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Abercrombie, Lascelles (1881–1938). Lascelles Abercrombie read Science at the Owens College, Manchester, but after only two sessions (1900–2) turned instead to journalism, poetry, drama, and the study of literature. A major figure in the Georgian poets, he was most famously associated with the group of writers, also including Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas, that clustered around Dymock in Gloucestershire. His first book of verse, Interludes and Poems, was published in 1908, and his collected Poems in 1930. Two of his poems, ‘Roses Can Wound’ and ‘“All Last Night …”’, appeared in *Leeds University Verse 1914–24 (1924), to which Tolkien was also a contributor. Abercrombie also wrote critical studies, including Thomas Hardy (1912) and The Epic (1914), and works on aesthetic theory, such as An Essay towards a Theory of Art (1922). During the First World War, declared unfit for reasons of health, he served as a munitions examiner. In 1919 he was named Lecturer in Poetry at the University of Liverpool.

In 1922 Abercrombie became Professor of English Literature at the University of *Leeds, succeeding *George S. Gordon; Tolkien, then Reader in English Language at Leeds, had also sought the chair (a new professorship, of English Language, was created for him two years later). In 1925, when Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair of Anglo-Saxon at *Oxford, Abercrombie as his head of department at Leeds wrote a glowing letter of recommendation. He named Tolkien ‘my principal colleague in the English Department’, who ‘has throughout acted as my advisor and collaborator in the conduct and policy of the department as a whole. … I have never consulted him without gaining an illumination that can penetrate as well as expatiate. But I must not omit to mention that I have gained at least as much from the keen artistic sensibility as from the science of his scholarship’ (*An Application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford by J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of the English Language in the University of Leeds, June 25, 1925).

In 1929 Abercrombie left Leeds for the Hildred Carlile Professorship of English Literature at Bedford College, University of London. He remained there until 1935, when he was elected Goldsmiths’ Reader in English at Oxford and a fellow of Merton College.

See further, The Georgian Revolt, 1910–1922: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal by Robert H. Ross (1965). The standard bibliography is A Bibliography and Notes on the Works of Lascelles Abercrombie by Jeffrey Cooper (1969).

Ace Books controversy. When *The Lord of the Rings was first issued in the United States (1954–6) its publisher, the Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston (*Publishers), chose to import printed sheets from Great Britain for binding domestically, rather than newly typeset and print a separate edition. They had long imported copies of *The Hobbit and *Farmer Giles of Ham, and continued to do so for The Lord of the Rings through the 1950s and early 1960s. For a work as unusual as The Lord of the Rings, importation in the first instance presented less financial risk; but in the long run too, at this time, it was more economical for Houghton Mifflin to import sheets than to print their own, and to the advantage also of George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers), as exporters of the books, and of Tolkien, because it lowered costs to both of his publishers and made his books more affordable to readers.

This practice meant, however, that the number of imported copies soon exceeded that allowed by the so-called ‘manufacturing clause’ in United States copyright law. U.S. law from 1891 until 1986 sought to protect the American printing industry by limiting the importation of books printed abroad and by promoting domestic manufacture. Under the law as amended in 1949 and in effect at the time of first publication of The Lord of the Rings an American publisher had six months in which to register ad interim copyright for a foreign work written in English, and then five years in which to typeset and print the book in the United States to qualify for full copyright; and in the meantime, no more than 1,500 copies printed abroad could be imported. In contrast, copyright in Great Britain and elsewhere under the Berne Convention (the international copyright agreement to which the United States, almost alone among nations, was not a signatory) was subject to fewer formalities, and was considered in force ipso facto for a living author.

Houghton Mifflin initially imported 1,500 copies of The Fellowship of the Ring and 1,000 copies of The Two Towers, numbers at or within the limit of the ‘manufacturing clause’. They applied for and received ad interim copyright for these volumes, and included copyright notices in the first printing of each to reflect this protection. By the time The Return of the King was ready, however, it was in such demand that Houghton Mifflin imported 5,000 copies, in order to sell as many as possible without delay. Because more than 1,500 copies were imported in the first instance, The Return of the King could not receive ad interim copyright, and did not include an American copyright notice in any printing. As soon as the total number of imported copies of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers exceeded 1,500, Houghton Mifflin omitted copyright notices in those volumes as well.

Knowing that they had passed the limit of imported copies, Tolkien’s publishers began to be concerned about the validity of his U.S. copyright in The Hobbit in the early 1960s, during discussions about the sale of film rights to that work (see *Adaptations). At this time also, with the popularity of The Lord of the Rings well established, American reprint publishers sought to sublicense a paperback edition, but Houghton Mifflin rebuffed all such overtures. In part this was because they did not wish to ‘cheapen’ a work which still sold well in hardback, but also because they were unsure whether they had the authority to grant an exclusive license to publish a paperback edition, given the now questionable copyright status of The Lord of the Rings under U.S. law.

In January 1965 Houghton Mifflin advised Allen & Unwin that the U.S. copyrights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings might be open to challenge. Although managers at both firms thought it unlikely that any reputable publisher would take advantage of the situation, they also felt that action should be taken to secure U.S. copyright for the two works beyond any doubt. On 8 February 1965 *Rayner Unwin of George Allen & Unwin explained the situation to Tolkien and asked him to provide revisions and extra material for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, such as a long-promised index for the latter, so that the books could be newly submitted for copyright in the United States.

Before Tolkien could do so, however, Ace Books of New York, a well-known publisher of science fiction, issued their own edition of The Lord of the Rings beginning in May 1965, at the then cheap price of seventy-five cents per volume. Ace Books held that the work was in the public domain in the United States, and therefore could be published by anyone without permission. Donald A. Wollheim, the chief editor at Ace Books, said in a contemporary article that it was ‘no secret’ to him that The Lord of the Rings had never been copyrighted in the United States: ‘I had known it from the moment I’d first bought a copy of the Houghton Mifflin edition in a book store when it had first appeared in 1954. One glance at the page following the title page startled me. No copyright, no date of publication. Just the line “Printed in Great Britain” …’ (‘The Ace Tolkiens’, Lighthouse 13 (August 1965), pp. 16–17). In fact, the first printing of the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship of the Ring had included a full statement of rights on the verso of its title-leaf, including ‘Copyright, 1954, by J.R.R. Tolkien’, and the American Two Towers likewise had a proper notice in its first printing. Wollheim evidently had seen a later printing, and not ‘when it [The Fellowship of the Ring only] had first appeared in 1954’. His concern about the inclusion of a copyright notice stemmed from a requirement for this in most books protected under U.S. copyright; but he overlooked an exception to the law as it then existed, for books protected by ad interim copyright.

In the same article Wollheim refuted criticism that was already coming to his attention, within months of publication of the Ace Books edition, in regard to ‘literary piracy’ and the fact that Tolkien was receiving no royalties from Ace Books. Wollheim wrote that Tolkien ‘should reserve his anger for the source of his deprival’, meaning Houghton Mifflin, for failing to secure his U.S. copyright; and he stated that Ace Books was ‘perfectly willing to pay the author for his work – and we’ve stated both publicly and in a message to Tolkien that we want to make an arrangement for such payments’ (‘The Ace Tolkiens’, p. 18). A similar statement by Wollheim concerning payments to Tolkien was quoted also in other venues. On this point Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin on 11 September 1965: ‘I do not believe that any such letter [offering royalties] was ever written to me. I certainly never received one. Had I done so, I should have at once sent the letter to you as … negotiators with Houghton Mifflin’ (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins).

Tolkien sent material for a revised Lord of the Rings to Houghton Mifflin from July to September 1965. This was incorporated in an authorized and newly copyrighted paperback edition by Ballantine Books of New York (*Publishers) and first published in October 1965. By then Ballantine had already rushed The Hobbit into print without revisions (which Tolkien had not yet completed), to have a Ballantine–Tolkien presence in bookshops as quickly as possible and to forestall any unauthorized paperback of The Hobbit which might appear. A revised Hobbit was published by Ballantine finally in February 1966. Every copy of the Ballantine Hobbit and Lord of the Rings carried a statement by Tolkien in reply to Ace Books: ‘This paperback edition, and no other, has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other.’ And a new Foreword in the Ballantine Lord of the Rings conveyed Tolkien’s view that it was ‘a grave discourtesy, to say no more, to issue my book without even a polite note informing me of the project’. Privately he also undertook a campaign against Ace Books in correspondence with American readers, to whom he remarked on the nature of theft. Altogether this produced a groundswell of opinion in Tolkien’s favour which seriously undercut sales of the Ace edition, even though the Ballantine Lord of the Rings was more expensive by twenty cents per volume.

Tolkien’s authorized publishers expressed their point of view as well – firmly in opposition to Ace Books – in the popular press, which brought the ‘war over Middle-earth’ (as some writers called it) further to public attention. A legal challenge was ruled out, as Rayner Unwin recalled: ‘Houghton Mifflin were not confident that they could enjoin Ace Books for breach of copyright, and from our general understanding of this complicated and untested branch of American law we [Allen & Unwin] agreed’ (George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer (1999), p. 118).

Whether or not the Ace Books Lord of the Rings was legally a ‘pirate’, the ethical aspects of the issue were strong and recognized as such by Tolkien’s fans. Some took it upon themselves to send him ‘royalties’; others, such as Nan C. Scott, wrote directly to the managers of Ace Books to complain about their treatment of Tolkien. In reply to Mrs Scott, Donald Wollheim again denied ‘piracy’ and declared Ace Books willing to offer Tolkien ‘some sort of royalty or honorarium, at our own volition’ (quoted in Rayner Unwin, George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer, p. 120). Mrs Scott addressed this point in a letter to the Saturday Review of 23 October 1965 (p. 56, in response to an article on the Ace–Tolkien controversy), noting that the tone of Wollheim’s reply to her ‘was a mixture of the suavely apologetic and the insolent, and the letter contained the suggestion that, if I were in touch with Professor Tolkien, I ask him to write to Ace Books about arranging a royalty, though the firm had no obligation to pay one!’ A letter by Wollheim himself in the same Saturday Review suggested that it was up to Tolkien to write to Ace Books if he was offended by their edition: ‘It seemed correct to us to ask one of [his] correspondents [Nan C. Scott] to tell him of our interest, for he did not write us nor did we even have his address’ (p. 56, emphasis ours).

Tolkien and his publishers on their part refused to countenance Ace Books’ claims, and in November 1965 the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) Bulletin supported Tolkien in an editorial. After quoting Donald Wollheim’s views in Lighthouse, the Bulletin editor declared:

To pretend that taking anything not nailed down is no robbery; or to protest, as Wollheim has done in another published statement (Saturday Review, Oct. 23 [1965]), that Ace is willing to pay Tolkien royalties but does not know his address; or to complain, with injured innocence, that Tolkien has failed to get in touch with Ace (as if the whole thing were somehow the author’s fault, and he really should apologize), is to adopt a distasteful attitude of wilful ignorance, bad faith and bad manners. Ace would earn more respect by admitting its fault; undertaking not to repeat it; and by making prompt and generous restitution to Professor Tolkien, whose address is: 76, Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford, England.

Within a month of this pointed editorial, Donald Wollheim wrote to Tolkien (copied to the SFWA), offering to pay an unspecified royalty direct to the author (while continuing to claim no legal obligation to do so), or to use full royalties to establish an annual science-fantasy award through the Science Fiction Writers of America. Wollheim suggested that Ace Books were only now, in December 1965, in a position to know the financial return on their edition relative to their investment. Moreover, in comparing the Ace Lord of the Rings, with its low price and long print run (150,000 copies), to the more expensive and relatively scarce (but hardly unavailable) Houghton Mifflin hardback edition, he implied that Ace Books had done Tolkien a significant favour in bringing his book to a larger audience.

The royalties offered by Ace Books, and the terms to be attached, came to the attention of the Science Fiction Writers of America and were described in their Bulletin for January 1966. ‘It is a giant step forward’, the Society reported, ‘for Ace to have written directly to Tolkien at all, after inexplicably refusing to do so for six months. But Ace’s proposed generosity toward SFWA, coupled with its niggardliness toward Tolkien, again exemplifies this company’s unfathomable mental processes and troglodytic manners. A Tolkien Award would be a good thing. A much better thing – and long overdue – would be payment of full royalties to Tolkien, to whom they belong’ (SFWA Bulletin, January 1966, p. 1).

Tolkien, on his part, had no interest in either establishing a ‘Tolkien Award’ or ‘authorizing’ the Ace edition in any way. He wrote to Rayner Unwin:

What would a skipper say to a pirate who (spying an ominous sail and ensign on the horizon) said ‘Shake hands! If you feel sore about this, I can assure you that we shall spend all the profits of our loot on a hostel for poor sailors’? …

I feel that there are only two ways of taking this offer: 1. Complete refusal to treat with Ace Books or countenance their edition. 2. Acceptance of royalties, if adequate, on the issue so far distributed, provided that Ace then retire from the competition. [29 December 1965, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins]

Unwin preferred the second alternative. After further negotiation, Tolkien and Ace Books came to an agreement by which eventually he received more than $9,000 in royalties on sales. This was formally announced by Ace Books in a press release issued in March 1966, which stated that the firm had ‘been on record from the start as willing to pay royalties to Dr. [sic] Tolkien, but not to his publishers who had forfeited his copyrights in the United States’. The release also included a statement signed by Tolkien but in fact proposed by Donald Wollheim, expressing his happiness to accept Ace Books’ ‘voluntary offer to pay full royalties … even though you have no legal obligation to do so’ (quoted from a reproduction in the Tolkien Journal 2, no. 2 (Astron 1966), p. 4). On 23 February 1966 Tolkien wrote to W.H. Auden that he had ‘signed an “amicable agreement”’ with Ace Books ‘to accept their voluntary offer under no legal obligation: to pay a royalty of 4 per cent. on all copies of their edition sold, and not to reprint it when it is exhausted (without my consent)’ (Letters, p. 367). In a letter of 21 March 1966, sent to the trade magazine Publishers Weekly (printed also, with date of writing, in Tolkien Journal 2, no. 2 (Astron 1966), p. 5), Rayner Unwin disagreed that Ace Books had been ‘on record from the start as willing to pay royalties’: ‘Only after energetic protests from numerous quarters had been sustained for several months did Professor Tolkien receive, in December last, for the first time, a letter from Ace Books.’ Unwin also remarked ‘that the net result of this affair has been to distract an author of genius … from all creative work [i.e. on *The Silmarillion]. Those who admire Professor Tolkien’s books and clamour for more will draw their own conclusion.’

Ace Books’ public relations efforts following their settlement with Tolkien also included an advertisement for their edition of The Lord of the Rings on the final page of John Myers Myers’ Silverlock, published by Ace in 1966. Within its text was the paragraph: ‘By arrangement with Professor Tolkien, these Ace volumes are the only American editions that are paying full royalties directly to the author. They are authentic, complete, unrevised and unabridged.’ This was true, in a manner of speaking: the Houghton Mifflin and Ballantine editions paid royalties only indirectly to Tolkien, through the chain of American publishers and George Allen & Unwin; the Ace volumes were ‘authentic’ and ‘complete’ in and of themselves, as far as those words had any meaning in context; and the books were indeed unrevised (compared to the Ballantine edition) and unabridged (there were, and are, no abridged editions in English). But it was also misleading and self-serving, and apparently little-noticed at the time.

The Ace Books edition of The Lord of the Rings was never reprinted. In 1966–7 the number of copies returned was greater than the number sold, as the Ballantine Books edition became the one clearly preferred by readers.

In later years Donald Wollheim continued to argue that Ace Books had been in the right to issue its edition of The Lord of the Rings, and that Tolkien’s authorized publishers had failed to protect his American copyrights. Some latter-day Tolkien enthusiasts also excuse the Ace Books edition on the grounds that had the issue not been forced, Houghton Mifflin might never have allowed The Lord of the Rings to be published as inexpensive mass-market paperbacks. ‘The Great Copyright Controversy’ by Richard E. Blackwelder, published in Beyond Bree for September 1995, follows this line. Although Blackwelder’s article is useful for its long (though by no means exhaustive) list of references to writings about the Ace Books controversy, he accepts Donald Wollheim’s arguments uncritically. Wayne G. Hammond, F.R. Williamson, and Rayner Unwin offered rebuttals to Blackwelder in Beyond Bree for December 1995. See further, Rayner Unwin, George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer, ch. 5; and Descriptive Bibliography, notes for A5c.

The question of the validity of Tolkien’s American copyrights continued to be challenged for more than a quarter-century after the Ace Books affair, and for the same reasons. At last in 1992 the issue was settled in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, in the case of Eisen, Durwood & Co. v. Christopher R. Tolkien et al. Eisen, Durwood, a book packager doing business as Ariel Books, sought a legal declaration that the original text of The Lord of the Rings – specifically, that of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers (The Return of the King was not considered due to ‘differing circumstances’) – was in the public domain in the United States due to the failure of Houghton Mifflin to include a copyright notice in a substantial number of the copies they had published. On the contrary, in a decision delivered on 6 April 1992 Judge Vincent L. Broderick found the Tolkien copyright of the first edition of The Lord of the Rings to be valid, and granted defendants’ motion for summary judgement in their favour. He concluded that even though Houghton Mifflin had not included a notice of copyright in many copies of The Lord of the Rings, the law did not provide for the forfeiture of copyright because of the failure to include such a notice. Indeed, he found, the Copyright Act of 1909 as later amended did not require a copyright notice to be printed in books with subsisting ad interim protection, which was true of the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers. In presenting their case Eisen, Durwood had abandoned any claim that excessive importation of copies printed abroad had resulted in loss of copyright through violation of the ‘manufacturing clause’; but even if the plaintiff had not done so, the 1909 Act again nowhere stated that forfeiture of copyright would automatically result. Judge Broderick’s decision was upheld on appeal in 1993.

This case immediately laid to rest any doubts about Tolkien’s U.S. copyright in the first edition of The Lord of the Rings or the legal correctness of his and his publishers’ position (apart from its clear moral authority) during the Ace Books controversy. Six years later, the United States Congress passed the Copyright Extension Act in response to a new international agreement on copyright approved by the group formerly known as GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), to which the United States was a signatory. This brought U.S. law regarding the length of copyright into line with the laws of its major trading partners and provided, moreover, that if a work was validly in copyright in any of the signatory countries, it was also to be considered in copyright in all of the other countries party to the agreement. Under this authority the *Tolkien Estate acted to re-register Tolkien copyrights in the United States, reinforcing and extending their validity.

See further, Joseph Ripp, ‘Middle America Meets Middle-Earth: American Discussion and Readership of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, 1965–1969’, Book History (2005), which discusses the Ace Books affair at length.

Acocks Green (Warwickshire). On 17 October 1966 Tolkien wrote to a group of primary school children in *Acocks Green, east of *Birmingham: ‘I lived till I was 8 at *Sarehole and used to walk to A[cocks] G[reen] to see my uncle. It was all “country” then …’ (quoted in Sotheby’s, English Literature, History, Children’s Books and Illustrations, London, 16 December 2004, p. 274). Acocks Green is some two miles north-east of Sarehole (now Hall Green). During Tolkien’s years at Sarehole (1896–1900) Acocks Green was still one of three hamlets along the Warwick Road, though already developed into a middle-class suburb of Birmingham since the opening of a local railway station in 1852. Much of its rural landscape was obliterated with the construction of municipal housing beginning in the mid-1920s.

Acta Senatus. Report, in Latin, of a Latin debate at *King Edward’s School, Birmingham, published in the King Edward’s School Chronicle n.s. 26, no. 186 (March 1911), pp. 26–7 The work is not signed, but Tolkien’s authorship is revealed in his papers.

Adaptations. Tolkien took a deep interest in the ‘fortunes’ of his works, ‘as a parent would of a child’ (letter to Carole Batten-Phelps, autumn 1971, Letters, p. 413). He felt strongly about the uses to which his works were put and was selective in what he allowed, in so far as he had the authority to do so and circumstances permitted. As discussed in our essay on the *Ace Books controversy, Tolkien held copyright in his works, but this did not go unchallenged, limiting his ability to deny permission for certain purposes; nor could he ignore the possibility of income from such projects, not only for himself and his family, but also for his publishers George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers), to whom he felt an obligation. Allen & Unwin on their part sought to sub-license Tolkien’s intellectual properties as it seemed best, a common function of publishers to enhance income for their authors as well as for themselves, though in Tolkien’s day it had not yet become as bound up in ‘media’ and merchandising (notably excepting the efforts of the *Walt Disney Studios) as it is today.

In this article we discuss, by no means exhaustively, adaptations of Tolkien’s works for the stage, radio, film, and television. For ‘adaptation’ in the form of ‘fan fiction’, see *Fandom and popularity. For unabridged or abridged readings of Tolkien’s works for broadcast or recording (granted that an abridgement is a special kind of adaptation, and that there may be a fine line between a reading and a dramatization), and for adaptations in print (such as comic-book versions), see notes under individual titles.

See further, Tolkien Adaptations, bd. 10 (2013) of Hither Shore: Interdisciplinary Journal on Modern Fantasy Literature, and Paul Simpson and Brian J. Robb, Middle-earth Envisioned (2013).

STAGE ADAPTATIONS

Interest in dramatic adaptation of Tolkien’s fiction was expressed at least as early as 1953, when Miss L.M.D. Patrick asked permission to perform a stage version of *The Hobbit at St Margaret’s School, Edinburgh. On that occasion Tolkien and George Allen & Unwin approved a limited run; but another play based on The Hobbit, sent to Tolkien by early 1959, seemed to him ‘a mistaken attempt to turn certain episodes … into a sub-Disney farce for rather silly children. … At the same time it is entirely derivative’ (letter to Charles Lewis, George Allen & Unwin, 30 April 1959, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). He admitted to a prejudice against dramatization and any kind of ‘children’s theatre’, but was willing to consent if an adaptation were ‘good of its kind’, or if the performance of the play were part of the normal processes of a drama school. He felt strongly, however, against the publication of such a work or its performance in a more public venue. Nevertheless, numerous versions of The Hobbit have been performed on stage, some with original songs.

In 1967 Paul Drayton, later director of music at New College School, Oxford, and Humphrey Carpenter, then an *Oxford undergraduate, with Tolkien’s permission adapted The Hobbit for performance by eleven- to thirteen-year-old boys. Their essay, ‘A Preparatory School Approach’ in Music Drama in Schools (1971), explains how Drayton devised the songs and overall musical structure for the play while Carpenter prepared the script with ‘two main principles in mind. First, to retain the style and character of the book, and second, to impose dramatic shape upon it. The first simply involved using the existing dialogue wherever possible, and consciously adopting Tolkien’s style when continuations and alterations had to be made.’ The second principle was to omit ‘incidents not absolutely vital to the plot – the trolls, the wolves, the eagles and Beorn. None of these occupy a strong place in the saga; they are trimmings, and easily disposed of.’ Carpenter also imposed ‘unity’ by introducing Bard earlier than Tolkien does, and by killing Smaug at the Lonely Mountain ‘in the centre of the action’; and he added references to *The Lord of the Rings ‘to extend the significance and importance of the ring in the play’ (p. 18). The dragon ‘flew overhead’ by means of lighting effects.

Tolkien attended the final performance. ‘He smiled a lot of the time’, Carpenter recalled, in particular at the boy who played Bilbo as a ‘fussy middle-aged bachelor’. But towards the end of the play, with notable departures from his book, Tolkien ‘did not approve of this tinkering with the story’ (‘“… One Expected Him To Go on a Lot Longer”: Humphrey Carpenter Remembers J.R.R. Tolkien’, Minas Tirith Evening-Star 9, no. 2 (January 1980), pp. 10–11; see also a report by Charles E. Noad of a talk by Humphrey Carpenter, Amon Hen 91 (May 1988), p. 14).

The scripts of a dramatization by Patricia Gray and of a musical by Allan Jay Friedman, David Rogers, and Ruth Perry were published in 1968 and 1972 respectively by the Dramatic Publishing Company of Chicago, ‘authorized by Professor J.R.R. Tolkien’. This imprimatur, however, was given only as part of a compromise between the publisher and George Allen & Unwin, at a time when the validity of the copyright of the first edition of The Hobbit in the United States, and therefore the ability to control or prevent dramatic adaptations, was seriously in question (see *Ace Books controversy, and further in the present entry). In fact, Tolkien disliked at least the version by Gray, and still less that he had little or no say in the matter. Through *Rayner Unwin he requested changes where the adapter had departed from the text without (as he felt) any dramatic necessity. Although the Dramatic Publishing Company held that they knew best what is needed for an effective stage play, they agreed to some of Tolkien’s requests, and Unwin felt that these repaired ‘a lot of the worst excesses and infelicities’ (letter to Tolkien, 19 June 1968, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). On 20 June Unwin wrote to H.N. Swanson, the American agent for Allen & Unwin, that ‘neither Professor Tolkien nor I are concerned about the process of dramatization so long as it is a dramatization of the book in question and that intrusions from elsewhere conform to the spirit and style of the original’. Tolkien further agreed that ‘the publication is with his authorization … [but] he would not wish it to be said that the dramatization has his approval’ (George Allen & Unwin archive, University of Reading).

It is common in some dramatizations of The Hobbit for characters to be changed or added to provide more female roles: thus the Elvenking may become an elven queen, or Bilbo Baggins may gain a sister who appears in the final scene. More simply, Thorin the chief dwarf, or even Bilbo, may be played by a female. The ‘small cast version’ of The Hobbit dramatized by Markland Taylor (1992) is an adaptation for only six actors with much doubling (there are twenty-three characters): in this the dwarves are reduced to only Thorin, and the Battle of Five Armies is only mentioned in a comment to the audience. Rob Inglis took the reduction process even further with his version for single performer, recorded in 1987 on the fiftieth anniversary of The Hobbit.

At perhaps the furthest extreme of adaptation of The Hobbit on stage was Down in Middle Earth, a musical for children by Fred Bluth performed in California in spring 1969. Bonniejean Christensen described this as ‘a fuzzy allegory’ in which Bilbo undertakes a psychological quest to recover a stolen ring, accompanied by ‘hip’ talk, allusions to sexuality, and psychedelic lighting (‘Report from the West: Exploitation of The Hobbit’, Orcrist (1969–70), p. 15).

Other stage dramatizations of The Hobbit include those by the Oxford University Experimental Theatre Club, adapted by Graham Devlin, music by Michael Hinton (1971); Phoenix Arts, Leicester, adapted by Rony Robinson and Graham Watkins, music by Stephanie Nunn (1984); the Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, adapted by Thomas W. Olson, music by Alan Shorter (1990); Company Skylark, adapted for puppets by Christine Anketell (1997); Manitoba Theatre for Young People, adapted by Kim Selody (1999); Vanessa Ford Productions, adapted by Glyn Robbins, music by Mark Bloxsidge (1999); and the Lansbury Players, London, adapted by Brian Sibley (2000).

An operatic version of The Hobbit was written by Dean Burry, originally for the Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus, scored for children’s chorus, adult baritone, and small chamber ensemble. This premiered in Toronto in 2004. Four years later, Burry prepared a revised version, with full orchestration, for the Sarasota (Florida) Youth Opera.

Stage adaptations of The Lord of the Rings date from at least 1960, with a production by Joyce Biddell of Maidstone, Kent. A lavish musical treatment of the work, employing sixty-five actors and a moving stage, was first produced in Toronto in 2006; its book and lyrics are by Shaun McKenna and Matthew Warchus, and its music by A.R. Rahman and Värttinä, collaborating with Christopher Nightingale. A reduced and rewritten version of the musical opened in London in 2007. As he did for The Hobbit, Rob Inglis has performed a one-man version of The Lord of the Rings, likewise much abbreviated.

A one-man stage adaptation of *Leaf by Niggle was produced in 2016 by the Puppet State Theatre Company of Edinburgh, performed by Richard Medrington with music by Karine Polwart.

RADIO ADAPTATIONS

In 1968 BBC Radio 4 broadcast The Hobbit dramatized in eight parts by Michael Kilgarriff with music by David Cain. This introduced a narrator, ‘The Tale Bearer’, who is often interrupted by Bilbo Baggins, and incorporated elements from The Lord of the Rings, such as a mention of Middle-earth though this name is not in The Hobbit as published. The adaptation was first issued as a commercial recording in 1988, based on private off-air tapes as the master tapes had been wiped. It was broadcast again on Radio 4 over four days in 1991.

The Lord of the Rings was first adapted for BBC radio in 1955–6, for the Third Programme, soon after its publication was complete. The producer Terence Tiller proposed an adaptation of its first part, The Fellowship of the Ring, on 25 January 1955, asking not only for Tolkien’s permission to proceed but also for preliminary suggestions from him, promising him the draft scripts for approval. Tolkien replied on 26 January:

I hope it will not seem too cool and cautious, if I ask whether you could (without much trouble) give me a general idea of what you have in mind as an ‘adaptation’, before I give my final approval.

For instance: do you propose to use actual parts or passages with summarized narrative links? The proposed time to be allotted is 4½ hours [45 minutes per episode]. The printed narrative, without preliminaries, occupies about 390 rather packed pages. …

Naturally he had ‘some views and preferences’; but ‘the “adapter” must, I think, work on his own lines. I should very much like to have some idea of what those are likely to be’ (BBC Written Archives Centre).

Tiller proposed to preserve Tolkien’s original dialogue as much as possible, which would be presented in a dramatic form with narration to link the scenes. Given time constraints, however, the original narrative and dialogue would need substantial reduction, and Tiller feared that many of Tolkien’s songs and poems would have to be excised. Tolkien approved, though only because Allen & Unwin felt that the project would be good for sales of his book.

During the summer of 1955 Tiller sent Tolkien scripts for the first three episodes. Tolkien seems to have found room for improvement and suggested alterations, which Tiller seems to have accepted – the archive is vague and incomplete on this point, as on others. Moreover, Tiller wisely asked Tolkien’s advice about accents for his characters’ speech. Tolkien replied:

I quite understand that the need for characterization, and making different speakers audibly recognizable, may well override my opinion. Also the skill of the actors may be inadequate to deal in nuances.

The relative passages are Vol. III, pp. 408 and 411 [of The Lord of the Rings, first edition, both in Appendix F, ‘On Hobbits’ and the beginning of ‘On Translation’]. From these, and from the actual characterization in my text, I think it can be seen that the Hobbit ‘gentry’ should not be made rustical in actual tones and accents. Their divergence from High Speech is cast rather in forms of grammar and idiom: they just speak unstudied modern English. Merry and Pippin are the two young hobbits of the highest birth in the land (heirs of the Master and the Thain) and should at any rate not speak differently from Frodo. I am against anything more than the merest tinge of ‘country’ (if any) in their speech. (Frodo’s superior linguistic skill would be exhibited only in Elvish.) The difference between ‘gentlehobbits’ and the Great is envisaged rather as one of period (in our terms) than dialect. The Great use a more archaic language (when functioning as the Great), and speak with greater solemnity and precision. The Hobbits just use our own rather slack colloquial.

But Sam and Butterbur (for Breelanders, Men and Hobbits, were in the same linguistic position) may well be characterized by speaking with a ‘country accent’ of some kind – fairly but not too strongly marked.

As for what kind of ‘accent’ – I do not think that matters very much, as long as it can be consistently maintained by the speakers. You say ‘West-Country’. Well since Elizabethan days that seems to have been favoured as ‘stage dialect’, though not often with any local or historical accuracy. ‘Accuracy’ fortunately does not matter at all in this translation into modern terms of a vanished past, and as long as the ‘accent’ used is fairly consistent, and such as to seem to the average listener vaguely ‘countrified’, that will do.

But you may note that I have deliberately avoided making the dropping or misuse of h a feature of any kind of hobbit-speech. I should prefer that this should be observed, though it is not, of course, vital (in the cases of Sam and Butterbur). Also I personally should prefer not to have any supposedly ‘Zummerzet’ z/v for s/f initially.

If I might make a particular suggestion: I should use the pronunciation of r as a main characterizing detail. Hobbit-gentry should speak more or less as we do (at our most unstudied). Sam, in addition to a rustic tone and vowel-colouring, should use the burred (or reverted) r. The Great, and especially the Elves, should sound their rs as a trill (though not with a Scots extravagance) in all positions. It is a great enhancement of English, as well as (now) bearing an archaic flavour. However, that is by the way. Some people find it difficult to do!

I am sure the whole matter is safe in your hands; and only on the point of not making Meriadoc or Pippin rustic (nor indeed any of the 144 gentry at the party) do I place any final importance. [10 September 1955, BBC Written Archives Centre]

In late September 1955 Tiller finally was able to send Tolkien copies of all six scripts. In his covering note he warned that Tolkien would ‘at first be a little shocked at the extent of the cutting: six half hours are pitifully brief [the running time per instalment had been cut to only thirty minutes, rather than forty-five], and inevitably a great deal of the flavour of your work has been lost. Nevertheless, I think the addition of music, and of living voices, will do much to replace such losses’ (21 September 1955, BBC Written Archives Centre). He telescoped certain incidents and simplified geographical details, but hoped that the main themes of the work were not totally obscured or mutilated. Tolkien replied that he was very interested in what Tiller had done, in an intellectual sense, as of course he had not yet heard the work performed on the air, and with music (by Anthony Smith-Masters); but the procedure had led him to some conclusions:

If a weakness of the book is the necessity of historical build-up concurrent with the tale of events – except for those who like the imaginary ‘history’ for its own sake – it is a greater weakness in a ‘dramatic’ form, in so far as this form still has to include a good deal of ‘explanations’. But what chiefly interested me in reading your scripts – beyond the interest in noting what you had picked out and what you had cut – was the fact that the inevitable reduction of background and detail had tended to reduce the whole thing, making it much more of a ‘fairy-tale’ in the ordinary sense. The hobbits seem sillier and the others more stilted. Though, of course, living voices may make a great difference, as you say. Anyway, as an author, I was comforted by being confirmed in my opinion that there are actually few, if any, unnecessary details in the long narrative! The loss of any of them deprives the story of significance at some later point. [27 September 1955, BBC Written Archives Centre]

Tolkien next wrote again at length to Tiller on 8 December 1955, after the adaptation had begun to be broadcast (14 November–18 December), and following a discussion of it on the programme The Critics (14 November):

I am glad The Times was appreciative; even though that seemed to infuriate the precious self-styled ‘critics’. I thought they were intolerable, with a superiority that only ignorance can maintain. You cannot expect to please many readers (or the author) at many points; but if it is any comfort to you I may say that I have a good many letters about the radio-version, and while some are adverse many ‘readers’ enjoy it, and also tell me that non-readers get a great deal out of it. … I do not agree with most of the criticisms myself … [such] as the one that wanted hobbits to pipe and squeak. Why should tones rise with fall in stature? Some of the silliest high-pitched voices I have heard belonged to people over six feet.

I liked Glóin’s foreign accent – though it was perhaps a bit heavily laid on …: dwarves spoke the Common Tongue natively …; but they had an uvular back R. But it does not matter. I was a bit disappointed that Bilbo sounded not only old but bored. The Elvish, and the names were managed excellently. But it was a pity that the preliminary announcer (unless I misheard) called Goldberry ‘Bombadil’s daughter’ (!) and asserted that the evil willow was an ally of Mordor. Mordor is not the master of all things hostile to the ‘humane’; and, so to say, there is much that seems evil to us that is not in league with the Devil!

I thought the cutting down of the difficult Chap. II of Book II (council [of Elrond]) was masterly, and got in all essentials without serious loss. [BBC Written Archives Centre]

Tiller for his part was not as unhappy about Bilbo as Tolkien, and noted that one or two letters sent to the BBC suggested that the Elves should have been more virile, while some maintained that Frodo was a good deal younger than the actor employed for the broadcast. Tiller admitted that it was his fault that Goldberry was described as Bombadil’s daughter: the relationship between them was never definitely expressed, and Goldberry ‘felt’ to Tiller like a female and second-generation Bombadil. ‘I really am sorry about this error’, he wrote to Tolkien, ‘but who is she?’ (12 December 1955, BBC Written Archives Centre). Tolkien did not answer this question, but commented that he ‘ought to remember that not all is in the “book”, and it is asking a lot to expect even that to be known. I think I had quite forgotten that Bombadil’s adventures as set out in the Oxford Magazine of 1934 (!) [see *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil] were not included. … Authors are no doubt often peevish folk!’ (letter to Tiller, 15 December 1955, BBC Written Archives Centre).

In other letters, however, Tolkien was more candid about his feelings. On 30 November he wrote to Molly Waldron: ‘I think the book quite unsuitable for “dramatization”, and have not enjoyed the broadcasts – though they have improved’ (Letters, p. 228). On 8 December he wrote to *Naomi Mitchison: ‘I think poorly of the broadcast adaptations. Except for a few details I think they are not well done, even granted the script and the legitimacy of the enterprise (which I do not grant). But they took some trouble with the names. I thought that the Dwarf (Glóin not Gimli, but I suppose Gimli will look like his father – apparently someone’s idea of a German) was not too bad, if a bit exaggerated’ (Letters, p. 229). To Rayner Unwin he wrote that he ‘agreed with the “critics”’ view of the radio adaptation’, and that his ‘correspondence is now increased by letters of fury against the critics and the broadcast’ – ‘but I suppose all this is good for sales’ (8 December 1955, Letters, p. 229).

Given these opinions, it was probably for the sake of publicity, which translated to sales of The Lord of the Rings, that Tolkien let Tiller know that he was willing that adaptations also of The Two Towers and The Return of the King should go ahead, as the producer wished. Among the senior staff of the BBC Third Programme, however, all but one lacked any personal enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings, and this fact seems to have carried more weight than the evident success of the Fellowship with listeners, and the apparent pride with which the BBC had announced that The Fellowship of the Ring was the first modern novel to be serialized on the Third Programme.

Tiller was now told that the BBC would have great difficulty in placing another twelve episodes of The Lord of the Rings – six for each of the remaining two volumes, as for the Fellowship – but there could be six new episodes, each also of only thirty minutes, ‘even though painful to the adapter’ – thus only three hours in which to dramatize the rest of the work. It was suggested that this would be possible because ‘Volume 2 is more homogeneous than Volume 1’, and ‘Volume 3 is not only shorter in itself than the other two, but could be made still shorter in adaptation by ending it with the victory and restoration of Gondor, the return to the Shire and final departure to the West being treated as an epilogue and either omitted altogether or disposed of in a few lines of narration’ (letter from Christopher Holme, Chief Assistant, Third Programme, to Terence Tiller, 20 January 1956, BBC Written Archives Centre). Tiller was appalled at the cutting that would be necessary to achieve this scheme. He pointed out that several listeners had thought that, indeed, Volume 1 had been cut excessively at three hours. But he would accept the limitations imposed on him, rather than leave the radio version of The Lord of the Rings unfinished.

At the beginning of November 1956 Tiller sent Tolkien the first three scripts in the new series. ‘Any listener who knows the books themselves will, I fear, be somewhat disappointed in the broadcasts’, he wrote. ‘I do feel, however, that other listeners will at least obtain the gist of the story and of its excitements’ (letter to Tolkien, 1 November 1956, BBC Written Archives Centre). He had been forced on many occasions to script his own narration, rather than use Tolkien’s. Should the Rohirrim speak with any particular accent? he asked. He proposed to make the Orcs sound as degraded and beastly as possible in their speech; but did Tolkien want them to have any particular accent, and should Sauron’s and Saruman’s Orcs be distinguished? Should the people of Minas Tirith have an accent? Tolkien replied at once:

Taking ‘accent’ to mean … ‘more or less consistent alterations of the vowels/consonants of “received” English’: I should say that, in the cases you query, no accent-differentiation is needed or desirable. For instance, it would probably be better to avoid certain, actual or conventional, features of modern ‘vulgar’ English in representing Orcs, such as the dropping of aitches (these are, I think, not dropped in the text, and that is deliberate).

But, of course, for most people, ‘accent’ as defined above is confused with impressions of different intonation, articulation, and tempo. You will, I suppose, have to use such means to make Orcs sound nasty!

I have no doubt that, if this ‘history’ were real, all users of the C[ommon] Speech would reveal themselves by their accent, differing in place, people, and rank, but that cannot be represented when C[ommon] S[peech] is turned into English – and is not (I think) necessary. I paid great attention to such linguistic differentiation as was possible: in diction, idiom, and so on; and I doubt if much more can be imported, except in so far as the individual actor represents his feeling for the character in tone and style.

As Minas Tirith is at the source of C[ommon] Speech it is to C[ommon] S[peech] as London is to modern English, and the standard of comparison! None of its inhabitants should have an ‘accent’ in terms of vowels &c.

The Rohirrim no doubt (as our ancient English ancestors in a similar state of culture and society) spoke, at least their own tongue, with a slower tempo and more sonorous articulation, than modern ‘urbans’. But I think it is safe to represent them when using C[ommon] S[peech], as they practically always do (for obvious reasons) as speaking the best M[inas] T[irith]. Possibly a little too good, as it would be a learned language, somewhat slower and more careful than a native’s. But that is a nicety safely neglected, and not always true: Théoden was born in Gondor and Common Speech was the domestic language of the Golden Hall in his father’s day. … [2 November 1956, Letters, pp. 253–4]

A few days later, on 6 November, Tolkien wrote to Tiller about the three scripts, not with any criticisms of detail, but rather (one might say) with criticisms of principle. He acknowledged that Tiller had had a difficult task, and could not have done better under the circumstances. But he was sharply displeased with the compression and deletions necessary to fit the rest of The Lord of the Rings into such a short span of time:

As a private conversation between you and me, I could wish you had perhaps time to spare to tell me why this sort of treatment is accorded to the book, and what value it has – on [the] Third [Programme]. For myself, I do not believe that many, if any, listeners who do not know the book will thread the plot or grasp at all what is going on. And the text is (necessarily in the space) reduced to such simple, even simple-minded, terms that I find it hard to believe it would hold the attention of the Third [Programme’s audience].

Here is a book very unsuitable for dramatic or semi-dramatic representation. If that is attempted it needs more space, a lot of space. It is sheerly impossible to pot the two books [The Two Towers and The Return of the King] in the allotted time – whether the object be to provide something in itself entertaining in the medium; or to indicate the nature of the original (or both). Why not then turn it down as unsuitable, if more space is not available?

I remain, of course, flattered and pleased that my book should receive this attention; but I still cannot help wondering: why this form? … I cannot help thinking that longer actual passages read, as a necklace upon a thread of narration (in which the narrator might occasionally venture an interpretation of more than mere plot-events) would, or might, prove both more interesting to listeners, and fairer to the author. But, as I have said, I lack experience in the medium, and this is in any case, no criticism of your text, but a sighing for something quite different – a moon no doubt. Final query: can a tale not conceived dramatically but (for lack of a more precise term) epically, be dramatized – unless the dramatizer is given or takes liberties, as an independent person? [Letters, pp. 254–5]

The preserved Tolkien–Tiller correspondence ends at that point; perhaps no reply was possible, nor is it known if Tolkien was sent the remaining three scripts. The new series of episodes was broadcast by the BBC from 19 November to 23 December 1956.

In 1981 another BBC radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell with music by Stephen Oliver, was broadcast on Radio 4 in twenty-six half-hour parts (rebroadcast in later years in thirteen one-hour parts). Sibley and Bakewell treated their source with great respect, utilizing Tolkien’s words and style whenever possible even as cuts were made, segments reorganized for dramatic effect, and additional dialogue invented. The series was well received by listeners, if not without criticism. In reviewing the first episodes for the BBC Radio 4 programme Kaleidoscope, Humphrey Carpenter felt that radio reduced The Lord of the Rings to dialogue, that the production lacked the full flavour of the book, and that The Lord of the Rings could not be successful in any medium other than print. See further, Microphones in Middle Earth, ed. Ian D. Smith (1982).

For lack of broadcast time Sibley and Bakewell omitted (among other elements) from their scripts the Tom Bombadil chapters from Book I of The Lord of the Rings, but in 1992 Sibley adapted these as two of the six parts of the BBC Radio 5 series Tales from the Perilous Realm. With these were dramatizations of Tolkien’s *Farmer Giles of Ham (also in two parts), *Leaf by Niggle, and *Smith of Wootton Major. This series too was issued as a commercial recording (1993).

The Sibley–Bakewell Lord of the Rings was first issued as a commercial recording in 1987. The compact disc issue of 2011 added new framing narration at the beginning and end of each CD, written by Brian Sibley and performed by Ian Holm as Frodo.

A six-hour dramatization of The Hobbit, by Bob Lewis, and a twelve-hour dramatization of The Lord of the Rings, by Bernard Mayes, were made, and first broadcast on National Public Radio in the U.S.A., in 1979. These have been heard on radio (as the ‘Mind’s Eye’ or ‘Radio 2000’ version) and sold on commercial media, though some recordings are abridged. The Lord of the Rings adaptation has been praised for its fidelity to the book – the Tom Bombadil episode is included – but criticized for amateurish or eccentric performances and, at least for some, by the American accents of most of its actors. See further, Christina Scull, ‘Middle-earth on Radio: Tapes from Both Sides of the Atlantic’, Amon Hen 95 (January 1989).

FILM ADAPTATIONS

According to Humphrey Carpenter, ‘the first overtures from the film world’ in regard to Tolkien’s works ‘came at the end of 1957 when Tolkien was approached by three American businessmen who showed him drawings for a proposed animated motion-picture of The Lord of the Rings. These gentlemen (Mr Forrest J. Ackerman, Mr Morton Grady Zimmerman, and Mr Al Brodax) also delivered to him a scenario or “Story Line” for the proposed film’ (Biography, p. 226). Letters in the Allen & Unwin archive at the University of Reading (*Libraries and archives), however, seem to indicate that Al Brodax enquired about the film rights in May or June 1957, and Forrest J. Ackerman (on behalf of Morton Grady Zimmerman) independently in September of the same year.

At first Tolkien was willing (if not enthusiastic) to allow such a project to go forward. On 19 June 1957 he wrote to Rayner Unwin: ‘As far as I am concerned personally, I should welcome the idea of an animated motion picture, with all the risk of vulgarization; and that quite apart from the glint of money, though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility. I think I should find vulgarization less painful than the sillification achieved by the B.B.C.’ (Letters, p. 257). On 4 September he was visited in Oxford by Forrest J. Ackerman and associates, and was impressed by visualizations for the film prepared by artist Ron Cobb, whom Tolkien compared favourably to Arthur Rackham. But he was less pleased with the proposed story-line written by Morton Grady Zimmerman. He remarked to Rayner Unwin on 7 September that this was

on a much lower level of art and perceptiveness than the pictorial material. It is in some points bad, and unacceptable, but is not irremediable, if the author of it … is open to criticism and direction. The ending is badly muffed … it reads like a production of haste, after a single reading, & without further reference to text. … Mr Ackerman’s line of talk was that a big object to the group was ‘pleasing the author’. I have indicated to him that will not be easy. Quite crudely: displeasing the author requires a cash equivalent. Only the prospect of a very large financial profit would make me swallow some of the things in this script! … An abridgement by selection with some good picture-work would be pleasant, & perhaps worth a good deal of publicity; but the present script is rather a compression with resultant over-crowding and confusion, blurring of climaxes, and general degradation: a pull-back towards more conventional ‘fairy-stories’. People gallop about on Eagles at the least provocation; Lórien becomes a fairy-castle with ‘delicate minarets’, and all that sort of thing.

But I am quite prepared to play ball, if they are open to advice – and if you decide that the thing is genuine, and worthwhile. [Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins, partly printed in Letters, p. 261]

On 11 September Tolkien wrote to his son *Christopher: ‘*Stanley U[nwin] & I have agreed on our policy: Art or Cash. Either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author’s veto on objectionable features or alterations’ (Letters, p. 261). To achieve this, Allen & Unwin negotiated with Ackerman through an agent in the United States knowledgeable about film contracts.

By the end of March 1958 Tolkien still had not given the story-line more concentrated attention. (See further, Todd Jensen, ‘The Zimmerman Film Treatment of The Lord of the Rings’, Beyond Bree, December 1995.) Rayner Unwin pointed out the financial advantages to Tolkien if a film were eventually made; and it was agreed that Ackerman and company should have a free option on the film rights to The Lord of the Rings for six months from the date that Zimmerman received Tolkien’s comments on the initial story-line, so that a new treatment could be produced which would be more agreeable to the author. Tolkien now applied himself to the task, but became even more dismayed. On 8 April 1958 he wrote to Rayner Unwin that the story-line

as it stands, is sufficient to give me grave anxiety about the actual dialogue that (I suppose) will be used. … It seems to me evident that [Zimmerman] has skimmed through the [Lord of the Rings] at a great pace, and then constructed his s[tory] l[ine] from partly confused memories, and with the minimum of references back to the original. Thus he gets most of the names wrong in form – not occasionally by casual error but fixedly (always Borimor for Boromir); or he misapplies them: Radagast becomes an Eagle. The introduction of characters and the indications of what they are to say have little or no reference to the book. …

I feel very unhappy about the extreme silliness and incompetence of Z[immerman] and his complete lack of respect for the original (it seems wilfully wrong without discernible technical reasons at nearly every point). [Letters, pp. 266–7]

In May Tolkien commented that it was vital to secure, if possible,

a revision of the story-line, with the object of removing its more wanton divergences from the book. Especially (for instance) reduction of eagles to their proper place; and amendment of such gross vulgarizations as the fairy-castle and minarets intruded into Lórien: and restoration of the vital scene at the end of the Ring in Chamber of Fire. [letter to Rayner Unwin, 16 May 1958, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, Harper-Collins]

In June he addressed these issues at greater length in a letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, with an extensive commentary: these are partly printed in Letters, pp. 270–7. His chief points are presented more succinctly, though, in an unfinished letter to Ackerman (probably April or early May 1958) preserved at Marquette University:

The Lord of the Rings is arranged in 6 sections or ‘books’. Each section consists of a series of chapters or scenes; and the placing in sequence of these, as also of the sections themselves, is the result of purpose and thought. In the author’s opinion this arrangement cannot be altered without serious damage.

It must surely be obvious that the author could not be pleased or satisfied with any limitations that make the dislocation of his narrative and its balance necessary; though he may, of course be made to understand the necessity for them, and put up with something less than pleasure or satisfaction.

In fact the whole construction, especially towards the end, has been extremely roughly handled; and I am not convinced that any limitations of time and space can really justify the confusion and violent alterations of the original narrative that are to be seen in the latter part of Series II and in Series III. The ‘interleaving’ of the events in the two main threads, Frodo–Sam and the War, which was deliberately avoided in the original with good reason, produces a jumble, that would be bewildering to any viewers not well acquainted with the book. The latter would not recognize the story as the one that I have told at all: the events, the characters, and the moral significance have all been altered and distorted. This is the crucial point, and I find Mr. Zimmerman’s treatment quite unacceptable. (To instance two minor points: On page 40 we pass with a ‘fade-out’ from one set of persons in a tunnel, to another set in a tunnel, though the events are in the narrative separated in time, and in space by some 500 miles, and have no special connexion. What has happened to Frodo between his capture and the point where on p. 51 he ridiculously ‘leaps through the air’ and tears the Ring from Sam [who has abandoned Frodo in Shelob’s lair and carried the Ring to Mount Doom himself]. I pass over the major matter: that the most important part of the whole work, the journey through Mordor and the martyrdom of Frodo, has been cut in preference for battles; though it is the chief point of the Lord of the Rings that the battles were of subordinate significance. Actually the skill of the artists could, I believe, have made the Mordor journey deeply impressive, and cuts elsewhere would have been justified, if they allowed them the opportunity.)

To speak frankly, the Story-line before me gives the impression of being hasty (and overheated). I am prepared to be told that it took Mr. Zimmerman weeks or months; but the impression will remain that it is nonetheless the product of a hasty reading of the original, which has failed to appreciate the tone and significance of the narrative. It appears to be based primarily on the memory of this reading (altered by the adapter’s private imagination), and the resulting script does not seem to have been compared very carefully with the book.

This seems to me to be shown by various points, which I do not cite as of great importance in themselves, but as evidence for my opinion.

There is a constant needless alteration of points of detail. As I have pointed out many of these in the page by page notes there is no need to cite them here. I will point to only one significant case. On p. 48 we read: He bends near to Eowyn and touches her lips lightly with his, then feeds her from a bowl of specially-prepared herbs. Compare this with my Vol III p. 144 [e.g. ‘Once more Aragorn bruised two leaves of athelas and cast them into steaming water; and he laved her [Éowyn’s] brow with it, and her right arm lying cold and nerveless on the coverlet’, bk. V, ch. 8]. The differences no doubt would be pictorially slight and unimportant; but I feel that they (especially the substitution of lips for brow in the circumstances) reveal insensitivity and/or haste – since this is only one instance out of a large number.

Events are coloured by anticipation of others later, to the destruction of carefully devised differences. For instance Rivendell is described as a ‘shimmering forest’, without any justification in the book (p. 10). This is a confusion with Lórien. (Mr. Zimmerman entirely misconceives Lórien and wilfully alters it to suit his own taste.) …

Granted the necessity for drastic reduction, I think that Mr. Z. is often mistaken in the methods that he employs for shortening. One may cut, or one may compress. In general, he prefers the more dangerous method of compression.

There are, of course, cuts – and the selection of the things to cut does not always meet the author’s approval. But usually the adapter compresses in various ways: he merely flips or glances at an event or scene; he combines or confuses two distinct scenes; and most unsatisfactory, he compresses the time and/or space of the action.

There are plenty of events and scenes in the original. In less space the canvas would become overcrowded. The first method has this effect. There are fleeting glimpses of things that have lost all significance or function in the economy of the story. It is like flipping over the illustrations to a long tale that is half forgotten. [Special Collections and University Archives, John P. Raynor, S.J., Library, Marquette University]

In the letter as sent, Tolkien wrote that Zimmerman ‘and/or others’

may be irritated or aggrieved by the tone of many of my criticisms. If so, I am sorry (though not surprised). But I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about. … The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies. [Letters, p. 270]

On 16 June 1958 Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin that he did not want ‘to kill the project, which I think promised well on the pictorial side’ (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins), but he continued to be annoyed with it. Although he left matters in his publisher’s hands, he felt that the proposal could not be accepted without ample payment in compensation. In the event, Ackerman allowed his option on a Lord of the Rings film to lapse in early 1959.

By then at least one other enquiry had been made, and more soon followed. Among these the most promising was that by William L. Snyder, doing business as Rembrandt Films, who planned to make a feature-length motion picture of The Hobbit. Tolkien and Allen & Unwin reached an agreement with Snyder in April 1962. Negotiations were complicated, however, by questions that now arose about the validity of Tolkien’s American copyright in The Hobbit, and ‘in the end’, as Rayner Unwin recalled, ‘only the advance of $15,000 and a share of any profits earned in countries that were signatories of Berne [the Berne Convention] remained. But we were not in a strong position’ (George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer (1999), p. 109).

Artist-animator Gene Deitch recalled in his online book How To Succeed in Animation being handed the task of making a feature-length animated Hobbit by William L. Snyder in 1964. Deitch and his friend Bill Bernal developed a screenplay in which they ‘introduced a series of songs, changed some of the characters’ names, played loosely with the plot, and even created a girl character, a Princess no less, to go along on the quest, and to eventually overcome Bilbo Baggins’ bachelorhood!’ After The Lord of the Rings appeared in paperback, Deitch ‘back-spaced elements’ from that book into the film script to allow for a sequel. But with Snyder’s option due to expire on 30 June 1966, and the property having become more valuable due to the explosion of Tolkien’s popularity in the United States, a film had to be produced quickly; but Snyder’s contract with Tolkien and George Allen & Unwin specified neither the nature of the film nor how long it needed to be. Deitch therefore produced a twelve-minute film of The Hobbit within a month’s time, composed simply of cartoon stills or three-dimensional constructions, in which the only action was created by movement of the camera. It incorporated art by the Czech illustrator Adolf Born, narration by broadcaster Herb Lass, and music by Václav Lidl. The film story departed drastically from Tolkien’s book, omitting all of the dwarves and giving Bilbo as companions Gandalf, a watchman, a soldier, and a princess on a quest to regain jewels stolen by the dragon Smaug from the town of Dale. Bilbo encounters Gollum, finds the magic ring, and himself kills the dragon. On 30 June 1966 the film was shown in a small room in midtown Manhattan to anyone Deitch could bring in from the street.

In the late 1960s the Beatles planned to make a film of The Lord of the Rings, with themselves as Gollum (John), Frodo (Paul), Gandalf (George), and Sam (Ringo), but were unable to purchase the rights. Already by mid-1967 Allen & Unwin began to negotiate with United Artists, who wished to purchase film rights to both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (though their interest was chiefly in the former work). A deal was struck at last in 1969. In the process, United Artists also secured any rights to a Hobbit film that might still be controlled by William L. Snyder: this avenue was thought less expensive than litigation to decide whether Snyder’s twelve-minute film had been too slight to fulfil his contract and the Hobbit rights had reverted to Tolkien.

In 1970 United Artists asked the director John Boorman to make a film of The Lord of the Rings. With Rospo Pallenberg, Boorman developed a two and one-half-hour script for a live action motion picture; but new management at United Artists chose not to pursue it, and it was eventually abandoned. Janet Brennan Croft has commented on the many liberties Boorman and Pallenberg took with Tolkien’s book when writing the script: ‘Characters, events, locations, themes, all are changed freely with no regard for the author’s original intent. Situations are sexualized or plumbed for psychological kinks that simply do not exist in the book.’ These include the seduction of Frodo by Galadriel, and the marriage of Aragorn and Éowyn. ‘Pipeweed seems equivalent to marijuana in its effects, and the hobbits’ beloved mushrooms are hallucinogenic’ (‘Three Rings for Hollywood: Scripts for The Lord of the Rings by Zimmerman, Boorman, and Beagle’, unpublished paper (2004), p. 4).

In 1976 the Saul Zaentz Company acquired the film rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in a complicated deal also involving the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. Zaentz now commissioned Ralph Bakshi, a sometimes controversial maker of animated feature films, to produce an animated version of The Lord of the Rings. Nominally following a screenplay by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle, Bakshi adapted only The Fellowship of the Ring and part of The Two Towers. He planned a second film to complete the story, as well as one of The Hobbit; but his Lord of the Rings (1978 U.S.; 1979 U.K.), though often praised for its use of rotoscoping, was widely criticized on release as confusing and humourless, and among Tolkien enthusiasts has been derided for errors and inconsistencies. In the wake of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, some have looked back to Bakshi’s effort in comparison and have found it the more faithful to Tolkien’s book (if still wanting in many respects). It has been issued on videocassette and in digital media. At the time of Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings the Saul Zaentz Company created a subsidiary, Tolkien Enterprises (now Middle-earth Enterprises, www.middleearth.com), to manage merchandising rights associated with the film.

Another motion picture adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was made by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens, directed by Jackson and released in three parts by New Line Cinema (2001–3) under licence from Tolkien Enterprises. Filmed in live action but with extensive computer-generated characters and effects, it was widely popular with audiences and critics and won prestigious awards. Tolkien enthusiasts, however, have been sharply, sometimes angrily divided over the work, though the lines are sometimes blurred. Some praise it highly, and accept its departures from its source as part of a legitimate interpretation of Tolkien’s book, or as necessary changes to suit a different medium. Others feel that the film is a travesty as an adaptation and seriously flawed even when considered solely as a motion picture. Points frequently argued for the latter include the diminishing or other alteration of characters in the film relative to their portrayal in Tolkien’s book, emphasis on violent action, the over-use of special effects, and the omission of scenes from the book while incidents invented by the screenwriters have been inserted.

Criticism among Tolkien fans became more mixed as release of the three parts progressed, and has been complicated by extended or re-edited versions on digital media. See further, Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, ed. Janet Brennan Croft (2004); Translating Tolkien: Text and Film, ed. Thomas Honegger (2004); Kristin Thompson, The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood (2007); section 10 (vol. 2) of The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference: 50 Years of The Lord of the Rings, ed. Sarah Wells (2008); and Picturing Tolkien: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy, ed. Janice M. Bogstad and Philip E. Kaveny (2011). Russell W. Dalton concludes in ‘Peter Jackson, Evil, and the Temptations of Film at the Crack of Doom’, in Light beyond All Shadow: Religious Experience in Tolkien’s Work, ed. Paul E. Kerry and Sandra Miesel (2011), that ‘although Tolkien’s climactic ending (at the Black Gate and on Mount Doom) emphasizes Boethian themes of mercy, forgiveness, and providence, the features on the Extended Edition DVD reveal that Jackson’s planned changes served to minimize these themes and instead emphasized Manichaean motifs, with both Aragorn and Frodo killing their enemies, the evil ones, in hand-to-hand battle’ (p. 178). Even in the theatrical version, both Frodo and Gollum fall while struggling, but Frodo manages to hang on to a ledge.

Heavily promoted, Jackson’s Lord of the Rings helped to increase sales of Tolkien’s works to extraordinary levels. Some who had not read the book chose to do so before seeing the first part of the film, so as not to spoil their first reading with images from a cinematic treatment. It is impossible to determine if those who read the book after seeing one or more of the films were able while reading to divorce their mental picture of characters and landscapes, not to say of events which do not appear in Tolkien’s text, from the adaptation; nor can it be known how many new readers became enthusiasts of Tolkien’s book rather than only devotees of the film. Numerous books about Tolkien were published to capitalize on the film’s publicity: many were rushed into print, and some occasionally confused the film with its literary source (as indeed continues to occur from time to time in discussions of the book).

The success of Peter Jackson’s adaptation has inspired fans to create their own films set in the world of The Lord of the Rings, made on very small budgets and primarily or wholly for streaming online. The most notable of these, for their level of cinematic quality, are Born of Hope: The Ring of Barahir (2009), produced and directed by Kate Madison and written chiefly by Paula DiSante (as Alex K. Aldridge); and The Hunt for Gollum (2009), produced, directed, and chiefly written by Chris Bouchard. Both are ‘unofficial prequels’ to The Lord of the Rings, based on material in the Appendices to Tolkien’s work. Because such films are derivative of Tolkien’s writings or of the New Line adaptations, or both, their producers have had to contend with questions as to their status under copyright law, and some ‘fan-produced’ films have not been allowed to proceed due to rights issues. See further, Maria Alberto, ‘“The Effort to Translate”: Fan Film Culture and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien’, Journal of Tolkien Research 3, no. 3 (2016), article 2.

In 2012–14 New Line Cinema released a second trilogy directed by Peter Jackson: The Hobbit, with the three films subtitled An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, and The Battle of the Five Armies. The screenplays were written by Jackson with Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro; the latter was also intended to direct, but withdrew due to schedule conflicts. Although Jackson’s Hobbit was financially successful, response to the films was less positive than it had been for Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. A frequent complaint was that Tolkien’s comparatively brief children’s book did not lend itself to a cinematic work as long as that based on The Lord of the Rings (which is at least a very long story). To expand their source material to three films (originally intended as two), the filmmakers included elements from the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings which take place ‘off-stage’ during the events of The Hobbit, such as the assault of the White Council on Dol Guldur, and added events and characters not conceived by Tolkien, such as a female elf, Tauriel. To the contrary, the filmmakers have argued, such changes from the book were needed for purposes of narrative and drama; and it is useful to think of Jackson’s Hobbit less as an adaptation of Tolkien’s original and more as a prequel to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, which has a similar appearance and tone. For The Hobbit too, extended versions of the films were released on digital media.

TELEVISION ADAPTATIONS

An animated film based on The Hobbit, adapted by Romeo Muller and produced by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass, was first broadcast on American television in 1977. It is largely faithful to the book though the action is compressed, the dialogue minimized, and music introduced. Sketches and finished paintings for the film were used to illustrate an edition of The Hobbit, first published by Harry N. Abrams, New York in the same year.

An animated film by the same writer and producers based on The Return of the King was first shown on American television in 1980. Rankin-Bass maintained that the third part of The Lord of the Rings had fallen into the public domain in the United States, and therefore a film of that part could be undertaken without the consent of the Saul Zaentz Company or the Tolkien Estate. The latter parties disagreed, but an amicable settlement was reached. Lacking the first two parts of The Lord of the Rings to lead into its events, the Rankin-Bass Return of the King resorted to awkward narration and flashbacks to fill the gaps. Although much of Tolkien’s dialogue was used, greater liberties were taken with his story compared with the Rankin-Bass Hobbit: Legolas and Gimli are omitted, Aragorn is not introduced until he arrives at the siege of Minas Tirith, and both Merry and Pippin are present on the field of battle with the Rohirrim.

Both Rankin-Bass Tolkien films were aimed at children, with cartoonish character design and the use of music to explain and advance the plot, notably by American folk singer Glenn Yarborough as ‘The Balladeer’ (in The Hobbit) and ‘The Minstrel’ (in The Return of the King). Older fans have taken issue with the acting (largely with American accents) and, especially in The Return of the King, with dialogue out of keeping with Tolkien’s original (‘Denethor’s gone looney’). The Rankin-Bass films have been made available on commercial media in North America.

An adaptation of The Hobbit in ten parts by Roger Singleton-Turner, with music by Alan Roper, was performed in 1979 on the BBC television series Jackanory by Bernard Cribbins, Maurice Denham, David Wood, and Jan Francis. The first three actors appeared in character as Bilbo, Gandalf, and (doubling) Thorin and Gollum, while the fourth served as narrator.

ADAPTATIONS NOT IN ENGLISH

Adaptations of Tolkien’s work in languages other than English have included stage productions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in Finland; The Lord of the Rings read on German radio by a full cast; theatrical dramatizations of Leaf by Niggle and Farmer Giles of Ham in the Netherlands and Sweden respectively; a Russian live-action television film based on The Hobbit, Skazochnoye Puteshestviya Mistera Bilbo Begginsa Khobbita (‘The Fabulous Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit’); and a Russian animated film of *Mr. Bliss based on Tolkien’s drawings.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Poem. The first of two published versions appeared in the Oxford Magazine for 15 February 1934, pp. 464–5. Tolkien later revised the poem slightly for the collection *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), pp. 11–16. The Oxford Magazine version was reprinted in Reader’s Companion, pp. 124–7 (the first edition mistakenly omitted the fifth verse), and in the expanded edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014), pp. 123–30.

SYNOPSIS

In both versions of the poem Tom Bombadil is ‘a merry fellow’ with a long beard, a bright blue jacket, yellow boots, and an old hat with a feather. On sunny days he wanders carefree in the meadows or sits ‘by the waterside for hours upon hours’. When he is happy he sings ‘like a starling’, ‘Hey! come, derry-dol, merry-dol, my darling!’ The poem relates his encounters with Goldberry, ‘the Riverwoman’s daughter’ who playfully pulls him into the water; Willow-man (Old Man Willow), a malevolent tree that traps him in a crack in its bole; the Badgerfolk, who mean to hold him forever in their tunnels; and Barrow-wight who threatens to take him ‘under the earth’ and make him ‘pale and cold’. Tom dismisses them all: he is ‘a clever fellow’ whom ‘none ever caught’. But in the final stanzas he himself catches Goldberry, and they have ‘a merry wedding’.

HISTORY

Tolkien based at least the flamboyant clothing of the character on a Dutch doll (a toy made of jointed wooden pegs) which belonged to one or more of his children (according to Biography it was owned by his second son, *Michael) and was given the name ‘Tom Bombadil’. In the 1920s Tolkien told stories about Tom to his children, but either he did not write them down or only one very brief, perhaps abandoned tale survives in Tolkien’s papers. Only three paragraphs before the manuscript fails, the story is set in Britain ‘in the days of King Bonhedig’ (Welsh bonheddig ‘noble’) long before the time of *Arthur, ‘Tombombadil’ is ‘one [of] the oldest inhabitants of the kingdom’, ‘four foot high in his boots’, with a long beard, ‘keen and bright’ eyes, and a ‘deep and melodious’ voice. As in the later poems, ‘he wore a tall hat with a blue feather’, a blue jacket, and yellow boots. The prose fragment was published in the 2014 edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book, pp. 277–8.

Tolkien seems to have composed, or at least begun, the Oxford Magazine poem around 1931, according to the date on a fine manuscript of part the work written by Tolkien in Tengwar (*Writing systems). See reproductions in *Pictures, no. 48, and in Parma Eldalamberon 20 (2012), pp. 126–7.

In a letter of 16 December 1937 to his publisher *Stanley Unwin, having been asked for a sequel to *The Hobbit, Tolkien suggested instead a story in which Tom Bombadil was the hero. ‘Or is he, as I suspect,’ Tolkien asked, ‘fully enshrined in the enclosed verses [The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in the Oxford Magazine]? Still I could enlarge the portrait’ (Letters, p. 26). As he had for The Hobbit, Unwin gave the poem to his young son *Rayner, who concluded that although it would make a good story, a better one would be that of Bullroarer Took, the hero of the Battle of the Green Fields mentioned in The Hobbit, chapter 1. ‘This story could be a continuation of The Hobbit, for Bilbo could tell it to Gandalf and Balin in his hobbit hole when they visited him [as told at the end of that book]’ (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins).

So Stanley Unwin reported, quoting Rayner’s review, in a letter of 20 December (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). By then, however, Tolkien had written to C.A. Furth at George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers) that he had begun after all a new story about Hobbits; but he did not forget The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Tom and Goldberry, Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight, and incidents and features of the poem reappear or are echoed in *The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien ‘wanted an “adventure” on the way’, as he wrote to in a letter to Peter Hastings in September 1954 (Letters, p. 192) – that is, an adventure for the four hobbits in The Lord of the Rings as they travelled east from Hobbiton – and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, though independently conceived, was at hand for inspiration.

Tom was now described in greater detail, and defined in part by his response to Sauron’s Ring: alone among the characters in The Lord of the Rings he is unaffected by the One Ring, and does not desire it. But his precise nature is not wholly explained. When Frodo asks Goldberry ‘who is Tom Bombadil’ she replies, at most, that Tom ‘is the Master of wood, water, and hill’ (bk. I, ch. 7). At the end of The Lord of the Rings he remains an enigma – intentionally so (see Letters, p. 174). Some readers, however, have refused to accept this state, and have written widely about Tom’s origin and meaning, in particular his place in the cosmology of The Lord of the Rings and *‘The Silmarillion’.

In a letter to Stanley Unwin of 16 December 1937 Tolkien described Tom as ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’ (Letters, p. 26). Later he wrote to Peter Hastings:

I don’t think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient [in The Lord of the Rings]. … I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out. I do not mean him to be an *allegory – or I should not have given him so particular, individual, and ridiculous a name – but ‘allegory’ is the only mode of exhibiting certain functions: he is then an ‘allegory’, or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture. … Also T[om] B[ombadil] exhibits another point in his attitude to the Ring, and its failure to affect him. [September 1954, Letters, p. 192]

In 1961–2 Tolkien slightly revised The Adventures of Tom Bombadil for publication in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962). Tom was now said to live in the valley of the Withywindle, in the world of The Lord of the Rings. In his preface to the 1962 volume, writing as the ‘editor’ of the Hobbits’ ‘Red Book of Westmarch’, Tolkien described the revised Adventures of Tom Bombadil as ‘made up of various hobbit-versions of legends concerning Bombadil’. Also in that collection is a sequel, *Bombadil Goes Boating. A third Bombadil poem, *Once upon a Time, was published in 1965.

Tolkien recorded the revised Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 1967 for the album Poems and Songs of Middle Earth (1967; first reissued in 2001 as part of The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection; see *Recordings).

On the development of the Tom Bombadil episode in The Lord of the Rings, see Christopher Tolkien, *The Return of the Shadow, especially ch. 5–7. On Tom Bombadil as a Dutch doll, see Patricia Reynolds, ‘The Real Tom Bombadil’, in Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction (1991). The latter book also contains two other pertinent works, ‘Tom Bombadil and The Lord of the Rings’ by Christina Scull and ‘The Natures of Tom Bombadil: A Summary’ by Charles E. Noad; and see also Gene Hargrove, ‘Who Is Tom Bombadil’, Mythlore 13, no. 1, whole no. 47 (Autumn 1986), and Jeffrey Stevenson, ‘T.B. or Not T.B.: That Is the Question’, Amon Hen 196 (November 2005). See also Reader’s Companion, pp. 124 ff, and our introduction and notes to the 2014 Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book. Poetry collection, first published in Great Britain by George Allen & Unwin, London, in November 1962, and in the United States by the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, in October 1963. See further, Descriptive Bibliography A6.

HISTORY

Tolkien’s Aunt *Jane Neave wrote to him near the beginning of October 1961 to ask ‘if you wouldn’t get out a small book with Tom Bombadil at the heart of it, the sort of size of book that we old ’uns can afford to buy for Christmas presents’ (quoted in Biography, p. 244). Tom Bombadil had featured in a poem, *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, published in 1934, and in Book I of *The Lord of the Rings (1954). Tolkien replied that although he did not feel inclined to write any more about that character, the poem ‘might make a pretty booklet of the kind you would like if each verse could be illustrated by *Pauline Baynes’ (4 October 1961, Letters, p. 308). He had in mind a book with little text and many pictures in a small format, like The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter which would be an ‘interim amusement’ until *The Silmarillion could be completed. His publisher, *Rayner Unwin, suggested instead that the poem be fleshed out with other ‘occasional verses’, ‘to make a [more substantial] book and not a pamphlet’ (letters, 11 October and 2 November 1961, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins).

Between November 1961 and April 1962 Tolkien sifted through the poems he had written to date, even very early works such as *The Trees of Kortirion and possibly You & Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (*The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva), looking for any that could be reprinted or revised. To Jane Neave he wrote that he had enjoyed himself very much ‘digging out these old half-forgotten things and rubbing them up. All the more because there are other and duller things that I ought to have been doing’ (22 November 1961, Letters, p. 309). Writing to Rayner Unwin, however, he regretted that there were few among his verses (he felt) that were compatible with The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and few that fit well even with each other. He had particular misgivings about ‘the vaguer, more subjective and least successful piece labelled *The Sea-Bell’ (letter to Rayner Unwin, 8 December 1961, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). By 12 April 1962, as he told his publisher, he ‘lost all confidence’ in the poems under consideration,

and all judgement, and unless Pauline Baynes can be inspired by them, I cannot see them making a ‘book’. I do not see why she should be inspired, though I fervently hope that she will be. Some of the things may be good in their way, and all of them privately amuse me; but elderly hobbits are easily pleased.

The various items … do not really ‘collect’. The only possible link is the fiction that they come from the Shire from about the period of The Lord of the Rings. But that fits some uneasily. I have done a good deal of work, trying to make them fit better: if not much to their good, I hope not to their serious detriment. [Letters, pp. 314–15]

He now made an arrangement of sixteen poems: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; *Bombadil Goes Boating; *Errantry; *Princess Mee; *The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late; *The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon; *The Stone Troll; *Perry-the-Winkle; *The Mewlips; *Oliphaunt; *Cat; *Fastitocalon; *Shadow-Bride; *The Hoard; *The Sea-Bell; and *The Last Ship. (Thus the order of contents in the first printing of the Allen & Unwin edition; see below.) Most were revised versions of earlier works, three (The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late, Oliphaunt, and The Stone Troll) were reprinted from The Lord of the Rings, one (Cat) had been written by Tolkien a few years earlier to amuse his granddaughter Joanna (see *Michael Tolkien), and one (Bombadil Goes Boating) was written for the collection, based on earlier workings.

To these Tolkien added a preface, an extension of the fiction he had adopted in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in which he poses as the editor of Hobbit manuscripts, including the ‘Red Book of Westmarch’: ‘The present selection is taken from the older pieces [in the Red Book], mainly concerned with legends and jests of the Shire at the end of the Third Age, that appear to have been made by Hobbits, especially by Bilbo [Baggins] and his friends, or their immediate descendants’ (1962 edn., p. 7). The fiction is extended even to the dust-jacket of the book, which claims that ‘during his renewed study of the “Red Book”, the editor of The Lord of the Rings became interested in verses that are to be found in it, apart from those included in the various tales and legends: pieces written out on loose leaves, crowded into blank spaces, or scrawled in margins’.

Pauline Baynes, who had impressed Tolkien with her pictures for *Farmer Giles of Ham, agreed to illustrate his new book. He advised her that the poems ‘were conceived as a series of very definite, clear and precise, pictures – fantastical, or nonsensical perhaps, but not dreamlike! And I thought of you, because you seem able to produce wonderful pictures with a touch of ‘fantasy’, but primarily bright and clear visions of things that one might really see’ (6 December 1961, Letters, p. 312). He approved of her new art, excepting only her full-page illustration for The Hoard (in which the dragon should have faced the mouth of the cave, the better to defend it) and the orientation of the original binding art in which the figure of Tom Bombadil is placed on the lower rather than the upper cover; these were published nevertheless.

With the second Allen & Unwin printing (and the first Houghton Mifflin printing) Fastitocalon and Cat were reversed in order, so that the first of these would not be bisected by an illustration for the second. The full-page illustration for Cat thus was correctly associated with that poem, but a two-colour ilustration for Fastitocalon was moved to the side of a sheet which (as an economy measure) was not printed in two colours, thereby omitting the orange flames of a campfire.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962) has been reprinted in *The Tolkien Reader (1966), *Poems and Stories (1980), *Tales from the Perilous Realm (1997), and elsewhere. In 1967 Tolkien recorded The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Mewlips, The Hoard, Perry-the-Winkle, The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon, and The Sea-Bell for the album Poems and Songs of Middle Earth (1967). On the same album, Errantry is sung by baritone William Elvin, accompanied on the piano by composer *Donald Swann. Tolkien also recorded Errantry and Princess Mee, which, however, were first issued only in 2001 as part of The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection (incorporating Poems and Songs of Middle Earth; see *Recordings).

An expanded edition, first published by HarperCollins, London, in October 2014, includes the text of the 1962 edition as well as commentary by editors Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, a selection of earlier published versions of the poems, one of the manuscript versions of the previously unpublished poem The Bumpus (precursor of Perry-the-Winkle), and the previously unpublished fragment of a prose story about Tom Bombadil (*‘Tom Bombadil: A Prose Fragment’). The volume also reprints the later Tom Bombadil poem *Once upon a Time, which is related to *An Evening in Tavrobel. The 1962 illustrations by Pauline Baynes are reprinted also, together with later art by Baynes for the collection as published in Poems and Stories, and calligraphic treatments by Tolkien of portions of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Errantry.

CRITICISM

With only a few exceptions, such as the anonymous critic in Junior Bookshelf (March 1963) who called it ‘a pathetic pip-squeak of a book’, reviewers approved of the Adventures of Tom Bombadil collection and found much to praise. Anthony Thwaite in ‘Hobbitry’ (The Listener, 22 November 1962, p. 831), for instance, described Tolkien’s poems as ‘by turns gay, pratling, melancholy, nonsensical, mysterious. And what is most exciting and attractive about them is their superb technical skill.’ And Alfred Leo Duggan, the unsigned author of ‘Middle Earth Verse’ in the Times Literary Supplement for 23 November 1962, wrote that ‘Tolkien is in fact a wordsmith, an ingenious versifier, rather than a discoverer of new insights. … Tom Bombadil himself is shown as a queer fellow, a little comical; but with something of the supernatural about him.’ The rhymes ‘invoke a mood rather than relate an anecdote. … These are clever verses, though they do not grip a reader as did all the tales of hobbits and elves [*The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings]’ (p. 892).

On 28 November 1962 Tolkien wrote to *Stanley Unwin that he had seen the reviews in The Listener and the Times Literary Supplement and ‘was agreeably surprised: I expected remarks far more snooty and patronizing. Also I was rather pleased, since it seemed that the reviewers had both started out not wanting to be amused, but had failed to maintain their Victorian dignity intact’ (Letters, p. 322). On 19 December 1962 he remarked to his son *Michael that sales of Tom Bombadil were so good that Allen & Unwin had made him an advance, and that, ‘even on a minute initial royalty, means more than is at all usual for anyone but [popular poet John] Betjeman to make on verse!’ (Letters, p. 322).

Ae Adar Nín. Partial translation by Tolkien into Sindarin (*Languages, Invented) of the Lord’s Prayer, edited with notes and analysis by Bill Welden, published in Vinyar Tengwar 44 (June 2002), pp. 21–30, 38.

Tolkien wrote Ae Adar Nín during the 1950s on the verso of a postcard containing one of his Quenya (*Languages, Invented) translations of the Lord’s Prayer (*‘Words of Joy’). The manuscript is reproduced on p. 23 of the Vinyar Tengwar article.

Ælfwine of England see Eriol and Ælfwine

Ainulindalë. The first component of *The Silmarillion (1977), pp. 15–22, and the final version of Tolkien’s tale of Creation, first told in The Music of the Ainur in *The Book of Lost Tales.

SYNOPSIS

Tolkien described The Music of the Ainur as

a cosmogonical myth … defining the relation of The One, the transcendental Creator, to the Valar, the ‘Powers’, the angelical First-created, and their part in ordering and carrying out the Primeval Design. It was also told how it came about that Eru, the One, made an addition to the Design: introducing the themes of the Eruhîn, the Children of God, The First-born (Elves) and the Successors (Men), whom the Valar were forbidden to try and dominate by fear or force. [letter to Christopher Bretherton, 16 July 1964, Letters, p. 345]

The tale is told to Eriol the mariner (*Eriol and Ælfwine) by Rúmil in the garden of the Cottage of Lost Play. Ilúvatar (Eru) describes to the Ainur (the First-created), whom he has sung into being, a design for the creation of a world and its history, and invites them to embellish it through their own music. They begin splendidly, with ‘the harpists, and the lutanists, the flautists and the pipers, the organs and the countless choirs of the Ainur’ fashioning ‘the theme of Ilúvatar into great music; and a sound arose of mighty melodies changing and interchanging, mingling and dissolving amid the thunder of harmonies greater than the roar of the great seas …’ (*The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 53). But one of the greatest of the Ainur, Melko, introduces ideas which destroy the harmony of the Music.

Twice Ilúvatar begins new themes, and twice Melko brings about discord. Ilúvatar stops the Music and informs the Ainur that he has given shape and reality to all that they played and sang, and that even the discords introduced by Melko will in the end add to Ilúvatar’s glory. Ilúvatar alone is responsible for the theme which introduces Elves and Men, ‘nor, for they comprehended not fully when Ilúvatar first propounded their being, did any of the Ainur dare in their music to add anything to their fashion; and these races are for that reason named rightly the Children of Ilúvatar’ (p. 57).

Ilúvatar then shows the Ainur the world they have helped to create, set in the void, and tells them: ‘even now the world unfolds and its history begins as did my theme in your hands. Each one herein will find contained within the design that is mine the adornments and embellishments that he himself devised. … One thing only have I added, the fire that giveth Life and Reality’ (p. 55).

As the Ainur watch the world they have a vision of the beginning of its history, and many become so enthralled that they seek and are granted permission to dwell in the world, to guard its beauties and to instruct the Children. Among those who choose to do so, whom the Elves call the Valar, are Manwë and his spouse Varda, Aulë and Ulmo, and even Melko, who pretends that he wants to heal the ills he introduced into the Music, but secretly plans to seize power from the other Ainur and to make war on the Children. From their participation in the Music and their vision of the beginning of the world’s history, the Valar know much, but not all of the future. In telling this story to Eriol, Rúmil ends by reporting words concerning Elves and Men spoken by Ilúvatar after the departure of the Valar (see *‘Of the Beginning of Days’, in which this material appears in The Silmarillion).

HISTORY

The Creation is not mentioned in the *Sketch of the Mythology (c. 1926); it is summarized in one paragraph in the *Quenta Noldorinwa (c. 1930), and in one sentence in both the ‘earliest’ and ‘later’ *Annals of Valinor (early and mid-1930s respectively). But at some time in the mid-1930s, with The Music of the Ainur before him, Tolkien made a draft, followed by a fair copy, of a new version as a separate work with the title Ainulindalë (Quenya ‘music of the Ainur’). For this he made extensive changes in word and phrase, and some additions, such as that the Valar took the shape and form of the Children, but the story remained close to that in The Music of the Ainur. This new version was published in *The Lost Road and Other Writings, presented as if a transcription or translation of a document written by Rúmil of Tûn.

In 1946 Tolkien made a draft (now lost) and then a typescript of a radical new version of the Ainulindalë. In this Ilúvatar shows the Ainur only a vision of what their music had created, but aware of their desire for what they see he speaks, and by his words gives being to their vision. In earlier versions the Valar enter the world together and find it fully formed by the Music; now Melkor arrives before the others, who find the world unshaped and labour in it for ages to accomplish their vision. An account of the first conflicts in Arda between Melkor and the other Valar, which had appeared in a later part of The Book of Lost Tales, was now placed in the Ainulindalë (see ‘Of the Beginning of Days’). Another significant change was to the cosmology: unlike the earlier version, the Sun exists from the beginning and the Moon is made by Morgoth from a piece of the Earth, from which he observes what happens below until he is cast out by the Valar. *Christopher Tolkien has called this a ‘de-mythologizing’ of the Sun and Moon ‘by removal from all association with the Two Trees’ (again see *‘Of the Beginning of Days’), and comments that ‘it seems strange indeed that my father was prepared to conceive of the Moon – the Moon, that cherishes the memory of the Elves … – as a dead and blasted survival of the hatred of Melkor, however beautiful its light’ (*Morgoth’s Ring, p. 43). Also the world (now called Arda) inhabited by the Valar and the Children was now only part of a much greater Creation.

By this time Tolkien had begun to doubt if his invented cosmology should be contrary to scientific reality. In summer 1948 he lent to *Katharine Farrer the mid-1930s manuscript of the Ainulindalë, on which he wrote ‘Flat World Version’, and the 1946 typescript, on which he wrote ‘Round World Version’. In a letter written to Tolkien probably in October 1948, Mrs Farrer said that she preferred the ‘Flat World’ version, and between then and 1951 Tolkien extensively revised that manuscript and wrote much new material on blank versos. Although this was again a ‘Flat World’, without the Sun in existence from the beginning, he incorporated with revision much of the 1946 text, including the Ainur being shown a vision and not reality and Arda only a small part of Creation, and he removed Melkor’s earlier arrival in Arda and his making of the Moon. An added ‘title-page’ changed the work’s history: it was now ‘written by Rúmil of Túna and was told to Ælfwine in Eressëa (as he records) by Pengoloð the Sage’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 8).

From this now complex document Tolkien wrote a beautiful manuscript with illuminated capitals. It begins by following its predecessor closely, but diverges more in its later parts; and Tolkien introduces the word Ea to mean the whole of Creation, the universe which Ilúvatar brings into reality with the words ‘Ea! Let these things Be!’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 31). The 1946 and later texts were published, in whole or in part, in Morgoth’s Ring (1993).

The Ainulindalë in The Silmarillion is based on this final manuscript, incorporating emendations made both to it and to a later amanuensis typescript, and is presented as straightforward narrative without reference to ‘ancient sources’. Some of the material from the 1951 Ainulindalë was incorporated in ‘Of the Beginning of Days’, the first chapter of the *‘Quenta Silmarillion’: the account of the early conflicts in Arda and of the establishment of the Valar in Valinor, and in the final paragraphs, the words of Ilúvatar concerning Elves and Men, and comments on their differing fates. Two editorial changes made to the published Ainulindalë by Christopher Tolkien are noted by him in The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 164, note 9, and in Morgoth’s Ring, p. 40.

Although Tolkien wrote no later version of the Ainulindalë, towards the end of the 1950s he began again to consider whether myth and science could be reconciled. In one of several texts he wrote that in ‘the oldest forms of the mythology’ which were ‘intended to be no more than another primitive mythology … it was consequentially a “Flat Earth” cosmogony (much easier to manage anyway): the Matter of *Númenor had not been devised.’ He had considered whether the best solution was to consider the earlier cosmology as representing confused and incorrect Mannish tradition, rather than truth known by the Elves:

I was inclined to adhere to the Flat Earth and the astronomically absurd business of the making of the Sun and the Moon. But you can make up stories of that kind when you live among people who have the same general background of imagination, when the Sun ‘really’ rises in the East and goes down in the West, etc. When however (no matter how little most people know or think about astronomy) it is the general belief that we live upon a ‘spherical’ island in ‘Space’ you cannot do this any more. [Morgoth’s Ring, p. 370]

CRITICISM

Several critics have remarked on the important role of *music in the Ainulindalë as in other Creation myths. In ‘The “Music of the Spheres”: Relationships between Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and Medieval Cosmological and Religious Theory’ in Tolkien the Medievalist (2003), Bradford Lee Eden writes:

As a medievalist, Tolkien knew and recognized the importance of music as an anthropomorphic reality and creational material in many mythologies. The medieval concept of the ‘music of the spheres’ was grounded in ancient and classical philosophy, discussed and theorized by Plato and Aristotle, through the early Christian writers and the third-century pagan philosopher Plotinus, up to the eventual standardization by Boethius in the early sixth century … as a classicist and medievalist, the ‘music of the spheres’ concept would have been deeply ingrained in his educational training, and his Catholic background would also have influenced his thought and creative processes. [p. 181]

Eden also finds recalled in the Ainulindalë ‘the medieval depiction of the various hierarchies of angels singing continuously around the throne of God’ (p. 185).

Other commentators have suggested that Tolkien’s Creation myth reflects ideas found in the writings of St Augustine. In ‘Augustine and the Ainulindalë’, Mythlore 21, no. 1, whole no. 79 (Summer 1995), John Houghton compares the Ainulindalë with Augustine’s interpretations of Genesis:

This is, I submit, an Augustinian account of creation. … In both cases, God first creates the angels and then reveals to them the further elements of creation; the angels’ own knowledge reflects ideas in the divine mind. In both cases, as well, after the revelation, God gives real existence to what the angels have perceived, upholding that existence in the void; yet that real existence has only the undeveloped potential of what it will become in the unfolding of time, and God reserves to God’s self the introduction of elements unanticipated in the basic design.

Granted these similarities, however, the two schemata do contrast in two ways. First is the fact that the predominant musical images function in the Ainulindalë in the way that speech and light, taken together as intellectual illumination do in Augustine’s reading of Genesis. Second is the way the Ainur act as sub-creators, developing the themes proposed to them by Eru Ilúvatar, whereas Augustine focuses on God as the sole creator. [p. 7]

Jonathan McIntosh in ‘Ainulindalë: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of the Music’, in Music in Middle-earth, ed. Heidi Steimel and Friedhelm Schneidewind (2010), rejects earlier interpretations of the Ainulindalë, especially, in his opinion, ‘the marked tendency in the Tolkien literature to read his creation-drama and the Music of the Ainur in particular in terms of the emanationist logic of the Neoplatonic philosophy. On this understanding, later stages of the creation-process and world-history are seen as metaphysically inferior to, and thus a “tragic” falling away from the supposedly more authentic and pure reality represented by the primeval Music.’ Instead, he argues that ‘the Ainur’s Music – along with the oft neglected … image … [of] the Vision of the Ainur – give mythic expression to the much more positive, comic, or rather “eucatastrophic” metaphysics of creation Tolkien inherited and adapted from his greater Catholic theological forbear, St. Thomas Aquinas’ (p. 53).

In The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision behind The Lord of the Rings (2005) Stratford Caldecott asserts that ‘Tolkien drew upon many legends that were known to him, and upon the Jewish and Christian traditions that he believed to be true. He was trying to write an account that would be complementary to, while not contradicting, the Genesis story. … For Tolkien, as a Catholic, God is the Creator of the World ex nihilo (“out of nothing”)’ (p. 71).

Anne C. Petty in her Tolkien in the Land of Heroes: Discovering the Human Spirit (2003) draws attention to the voice of the narrator of the Ainulindalë: ‘Anyone looking for biblical parallels within The Silmarillion should make note of the highly formal, King James-style diction.’ She also points out that this Creation myth ‘is where the seeds of discord are first sown and where all the difficulties, conflicts, sorrows, and heroic efforts that infuse Tolkien’s fantasy originate. Here’s the starting point for the main theme of The Fall, as well as the first use of the signature imagery of music and water, light and shadow, that Tolkien used to carry this theme through all three of his major works’ (p. 39). Tolkien himself commented in a draft letter to Rhona Beare, written in October 1968, concerning his placement of Melkor’s rebellion during Creation:

I suppose a difference between this Myth and what may be perhaps called Christian mythology is this. In the latter the Fall of Man is subsequent to and a consequence (though not a necessary consequence) of the ‘Fall of the Angels’: a rebellion of created free-will at a higher level than Man; but it is not clearly held (and in many versions is not held at all) that this affected the ‘World’ in its nature: evil was brought in from outside, by Satan. In this Myth the rebellion of created free-will precedes creation of the World (Eä); and Eä has in it, subcreatively introduced, evil, rebellions, discordant elements of its own nature already when the Let it Be was spoken. The Fall or corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable. Trees may ‘go bad’ as in the Old Forest; Elves may turn into Orcs, and if this required the special perversive malice of Morgoth, still Elves themselves could do evil deeds. Even the ‘good’ Valar as inhabiting the World could at least err; as the Great Valar did in their dealings with the Elves; or as the lesser of their kind (as the Istari or wizards) could in various ways become self-seeking. [Letters, pp. 286–7]

More expansively, Craig Bernthal states in Tolkien’s Sacramental Vision: Discerning the Holy in Middle Earth (2014):

This is Tolkien’s mythopoeic variation on John 1:1–5, the Music that was in the beginning. It is a retelling of and commentary on key creation and wisdom texts. It offers a short mythic explanation of the origin of free will and its relation to the fixed frame of God’s order. It identifies the origin of evil as an expression of the free will that God allows. Significantly, Tolkien associates the first sin with the act of creation. Melkor’s frustrated desire to create with the power of God makes him an envious destroyer – or attempted destroyer – of God’s creation. Ilúvatar’s gift of sub-creation, because it entails a powerful grant of freedom, has an equally powerful potential to be abused, and it is the tendency of sub-creation to go wrong, because the sub-creator can grow envious of the works of others and fall idolatrously in love with his own. This misdirected love becomes the archetypal pattern of sin in Middle-earth. In opposition, Tolkien sets an equally archetypal pattern of sacrifice and redemption. Tolkien’s mythic theodicy makes a promise, at least, that all evil will produce even greater glory and goodness. …

Tolkien was aware that his creation myth differed from the Jewish and Christian versions in one important aspect – evil is built into the world from the beginning rather than brought in, by Satan, from outside. … The difference this makes for Tolkien’s creation is that the built-in darkness of the world gives it more the flavor of Northern myth, and yet this darkness is just as much a part of the Bible, though it begins in Eden. [pp. 99–101]

Brian Rosebury in Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (2003) finds the Ainulindalë

a success both in literary and philosophical terms. Its fundamental mythical conception, the world as a Great Music made visible, its history a fulfilment of creative purposes which proceed both directly from God and mediately from him, through the sub-creativity of created beings, dates from as early as 1918–20 … it is the key to much else in Tolkien’s religious, moral and aesthetic vision. And its prose is at once appropriately ‘scriptural’ and distinctive of Tolkien. [p. 107]

He points out the similarities to Christian myth with Ilúvatar, the Ainur, and Melkor in place of God, the angels, and Lucifer, and notes that ‘the basic Augustinian apparatus in which nothing is created evil, but evil arises from the free will of created beings, is in place’. He also discusses differences mainly arising because the Creation ‘is carried out partly through intermediaries’ (p. 187).

See also Howard Davis, ‘The Ainulindalë: Music of Creation’ in Mythlore 9, no. 2, whole no. 32 (Summer 1982).

Akallabêth: The Downfall of Númenor. The penultimate component of *The Silmarillion (1977), pp. 259–82, and the last of three accounts of the island realm of *Númenor (see entry for summary) and its destruction at the end of the Second Age.

HISTORY

Tolkien had previously told this story in *The Fall of Númenor (c. 1936) and *The Drowning of Anadûnê (first part of 1946). Probably in the autumn of 1948 he wrote a new version, drawing on the earlier accounts; its original title was The Fall of Númenor, later changed to The Downfall of Númenor, but Tolkien always referred to it as the Akallabêth (‘the downfallen’ in the Númenórean language Adûnaic).

Although he apparently wrote the Akallabêth in parallel with the Appendices of *The Lord of the Rings, he seems to have intended that the history of Númenor and the Second Age should be part of *‘The Silmarillion’. On 7 April 1948 he referred in a letter to *Hugh Brogan to ‘The Silmarillion, which is virtually a history of the Eldalië (or Elves …) from their rise to the Last Alliance, and the first temporary overthrow of Sauron (the Necromancer); that would bring you nearly down to the period of “The Hobbit”’ (Letters, p. 129). He still hoped to publish The Silmarillion, and indeed felt, as he wrote to *Stanley Unwin on 24 February 1950, that its publication was necessary to make The Lord of the Rings ‘fully intelligible’ (Letters, p. 137).

Before he began work on the Akallabêth Tolkien made an outline history of Númenor, with rough dates for the thirteen kings (most of them not named) who followed after the death of Elros in Second Age 460, and for significant events. He then produced a manuscript of twenty-three pages, rewriting and replacing several of them in the process, emended these, and made a typed copy. Probably in 1951 he took up and emended the typescript, altered some names and the sequence of some events, rewrote certain passages, and inserted a lengthy rider with more details of the history of the last Númenórean kings, in particular their growing hostility to the Eldar and the Valar and to the Faithful. *Christopher Tolkien notes in detail in *Sauron Defeated (1992, pp. 375–87) and *The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996, ch. 5) how this version of the Akallabêth derives from both The Fall of Númenor and The Drowning of Anadûnê. He also calculates that from ‘the sailing to Anadûnê … no less than three-fifths of the precise wording of [the second version of the Drowning] was preserved in the Akallabêth’, but from ‘the same point … only three-eighths of the latter (again, in precisely the same wording) are present in [the second version of the Drowning]’ (Sauron Defeated, p. 376).

The emended typescript text, with a few corrections added to a later amanuensis typescript, was published in The Silmarillion as the Akallabêth. When dealing with the Akallabêth in The Peoples of Middle-earth Christopher Tolkien noted only the differences between the published version and the earlier versions, and explained changes he made to the text for publication in The Silmarillion, some of which he came to regret. Earlier he noted other changes in the published text in *Unfinished Tales (1980), pp. 226–7.

For comment and criticism, see *Númenor.

Alcar mi Tarmenel na Erun. Translations of the opening verse of the Gloria (Luke 2:14) into Quenya (*Languages, Invented), edited with notes and analysis by Arden R. Smith, published in Vinyar Tengwar 44 (June 2002), pp. 31–7. Five texts are extant, dating evidently from the mid-1960s.

Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner’s Wife. Story, published with commentary and notes in *Unfinished Tales (1980), pp. 173–217.

SYNOPSIS

Aldarion, son of Tar-Meneldur, fifth king of the island of *Númenor, has a great love for the sea, and from the age of twenty-five makes many voyages to Middle-earth. He forms a Guild of Venturers, and establishes in Middle-earth the haven of Vinyalondë. He is welcomed by Gil-galad, the last High King of the Noldorin Elves in Middle-earth, and by Círdan the Shipwright. In time, while in Númenor Aldarion comes to live on board ship and to spend much of his time improving harbours, overseeing the building of ships, and planting and tending trees to provide timber for ships. But ‘Tar-Meneldur looked coldly on the enterprises of his son, and cared not to hear the tale of his journeys, believing that he sowed the seeds of restlessness and the desire of other lands to hold’ (Unfinished Tales, p. 176). At last the king commands his son to stay in Númenor for a while, and in Second Age 800 proclaims him the King’s Heir. At a feast of celebration Aldarion meets Erendis: she is immediately attracted, and enters the queen’s household.

After only six years Aldarion resumes his voyages, dismissing his father’s plea that ‘the need of the King’s house is for a man who knows and loves this land and people’ (p. 178), and that Aldarion take a wife. Tar-Meneldur becomes wrathful, and forbids his wife and daughters from setting upon Aldarion’s ship the Green Bough of Return, cut from the tree oiolairë; but Erendis takes the bough in the queen’s stead, and Aldarion for the first time looks on her with love. Nevertheless many years pass before he seeks to marry her. He had not wanted to be bound; but now Erendis hesitates, not for lack of love, but unwilling to share Aldarion with the Sea. Her mother believes that it is not so much ships, the Sea, the winds, or strange lands which appeal to Aldarion, ‘but some heat in his mind, or some dream that pursues him’; to which the narrator of the story adds: ‘And it may be that she struck near the truth; for Aldarion was a man long-sighted, and he looked forward to days when the people would need more room and greater wealth; and whether he himself knew this clearly or no, he dreamed of the glory of Númenor and the power of its kings, and he sought for footholds whence they could step to wider dominion’ (p. 191).

For a while Aldarion neglects the Sea and, wooing Erendis, finds ‘more contentment in those days than in any others of his life, though he did not know it until he looked back long after when old age was upon him’ (p. 182). Eventually he persuades Erendis to be his wife, but is seized again with longing for the Sea. He suggests to Erendis that she sail with him; she refuses, having no desire to leave Númenor and fearing that she will die out of sight of land, but nevertheless places a bough on his ship. Aldarion finds Vinyalondë ruined and men in Middle-earth hostile to Númenóreans, and on his return voyage winds drive his ship into the icy North, where the bough of oiolairë withers.

Despite his absence the love between Aldarion and Erendis remains warm, and they are married at last in Second Age 870. Three years later, their daughter, Ancalimë, is born. But when she is only four Aldarion again sails for Middle-earth, promising not to be away more than two years, contrary to custom that parents stay close to their children when they are very young. Ancalimë never forgets that father put her away firmly when she clung to him at this parting, and this time Erendis does not take or send a bough of oiolairë to Aldarion’s ship. She leaves the home she had shared with him and retires to a house in the midst of Númenor, far from the sea, with only women about her. Aldarion is absent five years, during which time Erendis imparts to her daughter her bitterness against men. On his return Erendis receives Aldarion coldly, and he departs again the next day.

Aldarion brings to his father a letter from Gil-galad, who believes that a growing shadow in the east of Middle-earth is a servant of Morgoth, and seeks help from Númenor when the assault should come. Tar-Meneldur is in doubt what to do, and decides to resign the sceptre to Aldarion. This dismays Erendis, who refuses to leave her home to attend the proclamation of Aldarion as king.

At this point the manuscript ends, and no clear continuation emerges from Tolkien’s notes. Tar-Aldarion as King makes other voyages to Middle-earth. Though his achievements there are transitory, they pave the way for the success of later rulers, and for the aid Tar-Minastir sends to Gil-galad in Second Age 1700, which leads to the temporary defeat of Sauron. But there are also unfortunate consequences. Aldarion’s involvement in Middle-earth sets Númenor on the road leading eventually to its Downfall, and Ancalimë’s character suffers from her upbringing and her parent’s differences. Though she is clever, she is also wilful and malicious, and her own marriage is also unhappy. In Second Age 1075 she becomes the first ruling Queen of Númenor, the rules of succession having been changed. At the same time, Aldarion ordains that heirs to the Kingship should wed only those of the line of Elros, for he had come to believe that the root of his troubles with Erendis had been that she came of a line shorter-lived line than his own. The last mention of Erendis is that in old age in 985 she sought Aldarion, who was expected to return from a voyage, and ‘perished in water’ (p. 212).

HISTORY

Tolkien worked on Aldarion and Erendis probably in 1960: a sketch by him of a Númenórean helmet, with an inscription referring to Aldarion’s Guild of Venturers, is dated ‘March 1960’ (a redrawn version was reproduced on the dust-jacket of the first British and American editions of Unfinished Tales). Tolkien began, but left unfinished, five sometimes contradictory texts, which tended to move, as he wrote, from annalistic plot outlines to full narrative. The fifth text, which extends for some sixty manuscript pages, has the title The Shadow of the Shadow: The Tale of the Mariner’s Wife: and the Tale of Queen Shepherdess. From this a typescript was made, and at some time after January 1965 Tolkien began yet another typescript, filling out the schematic beginning, but abandoned it after only two pages; this has the title Indis i · Kiryamo ‘The Mariner’s Wife’: A Tale of Ancient Númenórë, which Tells of the First Rumour of the Shadow. He made a few notes and wrote some unconnected fragments of text for the unwritten part of the story, mainly concerning Ancalimë in later life, but little more about Aldarion and Erendis. *Christopher Tolkien notes that the work needed a considerable amount of ‘editorial rehandling’ to prepare it for publication; see Unfinished Tales, pp. 7–8, and *The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996), pp. 155, 351.

CRITICISM

The story of the unhappy marriage of Tar-Aldarion, the sixth King of Númenor, and Erendis, and of their daughter Ancalimë, is of great interest, not only for the information it gives of Númenor during the eighth to thirteenth centuries of the Second Age, but also because it is Tolkien’s most detailed study of a human relationship. The tale becomes increasingly sad in its depiction of two people of different interests and temperaments who love each other but cannot live the same life, until eventually love turns to bitterness. Tolkien gives a sympathetic depiction of both sides. (See also *Women.)

In a review of Unfinished Tales Thomas M. Egan wrote that Aldarion and Erendis ‘really illustrates Tolkien’s power as a story-teller’ and

answers his critics who have claimed he is insensitive to women, putting them up as plaster statues without real knowledge of their character and conflicts in the strains of married life. Using the structure of Númenor’s idyllic realm, Tolkien explores the war of the sexes as husband and wife find love from their differing characters, then grow gradually isolated. … Isolation and loneliness for Erendis makes her want to punish her adventuresome husband, and her recorded dialogue strikes a strangely modern tone. The result, as Tolkien probes further, is the tragic hatred which grows until it poisons their daughter, and sets the stage for further marital conflict in the next generation. … [‘Fragments of a World: Tolkien’s Road to Middle-earth’, The Terrier 48, no. 2 (Fall 1983), p. 10]

In another review, Peter S. Beagle called Aldarion and Erendis

a haunting story out of Númenor which tells of a king and queen who loved and damaged one another, and their daughter as well. Moving even in its sketchiness, it is unlike anything else of Tolkien’s that I know, and it nips strangely at the heart. The man understood more than the grandly heroic; he knew something about sorrow, and about possession, whether by hunger or fury or dreams. [‘A Fantasy Feast from Middle-earth’, San Francisco Examiner, 19 October 1980, p. A14]

T.A. Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth compares Erendis’s retreat to the centre of Númenor, and her statement that the bleating of sheep was sweeter to her ears than the mewing of gulls, to the story of ‘Njǫrthr the sea-god and Skathi, daughter of the mountain-giant, in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. Obliged to marry, these two tried taking turns to live in each other’s homes. But the marriage was a failure. …’ Njǫrthr complains: ‘Hateful to me were the mountains, I was there no longer than nine nights; the howling of wolves seemed ugly to me against the song of the swans’. And Skathi ‘replies with a complaint about the noise of the sea-mews’ (2nd edn. 1992, p. 217).

Richard Mathews in ‘The Edges of Reality in Tolkien’s Tale of Aldarion and Erendis’, Mythlore 18, no. 3, whole no. 69 (Summer 1992), discusses how pride and differences in interests and outlook lead step by step to the complete breakdown of the marriage, and describes ‘Tolkien’s refusal to allow the characters of the story to be portrayed in black and white’ as ‘a credit to the sophistication of emotion and mythos he conceives’ (p. 29).

In his ‘Law and Arda’, Tolkien Studies 10 (2012), Douglas C. Kane calls Aldarion and Erendis ‘perhaps Tolkien’s most emotionally nuanced story, a tale of true love initially overcoming tremendous obstacles, only to eventually collapse under the weight of two prideful people with truly irreconcilable differences’. He notes also that the child of Aldarion and Erendis, Ancalimë, the first ruling Queen of Númenor, ‘is described as having disastrous relationships with men, showing that Tolkien was well aware of how dysfunctional relationships tend to propagate themselves’ (p. 53).

Maddalena Tarallo, in ‘Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner’s Wife’, Amon Hen 205 (May 2007), suggests that readers are attracted to the story ‘mainly for its extreme modernity and for the accurate analysis of the characters’ psychological make-up’. Tolkien reveals ‘many deeply personal aspects’ of his characters’ relationship’, such that ‘we are painfully aware that Aldarion and Erendis almost completely lack a deep spiritual union that might counterbalance their disagreements or at least somehow lessen them’. Tarallo compares their ‘widely diverging attitudes’ and notes their ‘monumental pride’, comparing their tale with that of the Ents and the Entwives (in *The Lord of the Rings) in which ‘the male soul seems to yearn for adventure and freedom, while the female spirit looks more inclined to an orderly, and ordered, kind of life’ – ‘two totally opposed views and the refusal to find a neutral ground where a compromise might be reached’ (pp. 20–1). Tarallo believes that ‘the tale’s strong point resides in the unwillingness of the author to lay the blame on any one of the opposed parties: on the contrary he clearly shows how right and wrong are equally divided’ (p. 21).

Aldershot (Hampshire). From 28 July to 6 August 1910 Tolkien attended a camp with the *King Edward’s School Officers Training Corps (*Societies and clubs) and cadets from other schools at Aldershot, south-west of London. Their camp was pitched on a expanse of open land called Farnborough Common (now subsumed by the Farnborough airfield), and their exercises and inspections took place in the general vicinity. They were also taken in groups to visit a depot of military aeroplanes and airships in neighbouring Farnborough. Then as now, Aldershot was the centre of military training in England.

Allegory. In July 1947 *Rayner Unwin wrote of *The Lord of the Rings (then still in manuscript) that ‘the struggle between darkness and light’ sometimes seemed to leave ‘the story proper to become pure allegory’ (quoted in Letters, pp. 119–20). Tolkien was quick to advise Rayner’s father, publisher *Stanley Unwin, that he should

not let Rayner suspect ‘Allegory’. There is a ‘moral’, I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing. Even the struggle between darkness and light (as he calls it, not me) is for me just a particular phase of history, one example of its pattern, perhaps, but not The Pattern; and the actors are individuals – they each, of course, contain universals, or they would not live at all, but they never represent them as such.

Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human ‘literature’, that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily it can be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start from opposite ends. You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work. You cannot write a story about an apparently simple magic ring without that bursting in, if you really take the ring seriously, and make things happen that would happen, if such things existed. [31 July 1947, Letters, p. 121]

In a ?late 1951 letter to *Milton Waldman Tolkien made it clear that for him, allegory was something deliberately introduced into a work by the author: ‘I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language’ (Letters, p. 145). The *Oxford English Dictionary agrees with this definition: there allegory is the ‘description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance’, or ‘an instance of such description: a figurative sentence, discourse, or narrative, in which properties and circumstances attributed to the apparent subject really refer to the subject they are meant to suggest; an extended or continued metaphor’. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (8th edn., 1990) defined the term more succinctly: ‘a story, play, poem, picture, etc. in which the meaning or message is represented symbolically’, or ‘the use of such symbols’. But later in Oxford dictionaries the definition underwent a subtle change, to ‘a story, poem or picture which can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one’. This seems to suggest that a work can be an allegory without the intent of its creator, if it is so interpreted by the reader, and may reflect a tendency in contemporary literary criticism to prefer a reader’s or critic’s opinions to the author’s intentions (or what he claims were his intentions).

When The Lord of the Rings was first published many readers wrote to ask Tolkien what the story meant, or to describe their own interpretations. These queries led to an autobiographical statement written in 1955, in which Tolkien felt it necessary to state that The Lord of the Rings ‘is not “about” anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious, or political’ (Letters, p. 220). He thought that many readers misunderstood the meaning of the word allegory, and c. 1955 wrote to G.E. Selby: ‘There is, of course, no “allegory” at all in [The Lord of the Rings]. But people are very confused about this word, and seem to mix it up with “significance” or relevance’ (quoted in Sotheby Parke Bernet, Catalogue of Nineteenth Century and Modern First Editions, Presentation Copies, Autograph Letters and Literary Manuscripts, London, 28–9 July 1977, p. 110). The word he came to prefer, to describe what readers saw, was applicability. In a letter to Herbert Schiro on 17 November 1957 he wrote: ‘There is no “symbolism” or conscious allegory in my story. Allegory of the sort “five wizards = five senses” is wholly foreign to my way of thinking. … To ask if the Orcs “are” Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs. That there is no allegory does not, of course, say there is no applicability. There always is’ (Letters, p. 262).

Tolkien felt so strongly about the matter that in 1965 he devoted space to it in his Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. There he explained at length that much of the work, which some critics had supposed to be inspired by the Second World War and in some respects an allegory of it, in fact had been written before the war began.

As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical or topical … its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as a link between it and The Hobbit. The crucial chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if the disaster had been averted. …

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. …

Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or view of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

The fact that readers today can find relevance in The Lord of the Rings to current situations unknown to Tolkien emphasizes that applicability has a wider range than allegory, and can indeed originate in the mind of the reader. *C.S. Lewis approached the heart of the matter when, after reading part of Tolkien’s *Lay of Leithian, he wrote to him on 7 December 1929: ‘The two things that come out clearly are the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of a myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader’ (quoted in *The Lays of Beleriand, p. 151). And in a letter to Lucy Matthews about The Lord of the Rings Lewis wrote: ‘A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place. I think the something is “the whole quality of life as we actually experience it”’ (11 September 1958, C.S. Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 3 (2006), p. 971).

Despite Tolkien’s statement that he ‘cordially dislike[d] allegory in all its manifestations’, his stories *Leaf by Niggle and *Smith of Wootton Major seem to include allegorical elements. It is not clear in either case, however, that Tolkien set out consciously to create an allegory. His accounts of the writing of Leaf by Niggle suggest that it was entirely unplanned: ‘I woke up one morning … with that odd thing virtually complete in my head. It took only a few hours to get it down, and then copy out. I am not aware of ever “thinking” of the story or composing it in the ordinary sense’ (letter to Stanley Unwin, ?18 March 1945, Letters, p. 113).

Much later, he called the story ‘not really or properly an “allegory” so much as “mythical”. For Niggle is meant to be a real mixed-quality person and not an “allegory” of any single vice or virtue’ (letter to *Jane Neave, 8–9 September 1962, Letters, pp. 320–1). And yet in a draft letter to Peter Hastings in September 1954 he wrote: ‘I tried to show allegorically how that [*sub-creation] might come to be taken up into Creation in some plane in my “purgatorial” story Leaf by Niggle’ (Letters, p. 195).

In regard to Smith of Wootton Major, as part of prefatory comments to a reading of the story at Blackfriars, Oxford, in October 1966, Tolkien wrote that the story ‘is not an allegory – properly so called. Its primary purpose is itself, and any applications it or parts of it may have for individual hearers are incidental. I dislike real allegory in which the application is the author’s own and is meant to dominate you. I prefer the freedom of the hearer or reader’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford). Probably at the beginning of 1967 he wrote to Clyde S. Kilby that Smith of Wootton Major is ‘not an allegory (however applicable to this or that) in intention: certainly not in the “Fay” parts, and only fleetingly in the Human, where evidently The Cook and the Great Hall etc. represent The Parson and Church and their decay’ (Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois). And on 12 December 1967 Tolkien described it as ‘an old man’s book already weighted with the presage of “bereavement”’ (letter to *Roger Lancelyn Green, Letters, p. 389), a statement which has been seized upon by critics who have sought to interpret the work as a personal allegory.

Notable among these critics are T.A. Shippey, who has described Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major as ‘autobiographical allegories, in which Tolkien commented more or less openly on his own intentions, feelings and career’ (J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000), pp. 265–6), and Paul H. Kocher, to whom Leaf by Niggle was ‘an apparently simple but actually quite intricate vision of the struggles of an artist to create a fantasy world and of what happens to him and his work after death’, and who was tempted to describe Smith of Wootton Major as ‘Tolkien’s personal farewell to his art’ (Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien (1972), pp. 161, 203). For Shippey’s views on allegory in Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major, see entries for those works later in the present volume.

In The Road to Middle-earth Shippey also considers whether *Farmer Giles of Ham could be an allegory:

It is very nearly irresistible to conclude that in his mixture of learning, bluff and sense the parson represents an idealised (Christian) philologist; in which case the proud tyrant of the middle Kingdom who disards his most trenchant blade looks very like literary criticism taking no notice of historical language study! … Farmer Giles would be the creative instinct, the rope [Giles takes with him to hunt the dragon] (like Tailbiter) philological science, the dragon the ancient world of the Northern imagination brooding on its treasure of lost lays, the Little Kingdom the fictional space which Tolkien hoped to carve out, make independent and inhabit. [2nd edn. 1992, p. 90]

But this is no more than an exercise, only semi-serious, and shows how easy it can be to interpret almost anything in allegorical terms.

In Keble College Chapel on 23 August 1992, in his sermon delivered at the Tolkien Centenary Conference, *Father Robert Murray remarked that

the power of stories to act as parables depends not on whether they are fictitious or factually true, but on whether they possess that potential universality which makes others find them applicable, through an imaginative perception of analogy, to other situations.

At this point you will have picked up one of Tolkien’s memorable words, ‘applicable’. He used it often when discussing the power of stories to suggest more to the reader than they say, without their being artificial allegories. … A good story need not have a ‘message’ yet Tolkien often acknowledged that most great stories, whether as wholes or in many particulars, abound in morally significant features which are applicable to the experience of readers far removed in time and place from the story-teller.

Tolkien had an ambivalent attitude to allegory, often expressing dislike of it; but he ‘could not, however, refuse allegory some place, provided it were kept in it. It could serve in an argument; there he was quite prepared to make up allegories and call them such, as he did twice in two pages of his great lecture on Beowulf [*Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics]’ (‘Sermon at Thanksgiving Service, Keble College Chapel, 23rd August 1992’, in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995), p. 18).

In the first of these Tolkien speaks of Beowulf as a work of literature critics have treated as an historical document – expressed allegorically, Poesis (poetry) superintended by Historia, Philologia, Mythologia, Archaeologia, and Laographia (history, philology, mythology, archaeology, folklore). His second allegory, with a similar aim, tells of a man who built a tower out of stone from an older hall, on which he could look out upon the sea, but his friends pushed it over to examine the stones rather than appreciate the purpose of its builder, while his descendants wondered why he had built a tower with the stone rather than use it to fix up his old house. Tom Shippey explores the latter allegory in J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, suggesting that the old stone could stand for the remains of earlier poetry known to the Beowulf-poet (the builder of the tower, itself Beowulf); the house he lives in, partly built from the old stone, for Christian poetry contemporary with Beowulf (such as the *Old English Exodus); the friends who toppled the tower for critics who dissected Beowulf and pointed out ‘where the poem had gone wrong’; and the descendants for critics who ‘rejected dissectionism but said repeatedly that they wished the poet had written an epic about history rather than a mere fairy-tale about dragons and monsters’ (pp. 162–3).

See also, in our respective articles, Tolkien’s comments on the character Tom Bombadil relative to allegory in *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and his views in regard to allegory and symbolism in *Pearl.

The ‘Alphabet of Dairon’. Brief text on the runes devised by the Danian Elves of Beleriand, published in *The Treason of Isengard (1989), pp. 454–5. Their most elaborated form was the ‘Runes of Moria’, ‘long in use among the Dwarves, and most of the inscriptions employing it survived in the halls and chambers of Moria’ (p. 455).

*Christopher Tolkien dates the writing of this text to c. 1937, but notes that his father made additions substantially later. See also *Writing systems.

Alphabets see Writing systems

Aman. Originally the beginning of the introductory text to *Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (c. 1959), Aman was removed from that work to stand alone. Only one manuscript is extant, written with little hesitation or correction. *Christopher Tolkien published it, with notes and commentary, as text XI in the section ‘Myths Transformed’ in *Morgoth’s Ring (1993), pp. 424–31.

SYNOPSIS

In this the Valian Year is redefined, in accordance with cosmogonic changes Tolkien contemplated making to the *‘Silmarillion’ in later life: it is no longer based on the waxing and waning of the Two Trees, but on the Valar’s perception of the slow ageing of Arda. Elves are said to be able to live in Aman, the Blessed Realm of Tolkien’s mythology, because their speed of growth was in accord with the slow rate with which other living things aged in Aman. ‘For in Aman the world appeared to them as it does to Men on Earth, but without the shadow of death soon to come. Whereas on Earth to them all things in comparison with themselves were fleeting, swift to change and die or pass away, in Aman they endured and did not so soon cheat love with their mortality’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 426). In Middle-earth the Elves’ hröar (bodies, singular hröa) weakened or faded, even if very slowly, until only their longeval fëar (spirit, singular fëa) remained, whereas in Aman these aged at the same rate, and ‘the Eldar that remained in the Blessed Realm endured in full maturity, and in undimmed power of body and spirit conjoined for ages beyond our mortal comprehension’ (p. 427).

Tolkien also considered, under the (later) subheading ‘Aman and Mortal Men’, what would have happened to a Man if he had been allowed to live in Aman. The Valar could not alter his nature; he would remain mortal. Even in a life of a hundred years, little would seem to change or age in the land about him. His mortality would thus seem an even greater burden: ‘he would become filled with envy, deeming himself a victim of injustice. … He would not value what he had, but feeling that he was among the least and most despised of all creatures, he would grow soon to contemn his manhood, and hate those more richly endowed. He would not escape the fear and sorrow of his swift mortality that is his lot upon Earth … but would be burdened by it unbearably to the loss of all delight’ (p. 428).

Possibly the hröa of a man living in Aman might not wither and age, but the nature and doom of his fëa could not be changed and it must soon depart. ‘The hröa being in full vigour and joy of life would cling to the fëa, lest its departure should bring death; and against death it would revolt. … But the fëa would be as it were in prison, becoming ever more weary of all the delights of the hröa, until they were loathsome to it, longing ever more and more to be gone. The Man would not be blessed, but accursed’ (p. 429).

Ambarkanta: The Shape of the World. List of cosmographical words with explanations, and a description of the world of Tolkien’s mythology (*‘The Silmarillion’) as it stood at the time of writing, published with commentary, notes, three diagrams, and two maps in *The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986), pp. 235–61.

SYNOPSIS

The Earth is said to be globed within the Ilurambar, the transparent Walls of the World, impassable except by the Door of Night. On all sides of the Earth is Vaiya, the Enfolding Ocean – the seas and air – of which the Air is of two kinds, Vista which ‘sustains birds and clouds’ and Ilmen ‘breathed by the Gods, and purified by the passage of the luminaries; for in Ilmen [the Vala] Varda ordained the courses of the stars, and later of the Moon and Sun’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 236). Vaiya, Vista, and Ilmen are further defined in relation to Valinor and Middle-earth, and to the movements of the Sun and Moon. The creation of Valinor and the shaping of Middle-earth by the Valar are recounted; ‘but the symmetry of the ancient Earth was changed and broken in the first Battle of the Gods … and the Earth was again broken in the second battle … and it has changed ever in the wearing and passing of many ages’ (pp. 239–40).

HISTORY

When editing the Ambarkanta for The Shaping of Middle-earth *Christopher Tolkien believed that it belonged with his father’s writings of the early 1930s. Later, however, he realized that it dated instead from the mid-1930s, following the ‘later Annals’ but preceding *The Fall of Númenor; see *The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 9, 108.

At the beginning of the six manuscript pages of the text is an alternate title, Of the Fashion of the World; the title Ambarkanta (Qenya ambar ‘Earth’ + kanta ‘shape’) and a subtitle, The Shape of the World, are given on a separate but related title-leaf. Two of the three diagrams accompanying the text are labelled ‘The World from Númen (West) to Rómen (East)’ and ‘The World from Formen (North) to Harmen (South)’. The third, ‘The World after the Cataclysm and the ruin of the Númenóreans’, is related to three sentences added by Tolkien to the original text of the Ambarkanta, which ended with the final words quoted above: these refer to the re-shaping of the world that occurred at the end of the Second Age, when the Númenóreans sailed West against the ban of the Valar: ‘But the greatest change took place, when the First Design was destroyed, and the Earth was rounded, and severed from Valinor’ (p. 240). Christopher Tolkien feels that this addition could date from ‘much later; but … is far more likely to be contemporary, since the story of Númenor arose about this time’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 261). The third diagram, twice marked with ‘the Straight Path’ (by which the Elves may seek Valinor, while mortals may follow only the curvature of the earth), seems to belong to the same period; a precursor, ‘a very rough and hasty sketch, which shows a central globe … with two circles around it’ in which ‘a straight line’ extends ‘to the outer circle in both directions’, is described in The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 11.

The two related maps are inscribed ‘The World about V[alian] Y[ear] 500 after the fall of the Lamps … and the first fortification of the North by Melko’ and ‘After the War of the Gods (Arvalin was cast up by the Great Sea at the foot of the Mts.’ (sic, lacking a closing parenthesis).

‘The Ambidexters Sentence’. Text, edited with notes and analysis by Patrick H. Wynne, published as section IV of ‘Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals and Related Writings, Part Three’ in Vinyar Tengwar 49 (June 2007), pp. 3–37.

The work consists of two untitled pages, one in manuscript, dated later than 12 January 1968, and one typewritten, ‘bearing several successive versions of a sentence in Quenya [*Languages, Invented] (with English translation) concerning Elvish ambidexterity and the significance of the left hand’ (p. 3). The text is closely related to a section of *Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals. Here the text proper is followed by an appendix, ‘Late Writings on √nā ‘to be”.

Amroth and Nimrodel

see Part of the Legend of Amroth and Nimrodel Recounted in Brief

‘Analysis of Fragments of Other Languages Found in The Lord of the Rings’

see The Lord of the Rings; Words, Phrases, and Passages in The Lord of the Rings

Ancrene Riwle. A medieval guide or set of rules for anchoresses (female religious recluses), Ancrene Riwle is the longest and best known of a group of religious prose works written or translated in the thirteenth century in the West Midlands of England, in all of which Tolkien took an interest. Its eight sections prescribe a daily routine of prayers, but also offer practical guidelines for the conduct of life. Written originally in English, it proved so popular that it was translated into French and Latin and adapted for other audiences.

The language of this work, Tolkien wrote in his preface to the Modern English translation by his former B.Litt. student *M.B. Salu,

now appears archaic … and it is also “dialectal” to us whose language is based mainly on the speech of the other side of England, whereas the soil in which it grew was that of the West Midlands and the Marches of Wales. But it was in its day and to its users a natural, easy, and cultivated speech, familiar with the courtesy of letters, able to combine colloquial liveliness with a reverence for the already long tradition of English writing. [The Ancrene Riwle (1955), p. v]

Tolkien called this variant of Middle English ‘Language (AB)’, as it was shared between two manuscripts traditionally referred to with sigla as ‘A’ and ‘B’: respectively, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 402 (MS CCCC 402), apparently the earliest surviving manuscript of Ancrene Riwle, and MS Bodley 34 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which contains the works of the *Katherine Group. The language is usually referred to by others as the ‘AB language’.

MS CCCC 402 bears the title Ancrene Wisse – it is the only manuscript of this work to include a title – and because of this medieval authority, some scholars have argued that Ancrene Wisse should be used to refer to the work in general. *E.J. Dobson, for example, comments in ‘The Affiliations of the Manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse’, *English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (1962): ‘I use the title Ancrene Wisse to refer to the work as a whole, and do not follow the convention of restricting it to the text of [MS CCCC 402], in which I can see little if any point’ (p. 129). Ancrene Riwle is a corrected version of the title (Ancren Riwle) given the first complete edition of the work by its editor, James Morton, in 1853, and was used on all editions of the work, except Tolkien’s, published by the Early English Text Society (EETS; see *Societies and clubs). We chose Ancrene Riwle (except specifically for Tolkien’s edition of 1962) in the present book because of its predominant use by EETS, and because it was used for M.B. Salu’s translation (see below), though Ancrene Wisse was (properly) used for Tolkien’s edition.

Tolkien was concerned with Ancrene Riwle as early as 1920, while teaching at the University of *Leeds, most particularly with MS CCCC 402, the only surviving manuscript of a revised version of the text. His interest was linguistic, as demonstrated in the several references to Ancrene Riwle in his article *Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography in the Review of English Studies for April 1925, and as he remarked in *Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad, published in Essays and Studies in 1929. In November 1930 he wrote to *Kenneth Sisam of Oxford University Press (*Publishers), in regard to a proposed edition of Ancrene Riwle, that he could produce a plain text, with a limited glossary, in a short time, once he completed work on the ‘Clarendon Chaucer’ (see *Geoffrey Chaucer); but a full text, with a complete glossary and grammar, would better serve the study of Middle English. He already had a set of rotographs (photographic facsimiles) of MS CCCC 402 for private study, and if he did not yet have it in mind to prepare an edition of that text, it seems to have occurred to him at this point.

In the next few years he worked with various students, notably an Oxford B.Litt. candidate, *M.E. (Elaine) Griffiths, to prepare a partial transcription of MS CCCC 402, a nearly complete glossary, and an index. He also prepared a complete vocabulary and grammar of its language.

In late 1935 Tolkien was formally engaged by the Early English Text Society to edit MS CCCC 402 for publication, as part of a proposed series of editions of Ancrene Riwle texts. (For the history that follows, see also Chronology, especially entries from Autumn 1935, January 1936, 5 February 1956, and 30 March 1959 et passim.)

Almost at once Tolkien entered into a dispute with the governing committee of EETS as to whether the various manuscripts in the series should be transcribed line by line, exactly as written in the original text. The Committee argued that this approach was unnecessary and would take up too much space; a uniform page design was more important, for consistency and economy. Tolkien disagreed, in part because his transcription of MS CCCC 402, then much advanced, had been made line by line, and the thousands of references already in its glossary and index were keyed to folio and line in the manuscript, not to the typeset pages of the book planned by EETS. To alter these would have meant considerable expense of time and labour. But also, as Tolkien pointed out, a printed text which does not reproduce the precise order of its source will not serve a scholar interested in the finer points of the original manuscript. A line-by-line transcription, on the contrary, has

enormous advantages – in giving a clue to the relative vertical association of words in corrupt passages, as well as indicating the places where special alterations, paleogr[aphical] forms, omissions and other errors are likely. To this is added the facility of reference in those places where, however careful the present edition, a future worker will inevitably be obliged to collate with the manuscript. [draft letter to A.W. Pollard, c. 16 January 1936, Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford]

This argument continued for more than a year. The Secretary of EETS, *Mabel Day, herself later an editor of one of Ancrene Riwle texts, bore much of the burden, until in May 1937 a subcommittee devoted to Ancrene Riwle, and in August 1937 the full EETS Committee – their members perhaps weary of the debate (though still not without objection) – at last agreed to follow Tolkien’s view.

Tolkien hoped to finish his transcription of the manuscript quickly from the set of rotographs, then collate it against the original at Cambridge. But he found it difficult to arrange access to the library at Corpus Christi College, and other matters demanded his attention, not least the publication of *The Hobbit in September 1937. Before long, the Second World War halted many projects, although from 1942 to 1949 work on the edition which had been abandoned by Elaine Griffiths was taken up by M.B. Salu. The latter completed the index as well as a successful thesis on the grammar and phonology of the text. Salu later made a Modern English translation of MS CCCC 402, which was published in 1955 as The Ancrene Riwle with a brief preface by Tolkien; see further, Descriptive Bibliography B23.

In Michaelmas Term 1946, now as the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature officially concerned with Middle English studies at Oxford, Tolkien began to lecture on Ancrene Riwle and its language. In March 1948, faced with serious dental problems, he offered to hand over his still uncollated transcriptions of MS CCCC 402 if some other scholar would be willing to complete the edition for EETS. In the event, he was not replaced, and except for the production of specimen pages in August 1948 no further action seems to have been taken for eight years. One assumes, lacking evidence to the contrary, that Tolkien simply was left to get on with the work as best he could, though the continuing delay to its completion must have been an embarrassment to him, as he himself had been appointed to the EETS Committee in 1938 and to the Ancrene Riwle subcommittee in 1945.

By February 1956 Tolkien’s edition became the concern of *R.W. Burchfield, who had succeeded Mabel Day as EETS Secretary. At that time Burchfield was also officially a D.Phil. candidate under Tolkien’s supervision, and the two were on friendly terms. At Tolkien’s suggestion Oxford palaeographer *N.R. Ker was approached to write an introduction to the edition (Ker had introduced R.M. Wilson’s 1954 edition of a different Ancrene Riwle manuscript at Cambridge), while Tolkien himself was to aim to deliver his finished transcription by Michaelmas Term that year. Apart from other demands on his time, however, there was still too much work to be done on the manuscript in Cambridge to complete it by autumn, and arthritis had begun to make it hard for him to type or to use a pen. In May 1957 Burchfield became concerned that several of the EETS editions of Ancrene Riwle were delayed, not only Tolkien’s, and suggested that deadlines be imposed. On 31 March 1958, at a meeting which Tolkien did not attend, the EETS Committee voted to require him to deliver his book by the end of the following June, or the Society would issue a straightforward facsimile of MS CCCC 402 rather than his transcription. Spurred by this decision, Tolkien devoted more concentrated attention to the task, in particular during the month of August 1958. Even so, he did not deliver a typescript to EETS until September of that year.

When acknowledging receipt of the book R.W. Burchfield now unfortunately took the opportunity to express his personal view, which he suggested would be held also by other officials in EETS, that Tolkien’s edition should be printed in the same style as the other editions of Ancrene Riwle already issued by the Society, not in a line by line transcription. He carefully laid out his reasons, which had much to do with consistency and aesthetics, but apparently was unaware of the heated debate that had occurred long before he had become Secretary, or that it had been agreed twenty years earlier that Tolkien’s edition, at least, should appear as its editor wished.

Tolkien replied to Burchfield at once and at length, evidently in more than one letter. A draft of what was surely the longest of these, accompanying three pages of comments on printer’s specimen pages, contains a mass of detail and close argument, as well as calculations of spacing and lines per page, accompanied by fabrications of typeset pages made by Tolkien on his typewriter to illustrate his points. Although the finished version of his letter appears not to survive, and typically in correspondence Tolkien restrained his final remarks having vented his feelings in draft, it is clear from comments that he and Burchfield later made, and from the effect of the document, that his argument was compelling. He pointed out that the manuscripts of Ancrene Riwle were inconsistent by nature; that the aesthetics of a printed text were in the eye of the beholder (for his part, he found much that was unattractive in the versions of Ancrene Riwle published by EETS thus far); and that contrary to Burchfield’s view that line-end features of the manuscript could be dealt with in an introduction,

the place of the line-ending is an important feature, palaeographical, textual, and linguistic, at least as important as other features carefully attended to. In any case I think it would be an advantage to have at least one version presented in a form bearing a closer relation to the manuscript arrangements; and the specially important and beautiful MS A [MS CCCC 402, the chief manuscript of Ancrene Riwle] seems a reasonable choice. [Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford]

On 27 September Burchfield gracefully withdrew his opposition and renewed the support of the EETS Committee for Tolkien’s views.

On 22 March 1959 Burchfield informed Tolkien that his introduction was now wanted by 28 May. It was not a good moment: Tolkien had recently had an operation for appendicitis, and his wife was also ill. Proofs of the text were now expected in June or July; but then the printers went on strike, and proofs did not reach Tolkien until a year later, in early June of 1960, by which time he was again occupied with other things. His introduction still was not ready on 24 June 1960, and when visited by his colleague *Norman Davis, now Director of EETS, Tolkien declared himself unable to complete it, and that he would give Davis his notes to be passed on to N.R. Ker to use if he wished. Tolkien felt too unwell also to correct proof; but then he suddenly rallied. As he wrote to Rayner Unwin:

I am in fact utterly stuck – lost in a bottomless bog. … The crimes of omission that I committed in order to complete the [Lord of the Rings] are being avenged. The chief is the Ancrene Riwle. My edition of the prime [manuscript] should have been completed many years ago! I did at least try to clear it out of the way before retirement, and by a vast effort sent in the text in Sept. 1958. But then one of the misfortunes that attend on delay occurred; and my [manuscript] disappeared into the confusion of the Printing Strike. The proofs actually arrived at the beginning of this June, when I was in full tide of composition for the *Silmarillion, and had lost the threads of the M[iddle] E[nglish] work. I stalled for a while, but I am now under extreme pressure: 10 hours hard per diem day after day, trying to induce order into a set of confused and desperately tricky proofs, and notes. And then I have to write an introduction. [31 July 1960, Letters, pp. 301–2]

He sent Burchfield the corrected proofs at last at the end of August.

On 11 October 1960 Burchfield sent Tolkien an introduction on palaeographical aspects of MS CCCC 402 that N.R. Ker had completed. One month later, Norman Davis lunched with Tolkien, and having judged that there was no prospect of anything further from him for the introduction, gave permission that this could now go to press. But Tolkien had merely been distracted by other business, and replied with six pages of comments on Ker’s text early in the new year; these were accommodated, though the introduction was already set in type. Tolkien now also decided to write a supplementary introduction, which in the event became only a preface. During 1961 he made further comments on what Ker had written, correcting a serious error, and he proceeded to revise proofs under pressure of reminders from Burchfield. His progress was slowed by fibrositis and arthritis, but also by the unexpected discovery of editorial alterations, largely to do with capitalization, that Ker had made to the transcription of the Cambridge manuscript before it was set in type. When Tolkien finally delivered corrected proofs on 23 January 1962 he objected strongly to these changes, which had been made without his knowledge or consent. Burchfield defended Ker’s actions, which had been done without consulting the editor for lack of time, but agreed that the finished book should follow Tolkien’s instructions.

Because there had been so many delays already, Tolkien was not shown the final proofs as further revised. He was not to know also that the Early English Text Society wished to have Ancrene Wisse in print in 1962 (it was published officially in December of that year; see further, Descriptive Bibliography B25) to coincide with the publication by George Allen & Unwin of a Festschrift in Tolkien’s honour (English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday), a mark of the esteem in which he was held by his colleagues. Burchfield himself was a contributor.

Reviewers of Tolkien’s Ancrene Wisse uniformly welcomed its appearance and noted its long gestation. It was greeted, however, with disagreement over its methods and manner of presentation, notably its retention of original line-endings, and some small errors were pointed out. Arne Zettersten in English Studies 47 (1966) noted ‘a certain change or even improvement in editorial matters’ relative to earlier editions of Ancrene Riwle texts published by EETS (p. 291). In 1976 Zettersten edited the Magdalene College, Cambridge manuscript of Ancrene Riwle (Pepys 2498); later he stated that Tolkien gave him ‘splendid advice’ in regard to this work (see Zettersten, ‘Discussing Language with J.R.R. Tolkien’, Lembas Extra (2007), p. 21).

Tom Shippey takes a firm stance against Tolkien’s approach to the Corpus Christi College manuscript in ‘Tolkien as Editor’, in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Stuart D. Lee (2014). With only one exception, he notes, all of the EETS editions of Ancrene Riwle except Tolkien’s include introductions by their editor (the exception is R.M. Wilson’s edition, noted above). Shippey assigns Tolkien’s failure to provide an introduction in part to the time he devoted to The Lord of the Rings, but also to his ‘niggling’ – wasting time on unnecessary details – and to his insistence on line by line reproduction. Moreover, Tolkien’s ‘textual notes at the bottom of each page’ are

all but entirely concerned with detail about initials, underlinings, capital letters, marginalia. There are virtually no emendations or corrections in what is a long text. … Tolkien clearly thought that this particular scribe knew what he was doing, so that his work was best left alone; while he also wanted to come as close as he could to reproducing in print the appearance of the manuscript. The EETS did not agree with him. Tolkien was creating a lot of extra work, not only for himself.

Shippey suggests that EETS might have resisted ‘Tolkien’s argumentative tide’, and that his views on line by line transcription ‘could well have been answered – had Tolkien not been an Oxford Professor’ (p. 48). Tolkien ‘would have had more academic impact if he had produced his edition earlier, without unnecessary detail, and with a substantial supporting apparatus’ (p. 49).

Useful introductions to Ancrene Riwle and related texts are Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse, ed. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (rev. edn. 1992), and Yoko Wada, ed., A Companion to Ancrene Wisse (2003). See also Arne Zettersten, ‘The AB Language Lives’ in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2006); and ch. 16 (‘The AB Language: A Unique Discovery’) in Zettersten, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life (2011).

Ancrene Wisse see Ancrene Riwle

Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. Essay, published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 14 (1929), pp. 104–26. See further, Descriptive Bibliography B12.

SYNOPSIS

Tolkien argues that the language of Ancrene Wisse (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 402, see *Ancrene Riwle) is ‘either a faithful transcript of some actual dialect of nearly unmixed descent [from Old English, unadulterated by the effects of the Norman conquest], or a “standard” language based on one’ (p. 106). It is self-consistent and individual, and ‘identical, even down to minute and therefore significant details, with the language of MS. Bodley 34’ (p. 107) which contains the texts of the *Katherine Group, Hali Meiðhad (an appreciation of ‘holy maidenhood’ or virginity) among them. (Tolkien’s essay may be a development of one he listed as forthcoming in his June 1925 application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, The Second Weak Conjugation in the Ancren Riwle and the Katherine-Group.)

Tolkien theorizes that ‘the (English) originals of these works were in [a common] language (AB), they both belonged to nearly the same time, one not far removed from that of the actual manuscripts’ under consideration, ‘and they both belonged to the same (small) area)’, which he localizes to Herefordshire (p. 114). ‘Language (AB)’, usually termed by others the ‘AB language’, is so called after the standard sigla for the two manuscripts in question.

To support his argument, Tolkien intended to provide ‘a sample of a minute comparison’ of the texts, but this proved ‘impossible of satisfactory accomplishment within a very little space’. Instead he analyzes the manuscripts in regard to their treatment of ‘the verbs belonging to the 3rd or “regular” weak class, descended from O[ld] E[nglish] verbs with infinitive in -ian, or conjugated on this model’ (p. 117).

CRITICISM

In ‘Tolkien as Editor’, in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Stuart D. Lee (2014) Tom Shippey describes Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad as

a breakthrough in academic studies. … What Tolkien had noticed, and then proved to the hilt, is that two manuscripts, one of the Ancrene Wisse and one of Hali Meiðhad (and several associated female saints’ lives), were written in exactly the same dialect but by different handwriting. In medieval conditions, this could not have come about by accident or coincidence. The two scribes had been taught to write the same way. There was, then, even in the era of Norman-French dominance, a holdout area of England where English was still not just spoken, but written, and written as taught in a school of some kind. This holdout area … was moreover in the West Midlands, very close to what Tolkien regarded as home, and was linguistically continuous with Old English from the same area. [pp. 47–8]

In his Road to Middle-earth Shippey calls the essay ‘the most perfect though not the best-known of [Tolkien’s] academic pieces’, which ‘rested in classic philological style on an observation of the utmost tininess’ (2nd edn. 1992, pp. 36–7). But in a long comment on Tolkien’s scholarly influence aided by his rhetorical skills (‘Tolkien’s Two Views of Beowulf: One Hailed, One Ignored; But Did We Get This Right?’, ‘Scholars Forum’, The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza website, 25 July 2010) Shippey also wrote:

Tolkien’s 1929 essay on the language of Ancrene Wisse and its associated texts was so convincing that it all but stopped the study of Middle English dialects in its tracks. People reckoned that without a consistent shared and standardised dialect of the kind Tolkien discovered, one could come to no conclusions about authorial or scribal dialect at all, because they were bound to be Mischprachen, jumbled by copying. It was not till 1986, when the Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English came out, edited by Angus McIntosh and his team, that the view was refuted, and dialect study revived.

See also Shippey, ‘Tolkien’s Academic Reputation Now’, in his Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (2007).

Tolkien’s essay is still considered seminal, but his conclusions have been modified or refined by other scholars, perhaps most notably *E.J. Dobson, who have more closely localized the ‘AB language’, held different views than Tolkien on scribal practice, and enlarged the scope of the investigation by examining the ‘AB’ manuscripts next to others of the period. Michael D.C. Drout has commented (‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and Its Significance’, Tolkien Studies 4 (2007), p. 122) that

some of Tolkien’s discussion of the AB language has come in for criticism …, and there is less confidence in contemporary scholarship about the complete regularity of the AB standard; in particular, there is now some argument that the A and B texts actually do differ from each other …, challenging some of Tolkien’s conclusions. However, the broader argument about the persistence of Old English in the West Midlands remains accepted even if all of Tolkien’s conclusions about the AB texts are not.

See further, Richard Dance, ‘The AB Language: The Recluse, the Gossip, and the Language Historian’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (2003). Dance comments, among other points, that medieval scribes sometimes did ‘translate’ between written dialects, which would diminish Tolkien’s argument for a scribal community of the ‘AB language’. Also see comments by Drout on philological criticism in our essay on *Chaucer as a Philogist: The Reeve’s Tale.

Angles and Britons see English and Welsh

Annals of Aman see Annals of Valinor

Annals of Beleriand. The Annals of Beleriand exist in three versions. The first two, the ‘earliest’ Annals from the early 1930s, published with commentary and notes in *The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986), pp. 294–341, and the ‘later’ Annals from the mid-1930s, published with commentary in *The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987), pp. 124–54, chronicle events in Tolkien’s mythology (*‘The Silmarillion’) east of the Sea from the first appearance of the Sun and Moon to the end of the First Age. The Grey Annals from c. 1951, published with commentary and notes in *The War of the Jewels (1994), pp. 3–170, include events which happened in Middle-earth before the appearance of the Sun and Moon until the release of Húrin, at which point Tolkien left the manuscript unfinished.

In the internal context of the mythology the Annals of Beleriand (and the *Annals of Valinor) ‘were written by Pengolod the Wise of Gondolin, before its fall, and after at Sirion’s Haven, and at Tavrobel in Tol Eressëa after his return unto the West, and there seen and translated by Eriol of Leithien, that is Ælfwine of the Angelcynn’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 263; see *Eriol and Ælfwine); while the Grey Annals ‘were made by the Sindar, the Grey Elves of Doriath and the Havens, and enlarged from the records and memories of the remnant of the Noldor of Nargothrond and Gondolin at the Mouths of the Sirion, whence they were brought back into the West’ (The War of the Jewels, p. 5).

*Christopher Tolkien has speculated that his father’s ‘primary intention’ in writing the ‘earliest’ Annals of Beleriand ‘was the consolidation of the historical structure in its internal relations and chronology – the Annals began, perhaps, in parallel with the Quenta [*Quenta Noldorinwa] as a convenient way of driving abreast, and keeping track of, the different elements in the ever more complex narrative web’ of ‘The Silmarillion’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 294). The first manuscript of the ‘earliest’ Annals was apparently written at speed, much of it in a staccato style, then heavily emended, with many changes to the dates. At this stage the First Age lasted 250 years. Tolkien began a second text as a fair copy of the first, but this soon became a new work, with the Siege of Angband extended by a hundred years. This text was left unfinished, as was another version, in Old English, attributed to Ælfwine or Eriol, which corresponds in part to each of the other two texts but breaks off in mid-sentence just as the Siege of Angband begins.

Closely associated with the ‘earliest’ Annals are a series of genealogies of the Elven princes, of the Three Houses of the Fathers of Men, and of the Houses of the Eastern Men, together with a table of the divisions of the Qendi and a list of the many names by which the three divisions of the Elves were known; and a list of all the names in Tolkien’s works concerned with the legends of the Elder Days. These are described in The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 403–4.

The ‘later’ Annals of Beleriand are ‘not only fuller in matter but also more finished in manner’: they were now ‘becoming an independent work’ though ‘still annalistic, retaining the introductory Here of the year-entries (derived from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), and lacking connection of motive between events’ (Christopher Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 124). It is clear from various title-pages produced by Tolkien that he intended the Annals of Beleriand to be included in any published ‘Silmarillion’ following the *Quenta Silmarillion (begun mid-1930s) and the *Annals of Valinor (early and mid-1930s). The ‘later’ Annals of Beleriand are in a clear manuscript which Tolkien later emended, notably during the writing of the Quenta Silmarillion when he further extended the length of the First Age.

Tolkien began work on the Grey Annals by extensively revising the manuscript of the ‘later’ Annals of Beleriand, then writing a fuller version on the blank versos of the manuscript and some loose sheets. Before he had proceeded very far with this he began a new manuscript version, with the title The Annals of Beleriand or the Grey Annals. Although Tolkien never finished the Grey Annals, writing little beyond the death of Túrin, it is still a work of considerable length and substance: as in the contemporary Annals of Aman (see *Annals of Valinor), here the annalistic form almost gives way to a ‘fully fledged narrative’ (Christopher Tolkien, *Morgoth’s Ring, p. 192). Indeed, Christopher Tolkien considered that ‘for the structure of the history of Beleriand the Grey Annals constitutes the primary text’, and he used ‘much of the latter part … in the published Silmarillion with little change’ (The War of the Jewels, p. 4).

Tolkien introduced a lengthy excursus on the languages of Beleriand into the first text of the Grey Annals, partially rewrote it for a second text, then replaced most of the latter and introduced a new conception.

For the part played by the Annals in the evolution of Tolkien’s mythology, see entries for the separate chapters of *The Silmarillion.

Annals of Valinor. The Annals of Valinor chronicle events in Tolkien’s mythology (*‘The Silmarillion’) from the arrival of the Valar in Arda until the raising of the Sun and the Moon. They exist in three versions: the ‘earliest’ Annals from the early 1930s, published with commentary and notes in *The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986), pp. 262–93; the ‘later’ Annals from the mid-1930s, published with commentary in *The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987), pp. 109–23; and the Annals of Aman from c. 1951, published with commentary and notes in *Morgoth’s Ring (1993), pp. 47–138.

Tolkien emended his manuscript of the ‘earliest’ Annals in at least two stages, with many changes of date and some additions. He also wrote four Old English versions of the Annals of Valinor, supposedly translations from the Elvish (*Languages, Invented) made by Ælfwine (*Eriol and Ælfwine), of varying length and completeness. One may have preceded the Modern English version; another is unlikely to be earlier than c. 1937, and is written in a different form of Old English, that of ninth-century Mercia, used in glosses on the Vespasian Psalter (on which Tolkien lectured almost every year from 1932 to 1938).

The ‘later’ Annals of Valinor show little development from the ‘earliest’ Annals. The ending of the section written as if by Rúmil is clearly marked. This work was now considered part of ‘The Silmarillion’, to be placed between the *Quenta Silmarillion and the *Annals of Beleriand.

Tolkien began work on the Annals of Aman by heavily emending his manuscript of the ‘later’ Annals of Valinor. But before he had proceeded very far he began a new manuscript, adding much material as he wrote. *Christopher Tolkien has noted that from the birth of Fëanor this new version ‘bears no comparison with the cursory [“later” Annals of Valinor], and represents a wholly different impulse; indeed, in this section we see the annal form disappearing as a fully-fledged narrative emerges. As was often the case in my father’s work, the story took over and expanded whatever restrictions of form he had set for it’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 102). Tolkien divided these annals into two sections, beginning a new reckoning with the creation of the Two Trees (Valian Year 3501 = Year 1 of the Trees). He made frequent changes to dates after the creation of the Trees; only the final form has been published. He also began a typescript of the work, making many changes of varying significance, but abandoned it before the awakening of the Elves.

A preamble to the ‘earliest’ Annals of Valinor states that both this work and the Annals of Beleriand were written by ‘Pengolod the Wise of Gondolin, before its fall, and after at Sirion’s Haven, and at Tavrobel in Tol Eressëa after his return unto the West, and there seen and translated by Eriol of Leithien, that is Ælfwine of the Angelcynn’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 263); but by an addition, the original authorship of all of the entries up to and including the Doom of Mandos is transferred to Rúmil the Elfsage of Valinor. The preamble in Tolkien’s typescript of the Annals of Aman gives a different ‘provenance’ for the work: ‘Rúmil made them in the Elder Days, and they were held in memory by the Exiles. Those parts which we learned and remembered were then set down in Númenor before the Shadow fell upon it’ (Morgoth’s Ring, pp. 64–5). A section in the manuscript, ‘Of the Beginning of Time and its Reckoning’, is said to have been ‘drawn from the work of [Eldarin loremaster] Quennar Onótimo’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 49); it was later transferred to *The Tale of Years.

For the part played by the Annals in the evolution of Tolkien’s mythology, see entries for the separate chapters of *The Silmarillion.

Appearance. Photographs of Tolkien at school and university – see especially Biography, The Tolkien Family Album, and John Garth, Tolkien and Exeter College (2014) – show a serious young man of medium height, slender, clean-shaven, hair parted in the middle. By 1916, in Army uniform, he had a more conventional haircut and a moustache – the latter was compulsory for British soldiers of Tolkien’s time until October 1916. The image of Tolkien most familiar to his readers, however, is that of the author in his later years. Richard Plotz, who visited him in 1966, described Tolkien as ‘a medium-sized man … [who] looks much younger than his seventy-four years. Like one of his creations, the Hobbits, he is a bit fat in the stomach …’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien Talks about the Discovery of Middle-earth, the Origins of Elvish’, Seventeen, January 1967, p. 92). In a letter of 8 February 1967 to interviewers Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, Tolkien stated that he was not ‘tall, or strongly built. I now measure 5 ft 8½, and am slightly built, with notably small hands. For most of my life I have been very thin and underweight. Since my early sixties I have become “tubby”. Not unusual in men who took their exercise in games and swimming, when opportunities for these things cease’ (Letters, p. 373). In ‘The Man Who Understands Hobbits’ (Daily Telegraph Magazine, 22 March 1968) the Plimmers wrote that Tolkien had ‘grey eyes, firm tanned skin, silvery hair and quick decisive speech’ (p. 31).

When Tolkien was a pupil at *King Edward’s School, Birmingham there was no uniform except for the school cap, but when he attended a function at the School in 1944 he found that some of his contemporaries remembered him for his taste in coloured socks. As an undergraduate at *Oxford, and later as a professor, he wore the appropriate gown when concerned with academic matters. Richard Plotz noted on his visit in 1966 that Tolkien ‘wore a conservative English suit which fitted impeccably’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien Talks …’, p. 92). Clyde S. Kilby, who spent some time with Tolkien in the summer of 1966, noted that he ‘was always neatly dressed from necktie to shoes. One of his favorite suits was a herringbone with which he wore a green corduroy vest [waistcoat]. Always there was a vest, and nearly always a sport coat. He did not mind wearing a very broad necktie which in those days was out of style’ (Tolkien & the Silmarillion (1976), p. 24). He had a particular liking for decorative waistcoats: he told one correspondent that he had ‘one or two choice embroidered specimens, which I sometimes wear when required to make a speech, as I find they so fascinate the eyes of the audience that they do not notice if my dentures become a little loose with excitements of rhetoric’ (letter to Nancy Smith, 25 December 1963, Special Collections and University Archives, John P. Raynor, S.J., Library, Marquette University).

Desmond Albrow recalled (‘A Brush with Greatness’, Catholic Herald, 31 January 1997) his first meeting with Tolkien at the latter’s home in 1943, when Albrow was an eighteen-year-old student at Oxford. Tolkien ‘was the first Oxford professor that I had ever met face to face and the delightful fact was that he had behaved to me like a true scholar-gentleman.’ ‘Here’, Albrow thought,

was a professor who looked like a professor (C.S. Lewis looked more like an intellectual butcher). Tolkien wore cords [corduroy trousers] and a sports jacket, smoked a reassuring pipe, laughed a lot, sometimes mumbled when his thoughts outstripped words, looked in those days to my idealistic eyes like the young Leslie Howard, the film actor. There was a sense of civilisation, winsome sanity and sophistication about him.

Adele Vincent, a student at Oxford in the mid-1950s who heard Tolkien lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, described his appearance thus: ‘He was a robust-looking man, with a kindly face. … He wore dull, academic tweeds rather than the brightly colored clothes that the Hobbits favored and he was quite a bit taller than they were. … Like the Hobbits he smoked a pipe and like them, too, he wore life lightly, enjoying a jest, scorning pedantry’ (‘Tolkien, Master of Fantasy’, Courier-Journal & Times (Louisville, Kentucky), 9 September 1973, reproduced in Authors in the News, vol. 1 (1976)).

Interviewers have noted that Tolkien almost clung to his pipe, cradling it in his hand, or speaking with it in his mouth, sometimes making him difficult to understand. One of these, Richard Plotz, wrote that Tolkien ‘took out a pipe as he entered his study, and all during the interview he held it clenched in his teeth, lighting and relighting it, talking through it; he never removed it from his mouth for more than five seconds’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien Talks …’, p. 92). See also *Smoking.

LATER PHOTOGRAPHS

Among the best known photographs of Tolkien are those in which he poses with trees. In May 1971 Lord Snowdon photographed him seated against the roots of a great tree in Branksome Chine, behind his home in *Poole. Billett Potter captured him seated on the ground and leaning against a tree trunk. And his grandson, Michael George, took a photograph of Tolkien in the Oxford Botanic Garden, standing by his favourite tree, a Pinus Nigra, only a few weeks before his death. Snowdon also photographed Tolkien standing on a cliff, silhouetted against the sea.

Other photographs often show Tolkien with a pipe in his hand or mouth, or just lighting it, sometimes producing a waft of smoke: a 1972 sequence of such photos by Billett Potter, of Tolkien in his study in Merton Street, Oxford, is reproduced in Biography. Also in 1972, possibly on the same day, Potter photographed Tolkien in academic robes on the occasion of his award of an Honorary D.Litt. from Oxford University.

Photographer *Pamela Chandler twice visited Tolkien at his home in Sand-field Road, Oxford. On the first occasion, in August 1961, she took a series of black and white photographs of Tolkien in his garage-study seated at his desk by the window with bookshelves behind him, and of Tolkien and his wife *Edith in their garden or at the gate to their house. In August 1966 she took more photographs, this time in colour, of Tolkien and Edith, mainly together but also separately, in the garage-study and in the garden.

In 1968, not long before Tolkien moved from Oxford, John Wyatt photographed him in Merton College garden holding a copy of *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book. In early 1972, soon after Tolkien’s return to Oxford, Athar Chaudry photographed him in the same garden for an article in the local newspaper.

An Application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford by J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of the English Language in the University of Leeds, June 25, 1925. Pamphlet, twelve pages privately printed for Tolkien, in which he conveys his credentials to the electors for the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair, accompanied by a list of his publications and testimonials by colleagues and university officials: *Lascelles Abercrombie, *Henry Bradley, *L.R. Farnell, *George S. Gordon, Allen Mawer, M.E. Sadler, and *Joseph Wright. Most of Tolkien’s statement was printed in Letters, pp. 12–13.

Art. Tolkien learned to draw and paint at an early age. Although never more than an amateur artist, with a limited ability to draw the human figure, nevertheless he had a talent for rendering trees, flowers, and mountains; and though he sometimes complained that he could not draw, some of the illustrations he made for his own stories rival in quality the work of professionals.

His earliest art was inspired by places he visited, such as *Berkshire, *Cornwall, and *Lyme Regis, and reflects a concern for accuracy: some of the views and buildings he depicted can still be found today, almost exactly as he drew them. Between about December 1911 and summer 1913, however, while he was a student at the University of *Oxford, he made at least twenty ‘visionary’ pictures which he later collected into an envelope labelled Earliest Ishnesses. Although the derived word ishness appears as the final element in only two of the titles of his early drawings (Undertenishness and Grownupishness, see Artist and Illustrator, figs. 34–35), Tolkien applied it to all of his visual depictions of things symbolic and abstract, and later to any picture he drew from his imagination rather than from life. In January 1914 he wrote the title The Book of Ishness on the cover of a sketchbook, in which he continued his series of imaginative drawings. These now included The Land of Pohja (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 41), related to the *Kalevala, and pictures such as Water, Wind and Sand, Tanaqui, and The Shores of Faery (Artist and Illustrator, figs. 42–44), which are related to Tolkien’s *‘Silmarillion’ mythology. From this point painting and drawing became an additional outlet for his burgeoning imagination. Some aspects of his mythology emerged in writing and were then depicted in pencil, ink, and paints; but others began in pictorial form, and only later were put into words.

With the birth of his children Tolkien also used his skills as an artist to complement the stories he invented for the entertainment of his sons and daughter. For many years he produced annual letters to his children, written, decorated, and illustrated as by Father Christmas and accompanied by facsimile stamps and envelopes from the ‘North Pole’ (*The ‘Father Christmas’ letters). He also illustrated some of his longer stories, such as *Roverandom, *The Hobbit, and the picture book *Mr. Bliss. When The Hobbit was accepted for publication Tolkien convinced George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers) that it should contain pictures, some based on those already in its ‘home manuscript’, others made by Tolkien especially for the book, as well as maps, among which Thror’s Map is a ‘facsimile’ of an ‘antique’ map which figures in the story. He also designed the original binding for The Hobbit, and a dust-jacket – a stylized landscape of mountains and trees – which is still used on some editions of the book with only minor revisions.

The first edition of The Hobbit contained only black and white art; but when colour illustrations were wanted for the American edition, Tolkien produced five paintings in July and August 1937: The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the Water, Rivendell, Bilbo Woke Up with the Early Sun in His Eyes, Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves, and Conversation with Smaug (Artist and Illustrator, figs. 98, 108, 113, 124, 133; Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, figs. 11, 23, 39, 64, 71). These are some of his finest work, produced while Tolkien was ‘divided between knowledge of my own inability [to draw] and fear of what American artists (doubtless of admirable skill) might produce’, in particular ‘the *Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing)’ (letter to C.A. Furth, 13 May 1937, Letters, p. 17). See further, *The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Despite the success of his Hobbit art, Tolkien referred to it almost always with self-effacement: it was ‘indifferent’, ‘defective’, ‘not very good’. He lacked the time, while pressed with many academic and personal responsibilities, to practise and develop his painting and drawing to the point at which he might feel comfortable exposing it to public view. For his next book, *Farmer Giles of Ham, he turned to a professional artist, *Pauline Baynes, whose work he found a perfect complement to his text. After this Baynes became his illustrator of choice. He hoped that she might illustrate *The Lord of the Rings, but its limited budget made little allowance for art. Tolkien however, while writing The Lord of the Rings, made numerous rough sketches and several finished coloured pencil drawings to help him visualize topography and architecture. His painstakingly rendered picture of the Doors of Durin (Book II, Chapter 4) was redrawn by a blockmaker’s artist before publication; his even more elaborate ‘facsimile’ pages of the Dwarves’ Book of Mazarbul, with genuine stab holes and burn marks, proved too costly to reproduce; and the distinctive dust-jacket designs he made for The Lord of the Rings were set aside in favour of a uniform design for all three volumes, each with Tolkien’s Eye of Sauron–Ring inscription motif. See further, *The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Although Tolkien did not study art as an academic subject, he was aware of styles or movements such as Symbolism and Art nouveau, and had a keen interest in decoration and handicraft. There are few references to the ‘fine’ arts of painting and sculpture in his writings (*Leaf by Niggle notably excepted, in which the title character is a painter), but many to decorative art such as carving, weaving, jewellery, and metalwork (see especially *Smith of Wootton Major), as well as *calligraphy and artistic lettering, in which Tolkien himself was skilled. Throughout his life he was drawn to decoration: most of his later art consists of brightly coloured patterns and devices, drawn purely for enjoyment; and among his papers are several versions of a decorated tree, the ‘Tree of Amalion’, bearing various shapes of leaves and many flowers. These are visual representations of ‘the countless foliage of the Tree of Tales, with which the Forest of Days is carpeted’, as Tolkien wrote in his essay *On Fairy-Stories (*Tree and Leaf, p. 52), and they are related also to Niggle’s painting of a tree in Leaf by Niggle which had ‘all of its leaves in the same style, and all of them different. … It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots’ (Tree and Leaf, pp. 75–6).

*J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (1995) reproduces the widest range of Tolkien’s art, but only half of the images are in colour; with one exception, the colour is good. Artist and Illustrator mostly, but not entirely, supersedes *Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien (1979; 2nd edn. 1992), a collection of pictures which had appeared in a series of Tolkien calendars, with foreword and notes by Christopher Tolkien. The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2011) and The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2015) each reproduces in colour all relevant art known to the authors at the time of writing, including calligraphy and maps.

Tolkien’s art has been variously exhibited; see: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Drawings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1976, for an exhibition held successively at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the National Book League, London, 1976–7); Catalogue of an Exhibit of the Manuscripts of JRRT (Marquette University Library, 1984); Drawings for ‘The Hobbit’ by J.R.R. Tolkien (Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1987); J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit Drawings, Watercolors, and Manuscripts (Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 1987); J.R.R. Tolkien: Life and Legend (Bodleian Library, 1992); and The Invented Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: Drawings and Original Manuscripts from the Marquette University Collection (Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 2004).

A list of Tolkien’s published art is included in the second volume of the Reader’s Guide. See also Nancy-Lou Patterson, ‘Tree and Leaf: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Visual Image’, English Quarterly 7, no. 1 (Spring 1974); Priscilla Tolkien, ‘My Father the Artist’, Amon Hen 23 (December 1976); John Ellison, ‘Tolkien’s Art’, Mallorn 30 (September 1993); Michael Organ, ‘Tolkien’s Japonisme: Prints, Dragons, and a Great Wave’, Tolkien Studies 10 (2013); and Descriptive Bibliography, section E. On art inspired by Tolkien’s works, see *Illustration.

The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull with an introduction and brief explanatory texts, first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, London, in October 2011, and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, in September 2012. The volume contains every painting, drawing, and sketch known to the authors to have been produced by Tolkien to illustrate *The Hobbit, or for its maps, binding, and dust-jacket, or made by Tolkien for other purposes but which served as models or inspiration for his Hobbit art.

A list of Tolkien’s published *art is included in the second volume of the Reader’s Guide.

The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull with an introduction and brief explanatory texts, first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, London, and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, both in October 2015. The volume contains every piece of art, including calligraphy and maps, known to the authors at the time of writing to have been produced by Tolkien in relation to *The Lord of the Rings.

A list of Tolkien’s published *art is included in the second volume of the Reader’s Guide.

Arthur and the Matter of Britain. Tolkien enjoyed stories of King Arthur in his childhood reading, and remembered ‘a very deep desire to see and speak to a Knight of Arthur’s Court. If I had, I should have regarded him much as Peredur did. But that is a special case: the desire was in large part a desire to visit or see Past Time. Owing to the accidents of its mediaeval development Arthurian legends had taken on an historical guise. They did not occur “once upon a time”’ (*On Fairy-Stories (expanded edn. 2008), p. 286). Peredur is the protagonist of a Welsh romance dating at least to the thirteenth century. Tolkien also argued in On Fairy-Stories that it seemed ‘fairly plain that Arthur, once historical (but perhaps as such not of great importance), was also put into the Pot’ – that is, the ‘Cauldron of Story’. ‘There he was boiled for a long time, together with many other older figures and devices, of mythology and Faërie, and even some other stray bones of history (such as Alfred’s defence against the Danes), until he emerged as a King of Faërie’ (*Tree and Leaf, p. 30).

While attending *King Edward’s School, Birmingham Tolkien read one of the major works of Arthurian literature, the late fourteenth-century Middle English poem *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was to be significant in his academic career. He taught a class on the poem at the University of *Oxford in Trinity Term 1920, even before he held an academic appointment; and together with *E.V. Gordon he produced an edition of the work (published 1925) while employed at the University of *Leeds. Sir Gawain is the story of a knight of King Arthur’s court, described by Tolkien and Gordon as ‘shaped with a sense of narrative unity not often found in Arthurian romance. Most of the Arthurian romances, even the greatest of them, such as the French Perlesvaus, or Malory’s Morte Darthure … are rambling and incoherent. It is a weakness inherited from the older Celtic forms, as we may see in the Welsh Mabinogion, stories told with even greater magic of style and even less coherence than the French and English compilations’ (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Tolkien and Gordon (1925), p. x). Tolkien also made a verse translation of the poem, possibly begun while working on the edition; the translation was broadcast on BBC radio in 1953 and published posthumously in 1976.

Apparently in the early 1930s Tolkien began to compose a lengthy poem in alliterative verse, *The Fall of Arthur. He wrote 954 lines before abandoning the work c. 1937, though in 1955 he still hoped to be able to complete it. The volume of the same title, first published in 2013 (see separate Reader’s Guide article), includes the latest text of the poem, together with commentary by *Christopher Tolkien concerning notes and outlines for its continuation, and the context of the Arthurian tradition in which the poem was written.

In ?late 1951 Tolkien explained in a letter to *Milton Waldman that one of the reasons he wrote *‘The Silmarillion’ was that he

was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was, and is, all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and it does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its ‘faerie’ is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. [Letters, p. 144]

The Arthurian legends are ‘associated with the soil of Britain’ because they had their origins among the inhabitants of that land, and indeed, that whole body of legend is often referred to as the ‘Matter of Britain’. The Romans, who invaded the island in 43 AD, called it ‘Britannia’, a version of ‘Ynys Prydain’, the name given it by its native Celtic inhabitants. When the last of the Roman troops were withdrawn in AD 410 the Romano-British peoples tried unsuccessfully to defend themselves against invasion by Germanic tribes, mainly Angles and Saxons, the ancestors of the English, and eventually held out only in western areas such as Wales and Cornwall; many fled across the channel into north-west Gaul and called their new settlement ‘Brittany’.

The little contemporary evidence that exists has been thought to suggest that in the late fifth or early sixth century a dux bellorum or war-leader arose among the British and, in a series of battles, for a time managed to stem the Saxon advance and even to regain some territory. By the tenth century a body of literature about this leader, now given the name Arthur, developed among the remnants of the original British inhabitants in Wales and Brittany, written in the vernacular Welsh or Breton. (Wales and Welsh are English names, derived from Germanic walh, wealh, used to describe speakers of Celtic languages, though as Tolkien points out in *English and Welsh the same word was used to describe speakers of Latin.) The Arthurian legends arose in part to celebrate the successes, even if temporary, of the native British population against the English.

Those of the legends developed in Brittany were translated or retold in French, and new stories or versions of stories were written, adding characters such as Lancelot, changing Arthur’s early companions (such as Bedivere, or Bedwyr) into chivalric knights of the Round Table, laying increasing emphasis on the Grail Quest, and sometimes reducing Arthur himself to an ineffectual figure. The Norman invaders who conquered England in 1066 introduced some of these new tales into England, and the Norman rulers tended to identify themselves with Arthur, who had also defeated the English. Thus for Tolkien, who strongly identified himself with *England and the English, the Arthurian legends were not only not themselves English (as opposed to British), but to some extent were identified with the Norman invaders who had had a devastating effect on English language, traditions, and literature.

Tolkien’s objection in his letter to Milton Waldman that the ‘faerie’ of Arthurian legend was ‘too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive’ was probably directed mainly at the Welsh tales in the fourteenth- to fifteenth-century collection known as the Mabinogion. Earlier he had told *Stanley Unwin that he felt for Celtic things ‘a certain distaste; largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact “mad”’ (16 December 1937, Letters, p. 26). In his letter to Waldman he said that while he would like his invented legends to have ‘the fair elusive quality that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine, ancient Celtic things)’, he also desired a ‘tone and quality … somewhat cool and clear’ (Letters, p. 144).

Tolkien accepted that Christianity was of major significance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in his W.P. Ker Lecture on that work in 1953 he discussed at length Gawain’s conduct as a Christian. He may have felt that in some of the tales of Arthur the Christian content was treated superficially; but his main thought may have been regret that the heroic tales of the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons were lost, only hinted at in such works as survived the Norman Conquest.

In *Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), set in a time ‘after the days of King Coel maybe, but before Arthur or the Seven Kingdoms of the English’ (p. 8), Tolkien parodied and mocked both Arthurian legend and the critics who tried to reconstruct its true history. The King in this tale is not at all glorious, and his knights are cowards. In notes to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Farmer Giles of Ham (1999) Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond suggest that Tolkien alludes to the Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) by Geoffrey of Monmouth, an important twelfth-century source for the Arthur legends, especially for the ‘historical’ Arthur (though the work itself is pseudo-historical). But Farmer Giles of Ham also contains anachronisms for the period in which it is set, if ‘not really worse than all the medieval treatment of Arthurian matter’, as Tolkien wrote to Naomi Mitchison (18 December 1949, Letters, p. 133).

Characters in *The Notion Club Papers discuss Arthurian legend, possibly expressing Tolkien’s own opinions. One member says:

Of course the pictures presented by legends may be partly symbolical, they may be arranged in designs that compress, expand, foreshorten, combine, and are not at all realistic or photographic, yet they may tell you something true about the Past. And mind you, there are also real details, what are called facts, accidents of land-shape and sea-shape, of individual men and their actions, that are caught up: the grains on which the stories crystallize like snowflakes. There was a man called Arthur at the centre of the cycle.

To which another answers: ‘Perhaps! … But that doesn’t make such things as the Arthurian romances real in the same way as true past events are real.’ The first speaker comments that ‘history in the sense of a story made up out of the intelligible surviving evidence (which is not necessarily truer to the facts than legend)’ is not the same as ‘“the true story”, the real Past’ (*Sauron Defeated, pp. 227–8, 230).

In spite of what Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman, some critics have discerned influence from or echoes of Arthurian legends in Tolkien’s own stories. The most obvious is the similarity of the wounded Frodo’s departure from Middle-earth to Tol Eressëa in the West, at the end of *The Lord of the Rings, to the departure of Arthur to the Isle of Avalon after the battle of Camlann, to be healed of his wounds. Tolkien himself recognized this in the summary of The Lord of the Rings that he sent to Waldman: ‘To Bilbo and Frodo the special grace is granted to go with the Elves they loved – an Arthurian ending, in which it is, of course, not made explicit whether this is an “allegory” of death, or a mode of healing and restoration leading to a return’ (*Morgoth’s Ring, pp. 365–6). A few years later, in a letter to *Naomi Mitchison, Tolkien was sure that there was no return for Frodo to Middle-earth as a mortal, ‘since their “kind” cannot be changed for ever, this is strictly only a temporary reward: a healing and redress of suffering. They cannot abide for ever, and though they cannot return to mortal earth, they can and will “die” – of free will, and leave the world. (In this setting the return of Arthur would be quite impossible, a vain imagining)’ (25 September 1954, Letters, pp. 198–9).

Various other parallels to or influences of Arthurian legend have been suggested, but many of these, such as the Quest motif, are not unique to the Matter of Britain. In a series of articles in Beyond Bree Todd Jensen considered both similarities and differences between Tolkien’s writings and Arthurian legend, noting that many of them may have been unintentional or are derived from a common source: see ‘Hobbits at the Round Table: A Comparison of Frodo Baggins to King Arthur’ (Beyond Bree, September 1988); ‘Tolkien and Arthurian Legend’ (November 1988); ‘The Sons of Fëanor and the Sons of Lot’ (July 1992); ‘Mordred and Maeglin’ (September 1992); ‘Merlin and Gandalf’ (November 1992); ‘Aragorn and Arthur’ (January 1993); ‘The Historical Arthur’ (March 1993); and ‘Arthurian Britain and Middle-earth’ (April 1993). See also Verlyn Flieger, ‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the Matter of Britain’, Mythlore 23, no. 1, whole no. 87 (Summer/Fall 2000).

Other writers have commented on parallels between the Arthurian wizard Merlin and Tolkien’s Gandalf, and have come to different conclusions. Nikolai Tolstoy has said that

there can be no doubt that the wizard Gandalf of The Hobbit (1937) and the trilogy [The Lord of the Rings] which follows, is drawn from the Merlin of early legend.

Like Merlin, Gandalf is a magician of infinite wisdom and power; like Merlin, he has a sense of humour by turns impish and sarcastic; and, like Merlin, he reappears at intervals, seemingly from nowhere, intervening to rescue an imperilled cosmos. Even minor aptitudes are openly appropriated, such as Merlin’s propensity for appearing in the incongruous guise of a beggar, and his capacity for launching splendid displays of pyrotechnics. [The Quest for Merlin (1985; 1986 edn. cited), p. 40]

Miriam Youngerman Miller, however, concludes ‘that Tolkien did not so much employ the model of any one wizard, be it Merlin or Odin, in his invention of Gandalf, but rather patterned his mage according to the characteristics which underlie the archetype of the magician as it developed in ancient Persia (and no doubt before) and as it persists to this day’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Merlin: An Old Man with a Staff: Gandalf and the Magus Tradition’, The Figure of Merlin in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1989), p. 138). See further, comments by Carl Phelpstead in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), especially ch. 5. For a lengthy discussion of Gandalf in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings relative to Merlin in Arthurian tales, see Frank P. Riga, ‘Gandalf and Merlin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Adoption and Transformation of a Literary Tradition’, Mythlore 27, nos. 1/2, whole nos. 103/104 (Fall/Winter 2008).

In ‘An Ethnically Cleansed Faery? Tolkien and the Matter of Britain’, Mallorn 32 (September 1995), David Doughan notes that although Tolkien may have tried to avoid introducing an Arthurian element in his poetry and fiction, nevertheless it ‘keeps breaking through’, particularly in the influence of Welsh on names, though not necessarily on their meaning. Doughan cites (pp. 23–4) the use in the *Lay of Leithian of ‘Broseliande’ (later ‘Beleriand’), ‘originally “Bro Celiddon” – the land of Caledonia, and the supposed place of one of Arthur’s battles’; and, in *The Fall of Númenor, ‘Avallon’ as a name for Tol Eressëa (in later versions ‘Avallónë’, a haven in that island), similar to Arthurian ‘Avalon’, though Avallon is so called because ‘it is hard by Valinor’ (*The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 24), and Arthurian Avalon is related to Welsh afal ‘apple’.

Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Currie explore Arthurian sources for Tolkien’s story of ‘Beren and Lúthien’ in The Epic Realm of Tolkien, Part One (2009). As Carl Phelpstead has remarked, however, although ‘Lewis and Currie demonstrate a wide knowledge’ of relevant texts, ‘some – not all – of the many connections they make with medieval Arthurian texts are less convincing [than the ‘incontrovertible’ argument that Tolkien made use of ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ in The Mabinogion] and there is too ready an assumption that if a particular medieval text is in some way (more or less) similar to Tolkien’s and could have been known by him it must be a source: as a consequence they leave little to Tolkien’s own imagination’ (Tolkien and Wales, p. 73). Tom Shippey says much the same in ‘A Question of Source’, Mallorn 49 (Spring 2010), but finds plausible ‘the early Welsh demon cat, Cath Palug, as a model for Tevildo’ (the feline precursor of Sauron in The Book of Lost Tales) and ‘the hunting of the great boar Twrch Trwyth as a model for the hunt of the wolf Karkaras’ (p. 11).

Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth. The ‘converse of Finrod and Andreth’, published in *Morgoth’s Ring (1993), pp. 303–66.

SYNOPSIS

An introductory section preceding the actual converse states that, although the Elves learned little from Men about their past, they discovered that some Men believed that they were not naturally short-lived, ‘but had been made so by the malice of Melkor’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 304). The Elves were not certain whether Men meant by this a general result of the Marring of Arda or a deliberate change in their nature.

Then follows a philosophical debate between the Noldorin Elf Finrod of Nargothrond and Andreth, a Wise-woman of the House of Bëor. A record of this debate, which took place in the First Age during the long Siege of Angband (c. 409), was supposedly preserved in the lore of the Eldar and called in Sindarin (*Languages, Invented) Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth. In this Andreth rejects the belief of the Elves that it was through Eru’s design, or as a result of the general marring of Arda, that Men are short-lived. She says that some of the Wise among her people preserve a tradition that Men ‘“were not made for death, nor born ever to die. Death was imposed on us.” And behold! the fear of it is with us always …’ (p. 309). According to their lore, ‘we knew that in our beginning we had been born never to die. And by that … we meant: born to life everlasting, without any shadow of any end’ (p. 314). Finrod suggests that it is not death, but the fear of it, which comes from Melkor, and says that Elves too have died. Andreth points out that Elves do not die unless slain, and may return to life, while all Men die ‘and we go out to no return. Death is an uttermost end, a loss irremediable’ (p. 311). Finrod replies that although the Elves may endure as long as Arda, they do not know their fate beyond its end; and if Melkor has been able to change the very nature of Men, and ‘that in Eru’s despite’ (p. 312), then he is far more powerful than the Elves believed. Finrod suggests that only Eru would be able to do such a thing, and asks what Men did to anger him. Andreth is unwilling to reply.

Finrod and Andreth discuss the manner in which the hröar (bodies, singular hröa) and fëar (spirits, singular fëa) of Elves and Men differ. This leads Finrod to speculate that Eru’s original design for Man was that when his fëa departed from Arda it should ‘have the power to uplift the hröa, as its eternal spouse and companion, into an endurance everlasting beyond Eä, and beyond Time’; and from this he propounds that Men, as ‘heirs and fulfillers of all’, were intended ‘to heal the Marring of Arda, already foreshadowed before their devising; and to do more, as agents of the magnificence of Eru: to enlarge the Music and surpass the Vision of the World’ (p. 318). When Finrod asks Andreth if Men have no hope, she says that some believe that ‘the One will himself enter into Arda, and heal Men and all the Marring from the beginning to the end’ (p. 321). Finrod then comments that only Eru has greater power than Melkor, and ‘if He will not relinquish His Work to Melkor, who must else proceed to mastery, then Eru must come in to conquer him’ (p. 322). Towards the end, the conversation having turned to the unfulfilled love between Andreth and Finrod’s brother, Aegnor, Finrod explains that Aegnor turned away from Andreth not for lack of love, but from foresight that he would soon be slain.

The Athrabeth proper is followed by a commentary and lengthy notes, apparently (and unusually) written by Tolkien in his own persona, that is, not presented as a text or edited text deriving from an ‘original’ within the legendarium. The Athrabeth ‘is in fact simply part of the portrayal of the imaginary world of the Silmarillion [*‘The Silmarillion’], and an example of the kind of thing that enquiring minds on either side, the Elvish or the Human, must have said to one another after they became acquainted’ (p. 329). The existence of Elves and the Valar within this world must be accepted as ‘fact’. Tolkien outlines Finrod’s basic beliefs, derived from ‘his created nature; angelic instruction; thought; and experience’ (p. 330), and states how these are affected by his conversation with Andreth. Among matters discussed are the Elvish view of the nature of Mankind, the necessary union of hröa and fëa for incarnates (Elves and Men), and the Elves’ thoughts concerning their own fate at the ending of Arda. It is said that Finrod probably guessed that if Eru were to enter Arda he ‘would come incarnated in human form’ (p. 335), thus hinting at the coming of Christ. The notes, also written in an authorial voice, expand on certain points raised in the commentary, such as the place of ‘Arda’ (now referring to the solar system, but often used loosely so that the name seems to mean Earth) in ‘Eä’ (the universe), Elvish traditions of reincarnation, and so forth, and relate them to the larger legendarium.

One of the notes to the commentary explains Andreth’s unwillingness to say much about the past history and fall of Men:

Partly by a kind of loyalty that restrained Men from revealing to the Elves all that they knew about the darkness in their past; partly because she felt unable to make up her own mind about the conflicting human traditions. Longer recensions of the Athrabeth, evidently edited under Númenórean influence, make her give, under pressure, a more precise answer. Some are brief, some longer. All agree, however, in making the cause of disaster the acceptance by Men of Melkor as King (or King and God). In one version a complete legend [the Tale of Adanel] … is given explicitly as a Númenórean tradition. … The legend bears certain resemblances to the Númenórean traditions concerning the part played by Sauron in the downfall of Númenor. But this does not prove that it is entirely a fiction of post-downfall days. It is no doubt mainly derived from actual lore of the People of Marach, quite independent of the Athrabeth.

An addition to the note comments: ‘Nothing is hereby asserted concerning its “truth” [i.e. the truth of the Tale of Adanel], historical or otherwise’ (p. 344).

According to the attached Tale of Adanel, Men, near the beginning of their history, before any had died, turned away from the Voice which urged them to seek for answers, to the allegiance of a being who offered knowledge and gave many gifts. They revered him and obeyed him when he forbade them to listen to the Voice and ordered them to bow before him as their Master. The Voice then told them that the life it had given them would be shortened, and they began to die and suffer ills. Some rejected the Master but only a few escaped from his followers.

Tolkien also made a glossary or brief index of names and terms appearing in the Athrabeth, with definitions and some etymological information; this too was published in Morgoth’s Ring.

HISTORY

Only part of a preliminary draft (itself probably based on an earlier lost draft) of the manuscript debate of Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth survives, and differs considerably from the finished manuscript. In the draft much of what Finrod deduces during the conversation is presented as being Mannish tradition. Also, whereas in the final text Finrod asks Andreth what Men did to anger Eru and she refuses to reply, in the draft she gives a brief account similar to the Tale of Adanel. Tolkien then made a clear manuscript of the introductory matter and the debate. At some date he detached the beginning of the introduction as a separate text and gave it the title *Aman, and probably at the same time gave the remaining part of the manuscript the title Of Death and the Children of Eru, and the Marring of Men. He later added as another title or subtitle The Converse of Finrod and Andreth, an English rendering of Sindarin Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth. Tolkien himself usually referred to the work as simply the Athrabeth.

Two separate amanuensis typescripts were made from the manuscript of the debate, except for introductory matter. Tolkien lightly emended these, and himself typed the introduction on the typewriter he used from the beginning of 1959, making some changes. After the amanuensis typescripts had been made, Tolkien drafted the commentary and notes, and made a typescript of these. The text and commentary of the Athrabeth were preserved in a folded newspaper of January 1960, inscribed ‘Addit. Silmarillion | Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth | Commentary’ and ‘Should be last item in an appendix’ (to The Silmarillion). *Christopher Tolkien is inclined to date the work to 1959, following *Laws and Customs among the Eldar and *The Converse of Manwë and Eru.

CRITICISM

In the commentary Tolkien says that the Athrabeth is

a conversation, in which many assumptions and steps of thought have to be supplied by the reader. Actually, though it deals with such things as death and the relations of Elves and Men to Time and Arda, and to one another, its real purpose is dramatic: to exhibit the generosity of Finrod’s mind, his love and pity for Andreth, and the tragic situations that must arise in the meeting of Elves and Men. … For as eventually becomes plain, Andreth had in youth fallen in love with Aegnor, Finrod’s brother; and though she knew that he returned her love … he had not declared it, but had left her – and she believed that she was rejected as too lowly for an Elf. [p. 335]

But this is not the aspect which makes the greatest impression on most readers. For many the Athrabeth is a puzzling and somewhat startling work, in which Tolkien seems to introduce radical changes to conceptions established in his earlier writings, and writes in more detail about matters either left untold or barely touched on previously.

In earlier writings Man’s mortal nature is considered a gift, not a punishment, little indication is given of Eru’s intentions for Man’s part in the history of Arda, and the Fall of Man is only hinted at, as having taken place long before Men arrived in Beleriand. In the summary of his legendarium that he sent to *Milton Waldman in ?late 1951 Tolkien wrote that ‘the Doom (or the Gift) of Man is mortality, freedom from the circles of the world’ and ‘the first fall of Man … nowhere appears – Men do not come on the stage until all that is long past, and there is only a rumour that for a while they fell under the domination of the Enemy and that some repented’ (Letters, pp. 147–8). In the same letter, he wrote that ‘myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary “real” world’; and he criticized Arthurian legend (*Arthur and the Matter of Britain) for explicitly containing the Christian religion (p. 144).

In other letters, from 1954, Tolkien said that in his legendarium ‘Men are essentially mortal and must not try to become “immortal” in the flesh’ and that ‘Mortality’ is ‘represented as a special gift of God’ to Men and not ‘a punishment for a Fall’; and ‘Death – the mere shortness of human life-span – is not a punishment for the Fall but a biologically (and therefore also spiritually, since body and spirit are integrated) inherent part of Man’s nature’ (Letters, pp. 189, 205).

In a draft letter written in April 1956 he said: ‘I do not think that even Power or Dominion is the real centre of my story. … The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the heart of a race “doomed” to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race “doomed” not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete’ (Letters, p. 246).

These statements were made of course in letters not intended for publication, and Tolkien therefore could have introduced any changes or new ideas that he wished into the still unpublished *Silmarillion. He would have to take into account, however, the statement made in Appendix A of *The Lord of the Rings that although the Númenóreans had a longer life, ‘they must remain mortal since the Valar were not permitted to take from them the Gift of Men (or the Doom of Men, as it was afterwards called)’. According to a note written on the wrapping in which it was preserved, Tolkien intended, at least at one time, to include the Athrabeth and associated commentary in ‘The Silmarillion’ as the last item in an appendix.

Another note shows that Tolkien hesitated to include an account of the Fall: ‘Is it not right to make Andreth refuse to discuss any traditions or legends of the “Fall”? Already it is (if inevitably) too like a parody of Christianity. Any legend of the Fall would make it completely so?’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 354). Nevertheless, he included the Tale of Adanel. Christopher Tolkien writes that these remarks ‘are evidence that [Tolkien] was in some way concerned about these new developments, these new directions, in the underlying “theology” of Arda, or at any rate their so explicit expression’, and he saw a ‘significant shift’ from his father’s earlier writings and from comments made in letters (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 354). But Christopher was unable to interpret exactly what his father meant by them. He wonders if his father was referring to the suggestion that Eru himself would enter Arda, probably in human form. This, he says,

surely is not parody, nor even parallel, but the extension – if only represented as vision, hope, or prophecy – of the ‘theology’ of Arda into specifically, and of course centrally, Christian belief; and a manifest challenge to my father’s view in his letter of 1951 [to Milton Waldman] on the necessary limitations of the expression of ‘moral and religious truth (or error)’ in a ‘Secondary World’. [p. 356]

Various interpretations have been made of the Athrabeth texts, influenced to some extent by how far the reader accepts the truth of what is said and written. In the debate, Finrod and Andreth report Elvish and Mannish traditions and beliefs and express their own opinions and deductions, but none of these is necessarily actual truth, and even what is said may not (in the context of the invented world) have been correctly transmitted into later Elvish and Mannish tradition. The protagonists and the reader are within Tolkien’s secondary world. Although the commentary and notes seem to have a greater authority, coming from the creator of the fiction, they confirm neither Adanel’s account of the Fall nor Finrod’s deductions concerning Eru’s intentions for Man, nor Eru’s future entry into Arda, leaving these as possibilities rather than facts.

Verlyn Flieger suggests in ‘Whose Myth Is It?’ in Between Faith and Fiction: Tolkien and the Powers of His World, ed. Nils Ivar Agøy (1998), that Tolkien wrote the Athrabeth to explain his statement that death is a gift, because to maintain an inner consistency of reality ‘Men had to come to terms with death and question the circumstance of their own mortality’. Tolkien handled ‘what was clearly an ethically difficult, theologically risky problem for his sub-created world’: he allowed ‘the competing voices to speak for themselves, each to make its own case’, but ‘made sure that none of these competing voices spoke with final authority’ (p. 35). He did not include the Tale of Adanel in the Athrabeth, only as an appendix to his commentary and presented as lore rather than fact.

Nils Ivar Agøy argues in ‘The Fall and Man’s Mortality: An Investigation of Some Theological Themes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth”’, also in Between Faith and Fiction: Tolkien and the Powers of His World (1998), that in his later writings Tolkien was aiming ‘at “consonance” with Catholic theology in more and more contexts’ (p. 17). The Athrabeth ‘may have been intended as a kind of final statement’ on Death and the Fall ‘in the context of the legendarium, written at a time when the process of adjustment to Catholicism had gone so far that even the Revelation in Christ and the Incarnation were more than hinted at’ (p. 18). Agøy notes that ‘both Finrod and Andreth take for granted the view, essential in Christianity, that man is both body and soul. They reject the notion that the soul is the “real” human person, using the body only as a temporary habitation. … Their insistence that the soul cannot go on without the body is of course sound Catholic doctrine …’ (p. 19).

Agøy calls attention to Tolkien’s statement in a note to the commentary that mortals (such as Frodo) who passed ‘oversea’ did so by special grace, given ‘an opportunity for dying according to the original plan for the unfallen: they went to a state in which they could acquire greater knowledge and peace of mind, and being healed of all hurts both of mind and body, could at last surrender themselves: die of free will, and even of desire, in estel [hope]’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 341). Agøy points out that this supports the idea of ‘an afterlife for humans’, and that ‘God’s [Eru’s] “original plan for the unfallen” involved dying’ (p. 20). He considers that Tolkien in the Athrabeth and in various letters is making the point ‘that humanity had the wrong attitude towards Death’: it is indeed a Gift, and ‘accepting and welcoming death, giving up life voluntarily when the time was come, was a sign of “goodness” in Men’ (pp. 20–1). As the focus of Tolkien’s writings ‘shifted more and more from “stories” to working out in detail the philosophical and metaphysical framework in which they existed, explicit Christianity in Roman Catholic form simply could not be avoided. Its presence was a logical consequence of the fact that Tolkien insisted that “Middle-earth is … this earth”’ (p. 26).

In this regard it may be pertinent to note that in the 1968 BBC television documentary Tolkien in Oxford, in a discussion of the importance of death in the human story, Tolkien quoted Simone de Beauvoir, from the Patrick O’Brian translation of Une mort très douce: ‘There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to man is ever natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.’

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (2002) Bradley J. Birzer describes the Athrabeth as ‘possibly Tolkien’s most theological and profound writing in the entire legendarium, and it is essential to one’s understanding of Tolkien’s mythological vision’. On Andreth’s statement of men’s belief that they are ‘born to life everlasting’, Birzer comments that ‘she misinterprets it to mean the life of the body’ (p. 56).

Maria Kuteeva in ‘“Old Human”, or “The Voice in Our Hearts”: J.R.R. Tolkien on the Origin of Language’, in Between Faith and Fiction: Tolkien and the Powers of His World, ed. Nils Ivar Agøy (1998), describes the Tale of Adanel as not only offering ‘the most detailed account of the Fall of Man ever written by Tolkien’, but also containing ‘a fairly explicit account of the origin of human language’ (p. 84). Andreth, telling the story, says: ‘We understood the Voice in our hearts, though we had no words yet. Then the desire for words woke in us, and we began to make them’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 345).

In a comment on the work itself rather than on its theological content, David Bratman thinks that the Athrabeth ‘stands with the Council of Elrond [The Lord of the Rings, Book II, Chapter 2] as one of the great conversations in Tolkien’s work, and it certainly contains more dialogue, as opposed to narration, than anything else he wrote about the Elder Days’ (‘The Literary Value of The History of Middle-earth’ in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (2000), p. 77).

See further, Renée Vink, ‘The Wise Woman’s Gospel’, Lembas-extra 2004 (2004). See also *Mortality and Immortality.