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Atlakviða. Old Norse poem in the Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript compiled c. 1260 but containing poems from a much earlier period, often in corrupt form. Atlakviða was one of Tolkien’s chief sources for his Guðrúnarkviða en nýja (see *The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún). According to *Christopher Tolkien, his father

devoted much time and thought to Atlakaviða, and prepared a very detailed commentary (the basis for lectures and seminars) on this extraordinarily difficult text. It is a poem that he much admired. Despite its condition, ‘we are in the presence (he wrote) of great poetry that can still move us as poetry. Its style is universally and rightly praised: rapid, terse, vigorous – while maintaining, within its narrow limits, characterization. The poet who wrote it knew how to produce the grim and deadly atmosphere his theme demanded. It lives in the memory as one of the things in the Edda [the Elder Edda] most instinct with that demonic energy and force which one finds in Old Norse verse. [The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, pp. 311–12]

Two portions of Atlakviða translated by Tolkien into alliterative Old English were published in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009), pp. 369–70 and 374–6, with Modern English translations and commentary by Christopher Tolkien, as ‘Fragments of a Heroic Poem of Attila in Old English’. These comprise forty lines (eight stanzas) from the beginning of the poem and twenty-eight lines from near the end.

In the first portion, brothers Guðhere and Hagena have given their sister as wife to Ætla, ruler of the Huns. A messenger comes from Ætla inviting them to visit him and offering them gifts, land, and treasure. Guðhere is not tempted – he already has enough – but he asks Hagena’s opinion. Hagena is suspicious: a ring their sister sent is wound with a wolf’s hair.

The second text begins with Hagena’s laugh as the Huns cut out his heart. It then tells how Guðhere, now the only one who knows where in the Rhine the Niflungs’ treasure has been thrown, refuses to reveal the place. The portion ends with Guðhere in a snake pit, playing a harp.

More than one copy exists of each translation by Tolkien, with minor progressive movement. Most of the second part was set in type for an unknown purpose, probably for student use, with the title Gunnar’s End. Christopher Tolkien thinks it ‘very probable’ that his father made the translations during his ‘earlier years at Oxford after his departure from Leeds’, thus c. 1926–30.

Atlantis. From his youth Tolkien experienced dreams which he came to call his ‘Atlantis-haunting’ or ‘Atlantis complex’.

This legend or myth or dim memory of some ancient history has always troubled me. In sleep I had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming out of the quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. It still occurs occasionally, though now exorcized by writing about it. It always ends by surrender, and I awake gasping out of deep water. I used to draw it or write bad poems about it. [letter to Christopher Bretherton, 16 July 1964, Letters, p. 347]

In a letter to *W.H. Auden on 7 June 1955 Tolkien wondered if he might have inherited this dream from his parents, since he had then recently discovered that his son Michael, to whom he had never mentioned his own dreams, had similar experiences. At this time Tolkien did not think that he had had the dream ‘since I wrote the “Downfall of Númenor” as the last of the legends of the First and Second Ages’, which bears strong similarities to the legend of Atlantis (Letters, p. 213; see also *Númenor); but his letter to Christopher Bretherton in 1964 suggests that the dream still occasionally recurred.

The story of Atlantis is recounted in two works by Plato (c. 429–347 BC), the Critias and the Timaeus, repeating one that Solon (d. c. 560/559 BC) is said to have heard in Egypt, told to him by an Egyptian priest. Thousands of years earlier, Plato says in the Timaeus, the powerful island realm of Atlantis was defeated in its attempt to extend its power to Greece and Egypt, ‘but afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night’ Atlantis ‘disappeared in the depths of the sea’ (Benjamin Jowett translation, in The Dialogues of Plato, 1905 edn., vol. 2, p. 521). In the Critias Plato describes how Poseidon settled some of his offspring by mortal women on the island of Atlantis, and how the realm prospered and then lost the favour of the gods.

For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the gods, who were their kinsmen; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, practicing gentleness and wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, not caring for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them. … But when this divine portion began to fade away in them, and became diluted too often and with too much of the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, then they, being unable to bear their fortune, became unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see, they began to appear base, and had lost the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they still appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were filled with unrighteous avarice and power. [Jowett translation, The Dialogues of Plato, 1905 edn., vol. 2, p. 607]

The work breaks off as Zeus decides that people of Atlantis must be punished, ‘that they might be chastened and improved’.

Tolkien ended early versions of his *‘Silmarillion’ mythology with the overthrow of Morgoth at the end of the First Age. He said little of the fate of Men after that event, other than that by the judgement of the Valar the Outer Lands (Middle-earth) were to be for Mankind. Then, in 1936 or 1937, he extended his legendarium into a Second Age, centred on a new version of the Atlantis legend. As he told Christopher Bretherton: ‘I began an abortive book of time-travel of which the end was to be the presence of my hero in the drowning of Atlantis. This [land] was to be called Númenor, the Land in the West’ (16 July 1964, Letters, p. 347). Tolkien abandoned his time-travel story, *The Lost Road, when he had written only part of the Atlantis-Númenor episode, and only a few rough and incoherent notes indicate how he might have continued it.

But to provide background for this, he wrote *The Fall of Númenor, a brief history of a fictional island realm which has more than a few similarities with the story of Atlantis. Given by the Valar to Men as a reward for fighting against Morgoth, Númenor lay in the West of the Great Sea; and there for nearly 2,000 years its people flourished, becoming great mariners. Returning at times to Middle-earth, at first they sought to teach and help lesser men, but in their third millennium they sought instead dominion and tribute. Also they began to fear death, and at last defied a ban imposed by the Valar against sailing west beyond sight of Númenor. Vainly seeking immortality, the king’s fleet invaded Valinor in the West, upon which the Valar appealed to a higher power, and Eru (God) changed the shape of the world, destroying Númenor and most of its peoples. (See further, *Númenor.)

In The Fall of Númenor (c. 1936–7) it is said that

Valinor was sundered from the earth, and a rift appeared in the midst of Belegar [the Sea] … and into this chasm the great seas plunged, and the noise of the falling waters filled all the earth and the smoke of the cataracts rose above the tops of the everlasting mountains. But all the ships of Númenor … were drawn down into the great abyss and drowned. …

But Númenor being nigh upon the East to the great rift was utterly thrown down and overwhelmed in sea, and its glory perished. [*The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 15–16]

In *The Drowning of Anadûnê (end of 1945–mid-1946) Tolkien added portents warning the last king not to proceed with his invasion plans: ‘the land shook under them, and a groaning as of thunder underground was mingled with the roaring of the sea; and smoke appeared upon the top of [Meneltarma, the holy mountain in the centre of Númenor]’, and in the destruction of Númenor ‘last of all the mounting wave, green and cold and plumed with foam took to its bosom Ar-Zimrahil the Queen’ (*Sauron Defeated, pp. 371, 373). This seems to be the first hint in Tolkien’s writings that Meneltarma was volcanic. In the *Akallabêth (c. 1948) the eruption of Meneltarma contributes to the destruction of Númenor: ‘Then suddenly fire burst from the Meneltarma, and there came a mighty wind and a tumult of the earth, and the sky reeled, and the hills slid, and Númenor went down into the sea …’ (*The Silmarillion, p. 279).

Many of these details in Tolkien’s fiction have counterparts in writings of the first half of the twentieth century in which the legend of Atlantis was tied to the history of the eastern Mediterranean. Sir Arthur Evans’ excavations in Crete from 1899 to 1945 revealed the existence there in the second millennium BC of a previously unknown civilization which he called ‘Minoan’, after Minos, king of Crete in Greek legend. Minoan Crete was revealed as a trading and maritime power which had suffered a sudden and unexplained disaster. Later K.T. Frost suggested in two articles that Plato’s Atlantis preserved a memory of Minoan Crete and the sudden ending of its glory: ‘The Lost Continent’, The Times (London), 19 February 1909, and ‘The Critias and Minoan Crete’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 33 (1913), both cited in the ‘Atlantis’ entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica (14th edn. 1938). Then in 1939 Spyridon Marinatos put forward the theory that the sudden disaster which so damaged Minoan civilization was the cataclysmic eruption in the middle of the second millennium BC of the volcanic Cycladean island of Thera, north of Crete (‘The Volcanic Destruction of Minoan Crete’, Antiquity 13 (1939)). During the eruption the greater part of Thera collapsed into the sea, huge tsunamis ravaged nearby Crete, and pumice and other debris covered the ground. From this point it was no great leap to link, as Marinatos did in 1950, the sinking of Thera, the disaster suffered by Minoan civilization, and the story of Atlantis as a reflection of actual events.

In his 1955 letter to W.H. Auden Tolkien wrote that he had ‘bequeathed’ his dream of the Great Wave to Faramir in *The Lord of the Rings. In that work (Book VI, Chapter 5) Faramir tells Éowyn that the mountain of darkness they see from the walls of Minas Tirith reminds him of ‘[Númenor] that foundered and of the great dark wave climbing over the green lands and above the hills, and coming on, darkness inescapable’.

In *The Notion Club Papers, written during Christmas 1945 and first half of 1946, but purporting to be records of a society in 1987, during a thunderstorm two members of the Club seem to experience ancestral memories of the fall of Númenor. One of them cries out (pp. 251–2): ‘The King hath set forth his might against the Lords of the West. … The Eagles of the Powers of the World have arisen in anger. The Lords have spoken to Ēru, and the fate of the World is changed! … See! The abyss openeth, The sea falls. The mountains lean over. … All hath passed away. The light hath gone out!’

Tolkien also mentioned to Christopher Bretherton that he ‘used to draw [the wave] or write bad poems about it’ (Letters, p. 347), possibly a reference to his poem *The Horns of Ylmir and his drawing Water, Wind & Sand (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 42). Otherwise, there are only two drawings which might be connected with the wave among his art preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives): one of them, a decorative frieze, is reproduced in Artist and Illustrator as fig. 59.

Writing to *Elizabeth Jennings on 21 December 1955, Tolkien commented on her poem ‘New Worlds’, which concerns Atlantis as a dream of ‘swelling waters’ to ‘be ignored forever’, losing even its name, now that one knows actual ‘countries in space’. Tolkien ‘passionately’ agreed with this, ‘except that I do not think that it was hope that made (makes: it is very real to me) Atlantis real. “Hope” maybe imparts such reality as “countries in space” may possess for the mind. But to me Atlantis is a myth of regret. Both can be terrible deceits, must be so to any mind completely involved in the world (of the senses) but they seem to me quite different’ (British Library MS Add. 52599).

Attacks of Taste. Collection of statements by authors regarding the books they loved as teenagers, compiled and edited by Evelyn B. Byrne and Otto M. Penzler and published by the Gotham Book Mart, New York, in December 1971. See further, Descriptive Bibliography B29.

For this volume Tolkien briefly wrote, in a single paragraph, that during his teenage years he was not interested in ‘literature’ – perhaps forgetting the *Kalevala, which he read at that time – but mostly in works of science, ‘especially botany and astronomy’ (p. 43). His ‘most treasured volume’ was Flowers of the Field by C.A. Johns, first published c. 1850.

Auden, Wystan Hugh (1907–1973). As an undergraduate at Christ Church, *Oxford, W.H. Auden had a special admiration for Old and Middle English poetry and attended at least one of Tolkien’s lectures on *Beowulf. It was, he said, an ‘unforgettable experience’: ‘the voice was the voice of Gandalf’, the good wizard in *The Lord of the Rings (quoted in Biography, p. 133). Tolkien later said that Auden possessed an ear for Old English poetry while others were deaf to it. But Auden’s scholarship was wanting, and in 1928 he earned only a Third from a panel of examiners which included Tolkien and *David Nichol Smith. He was not interested in literary analysis, but in literature as art, and in whatever could help him become a great poet, a goal he confided to his tutor *Nevill Coghill. Indeed, Auden came to be considered one of the great poets of the twentieth century, as well as a distinguished playwright and critic. In 1939 he moved to the United States, where he lived until almost the end of his life.

Auden long admired Tolkien’s *Hobbit, and enthusiastically welcomed The Lord of the Rings. In 1954 he warmly reviewed The Fellowship of the Ring for the New York Times and the magazine Encounter, in 1955 gave a radio talk (which Tolkien disliked) on The Lord of the Rings on the BBC Third Programme, and in 1956 reviewed The Return of the King for the New York Times and the complete Lord of the Rings for Commonweal. Before writing about The Return of the King he sent Tolkien a series of questions and received a lengthy reply (Letters, pp. 211–17), the beginning of a long correspondence.

Also in 1956 Auden was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford for a five-year term. He was required to give only three lectures per year, and usually spent only four weeks out of the year in Oxford. In his inaugural lecture, Making, Knowing and Judging (1956), he described Tolkien as a magnificent reciter of Beowulf, and he singled out early English poetry among his strongest personal influences. ‘It is hardly surprising’, he said,

if a young poet seldom does well in his examinations. If he does, then either he is also a scholar in the making, or he is a very good boy indeed. … But there is nothing a would-be poet knows he has to know. He is at the mercy of the immediate moment. … His immediate desire can even be to attend a lecture. I remember one I attended, delivered by Professor Tolkien. I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish. [pp. 13–14]

Undergraduates in the audience who objected to the inclusion of Old English in the Oxford syllabus were shocked, but Tolkien was greatly pleased.

In December 1965 Auden gave an impromptu talk at a gathering of the recently formed Tolkien Society of America in New York (*Fandom and popularity). According to newspaper reports, he said that Tolkien lived in ‘a hideous house’, and otherwise made remarks which Tolkien thought ‘so fantastically wide of the mark that I should have to enter into a long correspondence in order to correct your notions of me sufficiently for the purpose’ (letter to Auden, 8 April 1966, Letters, p. 368). Tolkien and his wife felt ridiculed, though he allowed that the press reports (of an account published in the New Yorker for 15 January 1966) might have been garbled.

Nor was he pleased to learn that Auden had agreed to collaborate on a book about him for the Wm. B. Eerdmans series Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective. This project did not proceed in the face of Tolkien’s strong disapproval. ‘I regard such things as premature impertinences’, Tolkien wrote, ‘and unless undertaken by an intimate friend, or with consultation of the subject … I cannot believe that they have a usefulness to justify the distaste and irritation given to the victim. I wish at any rate that any book could wait until I produce the *Silmarillion’ (Letters, p. 367; see also *Biographies).

Although Tolkien sometimes disagreed with Auden’s assessment of his works, the two remained on friendly terms. Auden sent his books to Tolkien, contributed a poem, ‘A Short Ode to a Philologist’, to the Festschrift *English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (1962), and dedicated to Tolkien the Auden–Paul B. Taylor translation of the Elder Edda (1969). Tolkien in turn wrote an alliterative poem in Old and Modern English (*Languages), *For W.H.A., for a special number of the journal Shenandoah (Winter 1967) in honour of Auden. On 25 August 1971 Tolkien wrote to Robert H. Boyer that in recent years Auden’s

support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it.

I regard him as one of my great friends although we have so seldom met except through letters and gifts of his work. [Letters, p. 411]

Two standard references for Auden’s life and works are W.H. Auden: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter (1981) and W.H. Auden: A Commentary by John Fuller (1998). The standard bibliography is W.H. Auden: A Bibliography: 1924–1969 by B.C. Bloomfield and Edward Mendelson (1972).

‘Of Aulë and Yavanna’. The second chapter of the *‘Quenta Silmarillion’, published in *The Silmarillion (1977), pp. 43–6.

SYNOPSIS

Aulë, the great smith of the Valar, is eager to have pupils to whom he can teach his craft. Unwilling to wait until the Elves awake, he secretly fashions the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves. When Ilúvatar (Eru, the One) rebukes him, Aulë is prepared to destroy his creation, but because of his humility Ilúvatar gives the Dwarves life of their own, and Aulë stays his hand. The Dwarves, however, must sleep until the awakening of the Elves, who are to be the First-born of the Children of Ilúvatar. When Yavanna, the spouse of Aulë, learns of this, she fears that the Dwarves, and even the Children (Elves and Men), will harm the plants and trees that she loves. From Manwë, chief of the Valar, she seeks protection for what she holds dear, especially the trees: ‘Long in the growing, swift shall they be in the felling, and unless they pay toll with fruit upon bough little mourned in their passing. … Would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them!’ (The Silmarillion, p. 45).

Manwë has a vision of the Song of Creation, in which he perceives things he had not seen before. Eru speaks to him, saying: ‘When the Children awake, then the thought of Yavanna will awake also, and it will summon spirits from afar, and they will go among the kelvar [animals, living things that move] and the olvar [growing things with roots in the earth], and some will dwell therein, and be held in reverence, and their just anger shall be feared’ (p. 46). Some who enter the kelvar will become the great Eagles of the Lords of the West and others will walk in the forests as the Shepherds of the Trees (the Ents).

HISTORY

Aulë’s creation of the Dwarves first appeared in the ‘later’ *Annals of Beleriand of the mid-1930s, as reported by some of the wise in Valinor. But there is no intervention by Ilúvatar, and it is said that the Dwarves have ‘no spirit indwelling, as have the Children of the Creator, and they have skill but not art; and they go back into the stone of the mountains of which they were made’ (*The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 129). An early addition says that some believed ‘that Aulë cares for them and that Ilúvatar will accept from him the work of his desire, so that the Dwarves shall not perish’ (p. 146). Similar accounts are given in the *Lhammas and the *Quenta Silmarillion, written soon after the Annals.

In the earliest *‘Silmarillion’ narratives the Dwarves are portrayed as treacherous and unreliable. From the mid-1930s Tolkien began to take a less severe view; in this period he also completed *The Hobbit, in which the Dwarves become sympathetic characters as the story progresses. Although The Hobbit did not become demonstrably incorporated into the greater legendarium until Tolkien began to write *The Lord of the Rings, nevertheless Thorin’s dying words look forward to later writings: ‘I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed’ (The Hobbit, ch. 18). The Annals of Aman (see *Annals of Valinor), published in *Morgoth’s Ring (1993), and the Grey Annals (see *Annals of Beleriand), published in *The War of the Jewels (1994), both written c. 1950–1, repeat the original story. But the relevant part of the Quenta Silmarillion, as rewritten c. 1951, states that according to the traditions of the Dwarves, Aulë told their Fathers that Ilúvatar had accepted his work and ‘will hallow them and give them a place among the Children in the End’ (The War of the Jewels, p. 204). The Dwarves believed that when they died Aulë gathered them in special halls in Mandos where they practiced their crafts, and that after the Last Battle they would aid him in the re-making of Arda.

Probably towards the end of 1958, and perhaps in response to a query from his correspondent Rhona Beare (see Letters, p. 287), Tolkien decided that the story of the Dwarves needed expansion. He tried out various ideas before writing a two-page manuscript, followed by a fair copy, to replace most of the relevant section in the Quenta Silmarillion, and making emendations to the rest. This text provides the first part of ‘Of Aulë and Yavanna’ in The Silmarillion, with editorial changes noted in The War of the Jewels, p. 210.

The second part of ‘Of Aulë and Yavanna’, in which ‘the Shepherds of the Trees’ are mentioned, derives from a text of c. 1958–9 or later. See further, *Of the Ents and the Eagles.

Authorial presence. Tolkien’s presence, or voice, in his fiction varied and evolved in the course of his career as a writer and according to his audience. In the 1920s and 1930s he told many stories to his children. Those that were written down often preserve the feeling of an oral tale and include the author’s voice in comments made by the narrator.

One of Tolkien’s most elaborate ‘stories’ began simply at Christmas 1920 when he wrote an illustrated letter to his son *John in the guise of Father Christmas (*The ‘Father Christmas’ Letters). More such letters followed each year, and in time became more complex. As the North Pole household increased in size, Tolkien had to invent styles of writing and drawing to suit not only Father Christmas (‘What do you think the poor old bear has been and done this time? … Only fell from top to bottom of the main stairs’), but also the North Polar Bear (‘Who left the soap on the stairs? Not me!’), the cubs Paksu and Volkukka, the elf Ilbereth, and ancient cave bears, all presenting ‘first-hand’ accounts of events with a sense of immediacy and apparently free of authorial comment (quotations are from the 1928 and 1936 letters). These personae were further identified and enhanced – and the author’s true identity concealed – by the use of different scripts: a shaky hand for Father Christmas, thick printing for a bear’s paw, and flowing ‘Elvish’ calligraphy.

In *Roverandom, first told in 1925 to his sons John and *Michael, Tolkien established the situation quickly, but with a narrator’s judgement: ‘Once upon a time there was a little dog, and his name was Rover. He was very small and very young or he would have known better; and he was very happy playing in the garden in the sunshine with a yellow ball, or he would never have done what he did’ (p. 1). As the story proceeds, however, the narrator keeps a low profile while Rover receives information and guidance from a series of characters such as Psamathos the sand-sorcerer, Mew the seagull, and the Man-in-the-Moon. Towards the end of the book, as Rover makes his way home, Tolkien endows him with the writer’s own thoughts about pollution (see *Environment): ‘Motor after motor racketed by … all making speed (and all dust and all smell) to somewhere. “I don’t believe half of them know where they are going to, or why they are going there, or would know it if they got there,” grumbled Rover as he coughed and choked …’ (p. 87). Then, as the narrator ties up loose ends, another personal note enters: ‘Roverandom grew up to be very wise, and had an immense local reputation, and had all sorts of other adventures. … But the ones I have told you about were probably the most unusual and the most exciting. Only Tinker says she does not believe a word of them. Jealous cat!’ (p. 89).

*Farmer Giles of Ham, first told probably in the late 1920s, also seems to have begun as an impromptu tale, and as first written down the story was specifically for the author’s children: ‘Then Daddy began a story, and this is what he said: Once there was a giant, a fairly big giant: his walking-stick was like a tree, and his feet were very very large. If he walked down this road he would have left holes in it; if he had trodden on our garden he would have squashed it altogether; if he had bumped into our house there would have been no house left …’ (1999 edn., p. 81). The language and the humour are kept simple. Later, when it is mentioned that Giles took down a blunderbuss, the narrator is interrupted by a child listener:

‘What is a blunderbuss, Daddy?’

‘A blunderbuss is a kind of big fat gun, with a mouth that opens wide like the end of a horn, and it goes off with a terrific bang, and sometimes it hits what you are aiming at.’ [1999 edn., p. 82]

In the second version of the text ‘Daddy’ was replaced by the ‘family jester’.

A similar authorial voice may be heard in *The Hobbit. This story too, begun c. 1930, was first told orally; it grew in stages, with its audience – Tolkien’s sons John, Michael, and *Christopher – happy to hear the earlier parts again as later ones were devised, though perhaps still told extempore rather than from a written text. Christopher Tolkien is said to have complained that his father changed details of the story between hearings. Even the written text preserves the sense of an oral tale when its narrator stops to explain something obscure (‘The mother of our particular hobbit – what is a hobbit? I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare …’, ch. 1) or to give his audience the satisfaction of being aware of some piece of information (‘for trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of and never move again’, ch. 2 – the Tolkien children had heard of trolls from the family’s Icelandic au pairs).

Paul Edmund Thomas, in ‘Some of Tolkien’s Narrators’, Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (2000), finds that the narrator’s voice in The Hobbit

is not and cannot be precisely equivalent to Tolkien’s voice, because Tolkien stands both inside and outside the novel. Tolkien permeates the whole of the words of the text, so every voice within it is his, and yet Tolkien also looked upon his text objectively. Thus the narrator is, from one perspective, just as much a character as Bard, Balin, and Bilbo. And yet the narrator is a special character: as a third-person narrator, he is merely a voice, and he is in the story but not in the plot, and of course his voice has a much closer relationship to Tolkien’s voice than that of any other character. [pp. 162–3]

The narrator makes ‘interpretive comments … that give emphasis to points in the story’. When Bilbo finds the Ring, ‘It was a turning point in his career, but he did not know it’ (ch. 5). As the company enter Mirkwood, ‘Now began the most dangerous part of all the journey’ (ch. 7). The narrator also makes judgemental comments, such as that the trolls’ language ‘was not drawing-room fashion’ (ch. 2) before they had spoken a word. And he hints at the extent of his knowledge: ‘If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about [Gandalf], and I have only heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale’ (ch. 1). This is also one of the many examples of Tolkien speaking directly to the reader, often giving advice: ‘You ought not to be rude to an eagle, when you are only the size of a hobbit, and are up in his eyrie at night!’ (ch. 7) and ‘It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him’ (ch. 12).

Some readers find a certain charm and humour in the narrator, while others find him patronizing. It should be noted that in children’s stories of the time, assertive narrators were not uncommon. Tolkien in later years also regretted some of his comments as narrator, especially when, with the writing of *The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit became an integral part of his larger mythology (*‘The Silmarillion’) instead of only an independent story for young readers or listeners.

But as Thomas notes, in numerous passages in The Hobbit ‘the narrator does nothing but reveal descriptive information about the characters and the scenes and thus does nothing to call attention to himself. He makes no interpretations, no pointed opinions, and no direct addresses to the reader. Instead he puts himself in the background and appears as a self-effacing reporter of facts: the description, not the describer, receives the emphasis’ (p. 168).

Although precise dating of the writing of The Hobbit is open to debate, there is evidence both within and outside the manuscripts that there was a gap in its writing after the death of Smaug (in the middle Chapter 14), and that some time passed before Tolkien wrote ‘Not at Home’ and the rest of the story. Apparently influenced by his work on ‘The Silmarillion’ in the interim, the latter part of The Hobbit became ‘larger and more heroic’ (Letters, p. 346). Thomas comments that, with the author thus affected, the narrator of The Hobbit ‘had to follow suit by becoming more serious and by making utterances more appropriate to a heroic tale than to a children’s story … no obvious addresses to the reader occur in the last six chapters’, and in the completion of Chapter 14

the narrator presents the action from more points of view than in any other chapter. … These constitute major changes in the narrative voice. It is no coincidence that these changes occur as the language of the dialogue becomes more elevated and focused on subjects like the debate over the property claims to Smaug’s treasure and the debate over political rights in Esgaroth. It is no coincidence that these changes occur as the plot turns to violent action and swells from the onslaught of Smaug towards the Battle of Five Armies. And it is no coincidence that these changes occur as the scope of the narrator’s view abandons the domestic and provincial perspective of Bilbo and begins to sweep over great distances. [p. 179]

On the title-page of The Hobbit as published in September 1937 Tolkien is credited as the author, yet according to the blurb he wrote for publicity in December 1936 (also used on the dust-jacket) the story ‘is based on [Bilbo’s] personal memoirs, of the one exciting year in the otherwise quiet life of Mr Baggins’, and the runes on the dust-jacket Tolkien himself designed read: ‘The Hobbit or There and Back Again, being the record of a year’s journey made by Bilbo Baggins, compiled from his memoirs by J.R.R. Tolkien and published by George Allen & Unwin’. The key words in this conceit are ‘based on’ or ‘compiled from’: for there is much in The Hobbit which Bilbo could not have known or even heard reported, such as Smaug’s thoughts, nor would he (within this fiction) ever have made of himself some of the narrator’s comments, such as ‘He was only a little hobbit you must remember’ (ch. 1) or ‘[Bilbo] could not get into any tree, and was scuttling about from trunk to trunk, like a rabbit that has lost its hole and has a dog after it’ (ch. 6).

When Allen & Unwin asked for a sequel to The Hobbit and Tolkien began to write The Lord of the Rings, he struggled to find the right voice for the narrator. During the early phases of composition, concerning the journey to Rivendell, the narrator’s voice at first was prominent, but steadily became, as Paul Edmund Thomas comments, ‘less of a presence, less intrusive, more self-effacing, and more inclined to show rather than tell the action. Some sections of [the early] drafts are so highly conversational that the narrator almost vanishes altogether: only the speaking cues such as “said Bingo” and “said Odo” stand to remind us of the narrator’s presence, as he becomes a mere reporter of speakers’ expressions and tones of voice’ (p. 176).

The first draft of the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings includes a good example of its early tone. After an account of Bilbo’s party, in which the hobbit announces that he will be going away and getting married, Tolkien wrote: ‘That’s that. It merely serves to explain that Bilbo Baggins got married and had many children, because I am going to tell you a story about one of his descendants, and if you had only read his memoirs up to the date of Balin’s visit [at the end of The Hobbit] – ten years at least before this birthday party – you might have been puzzled’ (*The Return of the Shadow, p. 15). Here too Bilbo’s memoirs enter the story. The text of the first chapter changed considerably before it reached its final form, but Bilbo’s memoirs remained an element, first in a mention of the ‘leather-bound manuscript’ he takes with him, and then his comment to Gandalf: ‘I might find somewhere where I can finish my book. I have thought of a nice ending for it : and he lived happily ever after to the end of his days.’ Throughout the story there are allusions to indicate written sources behind The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: Merry had seen Bilbo’s ‘secret book’, Bilbo made notes of Frodo’s account during the Council of Elrond, on the stairs of Cirith Ungol Sam wonders if their story will one day be read out of a great book with black and red letters, Bilbo gives his diary and all of his notes and papers to Frodo and asks him to ‘knock things into shape’. Frodo finishes the account of his own story and leaves the last few pages for Sam to complete.

In his original Foreword to The Lord of the Rings (1954) Tolkien stated that the tale had been ‘drawn for the most part from the memoirs of the renowned Hobbits, Bilbo and Frodo, as they are preserved in the Red Book of Westmarch. This chief monument of Hobbit-lore … was compiled, repeatedly copied, and enlarged and handed down in the family of the Fairbairns of Westmarch, descended from that Master Samwise of whom this tale has much to say.’ He does not provide any explanation for his ‘access’ to the information contained in the Red Book. However, in acknowledgment of the breadth of the story, he continues: ‘I have supplemented the account of the Red Book, in places, with information derived from the surviving records of Gondor notably the Book of the Kings; but in general, though I have omitted much, I have in this tale adhered more closely to the actual worlds and narrative of my original than in the previous selection from the Red Book, The Hobbit.’ The Foreword is followed by a Prologue in which Tolkien, posing as editor, supplies information about Hobbits and their history, which (outside the fictional frame) he began to assemble as early as 1938–9, during the ‘Third Phase’ of writing what became Book I.

As the story developed and Bilbo’s Ring became the One Ring made by Sauron, Tolkien faced the problem of explaining how Gollum could have contemplated giving it to Bilbo if he won the riddle contest as told in the first edition of The Hobbit. At length he decided that Bilbo had not told the truth in his diary, or to Gandalf and the dwarves within the story, because he was already coming under the malign influence of the Ring. This explanation is included in the Preface to The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien accordingly rewrote Chapter 5, which first appeared in the second edition of The Hobbit (1951), and supplied a note at the beginning to explained the change, even before The Lord of the Rings was published.

At the beginning of Appendix A in the first edition of The Return of the King (1955) Tolkien expanded on his sources of information, or rather as a good ‘editor’, described his sources, tracing their transmission, validating their reliability, identifying actual quotations, and explaining his method of dealing with the material:

Until the War of the Ring the people of the Shire had little knowledge of the history of the Westlands … but afterwards all that concerned the King Elessar became of deep interest to them; while in the Buckland the tales of Rohan were no less esteemed. Thus the Red Book contained many annals, genealogies, and traditions of the realms of the South and the North, derived through Bilbo from the books of lore in Rivendell; or through Frodo and Peregrin from the King himself, and from the records of Gondor that he opened to them: such as The Book of the Kings, The Book of the Stewards, and the Akallabêth (that is, The Downfall of Númenor). From Gimli no doubt is derived the information concerning the Dwarves of Moria. … But through Meriadoc alone, it seems, were derived the tales of the House of Eorl; for he went back to Rohan many times. … Some of the notes and tales, however, were plainly added by other hands at later dates, after the passing of King Elessar.

Much of this lore appears as notes to the main narrative, in which case it has usually been included in it; but the additional material is very extensive, even though it is often set out in brief and annalistic form. Only a selection from it is here presented, again greatly reduced, but with the same object as the original compilers appear to have had: to illustrate the story of the War of the Ring and its origins and fill up some of the gaps in the main account.

Actual extracts from the longer annals and tales that are found in the Red Book are placed within quotation marks. These can often be seen to be copies of matter not composed in the Shire. Notes made at later times are printed as notes or placed in square brackets.

The second edition (1965) has a longer Foreword, mainly concerned with the work’s lengthy gestation and its reception, and Tolkien’s denial, responding to critics, that it has an inner meaning or ‘message’. The material at the beginning of Appendix A was also expanded, and partly moved to become an extra section at the end of the Prologue; Tolkien does not seem to have noticed that this repositioning reveals, to anyone reading the Prologue before the story proper, that all four hobbits returned safely to the Shire. New information provided here includes the addition in Westmarch of a supplementary volume to the Red Book, ‘containing commentaries, genealogies, and various other matter concerning the hobbit members of the Fellowship’. It also describes two other copies of the Red Book: the first, the Thain’s Book, had been made at the request of King Elessar and taken to Gondor by Pippin. It preserved some material that was later lost from the original, and ‘in Minas Tirith it received much annotation, and many corrections … and there was added to it an abbreviated version of those parts of The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen which lie outside the account of the War. The full tale is stated to have been written by Barahir, grandson of the Steward Faramir, some time after the passing of the King.’ An exact copy of this work was made in Gondor by Findegil, the King’s Writer, for Pippin’s great-grandson and kept at Great Smials in the Shire, together with other manuscripts written in Gondor,

mainly copies or summaries of histories or legends relating to Elendil and his heirs. Only here in the Shire were to be found extensive materials for the history of Númenor and the arising of Sauron. It was probably at Great Smials that The Tale of Years* was put together, with the assistance of material collected by Meriadoc. … It is probable that Meriadoc obtained assistance and information from Rivendell, which he visited more than once.

*Represented in much reduced form in Appendix B as far as the end of the Third Age.

Although Tolkien had implied in the first edition that the original Red Book was his source, he seems to have decided, perhaps prompted by queries from readers, that a more wide-ranging source was needed, most notably to explain The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen. He also speculates on the history of The Tale of Years.

Tolkien posed as the editor of two other published works as well. He revised his still unpublished Farmer Giles of Ham several times, most notably to read to the Lovelace Society at Worcester College, *Oxford, on 14 February 1938 in lieu of a talk on *fairy-stories. For this occasion he enlarged the story by half, adding names and allusions directed at an Oxford academic audience. The narrator is now anonymousm but obviously shares Tolkien’s interest in names, lexicography, and word-play. Nearly ten years later, when preparing it for publication, Tolkien made further additions and changes. The story now begins:

Ægidius de Hammo was a man who lived in the midmost parts of the Island of Britain. In full his name was Ægidius Ahenobarbus Julius Agricola de Hammo; for people were richly endowed with names in those days in those days, now long ago, when this island was still happily divided into many kingdoms: There was more time then, and folk were fewer, so that most men were distinguished. …

Farmer Giles had a dog. The dog’s name was Garm. Dogs had to be content with short names in the vernacular: Book-latin was reserved for their betters. Garm could not talk even dog-latin; but he could use the vulgar tongue (as could most dogs in his day) either to bully or to brag or to wheedle in. [p. 9]

And the first mention of the blunderbuss is followed by: ‘Some may well ask what a blunderbuss was. Indeed, this very question, it is said, was put to the Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford, and after thought they replied: “A blunderbuss is a short gun with a large bore firing many balls or slugs, and capable of doing execution within a limited range without exact aim. (Now superseded in civilized countries by other firearms.)”’ (p. 15) Thus he gives the Oxford English Dictionary definition, alluding to its four editors and perhaps sardonically wondering what firearms have to do with civilization.

Tolkien also added a foreword, or rather a mock foreword, to fit his mock-heroic story, in which he adopts the pose of a scholar who has translated and is editing an obscure document, not for its story but for the crumbs of information it provides. He does not rate it highly:

Of the history of the Little Kingdom few fragments have survived; but by chance an account of its origin has been preserved: a legend, perhaps, rather than an account; for it is evidently a late compilation, full of marvels, derived not from sober annals, but from the popular lays to which its author frequently refers. For him the events that he records lay already in a distant past. …

An excuse for presenting a translation of this curious tale out of its very insular Latin into the modern tongue of the United Kingdom, may be found in the glimpse that it affords of life in a dark period in the history of Britain, not to mention the light that it throws on the origin of some difficult place-names. Some may find the character and adventures of its hero attractive in themselves. [p. 7]

In our fiftieth anniversary edition of the work we remarked that ‘many who have written about Farmer Giles of Ham have interpreted its foreword as a satirical extension by Tolkien of his British Academy lecture, *Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. … In that landmark work he criticized the critics who approached Beowulf only as a historical document, not as a poem worthy of attention for its literary merits’ (p. viii). Here, in his foreword, Tolkien pretends to be just such a critic.

He adopted an editorial pose again in 1962 for *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book. Tolkien, in response to a suggestion from his Aunt *Jane Neave, had suggested to his publisher an illustrated edition of the poem *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. *Rayner Unwin liked the idea but wanted a longer book, and asked if Tolkien had other poems suitable for inclusion. Tolkien found several but was not entirely happy with them, as shown in a letter to illustrator *Pauline Baynes: ‘Alas! you put your finger unerringly on a main difficulty: they are not a unity from any point of view, but made at different times under varying inspiration’ (6 December 1961, Letters, p. 312). In a letter to Rayner Unwin on 12 April 1952 he suggested a possible solution:

The various items … 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. …

Some kind of foreword might possibly be required. The enclosed is not intended for that purpose! Though one or two of its points might be made more simply. But I found it easier, and more amusing (for myself) to represent to you in the form of a ridiculous editorial fiction what I have done to the verses, and what their references now are. [Letters, p. 315]

Unwin was amused by the foreword and approved it. Tolkien provided a short blurb which, adapted by Allen & Unwin (*Publishers), was used for advance publicity and on the dust-jacket, which includes the phrase: ‘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’.

As ‘editor’ of the book Tolkien again suggests a superior attitude. Some of the more (as he describes them) carelessly written poems

are nonsense, now often unintelligible even when legible, or half-remembered fragments. … The present selection is taken from the older pieces, 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 and his friends, or their immediate descendants. Their authorship is, however, seldom indicated. Those outside the narratives are in various hands, and were probably written down from oral tradition. [1962 edn., p. 7]

Tolkien then proceeds to assign authorship of selections specifically to Bilbo or to Sam, including *Errantry to Bilbo because of its relationship with his poem in Rivendell (The Lord of the Rings, Book II, Chapter 1). For some of the poems he suggests influences from outside the Shire: *The Hoard, for example, ‘depends on the lore of Rivendell, Elvish and Númenorean, concerning the heroic days at the end of the First Age; it seems to contain echoes of the Númenorean tale of Túrin and Mim the Dwarf’ (p. 8). His comment that Hobbits ‘are fond of strange words, and of rhyming and metrical tricks’ applies equally to himself.

Christopher Tolkien notes that in his father’s unfinished time-travel story *The Lost Road the biography of Alboin Errol is in many respects modelled closely on Tolkien’s own life. From childhood waking and dreaming, strange names come into Alboin’s mind, which he perceives as two related languages he calls Eressëan, or Elf-latin, and Beleriandic. He studies Latin and Greek at school, but, like Tolkien, spends time learning other languages, especially those of the North:

Alboin liked the flavour of the older northern languages, quite as much as he liked some of the things written in them. He got to know a bit about linguistic history, of course; he found that you rather had it thrust upon you by the grammar-writers of ‘unclassical’ languages. Not that he objected: sound-changes were a hobby of his. … The languages he liked had a definite flavour – and to some extent a similar flavour which they shared. It seemed too, in some way related to the atmosphere of the legends and myths told in the languages. [*The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 39]

Like Tolkien, Alboin wins a scholarship to university, apparently only at his second attempt, he reads Classics but changes to a different school after ‘Honour Mods’ (but History rather than English), and achieves a First. He begins to hear fragments of some form of an old Germanic language, one phrase of which he translates as ‘a straight road lay westward, now it is bent’ (p. 43) Also like Tolkien, Alboin eventually becomes a professor, but at a less prestigious university. He continues to have dreams, and in addition to his professional duties, to pursue his interest in myth and language. He has one son, Audoin, who shares many of his interests; Audoin also has dreams, but sees pictures rather than hear languages: ships, battles and ‘the great temple on the mountain, smoking like a volcano’, and an ‘awful vision of the chasm in the seas, a whole land slipping sideways’ (p. 52). Alboin wonders much about the past and has a desire ‘to go back. To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads … to see the lie of old and even forgotten lands, to behold ancient men walking, and hear their languages as they spoke them, in the days before the days, when tongues of forgotten lineage were heard in kingdoms long fallen by the shores of the Atlantic’ (p. 45) – a desire that Tolkien also shared. Unlike Tolkien, Alboin’s wish was granted.

Tolkien’s second time-travel story, *The Notion Club Papers, purports to be the surviving part of the records of the meetings of an Oxford society during 1986 and 1987, discovered in sacks of waste-paper in 2012. Tolkien is the author, of course, not only of these records but of the foreword written (in the fiction) by Howard Green, to accompany his (fictional) edition of the papers published in 2014 and the note Green added to the second edition. In the foreword Green accepts the dates on the papers and notes the curious fact ‘that no such club appears ever to have existed’ (*Sauron Defeated, p. 155), nor can any of the people named be identified. The ‘note to the second edition’ cites the opinions of other scholars that the paper used for the records seems to date from the period just after the Second World War, though against this the text seems to refer to later events, including the ‘Great Storm’ of 12 June 1987.

The discussions of the members constantly refer to the *Inklings and their writings. The more relevant Tolkien allusions note that some members ‘read old C.R. Tolkien’s little books of memoirs: In the Roaring Forties, and The Inns and Outs of Oxford’, but only three ‘bothered with Tolkien père and all the elvish stuff’ (p. 219). Elsewhere someone remembers finding in a secondhand shop a manuscript, Quenta Eldalien, being the History of the Elves by ‘John Arthurson’ (= John R.R. Tolkien, son of *Arthur Tolkien), in which is found the name Nūmenor (sic); John Jethro Rashbold, an undergraduate member, classical scholar, and apprentice poet, is recorded as attending meeting but never speaks (‘Tolkien’ is said to derive from tollkühn ‘foolhardy’ = ‘rash, bold’; see *Names); and Professor Rashbold of Pembroke is requested to decipher and translate an Old English text written in Tengwar (see *Writing systems).

An early list of members of the Notion Club identifies some with individual Inklings, and a replacement first page describes the work, as then conceived, as ‘Being a fragment of an apocryphal Inklings’ Saga, made by some imitator at some time in the 1980s’. This is followed by a preface addressed to the Inklings: ‘While listening to this fantasia (if you do), I beg of the present company not to look for their own faces in this mirror. For the mirror is cracked, and at the best you will only see your countenances distorted, and adorned maybe with noses (and other features) that are not your own, but belong to other members of the company – if to anybody’ (pp. 148–9). Indeed, no one member seems exactly to represent Tolkien, and the question is compounded by changes in the lists of members and their academic interests.

Verlyn Flieger has commented that ‘early drafts of the [Notion Club] “Papers” show Tolkien assigning (and reassigning) specific Inklings identities to specific Notion Club characters.’ Tolkien was ‘Ramer’ at one point but was changed to ‘Latimer’ and then finally ‘Guildford’, ‘who not by accident is the Club’s recorder, and thus the author of the minutes of the meetings which make up the “Papers”’(‘“The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers”: Myth, History, and Time-travel’ in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Stuart D. Lee, p. 165). But Tolkien soon abandoned definite equivalences, and his interests were scattered among the members. Michael Ramer shares his dream of the Great Wave (*Atlantis) and made other journeys in his dreams. Alwin Arundel Lowdham, like Alboin in The Lost Road, hears fragments of Elvish languages; both he and Wilfred Trewin Jeremy seem to be haunted by *Númenor, Tolkienian concepts such as a ‘native-language’ not necessarily the first learned, and ‘Elvish drama’.

Both *Leaf by Niggle and *Smith of Wootton Major have been seen as having autobiographical aspects. Niggle’s failure to complete his painting of the Tree, and the competing claims of art and social responsibility, are often compared to Tolkien’s struggles to complete The Lord of the Rings against professional, academic demands on his time; while some have seen in Smith, who is able to explore Faery by virtue of the star he wears but has to give it up so that it may pass to another, Tolkien recognizing his own declining capacity and saying farewell to his art. The latter receives support from Tolkien’s description of Smith of Wootton Major in a letter to *Roger Lancelyn Green as ‘an old man’s book, already weighted with the presage of “bereavement”’ (12 December 1967, Letters, p. 389).

Tolkien attributed the many parts of his legendarium to a series of witnesses, authors, and transmitters (see *‘The Silmarillion’, subsection ‘Internal sources’). In some early texts he imagined that true information about the fairies may have reached England through certain Anglo-Saxon figures who had heard stories from witnesses. For a time, the credentials of the originators or transmitters of the texts he produced were carefully recorded, often reaching back to the earliest Elvish loremasters. In later years he began to feel uneasy about presenting a cosmology which contradicted scientific facts, and towards the end of his life he wrote that ‘nearly all the matter of The Silmarillion is contained in myths and legends that have passed through Men’s hands and minds, and are (in many points) plainly influenced by contact and confusion with the myths, theories, and legends of Men’ (*The Peoples of Middle-earth, p. 390). He wrote three accounts of the fall of Númenor, later described as according to Mannish tradition, Elvish tradition, and Mixed Dúnedanic tradition.

On 20 September 1963 he wrote to Colonel Worskett about The Silmarillion as he hoped to prepare it for publication: ‘the legends have to be worked over … and made consistent; and they have to be integrated with [The Lord of the Rings]; and they have to be given some progressive shape. No simple device, like a journey and a quest, is available’ (Letters, p. 333). Also referring to ‘The Silmarillion’, Christopher Tolkien wrote that ‘in the latest writing [by his father] there is no trace or suggestion of any “device” or “framework” in which [the work] was to be set. I think that in the end he concluded that nothing would serve, and no more would be said beyond an explanation of how (within the imagined world) it came to be recorded.’ He does, however, note evidence which suggests that at least at one point Tolkien considered making Bilbo’s Translations from the Elvish the source of The Silmarillion, but Christopher was ‘reluctant to step into the breach and make definite what I only surmised’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, pp. 5, 6).

So we return to Bilbo and the ‘Red Book of Westmarch’. In The Lord of the Rings, at the end of Book VI, Chapter 6, Bilbo gives Frodo ‘three books of lore that he had made at various times, written in his spidery hand, and labelled on their red backs: Translations from the Elvish, by B.B.’ In the ‘Note on the Shire Records’ in the second edition of the Prologue the ‘transmission history’ of the ‘translations’ is enlarged, and one copy in particular, the only one to contain ‘the whole of Bilbo’s “Translations from the Elvish”’, is described as ‘a work of great skill and learning in which, between 1403 and 1418 [in the Shire-reckoning] [Bilbo] had used all the sources available to him in Rivendell, both living and written. But they were little used by Frodo, being almost entirely concerned with the Elder Days.’

In a letter Tolkien wrote to Richard Plotz on 12 September 1965, he said of The Silmarillion: ‘It lacks a thread on which its diversity can be strung’ (Letters, p. 360). This suggests that Bilbo’s Translations were as yet only a possibility; but after he visited Tolkien on 1 November 1966 Plotz reported that Tolkien told him that one of the problems delaying The Silmarillion was that ‘of finding a story line to connect all the parts. At the moment Professor Tolkien is considering making use of Bilbo again. In the period between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo was in Rivendell among all the Elves and Elven records and perhaps The Silmarillion will appear as his research in Rivendell’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien Talks about the Discovery of Middle-earth, the Origins of Elvish’, Seventeen, January 1967, p. 118).