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Barfield, Arthur Owen (1898–1997). Owen Barfield went up to Wadham College, *Oxford in 1919 on a classical scholarship. By mid-1921, when he received his B.A. and began work on a B.Litt., he was already a freelance contributor to periodicals such as the New Statesman, the London Mercury, and New Age. His first book was The Silver Trumpet (1925), a fairy-story which the Tolkien family enjoyed. This was followed by History in English Words (1926), concerning the history of language as the evolution of human consciousness, and Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928), based on his Oxford B.Litt. thesis, which was to have a profound influence on Tolkien.

Barfield had ambitions as a writer, but when at the end of the 1920s he had a family to support and his father needed help in his law practice, he resentfully became a solicitor. This experience, which lasted some three decades, found expression in This Ever Diverse Pair (1950, originally as by ‘G.A.L. Burgeon’). During this period Barfield also produced Romanticism Comes of Age (1944), a collection of literary and philosophical essays first published in periodicals, and his own favourite among his books, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957). Partial retirement in 1959, and full retirement in 1965, gave him greater freedom to write, and in the next twenty years he published many of his best works, including Worlds Apart (1963), Unancestral Voice (1965), What Coleridge Thought (1971), and History, Guilt and Habit (1979).

He also worked as an editor and translator, especially of the works of Rudolf Steiner. Most of Barfield’s writings were informed by his embrace of Anthroposophy and his study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thoughts on the Imagination.

In a brief note published in 1980 Barfield recalled that he was introduced to Tolkien ‘somewhere back in the ’twenties’ at dinner at the Eastgate Hotel in Oxford (*Oxford and environs) with their mutual friend *C.S. Lewis. ‘For some reason Tolkien was in a ridiculously combative mood’, for which Lewis afterwards privately apologized. But Barfield felt that the conversation was ‘entirely good-humoured and enjoyable; and [Tolkien’s] random belligerence had only made me laugh’ (‘Foreword’, VII 1 (March 1980), p. 9). In 1983 Barfield said in an interview that he had not known Tolkien very well, and had never had a conversation of any length alone with him; rather, they tended to meet in company with Lewis. Elsewhere Barfield recalled that he, Lewis, and Tolkien had ‘quite a few meetings … in Lewis’s room [at Magdalen College, Oxford] in the twenties’, even before the circle of friends who gathered around Lewis became known as the *Inklings (quoted in G.B. Tennyson, ‘Owen Barfield: First and Last Inklings’, The World and I (April 1990), p. 548).

He came, however, to attend Inklings meetings so rarely, as his home and work were in London rather than Oxford, that he ‘began to feel more like a visitor and less like a member. Moreover, since I had to leave early for London after a weekend with Lewis, I was excluded from all those auxiliary, and no doubt exhilarating, Tuesday morning luncheons at the Eagle and Child public house’ (quoted in Tennyson, p. 548). He estimated that he attended no more than ten per cent of Inklings gatherings, and regretted that he never heard Tolkien read from *The Lord of the Rings as it was being written – and yet Tolkien reported to his publisher that ‘the audience that has so far followed The Ring, chapter by chapter’ included ‘a solicitor’, by which he surely meant Barfield, among the Inklings (letter to Stanley Unwin, 31 July 1947, Letters, p. 122).

Barfield told an interviewer in September 1991 that he did not know Tolkien well. ‘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 himself ‘got stuck on page 337’ of The Lord of the Rings, Barfield did not 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. In Simon Blaxland-de Lange’s Owen Barfield: Romanticism Come of Age: A Biography (2006) 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. 54).

Tolkien once said that ‘the only philological remark (I think) in The Hobbit is on p. 221 (lines 6–7 from end) [of the first edition, 1937; in ch. 12]: an odd mythological way of referring to linguistic philosophy, and a point that will (happily) be missed by any who have not read Barfield (few have) …’ (letter to C.A. Furth, George Allen & Unwin, 31 August 1937, Letters, p. 22). The citation is to the sentence ‘There are no words left to express his [Bilbo’s] staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful’, and the reference is to Barfield’s Poetic Diction, whose arguments John D. Rateliff has summarized:

Imagination is as valid a tool as reason for the discovery of truth; the history of language is the history of human consciousness, showing a definite movement towards ever greater self-consciousness; many great poems and ancient texts cannot be properly understood unless we grasp that what looks to us like a word used in many different ways – some metaphorical, some literal – seemed to its author and original audience expressions of a single, unified meaning. For example, since we need different words for spirit, inspiration, and respiration, we miss the full meaning of the old word spiritus from which all three of these words and concepts descend. [‘Owen Barfield: A Short Reading List’, C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield: A Souvenir Book for the Centenary Celebration Held … by the Mythopoeic Society (1998), p. 22]

Or, as Humphrey Carpenter has put it, ‘in the dawn of language, said Barfield, speakers did not make a distinction between the “literal” and the “metaphorical” but used words in what might be called a “mythological” manner’ (The Inklings, p. 41).

This idea ran counter to the theory propounded by the philologist Max Müller, who called mythology ‘a disease of language’. Tolkien in his essay *On Fairy-Stories turned Müller’s phrase on its head by stating that ‘languages … are a disease of mythology’ (*Tree and Leaf, p. 24). Not long after the publication of Poetic Diction, C.S. Lewis reported that Tolkien had told him that Barfield’s ‘conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified [Tolkien’s] whole outlook and that he was always just going to say something in a lecture when your [Barfield’s] conception stopped him in time. “It is one of those things,” he said, “that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again”’ (quoted in The Inklings, p. 42). Verlyn Flieger has written at length of Barfield’s influence on Tolkien in her book Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (1983; 2nd edn. 2002). Another treatment of this subject is ‘“The Language Learned of Elves”: Owen Barfield, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings’ by Stephen Medcalf, VII 16 (1999).

Convenient collections of Barfield’s short writings and of extracts from his books are A Barfield Sampler, ed. Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas (1993), and A Barfield Reader, ed. G.B. Tennyson (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1999). Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity, ed. Shirley Sugerman (1976), is an important collection of works in appreciation of Barfield, with a bibliography by G.B. Tennyson.

A catalogue of the Barfield papers held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives), compiled by Catherine Parker, is available at www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/modern/barfield/barfield.html. These include two sets of spoof exam questions for the ‘College of Cretaceous Perambulators’ with which Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were concerned, around April 1938. The name ‘Cretaceous Perambulators’ refers to Lewis, Barfield, and friends who were fond of long walks, Cretaceous presumably because their walks sometimes took them onto the chalk downs of southern England.

See further, David Lavery, the Owen Barfield world wide website davidlavery.net/barfield/, and the website of the Owen Barfield Society, barfieldsociety.org/. The latter includes Jane W. Hipolito, ‘Bibliography of the Pubished Writings of Owen Barfield, 1917–2015’.

A photograph of Owen Barfield is reproduced in The Inklings, pl. 4a. Others are on the website of the Owen Barfield literary estate, www.owenbarfield.org/.

Barnett, Allen (1888–1970). Allen Barnett received his B.A. in 1910 from Georgetown College in Georgetown, Kentucky. From 1911 to 1914 he was a Rhodes Scholar at Exeter College, *Oxford, earning a Third in History. From 1914 to 1917 he taught at St Paul’s, a preparatory school in Concord, New Hampshire, and from 1917 to 1919 was in the U.S. Army Infantry; as Captain Barnett, he was on the Argonne front when the Armistice was signed. Apart from one year in the department of History at Georgetown College, Barnett’s later career as a teacher of History, Greek, and English was in preparatory schools in Kentucky and Virginia and at the high school in his home town of Shelbyville, Kentucky.

While at Oxford Barnett was a friend of Tolkien: both were members of clubs such as the Apolausticks and the Chequers (*Societies and clubs), and both were resident at one time in the ‘Swiss Cottage’ (*Oxford and environs). He appears in a group photograph of the Apolausticks taken in May 1912, reproduced in Biography, pl. 6b, and in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 14.

Barnett’s diary suggests a friendly, even mischievous association with Tolkien (‘Went back to the jolly inn in the morning with Tolkien and we both got quite merry and made awful fols of ourselves when we got back to college …’, quoted in Daniel Grotta, The Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, Architect of Middle-earth (2nd edn. 1978), p. 42), and John Garth has documented (Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 18, with a photograph reproduced from the Daily Graphic) Tolkien and Barnett visiting together the charred ruin of Fred Rough’s Oxford boathouse, which in June 1913 had been burned to the ground by militant suffragettes. If Grotta’s account is correct (see *Biographies), Tolkien and Barnett kept up a correspondence until at least the late 1940s, and Barnett sent food parcels to Tolkien during Britain’s postwar years of austerity.

In his obituary of Tolkien Guy Davenport reported a conversation with Barnett in which the latter told him that, during their time at Oxford, Tolkien ‘loved to hear [from Barnett] about the Kentuckians, their contempt for shoes, their fields of tobacco, their countrified ancient English names like Proudfoot and Baggins’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien R.I.P.’, National Review, 28 September 1973, pp. 1042–43). This was supposed by Davenport to be an influence on the Hobbits, a notion he later expanded (‘Hobbits in Kentucky’. New York Times, 23 February 1979) and which has conveyed to some of Tolkien’s readers (Daniel Grotta among them) that Hobbit surnames derive, as a matter of fact, from names in Kentucky tobacco-growing country. David Bratman has exploded this theory in ‘Hobbit Names Aren’t from Kentucky’, The Ring Goes Ever On (2008). Also according to Davenport, Barnett was unaware, until Davenport mentioned it, that Tolkien had become famous with his stories about Hobbits; but we would take this with a grain of salt.

See also David Cofield, ‘The South and the Hobbits: The Friendship of J.R.R. Tolkien and Allen Barnett’, Beyond Bree, August 1992.

Barnsley, Thomas Kenneth (1891–1917). T.K. Barnsley, known as ‘Tea Cake’, entered *King Edward’s School, Birmingham in 1908 and became a friend of Tolkien. A fellow member of the Debating Society (*Societies and clubs), he was described in the King Edward’s School Chronicle as ‘a loyal upholder of the Society who has never failed to display his unusual fluency (as distinct from argument) and remarkable talent for personalities of amiable virulence’ (n.s. 26, no. 187 (June 1911), p. 46). With Tolkien, *G.B. Smith, and *Christopher Wiseman he performed in The Rivals as produced by *R.Q. Gilson; and with them too he was a member of the *T.C.B.S., though not in its inner circle. He went on to read History at *Cambridge, where his high spirits and clever wit seem not to have been tempered by the discipline of study.

In the First World War Barnsley joined the 1st Birmingham Battalion (later known as the 14th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment), formed by his father, Lieutenant-Colonel (later Brigadier-General) Sir John Barnsley. In 1915 he transferred to the Coldstream Guards, in which he rose to the rank of captain. In August 1916 he was buried alive by a trench mortar at Beaumont-Hamel and evacuated to England. He returned to France, and on 31 July 1917 was killed in action in the Third Battle of Ypres while consolidating a captured position.

Barnt Green (Worcestershire). After *Mabel Tolkien’s death (1904) Ronald and *Hilary Tolkien spent some of their holidays with their *Incledon relatives in Barnt Green, a village south-east of *Birmingham. The area is now developed, and the Incledons’ cottage, if it still exists, has not been located. Tolkien was at Barnt Green during the Christmas vacation in 1912, when his play The Bloodhound, the Chef, and the Suffragette was performed in the family’s seasonal theatricals, and when upon reaching his twenty-first birthday on 3 January 1913 he wrote to Edith Bratt (*Edith Tolkien) proposing marriage. On another visit, in July 1913, he made several paintings and drawings, including King’s Norton from Bilberry Hill, Foxglove Year, and The Cottage, Barnt Green (Artist and Illustrator, figs. 16–18). In July 1915 while at Barnt Green he worked on an early version of his poem *The Happy Mariners.

Barrie, James Matthew (1860–1937). J.M. Barrie was the ninth child of a Scottish weaver, David, and his wife Margaret Ogilvie. Having lost her own mother when she was only eight, Margaret had to become mistress of the house and mother herself to her younger brother. She compensated for the abrupt end of her schooling by becoming an avid reader, and with her encouragement young James read tales of adventure such as Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne, as well as ‘penny dreadfuls’, and began to write his own stories and plays. After attending various academies James graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1882. His subsequent career led to, among other honours, a knighthood in 1913.

He was already a successful novelist and playwright in London when he met the Llewelyn Davies family, first the two eldest sons walking in Kensington Gardens with their nurse pushing baby Peter in a perambulator, then the boys’ parents, Arthur and Sylvia, and later two more boys, Michael and Nicholas. Barrie told the boys stories about pirates, Red Indians, and desert islands, and when they were orphaned took the main responsibility for their care. The family became models for, or at least lent their names to, characters in Barrie’s most famous play, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, first performed in 1904. Barrie’s mother too was an inspiration (for Mrs Darling, along with Sylvia Llewellyn Davies), and underlying the play was Barrie’s pre-occupation with the idea of a boy who would never grow up: his elder brother David had died in an accident, and to their mother lived on perpetually as a boy of thirteen. Peter Pan had made his first appearance in Barrie’s 1902 novel for adults, The Little White Bird: in this Peter is a young child who flies out of his nursery window to live with fairies in Kensington Gardens. (Parts of the book were reissued in 1906 as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with pictures by Arthur Rackham.)

In the play, the boy Peter enters the night nursery of the Darling children, Wendy, John, and Michael, and persuades them to journey to the Never Never Land, to an island with fairies, mermaids, bears, wolves, ‘redskins’, the Lost Boys (children who fall out of their prams and are not claimed), and pirates led by Captain Hook, Peter’s sworn enemy. They have many adventures, and Wendy acts as mother to her brothers and to the Lost Boys. On one occasion Peter and Wendy are marooned on a rock with a rising tide; Wendy escapes clinging to a kite, but Peter seems doomed and remarks, ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’. He too is saved, however, when a bird’s nest floats by. One day Wendy suddenly remembers her parents and refuses to believe Peter when he assures her and the Lost Boys that their parents will have long forgotten them. All except Peter decide to return home, but as they leave are captured by the pirates.

Meanwhile, Captain Hook has slipped poison into the medicine Wendy left for Peter; Tinker Bell, a fairy, tries to warn him, but he ignores her. To save him, she drinks the poison herself and is on the point of death. In the Darling nursery, Peter had said that whenever a child rejects belief in fairies, a fairy dies; now he appeals to the audience to clap if they believe in fairies, to save Tinker Bell – one of the most memorable moments of the play. Peter rescues his friends, and they continue their journey back to the Darlings’ house, where all are welcomed. But Peter refuses to stay, as he does not want to go to school or work in an office. Mrs Darling reluctantly agrees that Wendy may return to Never Never Land once a year for spring cleaning; but in the final scene, as she departs after the first visit, it is clear that she is already growing up, and Peter no longer remembers any of their earlier adventures.

Humphrey Carpenter comments in Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children’s Literature (1985):

Peter Pan was a success from its very first performance, at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, on 27 December 1904. The audience’s response – both adults and children – was wildly enthusiastic; the play thereafter became an annual fixture in London each Christmas and also toured Britain for much of the year, as well as being performed from coast to coast in America. Moreover, it initiated – or played a larger part than any other work in initiating – a fashion for ‘fairy’ literature and illustration in the Edwardian nursery, a fashion that scarcely abated until the 1930s. The effect of Peter Pan was, in other words, more immediate than that of any earlier work of children’s literature, Alice in Wonderland included. … We are dealing here not just with a piece of imaginative creation by one man, but with a public phenomenon. [p. 170]

During the week of 11–16 April 1910 a touring company brought Peter Pan to the Prince of Wales Theatre in *Birmingham. Dimitra Fimi has noted that reviews in Birmingham newspapers praised the spectacular presentation, ‘impressively painted scenery’, ‘complicated [flying] machinery’, and ‘high quality acting’, especially by Pauline Chase as Peter (Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (2009), p. 35). Having seen one of the performances, Tolkien wrote in his diary: ‘Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live. Wish *E[dith Tolkien] had been with me’ (quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 47). Carpenter suggests that the play may have influenced the ‘light fairy things tripping so gay’ in the poem Wood-sunshine that Tolkien wrote in July 1910, but Tinker Bell is the only fairy prominent in Peter Pan, and she appeared on stage only as a moving light – though Tolkien may have been moved by the plea to save her by applauding. As a child, he did not enjoy Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and although he ‘liked Red Indian stories and longed to shoot with a bow and arrow’ (Biography, p. 22), the ‘redskins’ in Peter Pan are not authentic.

Years later in On Fairy-Stories Tolkien rejected the sentimental attitude to childhood of much Edwardian writing. ‘The process of growing older is not necessarily allied to growing wickeder’, he wrote, ‘though the two do often happen together. *Children are meant to grow up, and not to become Peter Pans. Not to lose innocence and wonder, but to proceed on the appointed journey. …’ In a rejected draft, the second part reads: ‘Children are meant to grow up and to die, and not become Peter Pans (a dreadful fate)’ (extended edn. 2008, pp. 58, 190). An important theme of Tolkien’s developed mythology was accepting change and *mortality.

Both Dimitra Fimi in Tolkien, Race and Cultural History and John Garth in Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003) see a connection between Never Never Land (later Never Land, or Neverland) and the Cottage of Lost Play in *The Book of Lost Tales. There are similarities, but also differences: in Peter Pan the children travel physically to the Never Never Land, the setting for a series of superficially violent adventures, while in the Lost Tales some at least of the children who reach the Cottage of Lost Play travel by the Path of Dreams and occupy themselves in the garden and on the shores in peaceful occupations such gathering flowers, chasing bees and butterflies, or dancing. In the poem You & Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (*The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva) the writer remembers a time when a dark child and a fair child met in their dreams and enjoyed happy companionship by the Cottage of Lost Play. Fimi suggests that the reason why, at the end of poem, the two children can no longer find the path is that they are growing up. In Barrie’s play, Peter refuses to grow up, and he is the only one to stay in the Never Never Land.

On two occasions in 1957 Tolkien expressed approval of designs in the style of Arthur Rackham in connection with a proposed film of *The Lord of the Rings (*Adaptations). Some of Tolkien’s own art has Rackhamesque qualities, such as Taur-na-Fúin and Old Man Willow (Artist and Illustrator, figs. 54, 147; Art of The Hobbit, fig. 48, Art of The Lord of the Rings, fig. 23); in particular, these recall Rackham’s illustrations in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, perhaps the most reproduced and best known of his work.

In *On Fairy-Stories Tolkien refers to another play by Barrie, Mary Rose, first performed in 1920. Tolkien saw this performed at least twice, and may have seen or read other plays by Barrie. His daughter *Priscilla recalls that one performance was probably in the 1940s in the *Oxford Playhouse, which she attended with her parents. Mary Rose opens with a soldier, Harry, returned from the war and visiting a house he knew as a boy. There he sees visions of past events: of youthful Mary Rose, her fiancé Simon, and the girl’s parents, who feel duty bound to reveal to Simon that during a holiday in the Hebrides years before, Mary Rose had vanished from an island and turned up twenty days later with no knowledge of the passage of time. Four years later, Mary Rose and Simon visit the same island, leaving their young son Harry behind. The call comes to Mary Rose, whisperings of her name developing into ‘a fury as of storm and whistling winds that might be an unholy organ. … Struggling through them, and also calling her name, is to be heard music of an unearthly sweetness that is seeking perhaps to beat them back and put a girdle of safety round her’ (The Plays of J.M. Barrie (1931), p. 573).

After a further gap of twenty-five years, when Simon is visiting her parents, it seems that time has blurred the loss of Mary Rose, and even of her son who ran away to sea at the age of twelve. Mary Rose appears on the island again, unchanged, thinking that no time has passed; she returns home and looks for her young child. As the stage darkens, Mary Rose appears to the soldier, Harry, who has heard that ghosts can rest when they find what they are looking for – he himself is her son, now physically older than his mother – but he cannot get her to recognize him. She wants to go somewhere lovely, but does not know where that is – Harry thinks it might be Heaven. He wonders if she broke some law, coming back to look for her child. The stage instructions say: ‘The call is again heard, but there is in it now no unholy sound. It is a celestial music that is calling for Mary Rose … first in whispers and soon so loudly that, for one who can hear, it is the old sound in the world. … The smallest star shoots down for her, and with her arms stretched forth to it trustingly she walks out through the window into the empyrean. The music passes with her’ (p. 594).

In the published On Fairy-Stories Tolkien writes:

*Drama can be made out of the impact upon human characters of some event of Fantasy, or Faërie, that requires no machinery, or that can be assumed or reported to have happened. But that is not fantasy in dramatic result; the human characters hold the stage and upon them attention is concentrated. Drama of this sort [is] exemplified by some of Barrie’s plays. … There are, for instance, many stories telling how men and women have disappeared and spent years among the fairies, without noticing the passage of time, or appearing to grow older. In Mary Rose Barrie wrote a play on this theme. No fairy is seen. The cruelly tormented human beings are there all the time. In spite of the sentimental star and the angelic voices at the end (in the printed version) it is a painful play, and can easily be made diabolic: by substituting (as I have seen it done) the elvish call for ‘angel voices’ at the end. [extended edn., p. 82]

In a rejected draft he is much more outspoken:

In Mary Rose Barrie made a play on this theme: Successful in the sense that no machinery was required, and the fantastic events were by his art made ‘credible’. But nothing whatever is done with the horrible suffering inflicted upon the rest of the family. It is as if Barrie, expending his art upon making a Celtic fantasy credible in the centre of the stage, had ignored the human torment going on in the wings. The play is diabolic, or at least it can only stand as diabolic drama: that is, if an interpreter or producer says: ‘Yes, the sufferings of the characters are the thing, watch them squirm and die; the fairies do not matter, except as being malicious, and inhuman: no explanations given, there aren’t any.’ So it was as I last saw it. Mary Rose walked out finally to a summons of the same elvish tone as those which had called her away before. But not so Barrie. With characteristic shirking of his own dark issues, in the printed play there is at the end a sentimental falling star and the calling voices are angelic. Why? Why at all? Why at any rate only for Mary Rose? On any interpretation realistic, symbolic or allegorical, charming and elvish child as she may have been, she is not the natural dramatic centre of the play, and she the least deserving of such (in this story) inappropriate mercy. [extended edn., p. 273]

In another rejected draft he links Mary Rose with Barrie’s Dear Brutus (1917), a play in which an aging painter, broken by drink and despised by his wife, is given a magical opportunity to make his life over, but in the end must return to reality. Here Tolkien’s text is similar to the other draft, but ends with an extra paragraph: ‘But Barrie’s mercy may have been: they suffered and died – that is human fate, and God’s redress beyond the grave is not now my concern. But even for those entangled in “Faerie”, pinned in a kind of ghostly deathlessness to the earth God will grant release in the end’ (extended edn., p. 274).

See further, Andrew Birkin, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979); and Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (1997).

Barrowclough, Sidney (1894–1969). A friend of Tolkien at *King Edward’s School, Birmingham, which he entered in 1905, Sidney Barrowclough was involved in many of the same activities: football, the School library and magazine, the Literary Society, the Debating Society (*Societies and clubs). In debate he was said to have had a cold, cynical, elegant style. He was also a fellow member of the *T.C.B.S., though not part of its inner circle. In 1913 he went up to Cambridge to read Classics.

In the First World War Barrowclough joined the Royal Field Artillery and rose to the rank of lieutenant. He fought in the Somme and Salonica, was invalided home in 1916, returned to France in 1917, and due to injuries was placed on Home Service from June 1917 to January 1919.

The Battle of Maldon. Fragment of an Old English poem, known from a single manuscript. The original was almost entirely destroyed in the fire that consumed Sir Robert Cotton’s library in 1731, but the library’s under-keeper, John Elphinston, had made a transcript which he gave to the antiquary Richard Graves. Before the copy was made, leaves already had been lost from the manuscript, with the result that the beginning and end of the poem are no longer extant. The Battle of Maldon is its title by general agreement.

The work is the fullest surviving account of the battle fought at Maldon in Essex in August 991, and appears to be accurate in so far as it can be verified. It is felt to have been composed soon after the event, perhaps by one of its participants, but not written down until the eleventh century. During this battle, the local defence force, commanded by ealdorman Beorhtnoth (Byrhtnoð), opposed invading Vikings camped on the opposite side of an arm of the river Pante (Blackwater) which could be crossed at low tide only by a causeway. The narrow path might have been held by determined men, but Beorhtnoth, out of overmastering pride (for his ofermōde), agreed to his foes’ request to be allowed to cross so that a fair fight could be joined. Outnumbered, he and the men of his household were killed and the English routed, excepting only a few who fled the battle, even on their lord’s horse – an act of great shame in Anglo-Saxon culture.

At the last, just before the end of the fragment, the old retainer Beorhtwold (Byrhtwold) exhorts his men: Hige sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēntre, / mōd sceal þē māre, þē ūre mægen lȳtlað (‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens’, in Tolkien’s translation). These, according to Tolkien, ‘are the best-known lines of the poem, possibly of all Old English verse. … [They] have been held to be the finest expression of the northern heroic spirit, Norse or English; the clearest statement of the doctrine of uttermost endurance in the service of indomitable will’ (*The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, in Essays and Studies 1953 (1953), p. 13).

*E.V. Gordon has said that The Battle of Maldon has an

aristocratic quality … evident both in the glorification of the military ideals of the comitatus and in the close kinship in art and sentiment with other Old English court poetry. Maldon is of the same school as *Beowulf and nearer to Beowulf in heroic art and social feeling than any other Old English poem. … It is significant too that Beowulf and Maldon are the only Old English poems in which the heroic attitude is fully realized and described’ [The Battle of Maldon, ed. E.V. Gordon (1927), p. 23]

It has long been a set text for undergraduates studying Old English or medieval history, and was used as such by Tolkien as an undergraduate at *Oxford. Later, as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, he himself gave lectures on the poem, at least in 1928 and 1930; and it was apparently in the 1930s that he conceived of an epilogue of sorts, the alliterative verse-drama The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son (published 1953), which tells of two servants of the slain leader as they recover his body.

The transcription of Maldon by Elphinston passed from Graves to his friend Thomas Hearne, who printed the text as an appendix to his edition of the Cronica of John of Glastonbury (1726). The manuscript eventually reached the Bodleian Library, *Oxford (*Libraries and archives), where it was identified (in MS Rawlinson B 203) by the palaeographer *N.R. Ker. An edition of the transcript, made by E.V. Gordon, was published in 1937 in the series Methuen’s Old English Library. In his preface Gordon thanks Tolkien, together with Miss F.E. Harmer, ‘who read the proofs of my edition and made many corrections and contributions’. Tolkien also, ‘with characteristic generosity, gave me the solution to many … textual and philological problems’ (p. vi). An unpublished translation of the poem by Tolkien is among his papers in the Bodleian Library.

For criticisms of Tolkien’s views of The Battle of Maldon, see the relevant section in *The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son. Of these, for the present article, the most notable is T.A. Shippey’s opinion that Tolkien in ‘Ofermod’, which follows the verse-drama proper in Essays and Studies, presents ‘a veiled attack’ on Gordon’s edition. ‘The main drive of Tolkien’s piece’, he writes, ‘is to say that Gordon is wrong … in seeing this poem as the supreme example of the northern heroic spirit’ (‘Tolkien and “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth”’, in Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction (1991), p. 13). According to Shippey, Tolkien held that The Battle of Maldon ‘was an attack on the northern heroic spirit which had led to Beorhtnoth’s act of disastrous folly; but this had not been understood by modern critics like Gordon, who had preferred in a way to revive that heroic spirit by praising retainers like Beorhtwold instead of criticising leaders like Beorhtnoth’ (p. 14).

Some scholars, such as Jane Chance in Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England (rev. edn. 2001), have suggested parallels between the ideals of heroism in The Battle of Maldon and actions of characters in Tolkien’s fiction. See further, Stuart D. Lee and Elizabeth Solopova. The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien (2nd edn. 2015).

The Battle of the Eastern Field. Poem, first published as by ‘G.A.B.’ in the King Edward’s School Chronicle n.s. 26, no. 186 (March 1911), pp. 22–6. Tolkien’s authorship is revealed in his papers; his pseudonym ‘G.A.B.’ may be related to his sometime schoolboy nickname ‘Gabriel’. The poem was printed also in Mallorn 12 (1978), pp. 24–8, and in Mallorn 46 (Autumn 2008), following Maggie Burns’ article on pp. 20–2.

The poem is a parodic account of a rugby match and the feast that followed:

Ho, rattles sound your warnote!

Ho, trumpets loudly bray!

The clans will strive and gory writhe

Upon the field to-day.

It is presented as ‘a curious fragment’ of lofty antique verses ‘found … in the waste paper basket, in the Prefects’ Room’, but ‘much of it was so blotted that I could not decipher it’ (p. 22). The verses are interrupted by ‘blots’ and by ‘comments’ by ‘G.A.B.’, with a ‘correction’ as if by the editor of the Chronicle. The Eastern (Road) Field was the playing grounds for *King Edward’s School, Birmingham, which Tolkien attended as a boy. The poem also includes references to other local places, and to persons well known to Tolkien and his schoolmates, such as ‘Falco of the Bridge’ (fellow student F.T. Faulconbridge) and ‘the king Mensura’ (*A.E. Measures, one of the Masters and head of the house in which Tolkien was placed).

Jessica Yates, in ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field: A Commentary’, Mallorn 13 (1979), was the first to note that the poem is a parody of ‘The Battle of the Lake Regillus’ from The Lays of Ancient Rome by Thomas Babington Macaulay. In this, she writes, ‘Tolkien “Saxonised” the Roman world of Macaulay in the preferred use of English vocabulary’, using words such as clan, grail, corslet, helm, flaxen, liegeman, and henchmen which ‘evoke the Germanic heroic tradition’ (p. 5).

In ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’, Mallorn 46 (Autumn 2008), Maggie Burns points out that part of Macaulay’s poem had been a set text at King Edward’s School in 1906 and 1908 in a poetry recital competition mainly for younger boys, one of whom in 1906 would have been *Hilary Tolkien, and that the fiction of a manuscript found by chance ‘was used several times in the Chronicle in the years Tolkien was at King Edward’s’ (p. 16). She also explains some of the poem’s allusions to the school and its customs. Several lines, she notes, were taken directly from Macaulay or only marginally adapted, and the final stanza is not modelled on ‘Lake Regullus’ but on another popular poem by Macaulay, ‘Horatius’. Burns observes that ‘in the late Victorian and Edwardian period it was common to describe team sports in the vocabulary of the battlefield. The message to schoolboys that war was noble, and that it would be their duty to fight, was often conveyed through songs and poems’ (p. 19). The school song of King Edward’s Grammar Schools (c. 1895) makes a similar allusion.

The Battles of the Fords of Isen. Late, unfinished piece of ‘historical analysis’ related to *The Lord of the Rings, published with notes and commentary in *Unfinished Tales (1980), pp. 355–73.

Written by Tolkien no earlier than 1969, it surveys in retrospect the situation in Rohan prior to the War of the Ring, examines Saruman’s aims and strategy, and covers in detail the defending positions taken by the Rohirrim and the actual course of the battles. Associated material, also published in Unfinished Tales, gives particulars about the Marshals of the Mark and their duties at the time of the War, and provides a short history of the Enedwaith beyond Gondor’s western boundary at the Isen, and of the Tower of Orthanc in the Ring of Isengard.

Baynes, Pauline Diana (1922–2008). Pauline Baynes began to draw pictures for books and periodicals in the 1940s. She had almost no formal art training, but a natural talent for illustration and design. Her earliest published work includes pictures for titles in the Perry Colour Book series and for Clover Magic (1944) and Magic Footstool (1946) by Victoria Stevenson, and both pictures and text for her own Victoria and the Golden Bird (1948).

On 10 August 1948 Baynes was asked by Ronald Eames, art editor for George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers), to submit specimen illustrations for ‘an adult fairy story (complete with dragon and giant!)’ requiring ‘some historical and topographical (Oxford and Wales) realism’ in its setting: Tolkien’s *Farmer Giles of Ham (George Allen & Unwin archive, University of Reading). She replied at once, noting in jest, by way of credentials, that she had sketched in Oxford and picked potatoes in Wales. Around the beginning of October 1948 Tolkien looked at her portfolio and was charmed especially by ink and watercolour cartoons she had drawn after medieval manuscript illuminations, whose character perfectly complemented his mock-medieval story of Farmer Giles. Formally commissioned, Baynes quickly produced more than the required number of drawings. Tolkien found them to be in such perfect accord with his text that he declared: ‘they are more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme. I showed them to my friends whose polite comment was that they reduced my text to a commentary on the drawings’ (letter to Ronald Eames, 16 March 1949, Letters, p. 133).

After Farmer Giles of Ham was published with success in 1949 Baynes was Tolkien’s illustrator of choice. On 20 December 1949 he wrote that he had ‘two (large) books of mythical, legendary, or elvish kind’ which he expected to go into production the following year, and hoped that Baynes could provide ‘some illustration or decorations’ (Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois) – *‘The Silmarillion’ and *The Lord of the Rings. Baynes understood his request to be for headpieces and pictures to appear in margins, and was willing to produce them. But ‘The Silmarillion’ was unfinished, and the production budget for The Lord of the Rings made little allowance for art. Baynes was engaged by Allen & Unwin, however, to make a drawing of Aragorn’s standard (The Lord of the Rings, Book V, Chapter 7) for a newspaper advertisement, published in October 1955, and to paint a triptych view of Middle-earth to cover the slipcase of a deluxe boxed set of The Lord of the Rings (1964; parts were reproduced on the cover of the first one-volume paperback, 1968).

In 1961 the first paperback edition of *The Hobbit was published in the Puffin series by Penguin Books, with a wraparound cover by Baynes. In that same year she married Fritz Otto Gasch (1919–1988), a former German prisoner of war. They were good friends with Tolkien and his wife, exchanged letters, and visited the Tolkiens in *Bournemouth.

Late in 1961 Tolkien suggested that Baynes illustrate a selection of his poems. *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book, first published in 1962, is enlivened by a variety of her pictures. Tolkien approved her work, except for her cover art, the elements of which he felt should be reversed between front and back, and her full-page illustration for *The Hoard which depicts a young warrior without helm or shield, and a dragon facing away from the mouth of his cave, a poor position from which to defend it.

Partly in collaboration with Tolkien, Baynes drew a poster-map of Middle-earth with figures and scenes from The Lord of the Rings (1970). They consulted closely on geographical detail and nomenclature, as evidenced by a copy of the general Middle-earth map removed from The Lord of the Rings which Baynes and Tolkien covered with annotations (held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford). Tolkien was unhappy with the artist’s depiction of characters from The Lord of the Rings, in panels at the top and bottom of the poster, but he had made no objection when Baynes showed him the finished art before publication.

Baynes also illustrated Tolkien’s *Smith of Wootton Major (1967); she drew a second poster-map, There and Back Again (1971), based on The Hobbit (avoiding the illustration of characters except for the dragon and spiders); she depicted the scene of the last ship sailing from the Grey Havens (The Lord of the Rings, Book VI, Chapter 9) for the British poster edition of *Bilbo’s Last Song (1974), and for the book version of that poem (1st edn. 1990) illustrated the final chapter of The Lord of the Rings in a series of painted vignettes; she painted new covers for the 1975 and 1976 editions (respectively) of Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham; she produced the cover art for a paperback edition (1978) of Tolkien’s translations of *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo; she added new art to previous work in the reprint collection *Poems and Stories (1980), in the process correcting her illustration for The Hoard; and she contributed a map of the Little Kingdom to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Farmer Giles of Ham (1999). A painting made by Baynes in the mid-1970s, intended for a new edition of *Tree and Leaf, was first published at last in 2003 as insert art for a compact disc recording by Derek Jacobi of Smith of Wootton Major and *Leaf by Niggle.

Art by Pauline Baynes has also appeared in a wide range of books other than those by Tolkien, including Medieval Tales by Jennifer Westwood (1967), The Times Cookery Book by Katie Stewart (1972), and A Companion to World Mythology by Richard Barber (1979). Her illustrations for A Dictionary of Chivalry by Grant Uden (1968) won her the coveted Kate Greenaway medal. Her most famous work, however, is her art for the seven volumes of the Chronicles of Narnia by Tolkien’s friend *C.S. Lewis, first published in 1950–6. Altogether she had hundreds of commissions for books and magazines, as well as for products such as greetings cards and cigarette packages.

See also Wayne G. Hammond, ‘Pauline Baynes’, British Children’s Writers, 1914–1960 (1996). The greater part of the artist’s archive is held in the Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Bedford (Bedfordshire). Tolkien attended a class of instruction at Bedford, a town some fifty miles north of London, for about a month from 19 July 1915 before joining his Army battalion at Lichfield (*Staffordshire). ‘He was billeted in a house in the town with half a dozen other officers. He learnt to drill a platoon, and attended military lectures. He bought a motor bicycle which he shared with a fellow officer, and when he could get weekend leave he rode over to *Warwick to visit Edith [Bratt, his fiancée; see *Edith Tolkien]’ (Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 77). While at Bedford he wrote a poem, Thoughts on Parade, completed the poem *The Happy Mariners, and revised another, The Trumpets of Faery.

‘Of the Beginning of Days’. The first chapter of the *‘Quenta Silmarillion’, published in *The Silmarillion (1977), pp. 35–42.

SYNOPSIS

The chapter is divided roughly into three sections, concerning early events in Arda; comments on the greatest of the Valar and their relationship with the Elves; and the words concerning Elves and Men spoken by Ilúvatar after the departure of the Ainur who chose to enter Arda. In the first section, the attempts of the Valar to shape Arda are hindered by Melkor until Tulkas comes to their aid, and Melkor is driven out of Arda for a time. To give light to Middle-earth Aulë builds two great lamps on pillars, one in the north and one in the south, and in their light many growing things flourish (including trees, but not flowers), and beasts (but not birds) come forth. The Valar dwell on the Isle of Almaren in the midmost part where the light of the Lamps meets. There they rest from their labours and hold a great feast at which Tulkas and Nessa are wed. While they are thus occupied, Melkor looks down in envy and hatred on the Spring of Arda. He returns in secret with spirits he has perverted to his service, and begins to excavate a vast fortress, Utumno, under mountains in the north. The Valar are unaware of his return until they see the blight of his hatred on growing things, and beasts turning into monsters. They seek for his hiding place, but before they find it Melkor throws down the pillars and in their fall not only are the lamps broken, but the lands and seas rise in upheaval. Melkor escapes to Utumno, and the Valar need all their strength to restrain the tumult and save what they can of their labours. Once this is achieved, they fear to rend the Earth in pursuit of Melkor, since they do not know where the Children of Ilúvatar are sleeping.

The Isle of Almaren having been destroyed, the Valar establish new dwellings in Aman in the West across the Sea, in Valinor behind the protection of the mountains of the Pelóri which they raise on the eastern shore. Valinor becomes even more beautiful than Middle-earth in the Spring of Arda. It is blessed and holy because the Valar live there. Nothing fades or withers, and living things suffer no corruption or sickness. When Valinor is full-wrought, the Valar gather around a green mound which Nienna waters with her tears, and Yavanna sings into being the Two Trees, Telperion the elder, from whose flowers fall ‘a dew of silver light’, and Laurelin from whose clustered flowers spills ‘a golden rain’. Each in turn ‘waxed to full and waned again to naught; and ‘twice every day there came a gentle hour of softer light when both trees were faint and their gold and silver beams were mingled’ (p. 38). The Valar reckon time by this waxing and waning.

In the second section, the Valar, with the exception of Yavanna and Oromë, give little thought to Middle-earth, which lies in darkness. Then follow descriptions of Aulë, his spheres of devising and making, and his later friendship with the Noldor; of Manwë, his powers, and his later love of the Vanyar; and of Ulmo and his music which runs through all the waters of the world.

In the third section, after the Ainur depart to Arda, Ilúvatar declares that the Elves ‘shall be the fairest of all earthly creatures, and they shall have and shall conceive and bring forth more beauty than all my Children; and they shall have the greater bliss in this world’. But to Men he gives a different gift: ‘that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else; and of their operation everything should be, in form and deed, completed, and the world fulfilled unto the last and smallest’ (pp. 41–2). He knows that Men will often stray, but prophesies that nevertheless all they do will redound to his glory. Elves have a greater love of the Earth and are fated not to die unless slain or wasted in grief, but to live on the Earth until the end of days. If slain, they may in time return. Men are short-lived: they die and ‘depart soon whither the Elves know not’ (p. 42). The Valar tell the Elves that Men will join in a second Music of the Ainur, but they do not know the fate of the Elves after the World’s End.

HISTORY

Much of the content of the first section of this chapter was already present in the earliest version in The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor in *The Book of Lost Tales (c. 1919): there Melko reaches Arda before the other Ainur, causing tumult in the air and sea with his speed, and soon begins to delve for himself a stronghold, Utumna, in the North. There is no mention of where the Ainur dwell in Middle-earth. Melko is brought before the other Ainur but ingratiates himself with most of them, and at the request of Aulë builds two tall pillars on which Aulë places lamps to illuminate the earth, one with silver light, the other with gold. But Melko makes the pillars of ice, so that they melt from the heat of the lamps, which fall to the ground, causing floods and fires. The Ainur take refuge from the floods on an island which Ossë and water spirits draw across the Sea to a land in the west. There they create a secure dwelling place protected by mountains for themselves in the far West, which they call Valinor.

This first version of the creation of the Two Trees was much more elaborate than later texts, and less mythical, involving ‘sympathetic magic’. In the pit where Silpion (Telperion) would grow

they cast three huge pearls … and a small star … and they covered it with foams and white mists and thereafter sprinkled lightly earth upon it, but Lórien who loved twilights and flittering shadows, and sweet scents borne upon the evening winds, who is the lord of dreams and imaginings, sat nigh and whispered swift noiseless words, while his sprites played half-heard tunes beside him like music stealing out into the dark from distant dwellings. [*The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 71]

Laurelin, not Telperion, is there the elder tree. The chapter also includes lengthy description of the dwellings and mansions that Aulë built for each of the Valar, not carried forward into later texts.

The texts of the 1920s and 1930s are much shorter, and the absence of any element of the story does not necessarily mean that it had been rejected, but rather merely omitted. In none of these versions is Melko, now usually referred to as Morgoth, said to have arrived before the other Valar. The *Sketch of the Mythology (c. 1926), the *Quenta Noldorinwa (c. 1930), and the first version of the *Quenta Silmarillion (begun mid-1930s) do not mention Morgoth as having any part in the making of the pillars, stating only that he overthrew the lamps, which implies physical action. Yet Tolkien evidently had not abandoned the old story, for in both the ‘earliest’ and ‘later’ versions of the *Annals of Valinor (early and mid-1930s) Morgoth is said to have destroyed the lamps by deceit, and in the *Ambarkanta it is said that ‘the pillars were made with deceit, being wrought of ice’ (*The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 238). The Sketch of the Mythology says that when the lamps fall the (unnamed) isle where the Valar live is flooded, but nothing is said of its position. In the Quenta Noldorinwa the isle is said to be in the seas.

In the Sketch of the Mythology Yavanna ‘plants the Two Trees’ and ‘they grow under her songs’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 12). Telperion is described first, suggesting that it may already have become the elder of the Trees; this is specifically stated in the Quenta Noldorinwa. A replacement page in the Quenta Noldorinwa brings the description of the creation of the Trees closer to its final form, with Yavanna hallowing the mould with her song and Nienna watering the ground with her tears.

The version of the *Ainulindalë written in 1946 contained a new account, not only of the Creation, but also of early events in Arda. Since the Sun exists from the beginning and provides light to the earth (round, not flat), the episode of the making of the pillars and their overthrow is omitted. Instead there is open strife between Melkor and the other Valar as he tries to corrupt or destroy all that they labour to achieve in fashioning the earth for the coming of Elves and Men. With the help of the newly arrived Tulkas, Melkor is put to flight for a while, but seizing a piece of the earth he creates the moon, and from it keeps watch on the earth below. In versions of the Ainulindalë written c. 1949–51 Tolkien reverted to his original conception of a flat world without a sun, but retained some aspects introduced in the round world version. The story now approaches more closely that told in The Silmarillion: Morgoth has no part in the making of the Lamps, and the Isle of Almaren is in a great lake in the middle of the earth; but some elements are introduced which do not appear in the published text. Flowers and birds are mentioned as appearing under the light of the Lamps. Melkor makes war on the Valar and throws down the Lamps, and has grown so strong that the Valar can neither overcome him nor take him captive. He escapes and builds a stronghold in the North, Utumno. A similar story is told in the chapter ‘Of Valinor and the Two Trees’ in the Quenta Silmarillion as revised c. 1951. The contemporary Annals of Aman (see *Annals of Valinor) introduce the account of the Valar resting on Almaren, and the wedding of Tulkas and Nessa.

*Christopher Tolkien used material from all three of these closely contemporary texts – the Ainulindalë, the Quenta Silmarillion, and the Annals of Aman – to produce the first section of ‘Of the Beginning of Days’ in The Silmarillion. The beginning was taken mainly from the Ainulindalë with some phrases from the Annals of Aman; most of p. 36 and part of p. 37 were derived from the Annals, with a short section from the Ainulindalë; for the section on the establishment of Valinor and of the Two Trees, he drew on both the Annals and the Quenta Silmarillion.

The second section was drawn mainly from the Ainulindalë, c. 1949–51, which is a revision of a section of the earlier Ainulindalë of the mid-1930s, but Christopher Tolkien also incorporated a few phrases from the Annals of Aman.

The third section appeared first in the draft for The Music of the Ainur in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One. Ilúvatar’s statement is generally similar in meaning to that in The Silmarillion, but there are subtle differences: the Elves have a deeper knowledge of beauty; and to Men he gives the gift of ‘free will and the power of fashioning and designing beyond the original Music of the Ainu [sic, the plural form at this stage], that by reason of their operations all things shall in shape and deed be fulfilled, and the world that comes of the music of the Ainu be completed unto the last and smallest’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 61). Although Men live only a short time in the world, they ‘do not perish utterly for ever’ (p. 59), and at the world’s end will join in the Second Music of the Ainur. The Elves dwell for ever unless slain or wasted by grief, and should they die they are reborn in their children, but their fate after the ending of the world is not known even to the Valar.

In the fair copy that followed, Ilúvatar’s gift to Men is worded differently, or more clearly defined: ‘a free virtue whereby within the limits of the powers and substances and chances of the world they might fashion and design their life even beyond the original Music of the Ainur that is as fate to all things else’ (p. 59). Similarly the Elves dwell in the world ‘until the Great End’ rather than ‘for ever’ (pp. 59, 61).

In the Ainulindalë of the mid-1930s Ilúvatar’s words reach those in The Silmarillion. Though worded differently, the fates of Elves and Men remain the same. The 1946 Ainulindalë comments on the deep love of the Elves for the world to which they are bound, and in this text only it is said that Manwë knows the fate of Elves after the end of Arda. In the version of the Ainulindalë written c. 1949–51 was added, concerning Men, that ‘Death is their fate, the gift of Ilúvatar unto them, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy. But Melkor hath cast his shadow upon it, and confounded it with darkness, and brought forth evil out of good, and fear out of hope’ (*Morgoth’s Ring, p. 21). From this version Tolkien then made a fine manuscript incorporating further revisions; it was this text that Christopher Tolkien used for the last part of ‘Of the Beginning of Days’ in The Silmarillion, but removed references to the tale being told by Pengolod, and the statement that Elves who die often return and are reborn in their children, since Tolkien abandoned this idea in his later writings.

In the late 1950s Tolkien again considered a major change in the cosmology of his legendarium. Some of his ideas of how this part of the story might be modified were published in ‘Myths Transformed’ in Morgoth’s Ring (1993); see especially pp. 375–85.

‘Of Beleriand and Its Realms’. The fourteenth chapter of the *‘Quenta Silmarillion’, published in *The Silmarillion (1977), pp. 118–24.

The chapter describes the topography of the North-west of Middle-earth and the peoples that lived there after the Dagor Aglareb (see *‘Of the Return of the Noldor’). In the development of the *‘Silmarillion’ mythology this was a constantly shifting picture as Tolkien altered or added elements, moved places on the map, and changed names. The most significant texts in this sequence are: the *Quenta Noldorinwa (c. 1930) in *The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 103–4, 107–8; the ‘earliest’ *Annals of Beleriand (early 1930s) in The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 296–7, 310, 330–5; the ‘later’ Annals of Beleriand (mid-1930s) in *The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 127–9, 145–6; ‘Of Beleriand and its Realms’, Chapter 9 in the *Quenta Silmarillion (mid-1930s–early 1938) in The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 258–72; and the Grey Annals (c. 1951, see *Annals of Beleriand) in *The War of the Jewels, pp. 38–9, 117. In the rewriting of the Quenta Silmarillion c. 1951, original Chapter 9 became Chapter 11, ‘Of Beleriand and its Realms’, renumbered as Chapter 14 in the amanuensis typescript of c. 1958.

‘Of Beleriand and Its Realms’ in The Silmarillion was taken almost entirely from the final version of the Quenta Silmarillion, but with a certain amount of editorial reordering. It also includes short passages from the Grey Annals and one or two names from *Of Maeglin: Sister-son of Turgon, King of Gondolin.

Belgium. Tolkien went to Belgium at least four times, on professional business or to visit his colleague and former student *S.R.T.O. (Simonne) d’Ardenne. From 10 to 12 November 1950 he attended the Congrès du LX^e anniversaire des sections de Philologie romane et de Philologie germanique at the University of Liège as the official representative of the *Oxford English School, and spoke on the teaching of philology and literature at *Oxford. After the conference, until 17 November, he stayed with Simonne d’Ardenne at Solwaster in the Ardennes, in her family’s former hunting lodge. From 10 to 13 September 1951 he was in Liège for the Congrès International de Philologie Moderne, where he delivered a paper, *Middle English ‘Losenger’. On 2 October 1954 he received at the University of Liège an honorary D.Litt. (Doct. en Lettres et Phil.), proposed by Simonne d’Ardenne. He was again at Solwaster from 13 to 19 September 1957: on 17 September he wrote to *R.W. Burchfield that ‘the rain on these moors and dark forests is continuous. “Water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink” is very applicable, as everything is deluged, but the chalybeate water [impregnated with iron salts] is nearly brick-red: a bath is like being in a dye-vat; to drink is nonsense’ (Early English Text Society archive).

See further, Johan Vanhecke, ‘Tolkien and Belgium’, Lembas Extra (2007).

Bennett, Henry Stanley (1889–1972). Stanley Bennett was associated with the English School at *Cambridge, as undergraduate and teacher, from its earliest days at the end of the First World War. He lectured on medieval subjects and on Shakespeare, was elected a fellow of Emmanuel College in 1933, and for twenty-five years was its Librarian. His writings include The Pastons and Their England (1922), Life on the English Manor (1937), Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century (1947), and English Books and Readers (1952–70). His wife Joan (née Frankau, 1896–1986) was also at Cambridge, educated at Girton College, a lecturer in English from 1936 to 1964, a specialist in seventeenth-century English literature who also wrote on George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Tolkien was acquainted with the Bennetts and with their children, whom he amused with his story *Farmer Giles of Ham when he visited Cambridge in March 1939. In 1954 he corresponded at length with Stanley Bennett to encourage the election of *C.S. Lewis as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge.

Bennett, Jack Arthur Walter (1911–1981). After reading English at Auckland University College, New Zealand, in 1933 J.A.W. Bennet matriculated at Merton College, *Oxford, where he studied philology and medieval literature. He attended Tolkien’s lectures, and later would lend his notes on those of 1934–5 to *Alan Bliss for his edition of *Finn and Hengest (1982). In 1938 Bennett was awarded a D.Phil. for his thesis The History of Old English and Old Norse Studies in England from the Time of Junius till the End of the Eighteenth Century, examined by Tolkien and *David Nichol Smith. Also in that year he was elected to a junior research fellowship by Queen’s College, Oxford, but could not take it up until after the Second World War. In 1947 he was elected a fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took over the teaching of Old and Middle English from *C.S. Lewis, and in the early 1960s was instrumental in the creation of the B.Phil. (later M.Phil.) in English studies. In 1964 he succeeded Lewis as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.

Bennett wrote widely on Middle English literature, most notably on *Chaucer (The Parlement of Foules (1957), Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge (1974), etc.), and was an editor of medieval and Tudor texts. With *G.V. Smithers he was co-editor of Early Middle English Verse and Prose (1966; 2nd edn. 1968). Twice the Oxford University Press (*Publishers) considered him a candidate to take over the long-delayed ‘Clarendon Chaucer’ (*Geoffrey Chaucer) from Tolkien: in the first instance, Tolkien was given another chance to complete the work, and in the second it was decided to delay the Chaucer until Tolkien had retired from his professorship, to avoid embarrassing him.

For many years Bennett was assistant or chief editor of Medium Ævum, the journal of the Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature (*Societies and clubs). He also served, with Tolkien, on the Council of the Early English Text Society (*Societies and clubs). He contributed an essay, ‘Climates of Opinions’ (a history of the word climate), to the Festschrift *English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (1962), and another, ‘Nosce te ipsum: Some Medieval Interpretations’, to J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam, ed. *Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (1979).

On 15 August 1946 Tolkien brought Bennett to one of the regular Thursday evening meetings of the *Inklings. A week later Bennett showed up on his own, and soon became associated with the group despite initial misgivings by some of its members. *W.H. Lewis recorded in his diary that he found Bennett ‘a dull dog’ (Brothers and Friends, p. 193), and that *Hugo Dyson objected to Bennett because he was a Roman Catholic. In fact, Bennett was not received into the Catholic Church until more than a decade later, though he was inclined towards that faith and especially interested in the history of the liturgy.

A collection of J.A.W. Bennett’s essays, The Humane Medievalist and Other Essays in English Literature and Learning, from Chaucer to Eliot, was published in 1982. See further, P.L. Heyworth, ‘A List of the Published Writings of J.A.W. Bennett’, in Medieval Studies for J.A.W. Bennett, ed. Heyworth (1981).

Beowulf. The longest and most important surviving Old English poem, the work of a Christian of uncertain date, its earliest extant manuscript (part of Cotton Vitellius A.xv in the British Library) was written around the year 1000.

Briefly summarized – to say nothing of its richness as poetry – Beowulf concerns the exploits of the eponymous hero, a warrior of the Geats (a tribe of southern Sweden), endowed by God with superhuman strength. With his men he sails to Denmark, where a monster named Grendel is killing the warriors of the king, Hrothgar, in his hall, Heorot. Beowulf slays Grendel in terrible combat. When Grendel’s mother attacks the hall in revenge and carries off one of Hrothgar’s thanes, Beowulf follows her to the bottom of a lake in the midst of a fen and slays her as well. He then returns home, and after many years becomes king of his people. His fame as a warrior keeps his country free from invasion, and he increases its prosperity and happiness. After fifty years, however, a dragon appears, having been drawn from its hoard by the theft of a cup; although the beast wreaks havoc on the countryside, no warrior dares risk his life to confront it. The aged king takes up his sword and shield and, with the aid only of his retainer Wiglaf (his other companions having fled), defeats the dragon, but at the cost of his own life.

As an undergraduate at *Oxford Tolkien took classes on Beowulf taught by *Kenneth Sisam and attended lectures on the work by *A.S. Napier.

LECTURES ON BEOWULF

Tolkien himself lectured on Beowulf from autumn 1920, when he began to teach at the University of *Leeds, through Trinity Term 1946 while the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and again in Michaelmas Term 1962 as a substitute for his successor in the Anglo-Saxon chair, *C.L. Wrenn. The most complimentary of his students praised his lectures as entertaining as well as informative, and his reading of Beowulf like that of a bard in a mead hall (see the subsection ‘Tolkien and the Oxford English School’ in the article *Oxford English School).

From one set of his Oxford lectures Tolkien derived *Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, the landmark work he delivered to the British Academy in November 1936. Brief extracts from these and other lectures were published in *The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987), pp. 93–6. Later thoughts by Tolkien on the poem, relative to the Old English *Battle of Maldon, appear in the third part (‘Ofermod’) of his *Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son (1953).

A selection of extracts from Tolkien’s Oxford lectures on Beowulf was made by *Christopher Tolkien for *Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary Together with Sellic Spell (2014), pp. 137–353. Published as ‘the commentary’, these represent only a fraction of the materials on Beowulf, including drafts and working scripts, held in the Tolkien Papers in the Bodleian Library (*Libraries and archives), and were drawn largely from a set of lectures for the ‘general course’ for undergraduates in the Oxford English School, who were required in the final examination to read just over half of Beowulf in the original language, from the beginning to line 1650, and to translate passages. The later part of the commentary, Christopher Tolkien explains, is derived from yet ‘another set of lectures, addressed to the “philologists”, clearly written and lengthy discussions of major problems in the interpretation of the text of Beowulf’ (p. 132).

In addition to his university lectures, in January 1938 Tolkien gave a thirteen-minute talk on Beowulf and other Old English poetry, Anglo-Saxon Verse, in the BBC radio series Poetry Will Out.

TRANSLATING BEOWULF

In 1940 Tolkien completed a long preface for a new edition of John R. Clark Hall’s Modern English translation (1901, 1911) Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment. His essay, entitled *Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of ‘Beowulf’ (reprinted in *The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays as On Translating Beowulf), is divided into two parts, ‘On Translation and Words’ and ‘On Metre’. Tolkien warns that although Clark Hall’s text is a ‘competent translation’ of Beowulf it is no substitute for reading the poem itself – a great poem whose ‘specially poetic qualities’ cannot be caught in prose, and which in Modern English may lose the shades of meaning present in the original Old English. Clark Hall’s translation ‘is not offered as a means of judging the original, or as a substitute for reading the poem itself. The proper purpose of a prose translation is to provide an aid to study’ (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 49). Moreover, the prospective translator is advised against the use of ‘colloquialism and false modernity’. ‘If you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf,’ he says, ‘your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day that the poem was made.’ But ‘words should not be used merely because they are “old” or obsolete’ (p. 54).

Some twenty years later, the American scholar-poet Burton Raffel sent Tolkien a copy of his 1960 publication Poems from the Old English, comprising verse translations of shorter works such as *The Seafarer, *The Battle of Maldon, and *The Wanderer. In this Raffel briefly discusses reasons for translating Old English poetry (‘too many centuries, too many lost ideas, separate the Old English poet from his modern audience’, p. xviii). and methods of translation:

The translator’s only hope is to re-create something roughly equivalent in the new language [i.e. the translator’s language], something that is itself good poetry and that at the same time carries a reasonable measure of the force and flavor of the original. …

How close to the original must the translation be? Not so much in outward form, metre and rhyme, even line length, for in these respects reasonable freedom is of course necessary. But in fidelity to the precise content and tone of the original, its exact working out of images, its succession of ideas. [pp. xxvi–xxvii]

He argues that a translation of an Old English poem must, in the end, be freely ‘a poem in its own right, … a poem meaningful in its own language and at the same time suggestive of the accents and the culture of another’ (p. xxviii).

Tolkien disagreed with Raffel’s philosophy in his private papers. One improves his understanding of a language through translation, he said, though this may not be evident in the result; and a translation may be used to impart the nature of a language through its hearing – not reading, ‘for reading suggests close and silent study, the pondering of words, the solution of a series of puzzles, but hearing should mean receiving, with the speed of a familiar tongue, the immediate impact of sound and sense together’. ‘In all real language’, sound and sense ‘are wedded’. ‘A translator may hope (or rashly aspire) to heal the divorce, as far as is possible’, but he must achieve ‘absolute allegiance to the thing translated: to its meaning, its style, technique, and form’. ‘Fortunately’, he continues, ‘modern (modern literary, not present-day colloquial) English is an instrument of very great capacity and resources, it has long experience not yet forgotten, and deep roots in the past not yet all pulled up’ (‘Thoughts on Translation: Beowulf’, Tolkien Estate website).

TRANSLATIONS BY TOLKIEN

At Leeds Tolkien began, but abandoned after 594 lines, an alliterative verse translation of Beowulf into Modern English. This remains unpublished, though Tolkien included a few lines in his Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of ‘Beowulf’ (see below).

He also worked on a Modern English prose translation, which likewise was never finished to his satisfaction. Given the heavy demands on his time in the final months of 1925 and the first part of 1926 (see Chronology), it seems certain that at least the beginning of the prose translation as well was made during Tolkien’s time at Leeds. It was completed, though not all to Tolkien’s liking, by the end of April 1926, when Tolkien described it as such in a letter to *Kenneth Sisam at Oxford University Press (*Publishers), and was willing to put it in order if Sisam liked it. Its earliest typescript extends as far as line 1773, followed by a manuscript which takes up at the point where the typescript ends. A further typescript, made by Christopher Tolkien, can be dated to c. 1940–2. Tolkien heavily emended the initial typescript, notably in passages concerned with Grendel’s coming to Heorot and his fight with Beowulf, less so later in the text; and he lent it to *C.S. Lewis (thus after they met at Oxford in May 1926), who added his own queries. The manuscript was also emended, for the most part at the time of writing, and the final typescript received Tolkien’s corrections and further changes.

Michael D.C. Drout suggests in his review of *Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell in Tolkien Studies 12 (2015) that Tolkien’s purpose in making the prose translation is conveyed in a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, in which Tolkien writes of his intention to read his translation to Beowulf students in one sitting, supplemented with extracts from his verse translation, to help them grasp the poem before they themselves discuss and translate the Old English text.

On 25 October 1932 Tolkien suggested to R.W. Chapman that his prose translation might be published by Oxford University Press, but that it should be preceded by introductory matter on the diction of Old English verse, its metre, and so forth – much, presumably, as he later wrote in his preface to the Clark Hall volume – and that it should include notes concerning particularly difficult problems in the text. On 18 December 1932 Tolkien wrote to Kenneth Sisam that he hoped soon to complete his work on the Clarendon Chaucer (*Geoffrey Chaucer), and then to publish his Beowulf translation, ‘but life is short, & so is the day. I am obliged to examine Oxford (complete new syllabus), Manchester and Reading, for the meeting of ends, the coming year; and probably P. Mods [Pass Moderations] at the end of it. Also there are lectures & B.Litts and goodness knows what’ (Oxford University Press archives).

Tolkien’s prose translation was published at last in 2014 as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell. In a preface to this volume, Christopher Tolkien explains that his father made many changes to the translation, often in accord with discussion of textual points in his Oxford lectures, though sometimes he made points in his lectures which were not then reflected in a change to the translation. See further, entry for the 2014 volume below.

In ‘Tolkien’s Technique of Translation in His Prose Beowulf: Literalism and Literariness’, Mallorn 55 (Winter 2014), pp. 23–5, Britton Brooks notes Tolkien’s effort to preserve the Old English word order whenever possible, which sometimes inverts the syntax, though the translation ‘is not slavish’ to the original language, ‘and his attempt at balance with literary prose often leads to sentences in a recognizably modern syntax’ (p. 23). Tolkien ‘goes to great lengths to translate each word into acceptably literary equivalents, though not often via cognates’, while applying deliberate archaisms, and he consistently resolves Old English compounds into phrases (such as sundwudu > ‘the watery timbers’ = wooden boat). His translation adheres closely to the methodology he discussed in his Prefatory Remarks, ‘including his attempt at balancing literalism with literariness, but also is directly tied to his own maturation as a scholar, where through the resolution of compounds he seeks to explore their full imaginative potential, so that when the original Old English is reread, the text is further illuminated’ (p. 25).

Among lengthy comments about the translation in his Tolkien Studies review, Michael D.C. Drout notes that it is ‘consistently rhythmic. This rhythm is roughly trochaic and closer to a whole-line meter rather than the half-line metrics of the Old English text. Both stressed and unstressed syllables are less frequently stacked together than is the case in standard Modern English prose, but the thythm never becomes as obvious as Shakespearean pentameter’ (p. 156). ‘In content’, Drout continues,

the translation presents few surprises to the reader who already knows Beowulf in Old English. Tolkien does not incorporate much of his own interpretation but instead presents what would be the consensus view of the 1920s through 1940s on most of the cruces and ambiguities. That the translation contains little that most scholars (both contemporary and of Tolkien’s day) would find unusual is, to me, further evidence that the text was intended to give students a basic understanding of the poem, as an ‘aid to study’ that would not put them very far out of the mainstream of Beowulf criticism. [pp. 156–7]

Drout finds Tolkien’s translation the equal of any previous translation of Beowulf into prose (‘not a particularly high standard’), accurate, and with ‘some of the high formality and serious tone that Beowulf has in Old English’. But he doubts that it will replace the verse translation by Seamus Heaney ‘as the text most introductory students encounter’ (p. 157).

See also the subsection ‘Criticism’ in the article *Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell.

INFLUENCE ON TOLKIEN’S WORKS

Beowulf was an important influence on Tolkien’s own poetry and prose fiction. Probably at the end of 1922 he wrote the poem Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden, later revised as *The Hoard, which was inspired by line 3052 in Beowulf, ‘the gold of men long ago enmeshed in enchantment’. His poem *The Fall of Arthur is in the Beowulf metre. In *The Hobbit Bilbo’s theft of a cup from Smaug’s hoard in Chapter 12 is indebted to a similar episode in the final part of Beowulf, which likewise provokes a dragon’s rampage. In February 1938, in reply to a query about his sources for The Hobbit, Tolkien wrote that Beowulf was among the most valued, ‘though it was not consciously present to the mind in the process of writing, in which the episode of the theft [of a cup] arose naturally (and almost inevitably) from the circumstances. It is difficult to think of any other way of conducting the story at that point. I fancy the author of Beowulf would say much the same’ (letter to The Observer, published 20 February 1938, Letters, p. 31). Critics such as Jane Chance (Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England, 1979; 2nd edn. 2001) have suggested other parallels between The Hobbit and Beowulf, but the major work in this respect is Beowulf and The Hobbit: Elegy into Fantasy in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creative Technique by Bonniejean Christensen (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1969; later reductions in article form).

Beowulf is also often seen as an influence on *The Lord of the Rings, especially in regard to the men and culture of Rohan and in the heroism of the hobbits. For example, Tolkien acknowledged that there was probably a connection between the wasting away of Beowulf’s sword, with which he cut off Grendel’s head and killed Grendel’s mother, and both the melting of the Witchking’s knife in Book I, Chapter 12 of The Lord of the Rings and the withering of Merry’s sword in Book V, Chapter 6; and Christopher Tolkien has noted the distinct echo of the passages in Beowulf in which Beowulf and his men are accosted by the watchman on the coast of Denmark, and the challenge made to Aragorn and his companions by the doorward of Edoras in Book III, Chapter 6 (a text written in draft in Old English). On The Lord of the Rings and Beowulf, see further, Reader’s Companion, and on the subject of Beowulf and Rohan, see Clive Tolley, ‘And the Word Was Made Flesh’, Mallorn 32 (September 1995). Tolley also comments on Tolkien and Beowulf in ‘Tolkien and the Unfinished’, in Scholarship and Fantasy: Proceedings of The Tolkien Phenomenon, May 1992, Turku, Finland, ed. K.J. Battarbee (1993), noting, for example, that Unferth in Beowulf has a counterpart in Edoras, in the person of Gríma Wormtongue.

Beowulf was also an acknowledged source for the episode concerning King Sheave (Scyld Scefing) in *The Lost Road. ‘I have been getting a lot of new ideas about Prehistory lately (via Beowulf and other sources of which I may have written)’, Tolkien wrote to Christopher, ‘and want to work them into the long shelved time-travel story I began’ (18 December 1944, Letters, p. 105).

In September 1927 Tolkien painted in The Book of Ishness (*Art) a coiled dragon, inscribed ‘hrinȝboȝa heorte ȝefysed’ (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 48). These words are derived from a passage in Beowulf, ‘ða wæs hrinȝboȝan heorte ȝefysed / saecce tó séceanne’ (‘now was the heart of the coiling beast stirred to come out to fight’). In May 1928, also in The Book of Ishness, Tolkien drew an untitled watercolour sketch of a warrior with spear and shield facing a fire-breathing dragon (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 49); on 1 January 1938 he used this picture in a slide lecture at the University Museum, Oxford to illustrate how the king and his attendant fought the dragon at the end of Beowulf. In July 1928 Tolkien drew two pictures of Grendel’s mere, each inscribed ‘wudu wyrtum fæst’ (‘wood clinging by its roots’; Artist and Illustrator, figs. 50, 51).

By the early 1930s Tolkien composed two short poems, or two versions of the same poem, concerned with Beowulf and Grendel, or with Beowulf, Grendel, and Grendel’s mother. These were published in 2014 as *The Lay of Beowulf in Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell.

In the early 1940s Tolkien wrote a story, *Sellic Spell, as an attempt to reconstruct the Anglo-Saxon tale that lies behind the folk- or fairy-tale element in Beowulf (here ‘Beewolf’). In 1945 Tolkien’s friend *Gwyn Jones, Professor of English at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, read Sellic Spell and remarked that it should be prescribed for all university students of Beowulf.

Books and essays about Beowulf are legion. Among these, the present authors have found the following particularly helpful: *R.W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn (3rd edn. with a supplement by C.L. Wrenn, 1959); Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment, ed. C.L. Wrenn, rev. W.F. Bolton (1973); Beowulf by T.A. Shippey (1978); Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology, ed. R.D. Fulk (1991); A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (1997); A Critical Companion to Beowulf by Andy Orchard (2003); and The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment, ed. Leonard Neidorf (2014). Wrenn’s preface to his Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment credits Tolkien, together with R.W. Chambers, with ‘what is valuable in my approach to Beowulf’ (p. 5). See also references cited in the entry *Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Michael D.C. Drout describes the manuscripts of Tolkien’s translations of and commentaries on Beowulf in the Bodleian Library in Tolkien Studies 12 (2015), pp. 150–1.

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell. Translation by J.R.R. Tolkien of *Beowulf and related material, edited with notes and commentary by *Christopher Tolkien, first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, London, and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, in May 2014.

The volume contains Tolkien’s Modern English prose translation of Beowulf, with commentary drawn from his *Oxford lectures on Beowulf; *Sellic Spell, an adaptation of Beowulf in the form of a folk-tale; and two versions of a short poem, *The Lay of Beowulf. Three illustrations by Tolkien related to Beowulf are reproduced on the dust-jacket, and a fourth on the half-title.

The page breaks and line numbering in the American edition from p. 21 to p. 105 differ from those in the British edition, and thus are out of sync with references in the notes and commentary.

HISTORY

Tolkien had translated the entirety of Beowulf into Modern English prose by ?26 April 1926, when he wrote of it to *Kenneth Sisam of Oxford University Press (*Publishers). (See further, the subsection ‘Translations by Tolkien’ in the article *Beowulf.) But it was not yet to Tolkien’s satisfaction, and on 25 October 1932, when he suggested its publication to R.W. Chapman at Oxford University Press, he felt that it would require introductory matter on Old English verse and notes on textual problems. As Christopher Tolkien comments in his preface to the 2014 volume, his father, as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, still had years of study of Beowulf ahead of him, and in the course of time made many changes to his translation, often in accord with discussion of textual problems in his lectures about the poem; but when he revised his opinion about a textual point, he did not always alter his translation.

In the event, Tolkien never brought his translation into a final form. Its existence, however, was well-known; and in view of Tolkien’s ‘reputation and eminence in Old English literary and linguistic scholarship’, as Christopher Tolkien writes, its publication was a matter of importance. And yet there was ‘no obvious way’ to present the text: ‘To alter the translation in order to accommodate a later opinion was out of the question. It would of course have been possible to attach my own explanatory notes, but it seemed very much better to include in this book actual passages from the lectures in which [Tolkien] expounded his views on the textual problems in question’ (Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, p. viii).

Tolkien’s lectures display, ‘amid the huge library of Beowulf criticism, a very evident individuality of conception and insight’ (p. viii), and the commentary Christopher Tolkien drew from them ‘is and can only be a personal selection from a much larger body of writing, in places disordered and very difficult, and strongly concentrated on the earlier part of the poem’ (p. xi). The lectures from which the commentary was largely derived are concerned with the portion of Beowulf that Oxford English students were required to learn (lines 1–1650). The later part of the commentary, however, was drawn from yet ‘another set of lectures, addressed to the “philologists”, clearly written and lengthy discussions of major problems in the interpretation of the text of Beowulf’ (p. 132). (See further, the subsection ‘Lectures on Beowulf’ in the article *Beowulf.)

CRITICISM

Michael Alexander (‘Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary Review: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Long-Lost Translation’, The Guardian, 29 May 2014), describes Tolkien’s effort as ‘prose that sticks as closely as possible to the meaning and clause-order of the original. It has great accuracy and a sense of rhythm. Its style is, like that of the original, archaic, and often has striking inversions of word-order. It has its own spell, though its movement is more crabbed than that of the equally accurate version made by G.N. Garmonsway in 1968.’ The commentary, for its part, ‘shows the depth of Tolkien’s knowledge of the languages and early literatures of north-west Europe’. Alexander praises Christopher Tolkien’s editing and salutes his ‘pietas’ in producing ‘a portrait of a mind’ which ‘possessed a linguistic scholarship and a literary imagination very rarely found together’, but is ‘more interested in Beowulf than in Tolkien’. Before the book appeared, he had heard of the existence of the translation, but had assumed it would be in verse, having been shown an extract of Tolkien’s verse translation by Christopher Tolkien in the early 1960s. Alexander himself translated Beowulf into verse (1973, rev. 2001), and in an introductory note to his 1966 collection The Earliest English Poems wrote (p. 22): ‘I have never seen the point of translating verse into anything but verse.’

Marc Hudson, also a translator of Beowulf (1990), wrote in the Sewanee Review (‘Of Beowulf: A Commentary and a Few More Leaves of Tolkien’s Tree’, Winter 2016) was disappointed with Tolkien’s work. ‘In truth, Tolkien’s translation is a faithful and scholarly reading of the poem. It has dignity, if not grace, and passages of some beauty’ (p. 158). But he finds its prose rhythms often ‘ungainly, not at all resembling “the common and compact prose patterns in ordinary language”’ as Christopher Tolkien has described them, and he criticizes ‘Tolkien’s habitual use of an antiquated diction’ although this approach still had currency when Tolkien made his translation c. 1926. ‘Even a casual perusal of his scholarly writing reveals that he is quite capable of writing vigorous modern prose. So we may conjecture that Tolkien admired Beowulf too much and cared too keenly about his reading of individual passages to veer very far from a strict word-by-word translation. Tolkien’s translation is a principled effort: its limitations, even its aforesaid failures, were possibly intended’ (p. 159). Hudson finds Tolkien’s commentary on Beowulf to be a greater treasure, derived ‘from his tremendous erudition – his knowledge of medieval Germanic literatures and languages, as well as of the cultures that gave rise to them – and from his mythopoeic imagination’ (p. 163). Although it has its eccentricities, the commentary is ‘often illuminating’ and ‘essential reading for all serious students of the poem, whether they are just entering the anterooms of Anglo Saxon literature or are emeriti professors seeking fresh insights into the poem and its daunting darknesses’ (p. 163). Hudson praises Sellic Spell as ‘a strong creative effort to imagine the wonder tale, the myth which was the matrix, as Tolkien conceived it, to which the Beowulf poet added the historical matter of the poem’, but describes The Lay of Beowulf as ‘rather awkward rhythmic contraptions, occasionally redeemed by memorable imagery, and lurking in the homely borderlands of the literary ballad’ (p. 164).

Jeremy Noel-Tod, writing in the Telegraph (‘Beowulf, Translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, Review’, 20 May 2014), was also disappointed, in the first instance because the translation is in prose rather than verse, ‘and long-winded prose at that. This literal rendering is faithful to the formulaic circumlocutions, inversions and amplifications of Old English poetry. … Moments of comparable potency flash out from Tolkien’s prose’, however, ‘especially during the grand guignol fights with three monsters that were at the heart of his enthusiasm for the poem’. Noel-Tod is by no means unique among reviewers of the book in preferring, or at least prominently mentioning, the popular 1999 verse translation by poet Seamus Heaney, which is seen as more contemporary (to the present day) and less academic.

Kevin Kiernan, a retired professor of English at the University of Kentucky, argues on the website The Conversation that

the lofty metre of Beowulf is lost even in admirable poetic versions like Seamus Heaney’s, which is recognised as a new poem. … Prose translations such as Tolkien’s claim to be more ‘faithful’, but this fidelity refers to the literal translation of poetry, which captures only the facts of the story in unavoidably stodgy prose, struggling to sort out the word order while losing the grandeur of the verse.

Because Tolkien himself denigrated his translation (in his April 1926 letter to Kenneth Sisam, where he wrote that it was complete but not to his liking), Kiernan holds that it should not have been published. ‘Tolkien’s own creative legacy is secure. It will be a travesty if his Beowulf legacy turns out to be a translation he was the first to disparage’ (‘Publishing Tolkien’s Beowulf Translation Does Him a Disservice’, 29 May 2014).

In the New Statesman (‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: One Man’s Passion for the Threshold between Myth and Reality’, 29 May 2014) John Garth comments that Tolkien, ‘with too many projects to fit in one lifespan, would have needed a hard push, from a publisher and perhaps from a strong-armed friend such as C.S. Lewis, to finalise and publish his prose translation. The version that survives, though, is far from prosaic. He cannot conceal the strangeness of the underlying idiom but his cadence is commanding and his language evocative. …’ Garth feels, however, that although ‘students may prefer Tolkien for accuracy [of the text] and fans will snap his book up … it won’t convert admirers of Heaney’s poetic latitude’.

To date the most substantial response to Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary is the review by Michael D.C. Drout published in Tolkien Studies 12 (2015). Another Anglo-Saxonist, Drout has made a study of Tolkien’s papers related to Beowulf, at one time preparatory to a planned edition of both the verse and prose translations. The ‘volume not only gives us important insights into Tolkien’s thought’, he writes, ‘but also a rather significant contribution to Beowulf studies despite being published nearly three-quarters of a century after it was written’ (p. 149); but he is puzzled that Tolkien’s verse translation of Beowulf was excluded. He analyzes and discusses the prose translation at length, concluding that ‘in both content and style, Tolkien’s is the equal of any previous prose translation (though this is in itself, sadly, not a particularly high standard). It is accurate and transmits some of the high formality and serious tone that Beowulf has in Old English. I doubt, however, that it will replace Seamus Heaney’s poetic translation of Beowulf as the text most introductory students encounter’ (p. 157).

Like other reviewers, Drout finds Tolkien’s commentary on Beowulf ‘in many ways more interesting than the translation itself, especially because it is at times quite far from the consensus mainstream. Marked by great originality, the commentary regularly displays the signal quality of Tolkien’s scholarship: his ability to combine the rigor and knowledge of a hard-core philologist with the creativity and sensibility of a literary creator’ (p. 157). Scholars of Beowulf, he says,

should read the commentary carefully, if for no other reason than for the pleasure of watching one of the greatest philologists of the 20th century plying his trade. Many of Tolkien’s suggestions for individual emendations are both innovative and convincing, with detailed philological arguments supporting insightful readings of the text. His general view of the artistic and aesthetic qualities of Beowulf in the commentaries is consistent with his large-scale interpretation of the poem in ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ and is therefore both familiar and well within the current critical consensus. [pp. 158–9]

Tolkien’s ‘interpretation of the history, composition, and sources of the poem’, however, are ‘novel and idiosyncratic’ (p. 159). Drout notes in particular his ‘heretical’ view, ‘in today’s critical climate’ (p. 160), that Beowulf reflects the work of both its original author (a monk in Mercia, living long after paganism had disappeared from England) and a much later poet (perhaps Cynewulf), in a time of pagans, who wished to show that Christianity was the path to eternal life.

See further, Mark Atherton, ‘“Seeing a Picture before Us”: Tolkien’s Commentary in His Translation of Beowulf’, Mallorn 55 (Winter 2014), pp. 21–2.

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. The Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture for 1936, delivered by Tolkien to the British Academy in London on 25 November 1936, and to a meeting of the Manchester Medieval Society on 9 December 1936. It was first published in July 1937 as a separate booklet by Humphrey Milford, London, and in December 1937 within the annual volume of the Proceedings of the British Academy. See further, Descriptive Bibliography A2. It has been reprinted often; citations here are to its appearance in *The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (1983), pp. 5–48.

SYNOPSIS

Tolkien argues that critics of Beowulf to 1936 had viewed it ‘as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art’ (p. 5). It had not been considered as a poem, though it is ‘in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content’ (p. 7). Nor have critics appreciated the importance to the poem of the monsters that Beowulf defeats: Grendel and the dragon (Tolkien does not include Grendel’s mother). Quoting, inter alia, an influential statement by W.P. Ker that Beowulf has a ‘radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances [the monsters] in the centre and the serious things [allusions to history and other stories] on the outer edges’ (pp. 10–11), Tolkien remarks that while critics have praised the detail, tone, style, and total effect of Beowulf, they have felt that the talent of the Beowulf-poet ‘has all been squandered on an unprofitable theme: as if Milton had recounted the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse’ (p. 13). ‘The high tone, the sense of dignity, alone is evidence in Beowulf of the presence of a mind lofty and thoughtful’, he writes.

It is, one would have said, improbable that such a man would write more than three thousand lines (wrought to a high finish) on matter that is really not worth serious attention. … Or that he should in the selection of his material, in the choice of what to put forward, what to keep subordinate ‘upon the outer edges’, have shown a puerile simplicity much below the level of the characters he himself draws in his own poem. [pp. 13–14]

The great critics of Beowulf have thought otherwise partly because they have been more concerned with ‘research in comparative folk-lore, the objects of which are primarily historical or scientific’, and because the allusions contained in Beowulf ‘have attracted curiosity (antiquarian rather than critical) to their elucidation; and this needs so much study and research that attention has been diverted from the poem as a whole, and from the function of the allusions, as shaped and placed, in the poetic economy of Beowulf as it is’ (pp. 14–15). Also there is ‘a real question of taste … a judgement that the heroic or tragic story on a strictly human plane is by nature superior’ (p. 15); but one must consider the ancient taste of the audience of the poem as well as the modern taste of its critics.

Beowulf, Tolkien claims, helps us to esteem ‘the old heroes: men caught in the chains of circumstance or of their own character, torn between duties equally sacred, dying with their backs to the wall’ (p. 17). Its poet has devoted his whole work to the theme of ‘defeat inevitable yet unacknowledged … and has drawn the struggle in different proportions, so that we may see man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time’ (p. 18). The monsters of the poem are essential to this, ‘fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem’ (p. 19). They are at a point of fusion between the Heroic Age and Christendom, ‘adversaries of God’ but still ‘mortal denizens of the material world, in it and of it’ (p. 20). They are also connected to the theory of courage, for which Tolkien turns to ‘the tradition of pagan imagination as it survived in Icelandic’, in which men are allied with the Northern gods, able to share in the resistance to Chaos and Unreason, though defeat is inevitable. ‘At least in this vision of the final defeat of the humane (and of the divine made in its image), and in the essential hostility of the gods and heroes on the one hand and the monsters on the other, we may suppose that pagan English and Norse imagination agreed’ (p. 21). In Beowulf both the specifically Christian and the old gods were suppressed, but ‘the heroic figures, the men of old … remained and still fought on until defeat. For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come. A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. The monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the enemies of the one God …’ (p. 22).

Tolkien concludes that Beowulf is ‘a poem by a learned man writing of old times, who looking back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical’ (p. 26), a learned ‘Englishman of the seventh or eighth centuries’ (p. 27). ‘It is essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death’ (p. 28). Tolkien analyzes and praises its structure and the harmony of this with its elements, language, metre, and theme. ‘We have … in Beowulf a method and structure that within the limits of the verse-kind approaches rather to sculpture or painting. It is a composition not a tune’ (p. 30).

HISTORY

The Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture is given biennially. Endowed in 1924, it deals with ‘Old English or Early English Language and Literature, or a philological subject connected with the history of English, more particularly during the early periods of the language, or cognate subjects, or some textual study and interpretation’. The subject is left entirely to the chosen scholar, who is nominated by a specialist committee of fellows of the British Academy, and is sent an invitation to deliver the lecture at least two years in advance of the event. Tolkien therefore would have received an invitation from the British Academy c. 1934.

He derived Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics from a longer work, originally entitled Beowulf with Critics, later Beowulf and the Critics. The latter exists in two manuscripts, the second much enlarged from the first. Both were transcribed and annotated by Michael D.C. Drout in Beowulf and the Critics, first published in 2002. Drout dates the two texts, on various grounds, to between August 1932 and 23 October 1935; the first of these dates refers to the composition of a poem by *C.S. Lewis which Tolkien quotes in full. Internal evidence and general prose style clearly mark the work as a series of lectures; and given its subject and presumed terminus post quem, its first text seems likely to have been prepared for the lecture series ‘Beowulf: General Criticism’ which Tolkien was scheduled to give at *Oxford beginning in Michaelmas Term 1933. (At that time he also gave a series entitled ‘The Historical and Legendary Traditions in Beowulf and Other Old English Poems’, concerned, however, with the background of those works rather than their criticism. The manuscript of these lectures, the first page of which is dated at the time of writing ‘October 1933’, is preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives).)

Tolkien produced the second, expanded manuscript of Beowulf and the Critics presumably for a later iteration of ‘Beowulf: General Criticism’, scheduled for Michaelmas Term 1934 and 1936. For delivery to the British Academy in November 1936, he revised the second manuscript into a more concise and polished form; see comments in Drout, introduction to Beowulf and the Critics as published, and Drout’s ‘Rhetorical Evolution of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2006).

In late 1936 or early 1937 Tolkien sent the text of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, with an appendix and notes, to his friend and fellow Beowulf scholar *R.W. Chambers. On 2 February 1937 Chambers advised him to make no cuts, and to include the appendix (concerning Grendel’s titles, Christian and pagan ideas of praise and judgement as expressed in Beowulf, and particular difficulties arising from lines 175–88 of the poem). On 6 February, apparently in reply to a nervous message by Tolkien, Chambers wrote to reassure him that his lecture held together well, and again that it should be printed in its entirety. After its first publication in July 1937, Tolkien received numerous letters of congratulations from his academic colleagues.

It may be a measure (if unscientific) of the attention paid to Tolkien’s lecture that in the copy of the 1936 Proceedings of the British Academy shelved in the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library, Oxford – at least, as it was when we wrote the first edition of this book – Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics was read to the point of soiled exhaustion, with marks in pencil and blots of ink, while the rest of the volume was comparatively clean.

In 2011 Drout published a revised edition of Beowulf and the Critics, in which he not only corrected errors but made changes to take account of developments in Beowulf and Tolkien studies. New additions to the text include a nearly complete identification of the scholars to whom Tolkien alludes in the lecture as ‘the Babel of Voices’, and the notes Tolkien made in preparing the second, longer text.

CRITICISM

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics changed the course of Beowulf studies. *Kenneth Sisam wrote in his study The Structure of Beowulf (1965; corrected 1966) that Tolkien’s lecture ‘brought fresh ideas and has influenced all later writers’ on the poem. ‘Knowing well the detailed problems that occupy critics, he has withdrawn from them to give a general view of Beowulf as poetry, with a fineness of perception and elegance of expression that are rare in this field’ (p. 20). T.A. Shippey has said that ‘two of the qualities that made [the lecture] so influential are its aggression and its humour. In one allegory after another, Tolkien presents the poem as Cinderella taken over by a series of domineering fairy godmothers, as a victim of “the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research,” and as a tower looking out on the sea. … The major achievement of Tolkien’s essay was to insist on the poem’s autonomy and its author’s right to create freely, regardless of critical canons’ (‘Structure and Unity’, in A Beowulf Handbook (1997), pp. 162–3).

Reviews of the published lecture had little to say against it. R.W. Chambers, for instance, wrote in Modern Language Review 33, no. 2 (April 1938) that ‘towards the study of Beowulf as a work of art, Professor Tolkien has made a contribution of the utmost importance.’ However, ‘instead of weaving them into his discourse’ Tolkien ‘has hidden away all too many of his good things in appendices and notes’ (pp. 272, 273). T.A. Shippey, in a useful brief overview of the critical response to Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, notes that Tolkien’s ‘defence of the poem as something existing in its own right … was seized on eagerly, even gratefully, by generations of critics’ (‘Structure and Unity’, p. 163).

One of these was his former B.Litt. student Joan Blomfield (*Joan Elizabeth Turville-Petre), who built on his remarks on the structure of Beowulf in an essay for the Review of English Studies (‘The Style and Structure of Beowulf’, 1938). Another was the Swiss scholar Adrien Bonjour, who in his monograph The Digressions in Beowulf (1950) stated unequivocally that he followed Tolkien concerning the general structure of the poem:

Professor Tolkien’s interpretation seems to us indeed by far the most satisfactory dramatically as well as artistically. It is, at the same time, perfectly objective: it considerably heightens our appreciation of the poem by showing the grand simplicity of its original design, its real perspective, its structural force and permanent human element – and all this on a quite solid basis, all the more solid that it is devoid of the speculative element inherent in so many other tentative explanations. [p. 70]

The first major criticism of Tolkien’s lecture did not appear until 1952. T.M. Gang, in his ‘Approaches to Beowulf’, Review of English Studies n.s. 3 (1952), disputed Tolkien’s view that

the dragon-fight symbolizes the tragedy of the human struggle against the forces of evil. … That Grendel, who is maddened by the sound of harps, should represent the outer darkness in all its active malevolence is plausible; but dragons were, after all, the natural guardians of treasures … unpleasant though they were, they were not accomplices of hell. Nor, for that matter, were they “things made by the imagination” for any purpose whatsoever; they were solid enough fact for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle [pp. 7–8]

Gang argued that Tolkien ‘never exactly claims that the poet’s original audience would have interpreted it as he does’, and that his ‘reconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon view of the world, leaning heavily as it does on the extremely doubtful evidence of Norse poetry (of a later date than Beowulf and suggestive of a very different outlook on life) can hardly be accepted as objective, unbiased, or altogether convincing’ (p. 11). This was answered by Adrien Bonjour, in defence of Tolkien, in ‘Monsters Crouching and Critics Rampant: or The Beowulf Dragon Debated’, PMLA 68 (March 1953). But Gang’s views were echoed by J.C. van Meurs in ‘Beowulf and Literary Criticism’, Neophilologus 39 (1955): he found it ‘difficult to believe that the poem contains as much implicit symbolism as Tolkien ascribes to it’ (p. 118), and worried that Tolkien’s theory was so attractive ‘that it is in danger of being taken as dogmatic truth by present-day Beowulf scholars’ (p. 115).

A more concerted disagreement was put forth by Kenneth Sisam in The Structure of Beowulf. He took issue with Tolkien’s ‘explanation of the architecture of Beowulf as an artistic balance between the first two-thirds … and the last part’ of the poem, and with ‘his view that the central theme is the battle, hopeless in this world, of man against evil’ (p. 21). According to Sisam,

if the two parts of the poem are to be solidly bound together by the opposition of youth and age, it is not enough that the hero should be young in the one part and old in the other. The change in his age must be shown to change his ability to fight monsters, since these fights make the main plot. Instead, Beowulf is represented from beginning to end as the scourge of monsters, always seeking them out and destroying them by the shortest way. [p. 24]

Whereas for Tolkien the unifying theme of the poem is ‘man at war with the hostile world and his inevitable overthrow in Time’, in Sisam’s view ‘the monsters Beowulf kills are inevitably evil and hostile because a reputation for heroism is not made by killing creatures that are believed to be harmless or beneficent – sheep for instance.’ The idea ‘that Beowulf was defeated, that “within Time the monsters would win”’ must be read into the text. ‘There is no word of his defeat in the poem … according to the poet, the Dragon Fight was “his last victory” (2710). On the other hand, all the monsters are utterly defeated’ (p. 25).

George Clark in his Beowulf (1990), while agreeing with certain aspects of Tolkien’s lecture and acknowledging its significance in the history of Beowulf studies, found fault with it for having marginalized Grendel’s mother and trivialized the dragon ‘into an emblem of malice, blaming the monster for being too symbolic, for not being “dragon enough,” then graciously relenting with the comment “But for Beowulf, the poem, that is as it should be.” But it is not so’ (p. 10). He also rejected Tolkien’s view of the Beowulf-poet, in part because ‘the membrane separating Tolkien’s critical and creative faculties was permeable in both directions’ (p. 12) – that is, in Clark’s opinion, Tolkien the writer of fiction influenced Tolkien the scholar: ‘we have no evidence for an Anglo-Saxon poet like Tolkien’s, indeed like Tolkien himself, a nostalgic re-creator of lost worlds, of pastiche’ (p. 16). In response, one could argue that a scholar who is also a storyteller may have an advantage in understanding the work of a ‘mighty predecessor and kindred spirit’, to quote T.A. Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth (2nd edn. 1992). No one, Shippey wrote, ‘had understood Beowulf but Tolkien. The work had always been something personal, even freakish, and it took someone with the same instincts to explain it. Sympathy furthermore depended on being a descendant, on living in the same country and beneath the same sky, on speaking the same language …’ (p. 44).

Although Clark would place ‘Tolkien’s critical paradigm’ firmly among ‘the literary, moral, and political convictions’ of the period following the First World War (p. 9), the influence of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics is still to be felt in Beowulf studies. Its lively prose remains effective despite the passage of decades – untouched by the obfuscation that infects so much writing on literary subjects today. Its advanced age, however, seems to have led R.D. Fulk, editor of the anthology Interpretations of Beowulf (1991), to apologize for including Tolkien’s lecture in that book. ‘Any editor worth his salt’, he says in a preface,

and with an adequate understanding of the changing critical winds in the profession, would no doubt remark … that Tolkien’s lecture … has become the object of mindless veneration, is over-anthologized, hopelessly retrograde, and much too long, and so can safely be set aside now to make way for more important matters. … No one denies the historical importance of this lecture as the first sustained effort at viewing the poem on its own terms, according to aesthetic guidelines discoverable in the work itself, thus opening the way to the formalist principles that played such a vital role in the subsequent development of Beowulf scholarship. But Tolkien’s study is not just a pilgrims’ stop on the road to holier shrines: his explanation of the poem’s larger structure, though frequently disputed, has never been bettered, and the methodology inherent in his practice of basing claims about the macrostructural level on patterns everyone discerns in the microstructure remains a model for emulation. His view of the poet as an artist of an antiquarian bent remains enormously influential (and a major obstacle to dating the poem); and although the issue of the appropriateness of the monsters is not as pressing as it was in 1936, it is not superfluous in the context of some subsequent criticism. … [pp. xi–xii]

Peter S. Baker, editor of Beowulf: Basic Readings (1995), more directly counts Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics among those works ‘that have long been part of the standard reading list for a Beowulf course’ which ‘continue to be influential and are still worth the student’s attention’ (p. xi).

Significant comment on the lecture has also been made in the ‘Scholars Forum’ of The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza by Michael D.C. Drout (‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics: The Brilliant Essay that Broke Beowulf Studies’, 25 April 2010) and Tom Shippey (‘Tolkien’s Two Views of Beowulf: One Hailed, One Ignored. But Did We Get This Right?’ 25 July 2010). Shippey repeats the usual praise of Tolkien’s lecture as one which ‘altered the current of Beowulf scholarship, which is only slowly starting to look for new channels’. Tolkien’s success, he argues, was partly due to his rhetorical skill: ‘he could make a shaky case look rock-solid, and several times did, and the results have not always been totally fortunate. … He wanted people to see the poem as a whole, as an integrated and purposeful work by a single poet who had a very good idea of what he was doing. … Along with that, he wanted to argue for the right to write fantasy, and in that mode to create something valuable and autonomous. And in order to make that case, he was obliged to argue down the powerfully-expressed opinions’ of critics such as R.W. Chambers and W.P. Ker. After the Second World War ‘a whole industry grew up of books and essays which demonstrated that Beowulf was a work of great “organic unity” … and that all the many bits which had been taken as “digressions” or insertions actually played an important part in the poet’s conception. … Seeing the poem as a fantasy perhaps did not catch on quite so much.’

Drout on his part observed that Tolkien attacked the view ‘that Beowulf is most valuable not as literature, but as documentation about the history and culture of the pre-literate Germanic world’, a view which gave study of the work validity despite ‘the establishment view that Beowulf was ill-shaped and inferior’. Instead, Tolkien argued that ‘critics could justify their studying Beowulf on aesthetic grounds alone and that they did not need the additional buttressing of historical interest’. He himself did not say or think ‘that the historical and quasi-historical thoughts mentioned in Beowulf were unimportant. Nevertheless subsequent critics, seeing that they were free to discuss the poem as literature only, began to abandon historical scholarship that had figured so significantly in Beowulf studies.’ Shippey agrees, stating that ‘something got lost, which I think Tolkien would have regretted. … The effect of what Tolkien wrote has been to terminate interest in Beowulf as a guide to history.’ Yet Beowulf also contains allusions to ‘lost tales’, hints of unexplained actions, elements Tolkien introduced into his own writings. More significantly, his *Finn and Hengest (1982) makes it clear that Tolkien thought that the Old English Finnsburg Fragment and the account in Beowulf of ‘the fight at Finnsburg’ refer to an actual event. Both Drout and Shippey point out that more recent archaeological discoveries of a series of great halls in the area which best fits the site for Heorot indicated in the poem suggest that Beowulf does preserve some true historical memories.

Tolkien had written in his lecture that he accepted ‘without argument throughout the attribution of Beowulf to the “age of Bede” – one of the firmer conclusions of a department of research most clearly serviceable to criticism: inquiry into the probable date of the effective composition of the poem as we have it’ (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 20). But this, Shippey comments, came to be rejected, ‘often savagely … by a majority of Anglo-Saxonists, their view entrenched in a thoroughly one-sided “conference” (it was really more of a party rally)’, the conference on the dating of Beowulf held in Toronto in 1980, and expressed in The Dating of Beowulf, edited by Colin Chase (1981). From that point scholars began to write of a later date for Beowulf (with its poet imitating an earlier style, an idea enabled by Tolkien’s portrayal of him as an antiquarian), or that the poem was in effect undateable. Shippey notes, however, that ‘the balance is now beginning to turn again’ to the earlier date championed by Tolkien, ‘on grounds of metrical linguistics, palaeography, and onomastics’.

The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment, edited by Leonard Neidorf (2014), revisits this issue with numerous references to Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (but not entered in the index). Its essays by Tom Shippey, ‘Names in Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon England’, and by Michael D.C. Drout with Phoebe Boyd and Emily Bowman, ‘“Give the People What They Want”: Historiography and Rhetorical History of the Dating of Beowulf Controversy’, revisit some of Shippey and Drout’s points in their online essays.

See further, Drout’s long review of the lecture (‘not just the most important single essay written on Beowulf, but also one of the most influential and widely quoted literary essays of the twentieth century’, p. 134), as well as its criticism, in ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and Its Significance’, Tolkien Studies 4 (2007); and his ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics: Seventy-Five Years Later’, Mythlore 30, nos. 1/2, whole nos. 115/116 (Fall/Winter 2011).

‘Of Beren and Lúthien’. The nineteenth chapter of the *‘Quenta Silmarillion’, published in *The Silmarillion (1977), pp. 162–87.

SYNOPSIS

Barahir of the House of Bëor and a small band of men live as outlaws in their former homeland of Dorthonion, which was seized by Morgoth in the Battle of Sudden Flame. They are hunted until only Barahir, his son Beren, and eleven others remain. One of these, Gorlim, while visiting his ruined home is ensnared by a vision of his missing wife and captured by the enemy. Deceived by Sauron, he reveals his comrades’ hiding place and is put to death. But Gorlim’s shade appears to Beren, who is alone on an errand, and declares his treachery and death. Beren finds the others of his band slain, pursues their killers, and recovers from them the ring they had taken from his father, given by Felagund of Nargothrond with a promise of aid in need to Barahir who had rescued him from foes.

After four years Beren leaves Dorthonion and undertakes a terrible journey through Ered Gorgoroth and the region where the spider offspring of Ungoliant dwell. Eventually he comes to Doriath, ‘and he passed through the mazes that Melian wove about the kingdom of Thingol, even as she had foretold; for a great doom lay upon him’ (pp. 164–5). One summer evening he sees Lúthien, daughter of Thingol and Melian, ‘the most beautiful of all the Children of Ilúvatar’, dancing on the grass, and is enchanted by her. She disappears, and for long Beren seeks her. At last, near springtime, he hears her song which ‘released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed’ (p. 165). He calls her Tinúviel, nightingale, and as she looks on him she loves him, but once more vanishes from sight. ‘Thus he began the payment of anguish for the fate that was laid on him; and in his fate Lúthien was caught, and being immortal she shared his mortality, and being free received his chain …’ (pp. 165–6). But she returns, and they meet secretly through the summer.

They are betrayed to Thingol by Daeron the minstrel, who also loves Lúthien. Lúthien refuses to tell her father anything unless he first promises not to slay Beren or imprison him. She then leads Beren before her father, who scornfully asks him what he seeks in Doriath. Beren, feeling almost as if the words are put into his mouth, says that Lúthien is the treasure he desires. Melian warns Thingol to be careful but, seeking a way to keep his promise and yet destroy Beren, Thingol says that he too desires a treasure: ‘Bring to me in your hand a Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown; and then, if she will, Lúthien may set her hand in yours’ (p. 167). Beren accepts the challenge. Melian tells Thingol that he has doomed either his daughter or himself.

Beren makes his way to Nargothrond and seeks aid from Felagund according to the promise the king had made to Barahir. But Celegorm and Curufin, two of Fëanor’s sons who are living in Nargothrond, influence the Elves against giving aid to Beren. Felagund, therefore, removes his crown and with only ten faithful companions accompanies Beren on his quest. He disguises their band as orcs, but Sauron is suspicious and has them brought to his stronghold. He and Felagund strive against each other with songs of power, but Sauron prevails, and their true forms are revealed. Refusing to tell their names and purposes, they are cast into a pit and one by one begin to be devoured by a werewolf.

Learning of Beren’s plight from Melian, Lúthien wishes to go to his aid, but Daeron betrays her, and she is imprisoned by Thingol in a house high in a beech tree. By enchantment she grows her hair long, and from it weaves a dark robe to conceal her and a rope by which to escape, both charged with a spell of sleep. Meanwhile Celegorm and Curufin go hunting, hoping to hear news of Felagund, and take with them Huan, a wolfhound given to Celegorm by the Vala Oromë. It has been foretold that Huan can be overcome only by the greatest wolf ever whelped. They come upon Lúthien, and even her magic does not enable her to escape Huan. Brought to Huan’s master, she tells her story and seeks help in rescuing Beren from Sauron’s dungeons. But the brothers have no interest in doing so; they keep Lúthien a prisoner in Nargothrond, thinking to force her to marry Curufin. Huan, however, has loved Lúthien from the moment he saw her, and comes to her often. He understands all that she tells him about Beren, but is permitted to speak only three times before his death. He returns to her the magic cloak and, speaking for the first time, gives her counsel. They escape together, Lúthien riding on Huan’s back.

At last among the captives only Felagund and Beren remain. When a wolf comes to devour Beren, Felagund manages to free himself from his bonds and kills it, but is himself slain. As Beren grieves, he hears Lúthien singing outside, and sings in reply. Sauron recognizes Lúthien’s voice and thinks to capture her for Morgoth, but Huan slays all the wolves he sends, including Draugluin, greatest of werewolves, and even overcomes Sauron himself when he takes werewolf form. After Lúthien forces Sauron to yield the spells that control his tower, he flies away in the form of a vampire. The tower crumbles, Lúthien and Huan bring Beren forth, and together they bury Felagund’s body.

Huan returns to his master. When the folk of Nargothrond hear of Felagund’s fate Celegorm and Curufin are expelled. As they ride to join their brethren they come on Beren and Lúthien, who are arguing whether she should stay in safety or accompany him on his quest for a Silmaril. Curufin tries to abduct Lúthien, but Beren rescues her and is then himself rescued from Celegorm by Huan, who now rejects Celegorm as his master. Beren lets the brothers go free but takes Curufin’s weapons, including the knife Angrist made by Telchar of Nogrod, and his horse. As the brothers flee on Celegorm’s horse, Curufin fires two arrows: one is caught by Huan, but the other wounds Beren. Lúthien heals Beren and they reach the safety of Doriath. Beren steals away secretly while Lúthien is sleeping, not wishing her to accompany him into danger.

At the edge of the waste before Angband Beren sets Curufin’s horse free and sings a Song of Parting, believing that he is going to his death. But Lúthien arrives riding Huan, by whose counsel they have collected from Sauron’s ruined stronghold the wolf-skin of Draugluin and the bat-skin of Thuringwethil, a messenger of Sauron in vampire form. Huan speaks a second time and tells Beren that he cannot save Lúthien from ‘the shadow of death … for by her love she is now subject to it’. Beren can turn aside from his fate and they can live in exile for a while, ‘but if you will not deny your doom, then either Lúthien being forsaken, must assuredly die alone, or she must with you challenge the fate that lies before you’ (p. 179). Huan cannot accompany them further, but they may meet again in Doriath. Beren dons the skin of Draugluin and Lúthien that of Thuringwethil, and thus reach the Gate of Angband.

They are challenged by Carcharoth, a whelp of the race of Draugluin raised by Morgoth on living flesh to be the doom of Huan, but Lúthien casts a spell of sleep on him. They make their way down to Morgoth’s hall. Beren slinks beneath his throne. When Morgoth’s gaze strips Lúthien of her disguise she ‘named her own name, and offered her service to sing before him’, and he conceives ‘in his thought an evil lust’ (p. 180). With her song, however, she casts him and all of his court into slumber, and his crown falls from his head. Using the knife Angrist Beren cuts one Silmaril from the crown, but the knife snaps when he tries to take a second. He flees with Lúthien. As they reach the gate, Carcharoth springs at them. Beren tries to daunt Carcharoth with the Silmaril, but the wolf devours both Beren’s hand and the jewel within it. The Silmaril burns his inner parts, and he runs off mad with pain. While Morgoth and his court begin to rouse, the eagle Thorondor and his vassals carry Beren and Lúthien to Doriath.

Lúthien and Huan, who comes to them, heal Beren from the poisonous bite of Carcharoth. For a while they walk in the woods, but Beren, not wanting to withhold Lúthien from her father or have her live in the wild, persuades her that they should make their way to Thingol. The people of Doriath have sought in vain for Lúthien and grieved for her absence, and Daeron has strayed far away. Thingol has heard that Lúthien had been in Nargothrond but had fled. Just before Beren and Lúthien come to Thingol the king hears that messengers he had sent to Maedhros for aid in seeking Lúthien have been attacked by Carcharoth, who cannot be restrained by the power of Melian from entering Doriath. Beren kneels before Thingol and claims Lúthien as his own: he has fulfilled his quest. ‘Even now a Silmaril is in my hand’, but the hand is no longer on his arm. Thingol’s heart is softened, and ‘Beren took the hand of Lúthien before the throne of her father’ (pp. 184, 185).

But Carcharoth is drawing ever nearer to Menegroth. Beren rides out with Thingol and his hunters, Mablung and Beleg, and with Huan to seek the dread beast. Carcharoth leaps on Thingol, and Beren receives a mortal wound while defending the king. Huan and Carcharoth fight and slay each other, but before dying Huan speaks for the third time, bidding Beren farewell. Mablung cuts the Silmaril from the belly of the wolf and places it in Beren’s hand; ‘and Beren was aroused by the touch of the Silmaril, and held it aloft, and bade Thingol receive it’ (p. 186).

In Menegroth they are met by Lúthien who bids Beren wait for her beyond the Western Sea. And his spirit ‘tarried in the halls of Mandos … until Lúthien came to say her last farewell’. The spirit of Lúthien herself ‘fell down into darkness’, and coming to Mandos sang before him ‘the song most fair that ever in words was woven’, in which she ‘wove two themes … of the sorrow of the Eldar and the grief of Men. … And as she knelt before him her tears fell upon his feet … and Mandos was moved to pity, who never before was so moved, nor has been since’ (pp. 186–7). Mandos lays the case before Manwë, who consults the will of Ilúvatar and offers Lúthien two choices: to dwell among the Valar where Beren cannot come, or to become mortal and return to Middle-earth with Beren for a short time, and like him be subject to death. She chooses the latter, ‘that thus whatever grief might lie in wait’, her fate and that of Beren ‘might be joined, and their paths lead together beyond the confines of the world’ (p. 187).

HISTORY

The first version of this story, The Tale of Tinúviel in *The Book of Lost Tales, does not survive. Tolkien wrote it in pencil, probably in the second half of 1917, but overwrote it with a second version in ink and erased the pencil text, probably in summer 1919. References in other stories written in the intervening period, however, give some indication of what might have been in the original text. There, as in The Silmarillion, Beren was a Man, not an Elf. An allusion to ‘Tevildo Prince of Cats’ (*The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 47) suggests that Tevildo was already present in the first version. Elsewhere there are references to Lúthien’s parents, Linwë Tinto (> Tinwelint > Thingol) and Tindriel (> Wendelin > Gwendeling > Melian), and to their meeting, foreshadowing that of Lúthien and Beren. They have two children, Timpinen and Tinúviel, who ‘long after joined the Eldar again’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, pp. 106–7; it is impossible to know what Tolkien meant by this phrase).

In the revised version of The Tale of Tinúviel Tinwelint and Gwendeling, who live in a deep cavern in a hidden realm in the forest of Artanor protected by the magic of Gwendeling, also have two children, Dairon the piper and Tinúviel (her real name, not that given her by Beren) whose greatest joy is dancing. One night in June Beren the Gnome (a Noldo Elf) sees Tinúviel dancing to Dairon’s flute and is enchanted. As in the final version, she flees from Beren and he seeks her. There is no betrayal by Dairon, but Beren steps boldly before her and asks her to teach him to dance. She dances away, and leads Beren to her father’s halls. There is no suggestion that she has already committed herself to him. Tinwelint, who distrusts the Noldoli, is not welcoming, but Tinúviel pleads for Beren because of his great appreciation of her dancing. When Tinwelint asks Beren what he seeks, Beren replies: ‘thy daughter … for she is the fairest and most sweet of all the maidens I have seen or dreamed of’. Tinwelint laughs, and asks for a Silmaril from the Crown of Melko as the price of his daughter’s hand. All present think that he is jesting, but Beren replies: ‘Nay, but ’tis too small a gift to the father of so sweet a bride. … I … will fulfil thy small desire …’ (*The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 13). He leaves, and Tinúviel weeps, fearing that ‘Melko will slay him, and none will look ever again with such love upon my dancing’ (p. 14).

Beren, travelling towards Melko’s stronghold, is captured by orcs. He pretends that he is a trapper of small animals and birds who wishes to serve Melko. He is sent as a thrall to Tevildo, Prince of Cats, the mightiest of all Cats and ‘possessed of an evil sprite’ (p. 16) with many cats subject to him. When Beren fails in the tasks Tevildo sets him, he is made a scullion in Tevildo’s kitchen. As in the final version, Tinúviel learns of Beren’s captivity, is betrayed by Dairon, and is imprisoned by her father. She achieves her escape in the same way, but the tale describes at length the spells by which she makes her hair grow and gives the cloak and rope made from it the power of compelling sleep. Dairon tries to follow her but becomes lost. On her journey north Tinúviel meets Huan, Captain of Dogs, a friend of Beren and great enemy of Tevildo, who devises a plan to rescue Beren. Tinúviel goes to Tevildo’s stronghold, says that she has seen Huan lying sick in the woods, and offers to lead Tevildo to him. Through a hatch she catches a glimpse of Beren in the kitchen and speaks loudly so that he knows she is there. So deceived, Tevildo with two other cats follows Tinúviel to where Huan lies pretending to be sick. Huan kills one of the cats, Oikeroi, and the other two climb trees to escape him. Huan says that he will not let them come down until Beren is set free. Eventually Tevildo yields, throws down his gold collar as a token of authority to his followers, and reveals to Huan ‘the secret of the cats and the spell that Melko had entrusted to him … words of magic whereby the stones of his evil house were held together, and whereby he held all beasts of the catfolk under his sway, filling them with an evil power beyond their nature …’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 28). Tinúviel returns to Tevildo’s stronghold, speaks the spell, and rescues Beren.

Tinúviel wanders a long time in the woods with Beren and Huan, but ‘grew at last to long sorely for Gwendeling’. She wishes to return home but does not want to leave Beren. He suggests that the only thing they can do is to find a Silmaril. They consult Huan (who has no restriction on his speech), who gives them the skin of Oikeroi which he had taken as a trophy; Tinúviel sews Beren into it and teaches him how to behave like a cat. They leave Huan and make their way to Melko’s stronghold, Angband. Here the earlier story differs only in detail: Tinúviel pretends that she has been driven out by her father; Beren uses a knife from Tevildo’s kitchen to prise the Silmaril from Melko’s crown; and their escape is aided by Huan, not by eagles.

Beren feels that he should leave Tinúviel, since he has no Silmaril to give her father, but she persuades him to go in hope with her, for her father might have relented. They find that her father’s realm has suffered in her absence, most recently by the incursion of Karkaras (the precursor of Carcharoth) who, driven mad by anguish, has run wild through the woods and killed many. When they come before Tinwelint Beren declares that he has a Silmaril in his hand, but shows that his hand is no longer on his arm. As in The Silmarillion, Tinwelint’s heart is softened, and he accepts Beren; but in the revised Tale of Tinúviel Karkaras comes on the hunters while they are sleeping, with Beren keeping watch; Beren does not lose his life protecting Tinwelint; Tinwelint, not Huan, kills Karkaras; and Huan survives the fight. Tinúviel is not offered a choice, but Mandos allows both her and Beren to return into the world, warning them that ‘it is not to any life of perfect joy that I dismiss you … and know ye that ye will become mortal even as Men, and when ye fare hither again it will be for ever, unless the Gods summon you indeed to Valinor’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 40). They return to dance in the woods and hills.

Since in this version both Beren and Tinúviel are Elves, the conflict between differing fates which becomes such an important element in later versions is absent. Here they are permitted a fate which differs from that usual for Elves who die. Instead of waiting in the Halls of Mandos and being reborn again in their children, they are sent back as themselves, but now as mortal as Men. In another tale Tolkien wrote that ‘upon Beren and Tinúviel fell swiftly that doom of mortality that Mandos had spoken’, and while their child was still young Tinúviel slowly faded, and Beren searched for her until he too faded (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 240). Unfortunately it is not known how the matter was resolved in the lost first version, when Beren was a Man. *Christopher Tolkien has said that in this version of the story Tevildo and his castle occupy ‘the same “space” in the narrative’ as Sauron and Tol-in-Gaurhoth, but otherwise the two have nothing in common (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 53; see his detailed comparison of The Tale of Tinúviel with ‘Of Beren and Lúthien’ in The Silmarillion, in The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, pp. 51–60).

The names of Tinúviel’s parents achieved their final form, Thingol and Melian, in a typescript which Tolkien began soon after the second version of the story, but abandoned after Tinúviel’s meeting with Huan.

The earliest extant texts of the poem *Light as Leaf on Lindentree were made in Leeds c. 1923–4, when also some introductory lines of alliterative verse were added. Tolkien inserted this poem and various references to the story of Beren and Tinúviel into the second version of his alliterative poem *The Lay of the Children of Húrin, probably c. 1924–5. These show some development in the story, though Tolkien still hesitated whether Beren should be a Man or an Elf. The elven princess was now called Lúthien, and Tinúviel is the name given her by Beren. Dairon is no longer her brother but in love with her, and being jealous of Beren, ceases to play his flute. Perhaps most significantly, the inserted poem stresses the immediacy of Lúthien’s love for Beren when she first comes face to face with him.

In the brief *Sketch of the Mythology (c. 1926) Tolkien evidently was still undecided about Beren: his father Barahir is a chieftain of Ilkorindi (Elves), but Beren himself is said to be mortal. More is said about Beren’s earlier history: ‘Barahir is driven into hiding, his hiding betrayed, and Barahir slain; his son Beren after a life outlawed flees south, crosses the Shadowy Mountains, and after grievous hardships comes to Doriath’ (*The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 24). A statement that Barahir had been a friend of Celegorm of Nargothrond is not developed further, but foreshadows a major new element. Beren is given as a slave to Thû the hunter, not to Tevildo. Huan is killed in the fight with Carcaras while defending Beren. Events after Beren’s death are uncertain: ‘Some songs say that Lúthien went even over the Grinding Ice, aided by the power of her divine mother, Melian, to Mandos’ halls and won him back; others that Mandos hearing his tale released him. Certain it is that he alone of mortals came back from Mandos and dwelt with Lúthien and never spoke to Men again …’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 25). An addition made probably soon after this says that Mandos exacted in payment that Lúthien should become as mortal as Beren. The text was revised c. 1926–30 in response to the way the story was developing in the *Lay of Leithian, so that Beren is definitely a Man and the Nargothrond element enters.

Tolkien began to write the Lay of Leithian in summer 1925, telling the story of Beren and Lúthien at length in octosyllabic couplets. At various points while this was in progress he made five synopses for parts of the story still to be written, which indicate how the story changed in stages and expanded as new ideas came to the author and were adopted or rejected. Finally he decided that Beren was a Man, and in its final form the story told in the Lay approached very closely (if more briefly) that of The Silmarillion. Significant differences are few: Gorlim sees a phantom image of his missing wife by chance in a house and, believing her alive, deliberately seeks out Morgoth and betrays his comrades, hoping to be reunited with her; but he is killed by Morgoth. Beren, Felagund, and their companions are captured by Thû, Master of Wolves. After Beren steals away, Lúthien catches up with him first, and Huan comes later, having fetched the wolf coat and bat skin. Tolkien left the Lay unfinished in September 1931 at the point where Carcharoth devours Beren’s hand and the Silmaril.

The fourth and fifth synopses, however, contain additional material concerning the unwritten part of the Lay. During their flight Beren and Lúthien are ensnared by great spiders, but Huan rescues them, an idea which did not survive into later versions. As foretold, Huan is killed by Carcharoth in the great wolf hunt. The fate of the lovers is close to that in the Sketch: ‘Fading of Lúthien. Her journey to Mandos. The song of Lúthien in Mandos’ halls, and the release of Beren. They dwelt long in Broseliand, but spake never more to mortal Men, and Lúthien became mortal’ (*The Lays of Beleriand, p. 312). One idea which is referred to several times in the Lay and synopses, but which Tolkien abandoned in later versions, is that Morgoth sent a war band under Boldog to capture Lúthien.

The *Quenta Noldorinwa, written c. 1930 while Tolkien was still working on the Lay of Leithian, contains a brief account of the story based on the Lay to which it even refers. The latter part, roughly from the point where Beren is injured by Celegorm, was written before the corresponding part of the Lay. It follows the fourth synopsis in that Beren does not steal away from Lúthien after his recovery, but Huan, learning that they are not certain what to do, brings them the wolfskin and bat-garb and counsels them. Tolkien hesitated about the sequence of events at this point; in the fifth synopsis Beren leaves alone and is overtaken by both Lúthien and Huan, whereas in the Lay Lúthien reaches him first and Huan arrives later with the skins. There is no suggestion that Morgoth forces Lúthien to abandon her bat disguise. By an addition, Huan speaks for a third time before he dies.

The story is given briefly in both the ‘earliest’ and the ‘later’ *Annals of Beleriand (early and mid-1930s respectively). According to the ‘earliest’ Annals Barahir was slain in Year 160, and the whole story of Beren and Lúthien took place in 163–4. In the ‘later’ Annals Barahir’s death takes place in 261, emended to 460; the deeds of Beren and Lúthien are spread over the longer period 263–5 (> 463–5).

When writing the *Quenta Silmarillion (mid-1930s–early 1938) Tolkien found it difficult to keep the story of Beren and Lúthien to a length commensurate with the rest of the work, abandoning not only an unfinished draft when he realized it was too long, but also a shorter fair copy that followed at the point where Felagund and Beren are about to leave Nargothrond. He then rewrote the entire story more succinctly, closely following the Lay of Leithian with only a few changes. One of these, of the name Thû to Sauron as the servant of Morgoth who captures Beren and Felagund, was merely a change of name, as is clear in various contemporary versions of *The Fall of Númenor. The evolution of the story of Beren and Lúthien was virtually complete by the end of 1937.

About 1950, Tolkien began to make a revision of the Lay of Leithian left unfinished nearly twenty years before, and a full prose version closely related to the revision. This work included a revision of the story of Gorlim, in which his treachery is less deep and deliberate. Tolkien also told the story of Beren and Lúthien in short in the *Grey Annals (c. 1951, see *Annals of Beleriand), adding a few details such as descriptions of the refuge of Barahir and his men.

The chapter ‘Of Beren and Lúthien’ in The Silmarillion was based for the most part on the texts of the Quenta Silmarillion of the 1930s, mainly on a rejected first fair copy as far as the point where Felagund gives the crown of Nargothrond to Orodreth, but with some elements from the complete fair copy which was the source for the rest of the chapter. Christopher Tolkien also took from the Grey Annals a short passage describing Barahir’s refuge, and several short phrases which elucidated points of importance. He took the account of Gorlim’s treachery from the revision of c. 1950, and inserted thirty-two lines from the Lay of Leithian describing the contest between Felagund and Sauron (covered in only one sentence in the Quenta Silmarillion). See further, discussion in *The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 295–306; The Lays of Beleriand, p. 196; and *The Peoples of Middle-earth, pp. 318 and 369, and p. 372, n. 8.

Compare Christopher Tolkien’s compilation of texts for the story in the volume *Beren and Lúthien (2017).

BACKGROUND TO THE STORY

The story of Beren and Lúthien was inspired by an incident in Tolkien’s life which occurred in late May or early June 1917, when *Edith Tolkien danced for her husband in a woodland glade. He described the event in a letter to his son Christopher in 1972:

I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in *Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance. [11 July 1972, Letters, p. 420]

What this meant to Tolkien is shown by the inscription on the stone in Wolvercote Cemetery, *Oxford, marking the burial place of Ronald and Edith Tolkien: Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889–1971. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892–1973.

Tolkien commented on the story in a letter to *Milton Waldman in ?late 1951:

Here we meet, among other things, the first example of the motive … that the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world’, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak – owing to the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One, that resides in the intrusions of the Children of God into the Drama. It is Beren the outlawed mortal who succeeds (with the help of Lúthien, a mere maiden, even if an elf of royalty) where all the armies and warriors have failed: he penetrates the stronghold of the Enemy and wrests one of the Silmarilli from the Iron Crown. Thus he wins the hand of Lúthien and the first marriage of mortal and immortal is achieved. [Letters, p. 149]

CRITICISM

Christina Scull has noted that the significance of the story became greater in later versions as the importance of the Silmarils grew in the legendarium, and the one recovered by Beren and Lúthien enabled Eärendel to reach Valinor and obtain help against Morgoth. She also has found that the love of Beren and Lúthien for each other ‘becomes deeper in successive retellings, and seems at last foreordained in the Music of the Ainur’ (‘The Development of Tolkien’s Legendarium: Some Threads in the Tapestry of Middle-earth’, in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (2000), p. 16).

T.A. Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth counts at least eight extant versions of the tale of Beren and Lúthien, varying in length, completeness, intrinsic merit, literary merit, and ‘importance for understanding the development of the whole story. Yet the existence of all the versions together does more than merely provide one with more “ox-bones” for study. It also radically alters the flavour of the soup, creating something of the “flavour of deep-rootedness” which Tolkien so often detected and admired’ (2nd edn. 1992, pp. 277–8; ‘ox-bones’ and ‘soup’ are references to *On Fairy-Stories). Shippey also discusses at length some small but significant details in the story, among them Beren’s oath to Thingol:

If one had only the Silmarillion version of this scene, its logic and development would seem perfectly clear. One irreducible fact about Beren is that he becomes … ‘the One-Handed’. … Since this is an irreducible fact, surely it must all along have been part of the story that Beren, in the scene with Thingol, should find himself swearing an unknowingly ironic oath: in the words of the Silmarillion version, ‘when we meet again my hand shall hold a Silmaril’ – because of course when he and Thingol meet again his hand will be holding a Silmaril, but both will be in the belly of the wolf. With that established it would seem to be only plain sense for Thingol to have provoked the oath by setting up a hand for hand, jewel for jewel exchange, as again he so clearly does in the Silmarillion: bring me a jewel (the Silmaril) in your hand, and I will put in your hand a compensating jewel (Lúthien’s hand). …

Yet a glance at the [Book of Lost Tales, Part Two] version shows that in the beginning these connections were simply not there. Beren does say, in his second meeting with Thingol (there Tinwelint), ‘I have a Silmaril in my hand even now’ … but in the first meeting does not make the corresponding promise. His exact words are only ‘I … will fulfil thy small desire’: which, of course, at the time of their second meeting he has still not done. [p. 278]

Katharyn W. Crabbe in J.R.R. Tolkien (rev. and expanded edn. 1988) compares Beren as a hero to Túrin; like Túrin, he suffers loss and loneliness, but is motivated not by vengeance but by love. He is brave, and ‘although his pride may lead him to attempt the seemingly impossible, it does not lead him to mindless violence. It is a productive rather than a destructive pride … unlike Túrin, whose pride leads him time after time to bad decisions and self-destructive behavior’ (p. 194).

Verlyn Flieger devotes two chapters in Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (2nd edn. 2002) to the story. She poses the questions: ‘Can the *free will of Men alter the fate of Elves? Does the fate of the Elf entangle the Man who intersects it?’ and finds that ‘both fate and free will appear to be involved … in the lives of Beren, Lúthien, and Thingol’ (p. 131). She examines their actions in this context, and in relation to the main theme of her book, that The Silmarillion is ‘a story about light. Images of light in all stages – bright, dim, whole, refracted, clear or rainbow-hued – pervade the songs and stories of the fictive. It is a world peopled with sub-creators whose interactions with and attitudes toward the light shape their world and their own destinies within it’ (p. 49).

Iwan Rhys Morus in ‘The Tale of Beren and Lúthien’, Mallorn 20 (September 1983), comments that this story is

in many ways a turning-point in the mythology for in it many of the various strands of other narratives are brought together and combined to bring about the doom of the Eldar. Indeed I would argue that one of Tolkien’s master-strokes in this tale is the irony of the fact that the Free People’s greatest achievement against Morgoth – the taking of a Silmaril from the Iron Crown – is the seed that brings about their eventual utter downfall. [p. 19]

He discusses the influence of the episode at Roos on the story, and notes that this is not Tolkien’s only use of the motif of the ‘encounter in the woods’, citing among others Aragorn and Arwen, Thingol and Melian, Eöl and Aredhel, and Aldarion and Erendis. He suggests possible sources for elements of the story, in particular in the *Kalevala ‘the journey of Väinämöinen and Lemminkäinen to steal the Sampo, in which Väinämöinen’s singing casts the whole of Pohja into deep slumber’, and several wizards’ singing-contests.

Around this central core Tolkien has piled a plethora of mythic themes and motifs. The striking image of a hand in a wolf’s mouth is straight from the Prose Edda: Fenris and the god Tyr. Lúthien with her escape via a rope of her own hair from prison is of course Rapunzel from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The hunting of Carcharoth recalls the great quest for the Twrch Trwyth in ‘Culwch ac Olwen’ whilst the great hound Huan reminds me strongly of the most faithful of wolfhounds: Gelert in the old Welsh legend. [p. 22]

Richard C. West in ‘Real-world Myth in a Secondary World’, Tolkien the Medievalist, ed. Jane Chance (2003), also comments on resonances from various sources which a reader might recognize and suppose to have influenced elements of the story. But he quite rightly points out that similarities do not necessarily mean influence, and that the differences are often far more marked than the similarities. As one example he cites ‘Rapunzel’, one of the Märchen collected by the Brothers Grimm, remarking that ‘Lúthien lets her hair down not just to allow her lover to reach her but to enable her to reach him’ (p. 263). Myth, legend, and fairy-tale ‘were an integral part of [Tolkien’s] mental furniture and imaginative make-up’, and what we read ‘over and over are echoes, even when we cannot pinpoint an exact source’ (p. 264). West cites several works which may have provided ‘echoes’ for the story of Beren and Lúthien: Robin Hood and his outlaw band for Barahir; Tristan and Iseult living in the woods; the killing one by one of Finrod and Beren’s companions ‘is strongly reminiscent of the sons of King Völsung being killed one each night until only Sigmund survives’; Sauron’s shape-shifting recalls the Norse god Loki and the Greek Nereus; Carcharoth biting off Beren’s hand recalls Fenris Wolf and Tyr; Huan plays the same role as the magical helper in many fairy-tales; Lúthien in her pleading before Mandos ‘reenacts the descent into the underworld of Orpheus in Greek mythology or of Ishtar in Babylonian to recover a loved one, but with a happier result: much as in the Middle English *Sir Orfeo …’ (p. 265).

In another essay, ‘“And She Named Her Own Name”: Being True to One’s Word in Tolkien’s Middle-earth’, Tolkien Studies 2 (2005), Richard C. West points out that whereas in early versions of the story both Lúthien and Beren occasionally lie, and this is justified by the narrator, in the latest version Lúthien’s speaks only truth. He connects this with a common theme in Tolkien’s fiction, ‘that it is dangerous to use the weapons employed by evil even with good intentions’ (p. 4).

Randel Helms briefly discusses the development of the Beren and Lúthien story in his Tolkien and the Silmarils (1981), arguing that ‘its chief written source’ is the tale of ‘Culwch and Olwen’ in The Mabinogion (p. 15). Granted, as Carl Phelpstead does in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), that ‘Tolkien’s use of Culhwch and Olwen seems incontrovertible’ (p. 73), Helms’s assertion is perhaps too bold, considering the number of other possible sources, not to mention original invention by Tolkien.

Beren and Lúthien. Edition of texts relating the story of Beren and Lúthien from *‘The Silmarillion’, edited by *Christopher Tolkien. First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, London, and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, in June 2017.

The core of this book is not a single or composite telling of the story of Beren and Lúthien, but a collection of texts or extracts arranged to show its evolution over a long period. Christopher Tolkien provides a biographical and literary introduction (‘Notes on the Elder Days’), as well as a framework, in which he introduces each text and briefly gives relevant information about its source and how it fits into the wider mythology. (In the Reader’s Guide the development of the story of Beren and Lúthien is discussed mainly in the preceding article, *‘Of Beren and Lúthien’, and partly in *‘Of the Ruin of Doriath’ and *‘The Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath’. Each of these begins with a summary of the chapter in *The Silmarillion, then the story as told in *The Book of Lost Tales, followed by an account, text by text, of what was changed or added over the years. Each of the component texts also has its own entry in the present book.)

SUMMARY OF THE CONTENTS

Two extracts from the *Quenta Noldorinwa (1930) (*The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 88, 85) describe the making of the Silmarils and the meeting of Lúthien’s parents, Melian the fay and Thingol, one of the leaders of the Elves. An extract from *The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (pp. 9, 10) then tells how Gwendeling and Tinwelint (Melian and Thingol) established a guarded realm; and this is followed by the complete ‘Tale of Tinúviel’ from The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (pp. 10–41).

A synopsis of the story as it appeared in the *Sketch of the Mythology (c. 1926; The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 24–5) illustrates that Thû the hunter had now replaced Tevildo, and Beren was now a man, son of Barahir, a chieftain of Men. Next, an extract from the *Lay of Leithian (Canto II, lines 151–400; *The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 162–8) tells how Beren and Barahir’s refuge was betrayed to Morgoth by Gorlim, one of their companions, and how Beren, absent at the time of the attack, recovered a ring taken from his dead father’s hand.

From the Quenta Noldorinwa, one extract (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 104–6) explains the importance of the ring of Barahir, how the chieftain saved the life of a Noldorin prince, Felagund, who swore undying friendship and aid in time of need, and how Felagund founded the stronghold of Nargothrond; while a second (pp. 109–10) tells the story of Beren and Lúthien from the beginning, including Beren’s request to Felagund for aid, as far as the imprisonment of Beren, Felagund, and their companions by Thû. Another extract from the Lay of Leithian (Canto VI, lines 1678–1923 and Canto VII, lines 1924–2237; The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 212–18, 224–32) relates the same events at greater length and in more detail.

The story first told in the Quenta Noldorinwa is now taken up until its end, with Lúthien becoming mortal so that she would not be separated from Beren (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 110–15); and the story told in the Lay of Leithian (Cantos VIII–XIV; The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 235ff.) is then continued to the point where Tolkien abandoned the poem in 1931, just as Beren and Lúthien flee Angband and the wolf, Carcharoth, devours the Silmaril in Beren’s hand. This is accompanied by a short separate text, headed ‘a piece from the end of the poem’, which seems to refer to the Halls of the Dead in Valinor (The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 308–9).

At this stage Tolkien turned his efforts to a new, longer prose version of the ‘Silmarillion’, entitled *Quenta Silmarillion. After he had written the tale of Beren and Lúthien as far as the point at which Felagund gives his crown to Orodreth, he stopped because of its length and made a rough draft of the full story; and on the basis of this draft he made a second, shorter version which had reached the death of Beren by mid-December 1937, when Tolkien laid aside ‘The Silmarillion’ and began *The Lord of the Rings. Christopher Tolkien draws on both versions for the text in an explanatory bridging passage, while a brief extract from the published Silmarillion (pp. 182–3) brings Beren and Lúthien back to the borders of Doriath.

Christopher then looks back on the evolution of the story and raises one aspect he believes was of primary significance to his father: the fates of Beren and Lúthien after Beren’s death. He cites again their fates when both were Elves in The Book of Lost Tales, adding information about their return to Middle-earth (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 40), and contrasting this with the fate decreed for Elves in ‘The Coming of the Valar’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 76) hinted at in the separate piece from the end of the Lay of Leithian. He discusses later ideas of the fate of the Elves and the choices offered to Beren and Lúthien in later versions of their story, citing The Silmarillion (p. 42), the Quenta Noldorinwa (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 115), and the Quenta Silmarillion (draft for the ‘short’ version of text, in *The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 303–4), and finishes with a summary of the version published in The Silmarillion, p. 187, in which the choice rested with Lúthien alone.

Although the Quenta Silmarillion and other works remained unfinished, Christopher Tolkien returns to earlier, usually brief accounts for the later history of the Silmaril with which Beren and Lúthien were concerned. He pieces together an account relating the return of Beren and Lúthien, the setting of the Silmaril in the Nauglafring (the necklace of the Dwarves), how possession of the necklace led to the death of Thingol and the son and grandsons of Beren and Lúthien, and how by its power Eärendil, husband of Elwing, granddaughter of Beren and Lúthien, was able to reach Valinor and obtain aid from the Valar against Morgoth. For these, Christopher uses extracts from the Quenta Noldorinwa (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 132–4), The Silmarillion (p. 236), ‘The Nauglafring’ in The Book of Lost Tales (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, pp. 236–8), the Quenta Noldorinwa again (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 134), ‘The Nauglafring’ again (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, pp. 239–40, 242), and the Quenta Noldorinwa once more (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 148–50). The end of the latter was superseded by the Quenta Noldorinwa (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 153) and essentially reached the form of the published Silmarillion (pp. 247–50). The account proper ends with a brief quote from the Quenta Silmarillion: ‘None saw Beren and Lúthien leave the world or marked where at last their bodies lay’ (The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 305).

An appendix contains extracts from Tolkien’s reworking of the beginning of the Lay of Leithian, c. 1949–50. The first describes Beren and Barahir’s secret refuge (‘The Lay of Leithian Recommenced’, lines 173–98), then follows Gorlim’s treachery, with Sauron replacing Morgoth as its instigator, and Beren’s escape south (lines 199–592). This is followed by a ‘List of Names in the Original Text’ (not an index) ‘intended to assist a reader who cannot recall, among the mass of names (and forms of names), the reference of one that may be of significance in the narrative’ (Beren and Lúthien, p. 274). Some of the rarer names are given fuller explanation. Finally there is a glossary of ‘words (including forms and meanings of worlds differing from modern usage)’ (p. 286), with page references.

HISTORY

In his preface to this book Christopher Tolkien refers to a detailed study he made of the evolution of his father’s ‘Silmarillion’ writings following the publication of his own edition, The Silmarillion, in 1977. In 1981 he wrote to *Rayner Unwin about this study which he called The History of The Silmarillion:

In theory, I could produce a lot of books out of the History, and there are many possibilities and combinations of possibilities. For example, I could do ‘Beren’, with the original Lost Tale, The Lay of Leithian, and an essay on the development of the legend. My preference, if it came to anything so positive, would probably be for the treating of one legend as a developing entity, rather than give all the Lost Tales at one go; but the difficulties of exposition in detail would in such a case be great, because one would have to explain so often what was happening elsewhere, in other unpublished writings.

He told Unwin ‘that I would enjoy writing a book called “Beren” on the lines I suggested: but the problem would be its organization, so that the matter was comprehensible without the editor becoming overpowering’ (p. 10).

Now after many years during which ‘a large part of the immense store of manuscripts pertaining to the First Age, or Elder Days, has been published, in close and detailed editions; chiefly in volumes of *The History of Middle-earth’ (p. 11), Christopher returned to his original idea. Had it been published then, it ‘would have brought to light much hitherto unknown and unavailable writing. But this book [Beren and Lúthien] does not offer a single page of original and unpublished work. What then is the need, now, for such a book?’ In The History of Middle-earth the story of Beren and Lúthien, written by Tolkien during a wide span of years, is spread over several books and entangled with other events. ‘To follow the story … as a single and well-defined narrative’ (p. 12) is not easy. For the present book, then, on the one hand Christopher has

tried to separate the story of Beren and Tinúviel (Lúthien) so that it stands alone, so far as that can be done (in my opinion) without distortion. On the other hand, I have wished to show how this fundamental story evolved over the years. In my foreword to the first volume of The Book of Lost Tales I said of the changes in the stories …

development was seldom by outright rejection – far more often it was by subtle transformation in stages, so that the growth of the legends (the process, for instance, by which the Nargothrond story made contact with that of Beren and Lúthien, a contact not even hinted at in the Lost Tales, though both elements were present) can seem like the growth of legends among peoples, the product of many minds and generations.

It is an essential feature … that these developments … are shown in my father’s own words, for the method that I have employed is the extraction of passages from much longer manuscripts in prose or verse written over many years. [pp. 12–13]

Christopher notes that this brings ‘to light passages of close description or dramatic immediacy that are lost in the summary, condensed manner characteristic of so much Silmarillion narrative writing’, as well as elements ‘that were later altogether lost’ (p. 13), such as Tevildo, Prince of Cats.

Finally, acknowledging that the volumes of The History of Middle-earth ‘may well present a deterrent aspect, it was Christopher’s ‘hope, in composing this book, that it would show how the creation of an ancient legend of Middle-earth, changing and growing over many years, reflected the search of the author for a presentation of the myth nearer to his desire’ (p. 14). Since ‘the decision of what to include and what to exclude … could only be a matter of personal and often questionable judgement … there can be no attainable “correct way”’ (p. 16).

We should note, in case of changes to the text or page breaks of Beren and Lúthien in the eleventh hour, that we have written this article on the basis of a proof copy, kindly provided us by HarperCollins in advance of publication.

Berkshire. In summer 1912 Tolkien went on a walking tour in this county in the south-east of England, where he made several drawings and watercolours. He was especially interested in the local landscape and buildings, such as the church of St Michael, founded in Anglo-Saxon times but rebuilt in various periods, at Lambourn where King Alfred once had a manor. Tolkien drew its late Norman west doorway, a detail of its keystone, and a gargoyle above a Gothic window. (See Artist and Illustrator, figs. 11, 13.) He also went to East-bury, where he drew the High Street and picturesque thatched cottages (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 12), one of which still stands. In later years he was attracted, with his family, to the Vale of the White Horse with its famous stylized figure of a horse, around 374 feet long, cut into the grass on a chalk hillside c. 100 BC, and the ancient long-barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy (c. 2000 BC).

All three of Tolkien’s sons attended the Oratory School when it was located at Caversham, near Reading in Berkshire. When he returned to Oxford in 1972 after his wife’s death Tolkien often visited his youngest son, *Christopher, who at that time lived with his wife and children in the village of West Hanney in Berkshire (since 1974 part of Oxfordshire).

In his poems and stories the character Tom Bombadil, Tolkien said, was ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’ (letter to Stanley Unwin, 16 December 1937, Letters, p. 26), and the Barrow-downs near Tom’s home in *The Lord of the Rings (Book I, Chapter 8) may be indebted to the many prehistoric graves found in Berkshire.

Bibliographies. The standard history of the publication of Tolkien’s works is J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography by Wayne G. Hammond with the assistance of Douglas A. Anderson (1993). Except for a few minor omissions it is a comprehensive account (to mid-1992) of Tolkien’s books and the books to which he contributed, with details of content, binding, and textual changes in discrete editions and printings; of his contributions to periodicals, his published letters and art, interviews, recordings, and miscellanea; and of translations of his writings. Addenda and corrigenda to the Bibliography, as well as articles on Tolkien bibliography addressed to the serious enthusiast, have been published in the occasional magazine The Tolkien Collector (begun 1992). A second edition is planned. An online supplement and extension of the Bibliography, by Neil Holford, is at www.tolkienbooks.net.

For concise checklists of Tolkien’s principal works, and of his published art and poetry, see the appendix in the second volume of the Reader’s Guide. Other checklists, created by fans and societies, may be found online, such as ‘A Chronological Bibliography of the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien’ by Åke Bertenstam, at www.forodrim.org/arda/tbchron.html; most of these, however, are limited in detail and have not been kept up to date.

The most important of the early bibliographies of writings about Tolkien, Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist by Richard C. West (1970, an expansion of a work that appeared in the journal Extrapolation for December 1968), today is useful chiefly for the picture it affords of Tolkien studies in their infancy. A list of everything of major interest on Tolkien published to that date, it also includes less important material but omits work published in fan magazines (‘fanzines’). Entries considered by West to be of special note are marked with an asterisk. A second edition of Tolkien Criticism, published in 1981, is much enlarged but also more selective, to keep its length within bounds, the literature about Tolkien having expanded greatly the previous decade. Essays and reviews from three leading American fanzines (Mythlore, Orcrist, and the Tolkien Journal) were now cited. All entries in West’s second edition are to be considered ‘definitely of real importance’ to Tolkien studies ‘through the greater part of 1980, while what is excluded is much of what I consider peripheral’ (p. xi).

For Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 4 (Winter 2004) West produced ‘A Tolkien Checklist: Selected Criticism 1981–2004’, giving his subjective choices for ‘some of the best critical studies’ of Tolkien (p. 1015). Michael D.C. Drout and Hilary Wynne include an extensive bibliography, without annotations, in ‘Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look Back at Tolkien Criticism since 1982’, Envoi: A Review Journal of Medieval Literature 9, no. 1 (Fall 2000). This has been continued in the journal Tolkien Studies, by David Bratman and other hands.

J.R.R. Tolkien: Six Decades of Criticism by Judith A. Johnson (1986) is more expansive than West’s bibliography in its coverage of fan as well as mainstream publications (through 1984), and in its annotations provides a welcome alternative point of view to West, but is otherwise less helpful as a guide to scholarship. Valuable writings about Tolkien are listed in the dubious company of Tolkien-inspired blank books and other ‘Tolkieniana’. And whereas West’s second edition is divided simply into two sections, Tolkien’s own writings arranged chronologically, and critical works about Tolkien listed alphabetically by author or (when no author is given) by title, the entries in Johnson are organized in a difficult scheme of multiple chronological and alphabetical divisions and subdivisions. Johnson’s book, moreover, suffers from errors and inconsistencies.

Åke Jönsson, later known as Åke Bertenstam, cast a wide net in compiling En Tolkienbibliografi 1911–1980 = A Tolkien Bibliography 1911–1980 (1983; rev. edn. 1986). Despite the terminal date indicated in the title, Bertenstam also lists works by Tolkien, reviews of Tolkien’s works, and reviews of books about Tolkien that were published later than 1980. Fan publications are included, and many more British and European works than are covered by West or Johnson. Alone among Tolkien bibliographers, Bertenstam provides an index by subject. Five supplements to his bibliography have appeared in the occasional Swedish Tolkien journal Arda, beginning with the number for 1982–83 (published 1986) and ending with that for 1988–91 (published 1994).

Bertenstam’s experience illustrates the difficulties involved in maintaining a comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Tolkien, given the continual growth in that field, the rapidity of its expansion, and the cost of print publication (his final supplement occupied more than 200 pages, fully half of the 1988–91 Arda). Computer technology and the Internet offers a means to produce a Tolkien bibliography that is less expensive and more easily updated (if sometimes ephemeral, as websites and web hosts come and go), though there remains always the difficulty of finding personnel, usually volunteers, able and willing to gather, analyze, and enter bibliographic data and write expert annotations. Michael D.C. Drout and students at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, for example, have contributed to an online database, wheatoncollege.edu/english/tolkien-bibliography, about which he has written: ‘The bibliography is copious but not exhaustive. It has been compiled by students, though checked by me, but sometimes what happens is that a very enthusiastic student takes on a big pile of articles to read and summarize, then things come up, and the articles never do get into the database. So there are many lacunae, particularly in some of the more recent work’ (‘Tolkien Bibliography Online’. Wormtalk and Slugspeak (blog), 15 March 2010).

Further information on early reviews of books by Tolkien, and on early articles and comments on Tolkien, may be found in a series of annotated bibliographies by George H. Thompson in Mythlore (Autumn 1984–Autumn 1987; errata, Autumn 1997). ‘An Inklings Bibliography’, a feature published in most issues of Mythlore between whole nos. 12 (June 1976) and 85 (Winter 1999), often included annotated citations to Tolkien *criticism, compiled by Joe R. Christopher and Wayne G. Hammond. Two checklists of dissertations concerned with Tolkien supplement West’s Tolkien Criticism: Richard E. Blackwelder, ‘Dissertations from Middle-earth’ in Beyond Bree, March 1990, and Daniel Timmons, ‘Tolkien-Related Dissertations and Theses in English’ in Tolkien Collector 16 (July 1997).

No comprehensive, widely available bibliography of articles, reviews, and other writings about Tolkien that have appeared in fanzines has yet been published. One of the foremost experts on the subject, Sumner Gary Hunnewell, has produced relevant checklists, notably his series Tolkien Fandom Review which (to date) covers the period from the beginning of Tolkien fandom through the late 1960s. Lists, by a variety of hands, of Tolkien-inspired items such as calendars, posters, recordings, games, and collectible figures are occasionally published in the fanzine Beyond Bree; some of these were collected in the List of Tolkienalia, ed. Nancy Martsch (1992).

See also *Criticism; *Fandom and popularity.

The Bidding of the Minstrel, from the Lay of Eärendel. Poem, the latest version of which was published with commentary in *The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (1984), pp. 269–71.

In this work a minstrel is encouraged to sing of ‘Eärendel the wandering’, ‘a tale of immortal sea-yearning / The Eldar once made ere the change of the light’. But the poet replies that ‘the music is broken, the words half-forgotten’. The song he can sing ‘is but shreds one remembers / Of golden imaginings fashioned in sleep’.

The Bidding of the Minstrel survives in several versions. On one of these Tolkien noted that he wrote the poem in his rooms in St John Street, *Oxford in winter 1914. To its earliest finished text he later hastily added the title (as it appears to *Christopher Tolkien) The Minstrel Renounces the Song; later this became Lay of Eärendel and finally The Bidding of the Minstrel, from the Lay of Eärendel. In its original form it ‘was much longer than it became’ (Christopher Tolkien, The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 270): in early 1915 Tolkien divided its first part, The Bidding of the Minstrel, from its second, which he entitled The Mermaid’s Flute (see Chronology, entry for 17–18 March 1915 and later). He made slight revisions to The Bidding of the Minstrel in the period c. 1920–4.

The work is one of several early poems by Tolkien concerning the mariner Eärendel (variously spelled), who would figure prominently in *‘The Silmarillion’ (see *‘Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath’). Here Eärendel wanders earthly seas, a figure of ancient lore whose tales are bound up with those of the Elves (earlier ‘fairies’). On the back of one of the earliest workings of the poem is an outline of a great voyage by Eärendel to all points of the compass on earth, but also to ‘a golden city’ later identified as the Elvish city Kôr, before setting sail in the sky: see The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, pp. 261–2.

Bilbo’s Last Song (at the Grey Havens). Poem, first published in English by the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, as a poster in April 1974 (a Dutch translation appeared at the end of 1973), and by George Allen & Unwin, London, in September 1974. See further, Descriptive Bibliography A11. For later editions, see below.

In this work the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, now near the end of his life (‘Day is ended, dim my eyes’), bids farewell to his friends and to Middle-earth as he takes ship at the Grey Havens (at the end of *The Lord of the Rings) and sails ‘west of West’ to ‘fields and mountains ever blest’. The content and mood of the poem call to mind ‘Crossing the Bar’ (1889) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It was not, however, Tolkien’s own farewell to Middle-earth, as some have interpreted it, nor is it wholly a later work. Bilbo’s Last Song is a revision of a much earlier poem, Vestr um haf (Old Norse ‘west over sea’), from the 1920s or 1930s. In this there is no connection with Bilbo Baggins or Middle-earth; and it could not have become Bilbo’s Last Song until after Tolkien had conceived of the end of The Lord of the Rings, no later than November 1944 (see Letters, p. 104, letter to Christopher Tolkien, 29 November 1944: ‘But the final scene will be the passage of Bilbo and Elrond and Galadriel through the woods of the Shire on their way to the Grey Havens. Frodo will join them and pass over the Sea …’). But the poem was in its final form by October 1968, when Tolkien’s occasional assistant, *Joy Hill, discovered it while helping him arrange his books after he had moved from *Oxford to *Poole. On 3 September 1970 he presented the poem, with its copyright, to Joy Hill as a token of gratitude for years of friendship and service.

In the original Houghton Mifflin issue Bilbo’s Last Song was accompanied by a gauzy photograph of a river, for mood rather than as a depiction of the poem’s events. George Allen & Unwin, London, published the poem in September 1974, also in poster form but with an illustration by *Pauline Baynes of Sam, Merry, and Pippin watching the Last Ship sail into the West. In 1990 Bilbo’s Last Song was published in book form, accompanied by three series of illustrations by Pauline Baynes: one which tells the story of Bilbo’s last days at Rivendell, his procession to the Grey Havens, and his departure for the Undying Lands; another which depicts Bilbo remembering his past adventures; and a third which tells the story of *The Hobbit. The second of these was omitted in a new edition of Bilbo’s Last Song published in 2002.

As a poster, Bilbo’s Last Song was too slight to attract reviews, while the book version received (favourable) notice mainly for its illustrations.

Although it is not strictly part of The Lord of the Rings, the poem was smoothly incorporated into the 1981 BBC radio production of that work (*Adaptations) by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell. It has also been set to music (see *The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle) and recorded by *Donald Swann.

Biographies. Tolkien held qualified views on biography and its uses, in particular when he was to be the subject. On 24 June 1957 he wrote in response to a request from Caroline Everett, author of an M.A. thesis on his fiction: ‘I do not feel inclined to go into biographical detail. I doubt its relevance to criticism. Certainly in any form less than a complete biography, interior and exterior, which I alone could write, and which I do not intend to write’ (Letters, p. 257) – a biography, that is, which not only recorded ‘exterior’ facts such as those found in Who’s Who, but also examined how (or whether) Tolkien’s experiences had influenced his writings. Produced by anyone other than the subject himself, such a biography in its ‘interior’ aspects could be no more than speculation (notwithstanding critics who have argued that an author is the last person to understand what he writes). Elsewhere Tolkien wrote that ‘only one’s guardian Angel, or indeed God Himself, could unravel the real relationship between personal facts and an author’s works’ (letter to Deborah Webster, 25 October 1958, Letters, p. 288).

Even so, Tolkien was aware that many readers of *The Lord of the Rings were interested to know more about him, and was concerned that if facts about his life were to be reported, they should be reported accurately. In 1955 he provided information about his life and work to the columnist Harvey Breit of the New York Times Book Review, but felt that the result (‘Oxford Calling’, 5 June 1955, quoted in Letters, pp. 217–18) did not make sense. ‘Please do not blame me for what Breit made of my letter!’ he wrote to his American publisher, the Houghton Mifflin Company (*Publishers). ‘I was asked a series of questions, with a request to answer briefly, brightly, and quotably’, and he had done so (30 June 1955, Letters, p. 218).

When the critic Gilbert Highet likewise asked for biographical material, Houghton Mifflin forwarded the request and apparently made it known that a text was needed also for their own publicity purposes. In response, Tolkien prepared a formal statement which was part biography and part comment on issues related to The Lord of the Rings, asking forgiveness if Houghton Mifflin should find it ‘obscure, wordy, and self-regarding and neither “bright, brief, nor quotable”’. The statement, contained within a letter, was printed in Letters, pp. 218–21, incorporating annotations and corrections by Tolkien made to a typescript copy. A portion was quoted earlier in the article *Tolkien on Tolkien in the Diplomat for October 1966, together with three paragraphs from a letter Tolkien had written in 1963 to Mrs Nancy Smith (provided to the magazine by the recipient), but with errors.

Accounts of Tolkien’s life often have been marked by errors, by misinterpretations of facts, even by outright invention. On 16 January 1961, the translator Åke Ohlmarks having included biographical information in a preface to the Swedish Lord of the Rings (Sagan om ringen, 1959–61; see also *Translations), Tolkien objected that he did ‘not wish to have any biographical or critical material on myself inserted by the translator without my permission and without any consultation. The five pages of impertinent nonsense inserted by Mr Ohlmarks … could well have been spared’ (letter to Alina Dadlez, foreign rights coordinator at George Allen & Unwin, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). On 24 January 1961 he wrote again:

I do not object to biographical notice, if it is desirable (the Dutch [translation of The Lord of the Rings] did without it). But it should be correct, and it should be pertinent. …

Who is Who is not a safe source in the hands of foreigners ignorant of England. From it Ohlmarks has woven a ridiculous fantasy. Ohlmarks is a very vain man … preferring his own fancy to facts, and very ready to pretend to knowledge which he does not possess. He does not hesitate to attribute to me sentiments and beliefs which I repudiate. Amongst them a dislike of the University of Leeds, because it was ‘northern’ and no older than the Victorian seventies. This is impertinent and entirely untrue. [letter to Alina Dadlez, Letters, p. 305]

Ohlmarks had also made numerous factual mistakes, such as that the Tolkien–Gordon edition of *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925) was first published in 1934.

On 23 February 1966 Tolkien wrote to *W.H. Auden, who planned to write a book about him, that he regarded ‘such things as premature impertinences; and unless undertaken by an intimate friend, or with consultation of the subject (for which at present I have no time), I cannot believe that they have a usefulness to justify the distaste and irritation given to the victim. I wish at any rate that any book could wait until I produce the Silmarillion’ (Letters, p. 367). Indeed, not until *The Silmarillion was published in 1977 could one begin to appreciate Tolkien’s life’s-work, while today the biographer of Tolkien overlooks at his peril the long circuitous development of the mythology documented in *The History of Middle-earth (1983–96), as well as other works published still later.

EARLY BIOGRAPHIES

And yet Tolkien did not veto a book about him published in 1968 by William Ready, the former Director of Libraries at Marquette University (*Libraries and archives) to which Tolkien had sold some of his literary papers. The Tolkien Relation: A Personal Enquiry by William Ready (reprinted as Understanding Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings) is ‘personal’ in the double sense that it is one man’s view of his subject, and an enquiry into Tolkien’s life and character relative to his fiction, primarily The Lord of the Rings. Ready evidently hoped to play on his subject’s past acquaintance to gain his support and approval; and it may be that a sense of gratitude, for the interest Ready had shown in his work while at Marquette, prevented Tolkien from replying as forcefully has he had to W.H. Auden. Nevertheless he declined to supply personal information to Ready, once again citing a dislike of ‘being written about’, the results of which to that date ‘have caused me both irritation and distaste.’ And he hoped that Ready would make his treatment ‘literary (and as critical of that aspect as you like)’ rather than personal (letter to Ready, 2 February 1967, quoted in The Tolkien Relation, pp. 55–6).

Having seen Ready’s book in print, Tolkien wrote to Clyde S. Kilby:

Though ill-written it is not entirely without value, since the man is intelligent. But he is a rogue. … Ready paid me a short visit [in April 1967]. … A large part of the time he was with me he was talking about himself. I can now see his difficulty. If he had brought out a notebook and informed me of his object, I should have shown him out. He therefore had to rely on his own memory of the few remarks I made about my personal history. These he appears to have embroidered with wholly illegitimate deductions of his own and the addition of baseless fictions. [4 June 1968, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois]

Among these, Ready says that Tolkien’s mother, Mabel Suffield (*Mabel Tolkien), before her marriage had ‘worked with her sisters as a missionary among the women of the Sultan of Zanzibar’ (The Tolkien Relation, p. 6); that she died in 1910, not 1904; that Tolkien gave the W.P. Ker Lecture in 1933 (in fact it was in 1953); and that one of the *Oxford pubs in which the *Inklings met was the ‘Burning Babe’, presumably a mishearing of ‘Bird and Baby’, a nickname of the Eagle and Child. Mabel’s service in Zanzibar, a story wholly without foundation, in particular has cast a long shadow over later biographies and biographical sketches.

The first full biography of Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth by Daniel Grotta (or Grotta-Kurska), was published in 1976, three years after its subject’s death. To its credit, far more than may be said for most later accounts, it is the product of appreciable research, in libraries and through personal contacts. Grotta was denied access to Tolkien’s private papers, however, and according to his author’s note (p. 160) the Tolkien family ‘requested Tolkien’s close friends and associates to refrain from giving me information, out of respect for Tolkien’s memory’. By that time Humphrey Carpenter had been commissioned to write the biography described below, to which the Tolkien Estate gave preference. Grotta was also refused permission to publish some of the material he was able to glean nevertheless: there are omissions in his 1976 text, each with the label ‘deleted for legal considerations’. Under these circumstances he learned nothing of the *T.C.B.S., and concluded that Tolkien was referring to his fellow Oxford student *Allen Barnett (rather than *Christopher Wiseman) when he said that all but one of his close friends had been killed in the First World War. And since Grotta produced his biography too early to have read The Silmarillion (published in 1977), he could say little of substance about that seminal work, and with no knowledge of its manuscripts he wrote a confused description of its history.

Omissions such as these limit the usefulness of Grotta’s book, while its reliability is called into question by many careless errors, only a few of which need be mentioned. He mistakenly names as ‘Tolkien’s first tutor … a young Fellow named Joseph Wrighty, who had arrived at Oxford in the same year as Tolkien’ (p. 38; the eminent *Joseph Wright had been at Oxford since 1888 and a professor since 1901). Grotta notes that Tolkien took a Second in ‘Moderns (which included Anglo-Saxon, as opposed to Greek and Latin)’ (p. 39), rather than Honour Moderations, an examination for those reading Classics. He names *Nevill Coghill rather than *Norman Davis as Tolkien’s successor as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature (Coghill became the Merton Professor of English Literature in 1957, before Tolkien retired). And he describes the Ace Books edition of The Lord of the Rings as having ‘neither index nor appendices’ (p. 126), though it does include the latter.

In the second edition of his book, retitled The Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, Architect of Middle-earth (1978), Grotta made a few minor alterations, having ‘received much additional information from readers’ (p. 175; Carpenter’s Biography had appeared the previous year), but the greater number of errors from the previous text remained. One of these, in which Tolkien is said to have written a work called Númenor in the 1920s which preceded *‘The Silmarillion’ (the reverse of the actual sequence), is even compounded in Grotta’s second edition, in a new ‘epilogue’ on The Silmarillion then recently published. The 1992 reprint of his book contains a new preface, but is otherwise unchanged.

One review of the first edition of our Companion and Guide criticized us for not making more reference to Grotta, specifically to his use of the papers of Allen Barnett, which were seen as providing a window into Tolkien’s experiences at Exeter College (*Oxford). But Grotta’s reliability is so frequently called into question that it did not seem safe to trust his transcriptions any more than his facts, without verification. In this regard we could mention one passage almost certainly misattributed by Grotta to Tolkien, an off-colour joke said to survive in a typewritten letter sent to Allen Barnett and used to illustrate Tolkien’s ‘schoolboy wit’ as an Oxford undergraduate (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.

J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter (in the United States, originally Tolkien: A Biography), first published in 1977, is much to be preferred to Grotta. Publisher *Rayner Unwin recalled that he

had long worried that without an authorised biography there would inevitably be ill-informed and tendentious writings about Tolkien over which neither he nor we [his publishers] would have any control. In his lifetime Tolkien had brushed aside the fear, and for him it would indeed have been yet another distraction. But after his death it was one of the first matters that I raised with the [Tolkien] family. They accepted the need for something to be done, but were doubtful about who could be entrusted with such a commission and what control there might be over what was written. As a stop-gap solution I suggested a pictorial biography, using family pictures for the most part, with extended captions as the text. … *Priscilla [Tolkien], who lived in Oxford, knew a young man that she thought might be suitable. He worked for Radio Oxford, and I agreed to meet him. Humphrey Carpenter … was personable, eager, and willing to throw up his job on the radio to undertake our project. I didn’t think a mixture of photographs and extended captions needed any great qualifications so I agreed terms on the spot and encouraged him to get down to work. The material he needed for his research was stored in the converted barn next to the house that *Christopher [Tolkien] was then living in outside Oxford, and Humphrey found himself working closely alongside Christopher.

It soon became apparent that Humphrey had dug himself so enthusiastically into the project that a full-scale biography was in the making. Christopher seemed agreeable, and so was I. [George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer (1999), pp. 248–9]

To date, only Carpenter among Tolkien’s biographers has had full access to his subject’s private papers. In addition, he was able to interview members of Tolkien’s family and many friends and colleagues, and he had a good personal knowledge of Oxford and understanding of university life. Although ‘authorized’ by the Tolkien family, his book is by no means hagiography: it does not omit mention, for instance, of the younger Tolkien’s occasional bouts of despair, or of tensions within his marriage. And having been vetted by Christopher Tolkien, it contains very few errors or misinterpretations. (We note occasional disagreements with Carpenter in Chronology, and in the Reader’s Guide under *Reading.) Comparatively short by later standards, only (in its first edition) 260 pages excluding appendices and index, the Biography serves its purpose well without verbosity. In later editions its checklist of Tolkien’s published writings was expanded to include further posthumous works, but as of this writing it is many years out of date.

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 (1995), 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.

The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (1978), also by Humphrey Carpenter, is a useful adjunct to Biography though its concentration is on Lewis as the centre of the group of friends.

LATER BIOGRAPHIES

Although Tolkien: Man and Myth by Joseph Pearce (1998) often has been called a biography, it more narrowly explores the significance of Middle-earth and what it represented in Tolkien’s thought, and the connection between his religious faith and his life and writings – ‘internal’ biography more so than ‘external’. About a third of its text consists of long quotations by Tolkien himself and from writings about him, while several chapters are little more than a summary of Carpenter’s Biography.

Tolkien: A Biography by Michael White (2001) is largely a retelling of the standard life by Carpenter. In order to provide ‘a more colourful image of the creator of Middle-earth’ (p. 6), White adopted a ‘breezy’ prose style and, to impart a sense of immediacy, often assumes knowledge of thoughts and feelings. The tone of his book is set at once, as he imagines Tolkien returning home on ‘a warm early summer afternoon’, kissing his wife, and greeting ‘his baby daughter, five-month-old Priscilla’ (pp. 7–8) – even though Priscilla Tolkien was born on 18 June 1929, and could not have been five months old in ‘early summer’. In the same chapter White reports a ‘legend’ not substantiated anywhere else, that Tolkien was inspired to write the first line of *The Hobbit when he noticed a hole in his study carpet. Such inventions or suppositions are frequent in White’s book, together with many errors of fact.

The chief focus of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth by John Garth (2003; emended in the 2nd printing) is narrow, roughly from the end of Tolkien’s days at *King Edward’s School, *Birmingham to his demobilization from the Army. But Garth examines those formative years (1911–19) more fully than Carpenter was able to do, due to the opening some years later of pertinent First World War papers in the National Archives (Public Record Office). Garth also made a more extensive use of correspondence by Tolkien’s friends, to relate Tolkien’s military experiences and comradeship in the T.C.B.S. to his early poems (in so far as these had been published) and the beginnings of his mythology and invented languages. His study arose, he said, from his observation that Tolkien ‘embarked upon his monumental [‘Silmarillion’] mythology in the midst of the First World War, the crisis of disenchantment that shaped the modern era’; and one of his aims was ‘to place Tolkien’s creative activities in the context of the international conflict, and the cultural upheavals which accompanied it’ (p. xiii). A ‘Postscript’ or summation follows the biography proper.

Garth has continued to expand upon his 2003 book in later, shorter publications, including ‘Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War’, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, ed. Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger (2008); ‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Fairies’ (on the Gilson family), Tolkien Studies 7 (2010); ‘Robert Quilter Gilson, T.C.B.S.: A Brief Life in Letters’, Tolkien Studies 8 (2011); and Tolkien at Exeter College (2014; emended in the 4th printing).

J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography by Leslie Ellen Jones (2003) is aimed specifically at an American schools audience. For the sake of the student reader, she frequently interrupts her narrative of Tolkien’s life to explain about late nineteenth-century British society, English as a Germanic language, the causes of the First World War, and the like; and she often comments on matters of current social concern, such as class distinctions and the role of women. She devotes two chapters of her book to a discussion of The Lord of the Rings.

Since 1992 Colin Duriez has written several books on Tolkien or the Inklings which are at least partly biographical. These tend to be repetitive and lightweight in content. The most substantive is J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend (2012), though considerably shorter than Carpenter’s biography. Duriez himself admits that his book does not supplant Carpenter’s, which is ‘still indispensible, even now that so many more of Tolkien’s writings are available, not least because of his access to private documents and his ability to make sense of a universe of unfinished writings, diaries in code, and contradictory opinions’. Duriez’s book ‘is not intended for scholars but for ordinary readers wishing to explore the life of Tolkien and how it relates to his stories of Middle-earth’ (p. 9).

One of the most important biographies since Carpenter’s is Tolkien by Raymond Edwards (2014). Although Edwards depends a great deal on Carpenter, his book is not a mere update of Biography but incorporates more recent research and offers fresh insights. After a comparatiely weak account of Tolkien’s early years, once he reaches the point when Tolkien began to work seriously on *The Book of Lost Tales and associated poems, Edwards grasps the opportunity offered by The History of Middle-earth and the linguistic journal Parma Eldalamberon to follow the development of Tolkien’s legendarium and associated languages. He is particularly illuminating in his treatment of Tolkien’s academic career, and devotes considerable space to topics such as Philology and the *Oxford English School. He shows far more understanding than some other recent commentators of the demands Tolkien’s academic duties made on his time. In the main text, he says only what is necessary about religion in Tolkien’s life, instead devoting an appendix to Tolkien’s practice of his Catholic faith and the presence of Catholicism in his writings (*Religion).

Tolkien’s religion is more of a concern in The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (2015) by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, a work which also aims to be a joint biography of Tolkien, *C.S. Lewis, *Charles Williams, and *Owen Barfield. These men, the Zaleskis write, ‘make a perfect compass rose of faith: Tolkien the Catholic, Lewis the “mere Christian,” Williams the Anglican (and magus), Barfield the esotericist’ (p. 12); but the attempt to weave the four lives together is awkward. The Zaleskis admire Lewis as a Christian who learned the errors of his ways when he left the faith, then returned to be its champion, and as a writer and scholar who produced a substantial body of published work. Tolkien, however, is charged with ‘crimes of omission’, with ‘a long trail of starts, stumbles, and stops that typified his dilatoriness in academic labors’, which the Zaleskis attribute to his heart being instead ‘in the development of the legendarium and its offspring’ (p. 214) – though they note the importance of works such as *Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Among other works with biographical content, Diana Pavlac Glyer in The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (2007) has a worthwhile discussion of the importance of the Inklings to Tolkien (her Bandersnatch (2015) is an adaptation of the same work for a wider audience). Andrew H. Morton has produced two studies (the first in association with John Hayes) centred on Tolkien’s Aunt *Jane Neave: Tolkien’s Gedling 1914: The Birth of a Legend (2008) and Tolkien’s Bag End: Threshold to Adventure (2009). Phil Mathison has filled in some details about Tolkien’s life during the First World War in Tolkien in East Yorkshire 1917–1918 (2012). And Arne Zettersten in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life by Arne Zettersten (2011, previously published in Swedish in 2008) recalls his meetings and conversations with Tolkien in the latter’s final years (although Zettersten refers to correspondence, no quotations are given) and usefully discusses Tolkien’s academic work on the ‘AB language’ (*Ancrene Riwle).

OTHER BIOGRAPHICAL TREATMENTS

We must also mention three biographical sources associated with the Tolkien centenary in 1992. The Tolkien Family Album by *John and Priscilla Tolkien follows more or less the lines that Rayner Unwin had suggested: ‘a pictorial biography, using family pictures for the most part, with extended captions as the text’. It is interesting especially as a brief reminiscence of two of Tolkien’s children, and for its collection of photographs not reproduced elsewhere. Second, the Bodleian Library’s (*Libraries and archives) exhibition catalogue J.R.R. Tolkien: Life and Legend, written by Judith Priestman, describes and reproduces letters, illustrations, and drawings by Tolkien, pages from his academic and literary manuscripts, and photographs of relevant people and places. These are placed in the context of Tolkien’s life, ‘to indicate something of the scope and variety of [his] achievements’ (p. 7). Finally, also issued in 1992 was the film J.R.R.T.: A Portrait of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 1892–1973, with a script by Helen Dickinson, produced for the Tolkien Partnership by Landseer Film & Television Productions.

There is also useful biographical content in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (2006), and in books concerned more generally with the Inklings.

SHORTER BIOGRAPHIES

An ever-increasing number of shorter, illustrated biographies of Tolkien have also appeared, intended for younger (or more casual adult) readers. These include J.R.R. Tolkien: Man of Fantasy by Russell Shorto (1988); J.R.R. Tolkien: Master of Fantasy by David R. Collins (1992), made over in 2005 as J.R.R. Tolkien, significantly shortened and simplified, cluttered with inane sidebars (‘It’s a Fact!’), and injected with references to the Peter Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings (*Adaptations); Myth Maker: J.R.R. Tolkien by Anne E. Neimark (1996); J.R.R. Tolkien: The Man Who Created The Lord of the Rings by Michael Coren (2001); J.R.R. Tolkien: Creator of Languages and Legends by Doris Lynch (2003); J.R.R. Tolkien by Neil Heims (2004); The Importance of J.R.R. Tolkien by Stuart P. Levine (2004); J.R.R. Tolkien: Master of Imaginary Worlds by Edward Willett (2004); J.R.R. Tolkien by Vic Parker (2006); J.R.R. Tolkien by Jill C. Wheeler (2009); J.R.R. Tolkien by Mark Horne (2011); J.R.R. Tolkien by Alexandra Wallner (2011), a picture book in which Tolkien’s life is treated like a board game; and Caroline McAlister, John Ronald’s Dragons: The Story of J.R.R. Tolkien (2017). Each suffers to a degree from factual errors and (even allowing that these are necessarily short books) serious omissions; and many of the authors embroider or exaggerate for dramatic effect. Of these, Collins’ 1992 account is to be preferred for balance and accuracy, but the young person who has read The Lord of the Rings successfully should be equally capable of reading Carpenter’s Biography, and with greater reward.

CONSIDERATIONS IN TOLKIEN BIOGRAPHY

Almost all biographical writings about Tolkien rely to some degree on Carpenter, usually supplemented by reference to Tolkien’s published letters (1981). The best of the later biographies draw as well upon the large number of books and articles, by and about Tolkien, that have appeared since the Biography was published in 1977; the least of them are mere adaptations or reductions of Carpenter’s. The assiduous Tolkien biographer casts a wide net of research, but also must seek to understand what he finds, without assumptions based on his own age or culture – one finds, for instance, in some American accounts of Tolkien’s life, a lack of comprehension of English universities and their customs. It is possible to write an insightful biography without undertaking original research, relying only on existing sources (it is also possible, as we have seen in some books which claim to take a fresh approach to Tolkien’s biography, to turn the facts of his life into fiction); and yet, as shown especially by John Garth in Tolkien and the Great War and his other writings, and by the present book, important information is still to be gleaned from libraries and archives which can change the way we see Tolkien and interpret his works.

Nor can the biographer afford to be uncritical of sources. In the course of writing the Companion and Guide we discovered errors and discrepancies even in standard published works, and inconsistencies in manuscripts and recorded reminiscences. A wealth of information is to be found in a series of recordings of Tolkien’s family and friends made soon after his death by Ann Bonsor, and first broadcast on Radio Oxford in 1974; but in some of these, looking back to times long past, memory demonstrably failed. Nevill Coghill, for one, recalled how as secretary of the Exeter College Essay Club (*Societies and clubs) he had asked Tolkien to read a paper at one of their meetings. Tolkien agreed, and said that the subject of his paper would be ‘the fall of Gondolin’. Coghill remembered that he then spent weeks searching in reference books in vain to find a mention of ‘Gondolin’, not realizing that it was the name of a city in Tolkien’s mythology. Records show, however, that Coghill had not held any office in the Essay Club when Tolkien read The Fall of Gondolin (see *The Book of Lost Tales) to its members, and in fact was elected to the Club only on 27 February 1920, less than two weeks before the event.

Even Tolkien himself sometimes nodded. In referring to his lecture *On Fairy-Stories he twice gave an erroneous date for its delivery at the University of St Andrews (‘1940’ and ‘1938’, in fact 1939), and in his Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1965) he wrote that the work ‘was begun soon after The Hobbit was written and before its publication in 1937’, though in fact he began the sequel between 16 and 19 December 1937, after publication of The Hobbit on 22 September 1937. The latter is clear from a reading of Letters, and yet occasionally one still sees it written in books about Tolkien that he began The Lord of the Rings before the publication of The Hobbit, uncritically accepting his misstatement of 1965.

As we state in our preface, we did not write the Companion and Guide to be a substitute for Carpenter’s Biography, nor, even now in the second edition, do we feel that our book replaces Carpenter, but rather is a different, if much more comprehensive approach, to Tolkien’s life. We would agree with John Garth’s comment that ‘with the arrival of the Companion and Guide there ought now to be no excuse, beyond sheer laziness, for other biographers to use Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography as virtually the sole source of information about Tolkien’s life, as too many have done’ (review of the Companion and Guide, Tolkien Studies 4 (2007), p. 258). On the contrary, David Bratman has suggested that the Companion and Guide, ‘while a chronology and encyclopedia, rather than a biography, instantly superseded Humphrey Carpenter’s long-standard Tolkien: A Biography as the source of first reference for biographical data on the man’ (‘The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2006’, Tolkien Studies 9 (2009), p. 315).

In the present century numerous books and videos have been produced which purport to be accounts of Tolkien’s life. Some, as seen here, are genuine in their aims and have value. Others – to put it charitably – are less careful in reporting facts, indeed are largely (if not entirely) products of their author’s imagination. See further, our 2015–16 blog posts at wayneandchristina.wordpress.com titled ‘Tolkien Biographies Continued’ (i.e. since our 2006 edition).

‘Bird and Baby’ (Eagle and Child) see Oxford and environs

Birmingham and environs. Both of Tolkien’s parents came from this major manufacturing centre in the English *West Midlands, and he himself spent sixteen of his early years in or near the city. His father (*Arthur Tolkien) and paternal grandparents (see *Tolkien family) lived at ‘Beechwood’ in Church Road in the southern suburb of Moseley, while his mother *Mabel and her family (see *Suffield family) were from Kings Heath still further south. Mabel’s grandfather, John Suffield the elder, had once been a prosperous draper and hosier in Old Lamb House, Bull Street, Birmingham (demolished 1886), and other members of the family were employed in the business.

Tolkien himself came to Birmingham from *South Africa with his mother and brother at the end of April 1895; until summer 1896 they stayed at 9 Ash-field Road, Kings Heath with Mabel Tolkien’s parents and siblings. It was there in December 1895 that young Ronald Tolkien experienced his first wintry Christmas. In February 1896 his father died in Bloemfontein, and his mother decided that she and her sons should live independent of her parents’ crowded home, in the countryside where the boys could have fresh air. In summer 1896 Mabel rented a semi-detached cottage at 5 Gracewell Road (today 264a Wake Green Road) in the hamlet of *Sarehole not far to the east of Kings Heath, now part of the suburb of Hall Green. It was an idyllic setting, or became so in Tolkien’s memory, a rural paradise of fields, trees, and flowers and a working mill. But the interlude there was brief.

In September 1900 Tolkien began to attend classes at *King Edward’s School in New Street in the centre of Birmingham, some four miles distant, and at first walked most of the way between home and school since trams did not run as far as Sarehole, and Mabel could not afford train fare. It was a long walk for the family also to Sunday services at St Anne’s, the Roman Catholic church in Alcester Street, Moseley, in which Mabel had been received into the faith the previous June. In consequence, Mabel Tolkien later that September rented a small house at 214 Alcester Road, Moseley, near a tram route into the city. According to Humphrey Carpenter, however, ‘no sooner had [the family] settled than they had to move: the house was to be demolished to make room for a fire-station’ (Biography, p. 25). At the end of 1900 or the beginning of 1901 Mabel, Ronald, and his brother *Hilary moved once again, to 86 West-field Road, Kings Heath. Mabel chose their new home because it was close to the Roman Catholic church of St Dunstan, then a building of wood and corrugated iron on the corner of Westfield Road and Station Road. Tolkien now first came into contact with the Welsh *language, in names on passing coal-trucks.

Readers of Carpenter’s Biography, or of later *biographies which closely follow Carpenter, will have a mental picture of the Birmingham of Tolkien’s youth as purely an industrial city. Writing of Tolkien’s brief time in Moseley, Carpenter says:

Home life was very different [in the second half of 1900] from what [Ronald] had known at Sarehole. His mother had rented a small house on the main road in the suburb of Moseley, and the view from the windows was a sad contrast to the Warwickshire countryside: trams struggling up the hill, the drab faces of passers-by, and in the distance the smoking factory chimneys of Sparkbrook and Small Heath. To Ronald the Moseley house remained in memory as ‘dreadful’. [p. 25]

It is true to say that Birmingham was a centre of the Industrial Revolution, known for its metal-working, and that it was a focus of the railways. A contemporary observer called it ‘a metropolis of machinery … exceedingly interesting as a consistently developed exemplification of the nineteenth-century spirit’ (Harry Quilter, What’s What (1902), p. 236). Inevitably there was pollution and traffic, and substantial development was underway. But in residential suburbs such as Moseley factory smoke was less pronounced, and local industry supported the city’s excellent schools and museums, including an art gallery with works by the Pre-Raphaelites (see *Art). As Maggie Burns has pointed out (‘“… A Local Habitation and a Name …”’, Mallorn 50 (Autumn 2010)),

maps of the time [of Tolkien’s youth], in addition to contemporary descriptions by people living in Birmingham suburbs, give a different picture. The parts of Birmingham where Tolkien lived had parks, streams, gardens and trees. Birmingham was and is a city of trees. …

The Birmingham described as wasteland by Carpenter in the 1970s was not the Birmingham that Tolkien knew around 1900. Much of the town had been rebuilt during the 20 years before Tolkien arrived there as a three-year-old in 1985. There were many new and imposing buildings. …

The countryside was not distant from the city as implied in some Tolkien biographies. Sarehole was [only] four miles from the centre of Birmingham. … Horses were in the city as well as in the country.

In 1900 trams were still drawn by horses and cars were a rarity. [pp. 26–7]

Moseley in fact, situated on high ground, was relatively free from factory smoke – as a contemporary guidebook description put it, even more so than Edgbaston, which was considered the most fashionable suburb of Birmingham – and it was on the edge of the countryside, not far distant from Sarehole. In his poem *The Battle of the Eastern Field (1911, a parody of Macaulay) Tolkien writes of ‘Mosli’s [Moseley’s] emerald sward’ (and of ‘Edgbastonia’s [Edgbaston’s] ancient homes’). Kings Heath was to the south of Moseley, and although the Tolkiens’ home there was in a noisy and undoubtedly smoky location, near the railway with its coal-powered engines, the slopes of the cutting behind the house were covered with grass and flowers, and (as today) there were fields on the other side of the line.

Dissatisfied with St Dunstan’s, Mabel looked for a new place of worship and found the *Birmingham Oratory in the suburb of Edgbaston. In early 1902 she and her sons moved to 26 Oliver Road, Edgbaston (the house no longer exists), conveniently near the Oratory church and its attached grammar school, St Philip’s. There they stayed until April 1904, when Mabel was taken into hospital suffering from diabetes. Her boys lived for a while apart from their mother, until they were reunited in the hamlet of *Rednal, a few miles from the centre of Birmingham to the south-west, and were together until Mabel’s death on 14 November 1904.

Immediately after the loss of their mother Ronald and Hilary stayed with Laurence Tolkien, one of their father’s brothers, at Dunkeld, Middleton Hall Road, Kings Norton. By January 1905 *Father Francis Morgan, the priest whom Mabel had named her sons’ guardian, placed them instead with their Aunt Beatrice Suffield at 25 Stirling Road, Edgbaston, not far from the Oratory. Their room was on the top floor.

Early in 1908, life with Aunt Beatrice having proved unhappy for the boys, Father Francis moved them to 37 Duchess Road, Edgbaston, the home of the Faulkner family. Ronald and Hilary had a rented room on the second floor; on the first floor was another lodger, Edith Bratt (*Edith Tolkien), with whom they became friends. Edith played the piano and accompanied soloists at musical evenings given by Mrs Faulkner, but was discouraged from practising. Gradually Ronald and Edith fell in love. When their clandestine relationship came to the attention of Father Francis late in 1909 he took steps to end it. Ronald and Hilary were now removed to new lodgings with Thomas and Julia MacSherry at 4 Highfield Road, Edgbaston, at which address Tolkien lived until going up to Exeter College, *Oxford in October 1911.

During his years at King Edward’s School Tolkien became familiar with central Birmingham and with some of its merchants. Among these were Cornish’s bookshop in New Street, which Tolkien explored for books on *Philology; E.H. Lawley & Sons at 24 New Street, a jeweller at which Ronald and Edith bought each other presents in January 1910 (see Life and Legend, fig. 25); and Barrow’s Stores in Corporation Street (north from New Street), until the 1960s a flourishing grocer’s which had its origin in a shop founded in 1824 by John Cadbury (of Cadbury’s cocoa). An engraving of Barrow’s Stores is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 26. Tolkien and some of his friends at King Edward’s School, having formed a Tea Club, met regularly in Barrow’s Tea Room. *Christopher Wiseman recalled that ‘in the Tea Room there was a sort of compartment, a table for six, between two large settles, quite secluded; and it was known as the Railway Carriage. It became a favourite place for us, and we changed our title to the Barrovian Society after Barrow’s Stores’ (quoted in Biography, p. 46). The group ultimately combined the names Tea Club and Barrovian Society, abbreviated as *T.C.B.S.

On 9 November 1916, having contracted trench fever during military service in France, Tolkien was admitted to the First Southern General Hospital, a converted facility of over one thousand beds at the then newly built Birmingham University in Edgbaston. He was a patient there until 9 December 1916, when he was able to take sick leave. During these few weeks in hospital he may have begun to write *The Book of Lost Tales.

Referring to Sarehole, Tolkien wrote in a draft letter to Michael Straight that he had been ‘brought up in an “almost rural” vilage of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of Birmingham’ (probably January or February 1956, Letters, p. 235). Maggie Burns has suggested that some of Tolkien’s relatives, many of whom lived in Moseley, could be described as ‘prosperous bourgeoisie’. Arthur Tolkien’s sister Mabel lived with her husband, Thomas Mitton, in ‘Abbotsford’, a large house with a garden in Wake Green Road in Moseley. His grandparents on his mother’s side lived off Wake Green Road in Cotton Lane, from 1904 to 1930; and on his father’s side, his grandparents lived in Church Road, also off Wake Green Road, until 1900. Mabel Tolkien’s sister’s family, the Incledons (*Incledon family), had what Maggie Burns describes as ‘a luxurious new house’ in Chantry Road, Moseley, ‘with a garden running down to a private park’ (‘“… A Local Habitation and a Name …”’, p. 27).

At least in the period 1913–15, Tolkien occasionally visited his friend *Robert Q. Gilson at his family home in Marston Green, near Birmingham to the east.

When Tolkien lived in Birmingham, most of the buildings in the city centre were still of recent vintage, having been built or re-built within the previous fifty years. But some were replaced within the next half-century, to Tolkien’s dismay. On 3 April 1944, having recently visited the new King Edward’s School in Edgbaston Park Road, he wrote to his son *Christopher: ‘Except for one patch of ghastly wreckage (opp[osite] my old school’s site) [Birmingham] does not look much damaged: not by the enemy [in wartime bombing raids]. The chief damage has been the growth of great flat featureless modern buildings. The worst of all is the ghastly multiple-store erection on the old site’ (Letters, p. 70).

Two towers in Birmingham have been suggested as the inspiration for those in the *Lord of the Rings volume title The Two Towers. One is Perrot’s Folly, built in 1758 by John Perrot and used by Birmingham University as a weather observatory from the 1880s to the 1970s; the other is the chimney of the Edgbaston Water Works. It hardly seems necessary, however, for Tolkien to have based any of the towers in The Lord of the Rings – there are more than two – specifically on any of the towers he may have seen in Birmingham – there are more than these two – or indeed on any particular tower, when such constructions are common in European architecture and in literature.

Contemporary maps and descriptions of the places in and near Birmingham where Tolkien lived, and recent photographs of his former homes, are reproduced in the booklet Tolkien’s Birmingham by Patricia Reynolds (1992) and in Robert S. Blackham, The Roots of Tolkien’s Middle Earth (2006; see also his ‘Tolkien’s Birmingham’, Mallorn 45 (Spring 2008)). Photographs of Tolkien homes are included also in the article on Tolkien in Some Moseley Personalities, Volume I (1991). Moseley and Kings Heath on Old Picture Postcards, compiled by John Marks (1991), is a useful collection of photographs of those places dating from Tolkien’s years in Birmingham. Additional resources are Hall Green, compiled by Michael Byrne (1996); Edgbaston, compiled by Martin Hampson (1999); and Christine Ward-Penny, Catholics in Birmingham (2004). Also see further, Maggie Burns, ‘Faces and Places: John Suffield’, Connecting Histories website; and pages on the website of the Library of Birmingham, www.libraryofbirmingham.com/tolkien.

Birmingham Oratory. The Oratory Order begun in Rome by St Philip Neri was formally recognized by Pope Gregory XIII in 1575. Its main mission is preaching, prayer, and the administration of the sacraments. John Henry Newman, later Cardinal Newman, introduced the order into England by founding the Oratorian Congregation in Birmingham in 1848. In 1852 the community moved to Hagley Road in the suburb of Edgbaston, where a house and church were built. (Their first chapel, in Alcester Road, Moseley, was replaced by St Anne’s Church, which Tolkien, his mother, and his brother attended for a while; see *Birmingham and environs.) In 1859 Newman also founded St Philip’s, a grammar school attached to the Oratory Church. The church was later extended, and beginning in 1903 a new building, designed by E. Doran Webb, was constructed over the old, in the style of the Church of San Martino in Rome as Newman had originally desired. A photograph of the old church is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 23.

Tolkien’s mother *Mabel, a recent convert to Catholicism seeking a satisfactory place of worship, discovered the Oratory in 1901, and early in 1902 moved with her sons to Edgbaston. *Father Francis Morgan, a member of the Oratory community then carrying out the duties of parish priest, became a close family friend and after Mabel’s death the guardian of her children. Tolkien and his brother *Hilary briefly went to St Philip’s School, because it offered a Catholic education at low cost and was convenient to home, until it became clear that it could not provide the quality of learning that young Ronald Tolkien needed. (Tolkien returned to *King Edward’s School, which he had attended earlier; Hilary joined him after a period of tuition by their mother.)

As wards of Father Francis the Tolkien boys spend much of their time between 1904 and 1911 at the Oratory. Tolkien later recalled that he was ‘virtually a junior inmate of the Oratory house, which contained many learned fathers (largely “converts”). Observance of religion was strict. Hilary and I were supposed to, and usually did, serve Mass before getting on our bikes to go to [King Edward’s] school in New Street’ (letter to his son Michael, 1967, Letters, p. 395). In 1909 they also were in charge of three patrols of Boy Scouts under the aegis of the parish. In these years Ronald and Hilary would have witnessed the transformation of the Oratory Church from old to new.

Blackwell, Basil Henry (1889–1984). Basil Blackwell was educated at Merton College, *Oxford and trained at Oxford University Press in London. From 1913, for six years, he worked with his father’s publishing firm, B.H. Blackwell, which published Tolkien’s early poem *Goblin Feet in *Oxford Poetry 1915; the annual Oxford Poetry volumes, begun in 1913, were Basil’s idea. Although Tolkien came to dislike Goblin Feet, he expressed gratitude to Blackwell as his first publisher (silently omitting his schoolboy publications in the Chronicle of *King Edward’s School, Birmingham). In 1919 Blackwell became an independent publisher, and in succeeding years expanded his operation. In 1924, on his father’s death, he became head of the family bookselling business as well. During his long life he also presided over trade and scholarly associations, and held civic posts in Oxford. He received numerous honours, including a knighthood in 1956 and an honorary fellowship at Merton College in 1959.

For a few years, from 1926, Blackwell and Tolkien were neighbours in North Oxford, at 20 and 22 Northmoor Road respectively. When in 1929 Blackwell vacated no. 20, Tolkien purchased it; he moved his family into the comparatively larger house in 1930. Tolkien was also a frequent customer of Blackwell’s Bookshop in Broad Street, *Oxford, where by 1942 his account was seriously overextended. Blackwell offered to reduce Tolkien’s debt by publishing his translation of *Pearl (which existed in a finished form since 1926) and applying the translator’s payment against his account. The work was set in type, but Tolkien failed to write more than rough notes for an introduction, and in the end Blackwell abandoned the project with remarkable grace.

See also Rita Ricketts, Adventurers All: Tales of Blackwellians, of Books, Bookmen, and Reading and Writing Folk (2002), and Ricketts, Scholars, Poets & Radicals: Discovering Forgotten Lives in the Blackwell Collections (2015).