Work” or one or other of the many subjects on which he wrote. The amount of the stipend is small, being only £30.’ A number of letters were exchanged. . . .
Hart also notes that Tolkien was invited to speak only after Professor Gilbert Murray of Oxford and the Right Honourable Lord Hugh Macmillan were approached and each declined.
pp. 687–8, entry for On Fairy-Stories: In regard to the publication history of On Fairy-Stories, Rachel Hart notes that the University of St Andrews reached an agreement with Oxford University Press to publish the first ten Andrew Lang Lectures. Tolkien’s lecture, however, was the eleventh in the series, and in the event, appeared in Essays Presented to Charles Williams two years before the OUP volume, which had been delayed by the war.
pp. 689–90, entry for Charles Talbut Onions’: According to Tom Shippey, C.T. Onions pronounced his surname not like the vegetable but ‘On-aye-ons’, and ‘unlike Tolkien he retained a Birmingham accent through his life’ (‘History in Words: Tolkien’s Ruling Passion’, in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder (2006), p. 26; reprinted in Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (2007)).
pp. 693–713, entry for Oxford and environs: Useful sources for this entry include Philip Atkins and Michael Johnson, A New Guidebook to the Heart of Oxford (1999); Christopher Hibbert, ed., The Encyclopædia of Oxford (1988); Derek S. Honey, An Encyclopaedia of Oxford Pubs, Inns and Taverns (Usk, Mon.: Oakwood Press, 1998; this should have been included in the list of Works Consulted); and Geoffrey Tyack, Oxford and Cambridge (the Blue Guide to this region, 5th edn., 1999). A new book, Oxford Then & Now: From the Henry Taunt Collection by Malcolm Graham and Laurence Waters (Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2006), includes photographs of Oxford as it was when Tolkien was an undergraduate at Exeter College, juxtaposed with photos of more or less the same view as it is today.
pp. 702–3, entry for Oxford and environs: On Exeter College, Oxford, see also John Garth, ‘Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War’, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, ed. by Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger (Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree, 2008), pp. 12–56.
p. 707, entry for Oxford and environs (‘Old Ashmolean’): A photograph of the interior of the Old Ashmolean, showing the Dictionary Room where Tolkien worked and some of its staff (including Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and Charles Onions), is reproduced in Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006), p. 5.
pp. 744–6, entry for The Oxford English School: Related to the theme of this essay is Tolkien’s poem Lit’ and Lang’, written while he was at *Leeds and later published in *Songs for the Philologists. In this there are ‘two little groups, / Called Lit’ and Lang’’, i.e. the Literature and Language sides of an English school curriculum. Lit’ does not like philology and ‘was lazy till she died, / Of homophemes’ (words of different meaning or spelling which require the same position of the lips – that is, Lit’ was too lazy to look at the words themselves). When doctors cut up the corpse of Lit’ ‘they couldn’t find the brain’. Lang’ does not mourn her death.
p. 747, l. 1: For ‘d. 1916’ read ‘1894–1916’. R.S. Payton entered King Edward’s School in January 1906.
p. 747, entry for Wilfrid Hugh Payton: King Edward’s School records give W.H. Payton’s year of birth as 1892. He entered the School in January 1904. In later years he was in the Indian Civil Service, and was appointed Chief Secretary to the Government of Burma in 1944.
p. 771, ll. 21–3, entry for Poetry: ‘Tolkien also began a translation of the Middle English Owl and the Nightingale, but probably did not complete it.’ That Tolkien did not complete this translation to his satisfaction is certain; he said in 1967, unambiguously, that he was ‘giv[ing] up the task’. That Tolkien had a translation apparently complete by 8 April 1932, however, is indicated by C.S. Lewis in a letter to his brother: see Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 75.
p. 788, l. 14 from bottom: For ‘Idril’ read ‘Elwing’.
p. 814, entry for Francis Vincent Reade: For ‘c. 1895’, l. 16 from bottom, read ‘1874’. An article on Father Vincent appeared in the Oratory Parish Magazine in early 2007 (‘Francis Vincent Reade’, pp. 2–3; no. 1 of the series ‘Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory’). A man of small stature, he was known as ‘Father Vincent’ to avoid confusion with Father Francis (Morgan): it was an Oratory custom that no two members of the community should have the same name. Father Vincent entered Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1894, earned his B.A. (second-class Theology Tripos) in 1897, when he proceeded to attend Ely Theological College, and was awarded an M.A. in 1903. Although he had become a Priest of the Church of England in 1899, in 1904 he converted to Roman Catholicism and studied in Rome for ordination. He entered the noviciate of the Birmingham Oratory in 1906, and was ordained successively Deacon and Priest in 1908. His main work at the Oratory was as a teacher of religious education and English literature at St Philip’s Grammar School, and from 1910 to 1937 as Headmaster. From 1932 until 1947 he was Supervisor of the Oratory. Among his few published writings is the chapter ‘The Sentimental Myth’ in John Henry Newman: Centenary Essays (ed. Henry Tristram, 1945). A portrait of Father Vincent Reade, by Birmingham artist B. Fleetwood-Walker, is reproduced on this site.
p. 818, ll. 6–7 from bottom, entry for Reading: David Doughan has convinced us that Tolkien’s reference to ‘Joad’ in fact is not to Steinbeck’s novel but to the philosopher and radio personality C.E.M. Joad, who was caught travelling by rail without a ticket.
pp. 826–7, entry for The Reeve’s Tale: Tolkien’s version of 1939 has been reprinted in Tolkien Studies 5 (2008), pp. 173–83.
p. 835, l. 1: For ‘an whence?’ read ‘and whence?’.
p. 835, l. 23: The word ‘Sea’ should be followed by a closing quotation mark.
p. 836, l. 3: The quotation mark after ‘Age’ should be single, not double.
p. 859, l. 14: For ‘dates from 1925’ read ‘is dated ‘1925’’.
p. 873, l. 17, entry for Sarehole (Warwickshire): A photograph of Wake Green Road in 1900 may be seen on the ‘j.r.r. tolkien’s childhood in birmingham’ page on the Birmingham City Council web site.
p. 875, entry for Sauron Defeated: Part One, ‘The End of the Third Age’, also reproduces Tolkien’s illustrations ‘Tower of Kirith Ungol’ and Orodruin, Mt Doom.
p. 878, l. 4: In ‘possibly to see his *Aunt Jane Neave’ delete ‘possibly’.
p. 878, ll. 6–8, entry for Scotland: On the place and date of writing The Grimness of the Sea, see our note above for p. 415.
p. 884, l. 9 from bottom: Begin new paragraph with ‘This volume’.
p. 891, l. 6: For ‘bring’ read ‘brink’.
p. 894, l. 5: For ‘The Vale of Tol Sirion’ read ‘The Vale of Sirion’.
p. 907, l. 4: For ‘*Akallabeth’ read ‘*Akallabêth’.
p. 910, l. 5: For ‘has already returned’ read ‘had already returned’.
p. 911, l. 16 from bottom: For ‘with he more’ read ‘with more’.
pp. 938–42, entry for Geoffrey Bache Smith: Smith entered King Edward’s School in January 1905, the same month as Tolkien’s brother *Hilary. Like Tolkien, he earned distinction as a King Edward’s Scholar and was the recipient of School prizes.
p. 951, l. 16 from bottom: For ‘manages’ read ‘managed’.
p. 951, ll. 6–7 from bottom, entry for Smoking: The full citation of the article by Alan Smith is ‘A Shire Pleasure’, Pipes and Tobacco 5, no. 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 20–4.
p. 956, final paragraph, entry for Societies and clubs: In the process of reducing the Reader’s Guide to a more manageable length, this paragraph was abridged more than it should have been. It would better begin:
While at Oxford, Tolkien continued his military training as a member of the King Edward’s Horse, an organization formerly known as the King’s Colonials. He joined this part-time regiment, open only to those, like himself, born in the British colonies, on 28 November 1911. Since its members were not professional cavalry with a dedicated stable, for their training sessions they had to hire or borrow such horses as they could find. Although a better class of horse was available for hire in Oxford to satisfy demand by undergraduates in the hunting season, it would not have been trained for military manoeuvres, nor was there any guarantee, or even likelihood, of a rider getting the same horse twice. Years later, Tolkien told his children of the problems of training a succession of horses.
From 27 July to ?10 August 1912 . . .
p. 968, ll. 18–19 from bottom, entry for Songs for the Philologists: In regard to Frenchmen Froth, see further, the sub-section ‘French’ under *Languages.
p. 968, ll. 15–17 from bottom, entry for Songs for the Philologists: In regard to Lit’ and Lang’, see further, our addendum to pp. 744–6.
p. 972, ll. 1–3, entry for South Africa: One of the photographs, inscribed and hand-tinted by Mabel Tolkien as a Christmas greeting, may also be seen on the ‘j.r.r. tolkien’s childhood in birmingham’ page on the Birmingham City Council web site.
p. 980, entry for Courtenay Edward Stevens: C.E. Stevens received his B.A. in 1928. He completed his B.Litt. thesis in 1930; this was published as Sidonius Apollinaris and His Age in 1933. See further, The Ancient Historian and His Materials: Essays in Honour of C.E. Stevens on His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Barbara Levick (Farnborough, Hants: Gregg, 1975).
pp. 984–5, entry for Suffield family: The elder John Suffield, father of Tolkien's maternal grandfather of the same name, began a drapery business in Old Lamb House, Bull Street, Birmingham, in 1826. In later decades the business expanded, and employed many members of the Suffield family. The younger John Suffield, the eldest son, appears to have been in charge. The business ultimately failed, however, possibly in 1889, and Tolkien’s grandfather became a brass founder before working, as he did until the age of eighty-seven, as a commercial traveller. A late photograph of Old Lamb House, with Tolkien’s grandparents in an upper window, may be seen on the ‘j.r.r. tolkien’s childhood in birmingham’ page on the Birmingham City Council web site.
In an online exhibition devoted to Jane Suffield (i.e. Jane Neave), Maggie Burns notes that the Suffields were interested in literature and drama, and that the younger John Suffield was a member of the Central Literary Association and the Birmingham Dramatic and Literary Club. Further, this noncomformist family believed in education for women as well as for men, which helps to explain the notable learning and abilities of Mabel Suffield, Tolkien’s mother, and of her sister Jane.
p. 984, l. 5 from bottom: For ‘1904’ read ‘1904, see *Mabel Tolkien’.
p. 999, l. 13: For ‘Völsungasaga’ read (for consistency) ‘Völsunga Saga’.
p. 1009, l. 8: For ‘Thomas Mitton’ read ‘Thomas Ewart Mitton’. Maggie Burns of Birmingham Archives and Heritage has created an online exhibition about Mitton.
p. 1011, l. 17 from bottom: For ‘an critical edition’ read ‘a critical edition’.
pp. 1016–17, entry for Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien: In regard to Hilary’s years at King Edward’s School, it should be added that although he was no scholar like his brother, nonetheless he usually maintained a respectable rank within his class.
p. 1017, entry for Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, final paragraph: A photograph of Hilary as a young man may be seen on the ‘j.r.r. tolkien’s childhood in birmingham’ page on the Birmingham City Council web site.
p. 1032, l. 5: For ‘set a known geographic environment’ read ‘set in a known geographic environment’.
p. 1038, second paragraph, entry for Translations: To the works discussing translations of Tolkien, see also essays by Renée Vink (on the Dutch translation of The Lord of the Rings) and Nils Ivar Agøy (on the Norwegian Silmarillion, Hobbit, and Unfinished Tales) in Lembas Extra (Wapenveld, Netherlands: Tolkien Genootschap Unquendor; Leiden: Tolkienwinkel, 2007), pp. 26–50.
pp. 1045–7, entry for Vincent Trought: Trought entered King Edward’s School in March 1902. Like Tolkien, he earned distinction as a King Edward’s Scholar and was the recipient of School prizes.
p. 1054, l. 19 from bottom: For ‘Beleg’ read ‘Túrin’.
pp. 1083–4, entry for John Barrington Wain: See further, David Gerard, John Wain: A Bibiliography (London: Mansell; Westport, Connecticut: Meckler, 1987; supplement, Wilmslow: Elvet, 1996), and Elizabeth Hatziolou, John Wain: A Man of Letters (London: Pisces Press, 1997).
p. 1104, entry for Charles Walter Stansby Williams: In ?November 1943 Tolkien wrote a long poem beginning ‘Our dear Charles Williams many guises shows’: see further (in Addenda), *A Closed Letter to Andrea Charicoryides Surnamed Polygrapheus, Logothete of the Theme of Geodesia in the Empire, Bard of the Court of Camelot, Malleus Malitiarium, Inclinga Sum Sometimes Known as Charles Williams.
p. 1105, entry for Charles Walter Stansby Williams: Another significant book concerning the works of Charles Williams is Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration by Gavin Ashenden (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2008).
pp. 1105–7, entry for Christopher Luke Wiseman’: Wiseman entered King Edward’s School in March 1905.
p. 1108, ll. 14–19, entry for Women and marriage: For ‘Tolkien stayed with his Aunt Jane. . . . In later years he sent her . . .’ read ‘Tolkien visited his Aunt Jane in Scotland at least twice during 1909–11, while she was Lady Warden of University Hall at St Andrews. It was through Jane that he joined the *Brookes-Smith family on a walking tour of *Switzerland in 1911. In following years, he made several visits to *Gedling, where Jane and Hilary Tolkien were working on Phoenix and Manor Farms. Later Tolkien sent Jane . . .’
p. 1123, entry for Women and marriage: Add to the ‘see also’ references: David Doughan, ‘Women, Oxford and Tolkien’, Mallorn 45 (Spring 2008), pp. 16–20.
p. 1179, l. 6 from bottom, list of Works Consulted: The full citation of the article by Alan Smith is ‘A Shire Pleasure’, Pipes and Tobacco 5, no. 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 20–4.
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