Filling Up the Corners
Christina writes: Wayne and I have been serious collectors of J.R.R. Tolkien for well over thirty years. From the beginning Wayne focused on collecting material by Tolkien in order to write J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography (1993), along with significant material on Tolkien. As for myself, at first I spread my net much more widely, trying to be a completist Tolkien collector in almost every aspect. By the time I joined Wayne in the U.S.A. in 1995, our combined collection already included most of the items listed in his bibliography, and in the following years we have been able to add several more important items. Today our Tolkien purchases are mainly new publications. Only rarely are we able to fill outstanding lacunae, some of which we have never seen offered for sale, while others are priced very dearly indeed. But we can dream of finding a run of the Oxford Magazine, or an original duplicated typescript Songs for the Philologists, being sold for a reasonable price if not quite for a song. Most of the older items we occasionally acquire are of a lesser stature, ‘filling up the corners’ of our collections or adding a postscript.
One purchase during 2011, however, was a major desideratum. I began to collect Tolkien’s work in translation in the mid-1980s, when being a completist in that area was entirely possible (and demanded much less space than it does now). Although I obtained many early translations, the first German Hobbit – Kleiner Hobbit und der grosse Zauberer, with illustrations by Horus Engels, published in 1957 – always eluded me. Then, in February last year, we were able to acquire a copy. We had seen a few on eBay, but either the seller would post only to Germany or the book was in poor condition. The copy we bought is in very good condition with a slightly chipped dust-jacket, and the seller was in the U.S.A. which simplified shipping.
From 1967, Houghton Mifflin issued the three volumes of their second edition Lord of the Rings in a black slipcase with a red label. A few later printings were issued in a red slipcase. We had noted a few such sets on eBay, but they always went for far more than we were prepared to pay for a comparatively minor change in presentation. Last June we were the winning bidder in an auction which did not reach such a high figure. Our set contains a 14th printing Fellowship of the Ring and 13th printings of The Two Towers and The Return of the King. We have a set of 12th, 11th, and 11th printings in the black slipcase, and one of 17th, 16th, and 16th printings in later dust-jackets and a cream slipcase (bought c. 1980), so at the most there were four printings in the red slipcase.
We already owned The Lord of the Rings dramatized by Bernard Mayes (copyrighted by AVC Corporation 1979) in a later issue by Mind’s Eye on twelve cassettes (date unknown) and by the Highbridge Company on nine compact discs in 2002, when last September we saw an interesting set offered on eBay we could not resist. This is a ?1979 issue by Jabberwocky Cassette Classics for schools on twelve cassettes with twelve ‘Read-Along Booklets’, each giving the script for one cassette, and a thicker Teacher’s Supplement with summaries, suggested questions, etc.
We acquired rather more items related to Pauline Baynes during 2011, perhaps because we have not been collecting her work quite as long as we have Tolkien, and therefore have more desiderata. Several items were quite minor, involving reproductions of artwork we already owned in another form or printing.
The upper cover of the dust-jacket on the first (and possibly the second) printing of The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis, the penultimate book published in the Chronicles of Narnia, had a blue-green background with a vignette by Pauline Baynes printed in black against an ochre ground in the centre. By the third printing, the ochre ground was removed, leaving Pauline’s vignette black against white. One of our purchases last year was a copy of the 5th printing (1966), with the whole of the upper jacket, including the area behind the vignette, printed yellow-green. Although this involved no new work by Pauline, we like to keep note of such changes. The jacket on the next printing in 1968 has a purple ground, but with the vignette once more against a white ground.
Pauline designed new dust-jackets for the Narnia books in the mid-1970s, each with two colour illustrations, a roundel on the upper cover and a tall panel on the spine. I had acquired copies of these years ago, but had The Horse and His Boy only in two defective copies, both with good dust-jackets but one a 5th printing lacking the front endpaper and the other, earlier, lacking its title-leaf. In August 2011 we managed to acquire an intact first printing.
Also in August we bought on eBay a wooden jigsaw puzzle with Pauline’s illustration A Christmas Party, originally reproduced in the Illustrated London News, Christmas Number 1958 (also in our collection), as The Christmas Tree in History and Legend – IV: Queen Caroline’s Household in the 1820s. We enjoyed doing the jigsaw together to check that there were no missing pieces.
Our copy of Holly Leaves for 1953, with Pauline’s illustration Christmas Eve about 1460 and advertisement for Huntley & Palmer’s Biscuits was an American issue (with variant price on the cover), so when we saw a copy of the British issue on eBay in October we decided to add it to our collection.
We knew from having seen a copy in Pauline’s archive, on one of our visits to her, that she had provided four illustrations (three black and white, one in black and one colour) for ‘Sinbad in the Valley of Diamonds’ as retold by Andrew Lang, published in Children’s Digest for November 1979, for which Pauline provided as well a colour picture for the cover. We were happy to find a copy of this little magazine last year on eBay. Also, we had seen among Pauline’s original art two black and white tone drawings on which she had written ‘Elizabethan’, and guessed that this referred to Young Elizabethan: The Magazine for Boys and Girls, but had no idea when the issue might have been published. Then in November a seller on eBay listed a copy of the magazine for August 1955 and included Pauline Baynes among the contributors. We wrote to the seller and asked for further details, just in case something went wrong with our bid, though in the event we did not face much competition. We filled another gap in our collection as well as in the Baynes bibliography on which we’re working.
Quite early in collecting Pauline Baynes I acquired a copy of the magazine Lilliput for November 1947 which has four full-page colour illustrations by her accompanying ‘The Fairy Stories to End Fairy Stories’, an article about Count Anthony Hamilton and his Four Facardins (c. 1700), a fairy story parodying The Arabian Nights. These rather awkward early illustrations are particularly interesting, given that not so many years later, one of Pauline’s most admired commissions was art for the retelling of The Arabian Nights by Amabel Williams-Ellis (1957). We knew that Pauline had made a number of small black and white drawings for Lilliput as well, having seen original art, proofs, and tear sheets in her archive, but again had no idea when they were published. Wayne found online an incomplete index of articles and stories in Lilliput which gave the date for a couple of the items for which she had tear sheets with the titles, but it seemed that the only way to identify the rest would be to go the British Library and look at a range of copies in the years it seemed, from the evidence available, that Pauline would have contributed to the magazine (chiefly during the time that Kaye Webb, later in charge of Puffin Books, was on the Lilliput staff). Since this search undoubtedly would take many hours, while also checking to see if Pauline had contributed anything else for which she had not kept examples, we kept putting it off. Then last year Wayne found several sets of Lilliput in the right range of dates offered on abebooks.com at reasonable prices, and we decided to buy them and check their contents for Pauline’s work at leisure. We found all of the art represented in her archive within the four volumes for 1944–48. We felt that this was a good purchase even apart from the Pauline Baynes content, as Lilliput was a sophisticated little magazine with a miscellany of interesting articles, fiction, art photos (many by Bill Brandt), and satirical cartoons (some by Ronald Searle, including a selection of his ‘St Trinian’s’ art).
Images: Dust-jacket for Kleiner Hobbit und der grosse Zauberer (1957); the boxed set of ‘Jabberwocky’ Lord of the Rings cassettes and accompanying booklets; one of Pauline Baynes’s illustrations for The Four Facardins, published in Lilliput for November 1947.
G.B. Smith: An Inventory
By June 1915, Geoffrey Bache Smith had been in the Army for several months and was in a good position to advise his friend J.R.R. Tolkien on the practical matters of his own enlistment. On ?20 June Smith wrote to Tolkien, detailing at length what the new officer should have in his camp kit (and which he was expected to buy, out of an Army allowance or at his own expense): ‘a bed, bath- and washstand, sleeping-bag, and at least two blankets or rugs; also a hair (not an air) or down pillow, and I rather advise a mattress (cork), and a few other things . . .’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford; see The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology, pp. 67–8). The ‘few other things’ became many as Smith went on. He also advised where Tolkien should obtain his gear and on fine points of officers’ clothing.
Eighteen months later, Smith was dead, after being wounded by shrapnel and succumbing to gas gangrene. On 11 December 1916, eight days after his death, Smith’s surviving personal effects were recorded in War Office files, now in the National Archives at Kew. Documents like the inventory of Lieutenant Smith’s property given below (from National Archives reference number WO 339/28936, read while researching the Companion and Guide) are of little consequence in the larger history of the First World War, but they help to personalize the conflict by focusing on one man rather than the tens of millions who served; and while this particular document would be of comparatively less importance to a biography of G.B. Smith than his letters and poetry, it serves to reflect the man through the small things that gave him comfort. It suggests, as well, the kinds of personal goods Tolkien himself would have carried during his own wartime service.
Inventory of effects, 11 Dec. 1916
spirit flask
hair brush
3 brushes (shaving) [for applying soap]
4 pipes
note book
tin cont[ainin]g: cigarettes
razor strop
2 packets of tobacco
pocket knife
2 tie pins
3 studs [shirt fasteners]
3 pencils
1 cloth bag
1 comb in case
1 comb
1 officer’s advance book
2 tobacco pouches
glass mirror
2 tooth brushes
shaving stick
metal cigarette case
fountain pen
ink tablet tube
3 identity discs
razor
wrist watch (damaged) and strap
note wallet
postal packet; A.F. [Army Form] W. 3100
cheque book
large note book
2 writing pads
pad cont[ainin]g: correspondence etc.
These miscellaneous items were to be forwarded to Smith’s mother in Grove Crescent, West Bromwich (north-west of Birmingham). They still had not reached her by 26 December, when she wrote to Tolkien.
Notably absent from this list are any articles of clothing or larger pieces of camp kit, or any books that had been in Smith’s possession. It may be that these were only the effects on his person when he was wounded, separate from whatever he may have left at his base. Notably present is plentiful equipment for writing and especially for smoking: four pipes, two tobacco pouches, and a tin of cigarettes!
The Tolkien Collector 32
The latest issue of our occasional magazine, The Tolkien Collector, went out to subscribers just before New Year’s. Those whose subscriptions end with no. 32 will find enclosed a notice to that effect. In addition to the usual sections on new books by and about Tolkien, new translations of Tolkien’s works, and miscellaneous items, Tolkien Collector 32 includes a feature article by David Bratman, ‘A Tolkien Classification System’, describing how David organizes his Tolkien collection. (How do you organize yours?)
As usual, we’ve issued The Tolkien Collector more ‘occasionally’ than we’d like, and will try to make it more than an annual publication in 2012.
Happy Tolkien’s birthday!
More Addenda and Corrigenda
We posted to our website this afternoon new addenda and corrigenda to The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (both the Chronology and the Reader’s Guide as well as the work as a whole), the 50th anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings, and The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. Wayne has made an addition also to his Arthur Ransome: A Bibliography. Altogether, thirteen web pages have been updated, including the supplemental bibliographies for the Companion and Guide and the Reader’s Companion. For many of our additions, and one correction, to the Companion and Guide we’re indebted to Carl Phelpstead’s Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), a work we warmly recommend as an essential volume in Tolkien studies (see further here). We have also begun to mine more thoroughly Christina’s Tolkien scrapbooks as she proceeds to index them.
In reply to Gian Pietro’s request in his comment on A Working Library, Part Two, here’s another photo of some of our Lord of the Rings bookshelves, from a closer distance. Our site stats suggest that pictures of our book collection are very popular!
Oxford Cadets
Earlier this month on theonering.net, ‘geordie’ mentioned the edition of Sir Orfeo (published 1944) that Tolkien prepared for the naval cadets’ course at Oxford. To this ‘Squire’ facetiously replied: ‘It still staggers me that the Royal Navy, in the middle of a desperate war, trying to train raw officer cadets as quickly as possible for rigorous convoy duty, felt it was necessary to teach them to appreciate Middle English poetry.’ And ‘Morthoron’ added: ‘You never know in the middle of a sea battle when a quote from “Piers Plowman” would come in handy.’ Reading these comments, it occurred to us that although we had dealt with the events of the wartime Navy and Air Force cadets’ courses at Oxford in the Chronology volume of our J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (pp. 258–90), especially as they concerned Tolkien, the first director of the cadet courses for the English School, there was confusion as to their very serious purpose relative to the war effort.
It was, in fact, national policy in Britain during the Second World War that soldiers, sailors, and airmen were better for having experienced, even for a brief time, the rigours of a university education. An editorial in the Times for 21 October 1941 (‘The Student at War’) commented that all of the three armed services needed
to recruit trained minds in a variety and in numbers quite as great as the universities are able to supply. They need men of many highly specialized scientific acquirements . . . ; but they need also men who have profited by that rapid enlargement of mental horizons which is the first gift that a university confers upon its pupils.
In response, the University of Oxford offered short courses to service probationers sent by the Army, Navy, and Air Force, to be conducted alongside more specific military training. The Times reported on 17 December 1942 (‘Oxford University Students: Effect of National Service Bill’) that ‘some students’ would come up to Oxford in January 1943
for a six-months’ naval course, and they will be followed by another set in April; these two sets will overlap. The naval courses will be in addition to those (also of six months’ duration) for Army signallers and R.A.F. [Royal Air Force] cadets which the university has been conducting for more than a year. The Navy and the R.A.F. are allowing short course men to take humane subjects if they prefer them, and it is expected that about half will do so.
Army cadets were restricted to the science and technical curriculums. On 20 October 1943, it was said in the Times (‘Oxford University: Opening of the New Academic Year’) that
the Navy and the Air Force permit, and indeed encourage, their cadets to read subjects other than science; of the naval cadets now in residence three out of four are reading arts (with history and modern languages leading, English and law good runners-up, and a fair sprinkling of classics), and of the Air Force cadets two out of three.
In our Chronology (p. 279) we give the example of Anthony Curtis, who recalled wearing, while a cadet at Oxford, an Air Force uniform for three days each week and an academic gown another three. (His sessions with C.S. Lewis on Paradise Lost made him feel an ignoramus, while Tolkien, his teacher of medieval English, ‘was the soul of affability’.) Another example, from the Royal Navy, was Rayner Unwin, son of Tolkien’s publisher Stanley Unwin. Rayner wrote in his memoir, George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer (1999), that after he was called up in 1943, ‘when it seemed that I might constitute what was called “officer-like material” and thus be eligible for a brief deferment on a university short course, I was able to express an absolute preference not only for Oxford but for Trinity College’ where he had been a lodger with the President while working in Blackwell’s bookshop. ‘The six months’ course was a strange mixture of basic training for the armed forces and an academic subject. It had not been my father’s intention that I should go to a university at all, and because I lacked classics I was unqualified for Oxford. But my naval short course let me in, and father was as delighted as I was’ (p. 87). The cadet scheme appears also to have helped to broaden the social basis of entrance to Oxford, drawing in, for instance, the future actor Richard Burton, a miner’s son from Wales. Burton himself did not return to Oxford after the war to take a full degree course, but many short-service candidates did.
The University during the Second World War is well documented in volume 8 of The History of the University of Oxford (The Twentieth Century, 1994). In that period, compared to the First World War, Oxford kept up its male undergraduate population, ‘partly because the need for conscripts to serve overseas was less pressing and partly because the University agreed to host special courses for probationers in the Royal Signals and for army and air-force cadets; 3,000 probationers and cadets had matriculated in the University by 1942’ (p. 48). The six-month programme for cadets in which Tolkien was involved was only one scheme. From May 1941 to December 1942, when the age of call-up into the armed services fell first to nineteen and then to eighteen,
the government allowed male undergraduates in the humanities to defer their call-up for at least twelve months, thus enabling them to complete part 1 of their examinations. But this was on condition that they accept military instruction in the Senior Training Corps or Air Squadron. As a result they would normally spend about nine months at Oxford with two days a week devoted to military training, which now officially took priority over the timetable for lectures and tutorials. In order to ensure for themselves a period at university, pupils began to leave school earlier, and the University allowed them to matriculate at the beginning of the Hilary or Trinity terms. Courses often ran on into the vacations, and the distinction between term and vacation was rapidly disappearing. [p. 175]
From December 1942, the University restricted entry to students under eighteen at the time of matriculation. (Christopher Tolkien, it may be remembered, matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford, in January 1942, when only seventeen, in order to complete some of his studies before being called up for war service.) This action, the History notes (pp. 175–6),
would have drastically reduced the number of male undergraduates but for the fact that from 1942 onward the University agreed to introduce six-month short courses, free of the normal entry requirements, for service cadets. . . . Short courses, in which military training was combined with part-time study, bore little relationship to the normal honours curriculum. Nevertheless service cadets were matriculated, housed in college and lived under academic rather than military discipline.
References
Harrison, Brian, ed. The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 8: The Twentieth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
‘Oxford University: Opening of the New Academic Year’. Times (London), 20 October 1943, p. 7.
‘Oxford University Students: Effect of National Service Bill’. Times (London), 17 December 1942, p. 2.
‘The Student at War’. Times (London), 21 October 1941, p. 5.
Unwin, Rayner. George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer. Ludlow: Privately Printed for the Author by Merlin Unwin Books, 1999.
Deathly Hallows
Wayne writes: Christina and I spent the Thanksgiving holidays doing all of the things one traditionally does at that festive time: inventorying books, sorting files, writing Tolkien addenda and corrigenda, answering e-mail queries. . . . That’s not traditional at your house? How strange! We also watched on DVD the final Harry Potter films, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, parts one and two.
Both of us have been Potter fans from the beginning. We have all of the books, in both British and American editions – the American copies are better designed and illustrated, the earlier British texts are un-Americanized – and we still recall our experience of seeing the first of the films, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (with its proper British title, if you please) in the big cinema at Leicester Square in London. Never before had I seen so many children in a movie audience sitting absolutely quiet, their eyes fixed on the screen, for the whole of two hours. We liked that film very much, and also the next in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. In part – in addition to the quality of acting, set design, music, and so forth – we enjoyed them because they stayed reasonably close to the letter and spirit of J.K. Rowling’s books, which was a comfort at that time (2001–2), when Peter Jackson was playing fast and loose with our beloved Lord of the Rings.
We were disappointed with the third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, whose director, auteur Alfonso Cuarón, tried to leave his personal stamp as much as possible, and in which there were (relative to the earlier films) changes in costuming and set design we felt jarring. Films four and five – Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix – worked well enough, we thought, despite changes and excisions, while the sixth, Half-blood Prince, felt more rushed and compressed though it was true enough to its source. The later books in the series of course are much longer, which made them impossible to adapt within a normal running time without cutting or condensing.
Immediately after Thanksgiving, we received the Autumn 2011 number of Mallorn, the journal of The Tolkien Society, which includes an article about the final Harry Potter films – the two-part Deathly Hallows – by Mallorn editor Henry Gee. Deathly Hallows, Gee thinks, ‘simply couldn’t be treated to the same process of radical condensation’ used in previous films, but had to be spread over two. This, he adds,
is just as well, as the film gives space for the plot to breathe, and brings life to a book which, one senses as one approaches the end, is running out of puff. Scenes in the book that really ought to have great emotional power – the battle at Hogwarts, for example – tend to come over as a rather rushed football commentary, when Rowling really ought to have taken a breath and approached the ending in suitably elegiac mood. No such problems for the film, however, where the scale of the devastation wrought by the final battle – the loss – comes over with suitable impact.
We strongly disagree with this judgement. The book Deathly Hallows is hardly ‘running out of puff’ at the end, but remains exciting and engaging. It has its elegiac moments, but they’re in their proper places, before and after the fighting. And I’m at a loss to think how the battle at Hogwarts, with the deaths of beloved characters, could be seen as lacking in ‘emotional power’ as written. After watching Deathly Hallows, in fact, Christina and I both needed to re-read the book to counteract what we felt were serious inadequacies in its screenplay.
Part of the appeal of Rowling’s stories is their wealth of detail, especially in the interplay of the main characters with each other and with the many secondary characters populating the books’ wizarding and Muggle worlds. Films, of course, can convey such a quality, in dialogue or in the smallest glance – playing to the strengths of a visual medium – and when done well, can enlarge upon a text while being true to it. Most of the earlier Harry Potter films accomplished this to an admirable degree. In Deathly Hallows, though, even extended over two parts, too much of the richness of the book is lost on screen, some of it discarded or changed no doubt for the sake of running time or cost, but also, I feel sure – especially in the second part, which was released in 3D – so that there would be more room for visual effects.
If we had not first read the book, we would have been utterly lost in film-Deathly Hallows at several points. Without foreknowledge, it would have been impossible to follow, for instance, the passing of mastery of the Elder Wand (an explanation is clumsily tacked on after the battle) and the complicated matter of Hallows and Horcruxes. But even small details are muddled, such as where our heroes go after they escape from Malfoy Manor: to the uninitiated, it can’t be at all clear that the house by the sea is Bill and Fleur’s Shell Cottage. We were interested to see that information which would have served to clarify the story is conveyed in some of the deleted scenes on the DVD. These would have been better left in. Other scenes, such as the farewell of Harry and Dudley which is so poignant in the book, were shot but also deleted. Of course, Ultimate Edition DVDs are promised, so one can hope for a longer and more coherent cut.
Unfortunately, nothing short of a reshoot could save the conclusion of the second part. It was there that we were glad that, for one reason or another, we had not seen Deathly Hallows in the cinema, where we would have had to hold our tongues, but had waited for the DVD and could spout off as we liked in our sitting room. We understand – as is often said – that films are different from books, and not everything in a book can be included in a film (at least, not always; some films have come close). But films must have an internal logic, no less than books, and a film which uses a book as its source must either follow its internal logic or create a new one – there can be no half-measures. Also, it seems reasonable to think that when an author hands a screenwriter powerful, dramatic scenes on a platter, they would be welcomed and retained more or less as given. Why, then, in the film, when Voldemort needs to keep Nagini close to him, and says in dialogue that this is crucial (as it is in the book), is the snake not near him at the end but chasing Ron and Hermione? (The answer to this and other questions is undoubtedly that it made for good 3D effects.) Why remove the very dramatic moment when Neville kills Nagini in defiance of the dark lord, right in front of Voldemort and all of Neville’s friends, instead setting this deed apart from the main action with only Ron and Hermione to witness it? Why condense to such a remarkable degree the action-packed battle of Hogwarts, showing little of it relative to the book, though one would have thought it perfect for translating into film? Why make the final duel between Harry and Voldemort into a movie-cliché wizards’ battle, with the foes swooping through the castle until they meet not before the assembled combatants but in a deserted courtyard? Harry wins, but no one sees him do it: there is no climactic emotional release from his friends. And without their important final conversation, only a test of brute magical strength, no moral distinction between Harry and the dark lord is made at the end, which Rowling does so beautifully in her book.
So – to say no more – we were disappointed, at these and other points. As always, though, the acting was very good. Throughout the series, it has been wonderful to see great British actors playing even lesser roles, which for some in Deathly Hallows, such as Jim Broadbent and Emma Thompson, amounted to cameos. The art direction was also first-rate, and many scenes were visually very impressive. We were especially struck by how perfectly Helena Bonham Carter adopted Emma Watson’s mannerisms when she played Watson’s character Hermione disguised as Carter’s Bellatrix Lestrange.
Image: The American dust-jacket of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, wraparound art by Mary GrandPré. This was the only book in the series for which, when we bought the British edition, we selected the version with the elegant ‘adult’ dust-jacket, that is, with art an adult wouldn’t find embarrassing if seen to be reading the book. We thought the jacket art for the ‘children’s’ version too messy (see comparisons here).
A Working Library, Part Two
Christina writes: When writing about or editing Tolkien, Wayne and I make extensive use not only of our core Tolkien collection, but also of other works which are the subject of this part of ‘A Working Library’.
In each of our two working areas is a copy of the microprint edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Wayne has the two-volume set from 1971, and I have the three volumes from 1978, each having kept the edition owned before we were married. The OED is frequently consulted, and was in near-constant use when dealing with unusual words in the Reader’s Companion. On a low bookcase next to my desk are also several other dictionaries: The English Dialect Dictionary, edited by Joseph Wright, in six volumes (1898–1905), An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collection of the Late Joseph Bosworth, edited and enlarged by T. Northcote Toller (1898), with Toller’s Supplement of 1921; An Icelandic-English Dictionary by Richard Cleasby, Gudbrand Vigfusson, and William A. Craigie, the second edition of 1957; and Y Geiriadur Mawr: The Complete Welsh-English English-Welsh Dictionary by H. Meurig Evans and W.O. Thomas, new edition (1995).
On my desk proper I keep copies of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (2002), The Oxford Thesaurus of English (2004), and New Hart’s Rules: The Handbook of Style for Writers and Editors (2005). With these, because I need to refer to it so often, is my working copy of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Wayne has near his desk a similar but larger collection of dictionaries and thesauri, as well as a variety of style manuals (MLA, Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge, etc.) for all occasions, usage guides (the 1965 second edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage is often off the shelf), the Oxford Spelling Dictionary (1986), and the Phonetic Symbol Guide by Geoffrey K. Pullum and William A. Ladusaw (1986), among much else. 
Also in his studio are many shelves of books on printing and typography, which support the typesetting and design work he has done for several of our books as well as other purposes: here The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst (2004) has pride of place.
Until our renovations in 2007, most of the books in our general reference collection were kept on shelves in our kitchen-cum-dining area. These have now been moved into the basement (to make room for a more traditional china cabinet). Among them are Greek and Latin dictionaries as well as various modern language dictionaries, which I often use when describing Tolkien translations for The Tolkien Collector. An invaluable help in this work is also The Language of the Foreign Book Trade: Abbreviations, Terms, Phrases, by Jerrold Orne (1976). We also own a 24-volume set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the 14th edition (1938), which we were lucky to acquire as a library cast-off. It’s limited by its cut-off date, of course, but it comes from the period when articles were written by leading experts and the Britannica had a deservedly high reputation. To give just two examples, I quoted from its account of ancient siege engines when annotating ‘The Siege of Gondor’ in the Reader’s Companion, and I found its account of the early 20th-century English educational and examination system useful when writing in our Companion and Guide about Tolkien at King Edward’s School and his matriculation at Oxford. The Britannica in fact also serves another purpose: as a ‘canary’ in our renovated basement. Before we installed new drains, mould quickly formed on the cloth bindings of the Encyclopaedia, which seemed particularly susceptible to the problem. Now that our basement is dry, we returned the (cleaned) Britannica to its former home, and I keep a careful eye on it to check for any sign of mould, not relying only on electronic gauges to tell us that the relative humidity is at an acceptable level.
Other books in our reference section include two by Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names (1980) and English River Names (1968), which we consulted for various Shire place-names in the Reader’s Companion. We also have, though have found less useful, The Cambridge Dictionary of Place-Names by Victor Watts (2004), and a number of the regional volumes published by the English Place-Name Society, which have been very useful. Along with these are various books on first names and surnames, such as the Dictionary of English Surnames by P.H. Reaney and R.M. Wilson (1997), which we used when researching Hobbit names.
The low bookcases under the bow window in the Tolkien Library are filled mainly with books dealing with aspects of Tolkien’s life and work. These include, for Tolkien’s early life, Images of Hall Green compiled by Michael Byrne (1996), Moseley and Kings Heath on Old Picture Postcards by John Marks (1991), Some Moseley Personalities, Volume I (1991), and Catholics in Birmingham by Christine Ward-Penny (2004). For his time at King Edward’s School we own King Edward’s School, Birmingham, 1552–1952 by T.W. Hutton (1952) and No Place for Fop or Idler: The Story of King Edward’s School, Birmingham by Anthony Trott (1992). Most important of all, from our collection of works by Tolkien, is a bound volume of the King Edward’s School Chronicle for 1909–14. Wayne and I both had in our individual collections photocopies of items attributed to Tolkien, and mentions of him speaking in debate or taking part in a rugby match, and while working on the Companion and Guide we spent some time at the Bodleian making copies of other useful pages in the Chronicle. We were very happy, however, to find this bound volume on eBay, and on several occasions while writing our book we extracted further information which we had not previously thought significant.
When writing in the Companion and Guide about Tolkien’s visit to Switzerland in 1911, Wayne drew upon Tolkien’s own accounts in Letters, of course, as well as an unpublished account by Tolkien’s friend Colin Brookes-Smith (now partly published in Tolkien’s Gedling 1914: The Birth of a Legend by Andrew H. Morton and John Hayes, 2008), but also on the travel guide Switzerland by Karl Baedeker to plot their route, using our copy of the 24th edition, published in 1911. When we came to write about Tolkien’s visit to Italy in 1955, I consulted various guides and souvenir books I had collected during my own visits there in 1968 and 1970.
We found the most useful general book on Oxford, both ‘town’ and ‘gown’, to be The Encyclopaedia of Oxford edited by Christopher Hibbert (1988), with entries describing and giving the history of places from pubs to colleges (still standing or long gone), explaining university institutions, associations, and clubs, and providing biographies of the famous people associated with Oxford. Other books about Oxford can be divided into three classes. First there are books about the university, its history and statutes, and those aiming to provide guidance to students. Volumes 7 and 8 of The History of the University of Oxford cover the relevant period for Tolkien: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2, edited by M.G. Brock and M.C. Curthoys (2000), which includes the beginning of the 20th century up to 1914, and The Twentieth Century, edited by Brian Harrison (1994). We also have a volume containing the Examination Statutes for 1930–31, and two general guides, Handbook to the University of Oxford (1933) and Oxford of Today: A Manual for Prospective Rhodes Scholars, edited by Laurence A. Crosby, Frank Aydelotte, and Alan C. Valentine (1927). Supplementing the topographical entries in Hibbert are the Blue Guide Oxford and Cambridge by Geoffrey Tyack (1999) and A New Guidebook to the Heart of Oxford by Philip Atkins and Michael Johnson (1999). We’ve also read a few general books about Oxford and Oxford people, more for atmosphere than for information: Oxford Now and Then by Dacre Balsden (1970), Oxford: A Cultural and Literary Companion by David Horan (1999), and Oxford Observed: Town and Gown by Peter Snow (1991). One of the most unusual but also most useful items we’ve acquired is the 34-page booklet When the Lights Went Out: Oxfordshire 1939–1945 by Malcolm Graham and Melanie Williams (1979), which provides fascinating information about Oxford during the Second War, including how people managed in the blackout.
In regard to Tolkien’s service in the First World War, the most important published source is the two-volume History of the Lancashire Fusiliers by Major-General J.C. Latter (1949). Again, we began with photocopies of this book made from a copy received on interlibrary loan, and later were able to buy our own copy, luckily before we began to write the final text of the Companion and Guide. Also kept in our Tolkien Library are a copy of the signalling manual that Tolkien used, Signalling: Morse, Semaphore, Station Work, Despatch Riding, Telephone Cables, Map Reading (1915), A Town for Four Winters: Great War Camps on Cannock Chase by C.J. and G.P. Whitehouse (1983), and Kingston-upon-Hull before, during and after the Great War by Thomas Sheppard (1919).
Other books on the Great War are now shelved in the basement in a more general section of modern history. We already owned Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), but for our Tolkien work added many others that we saw in the bookshops of the National Archives at Kew and the Imperial War Museum. Most of these are devoted to the Battle of the Somme: The Imperial Museum Book of the Somme by Malcolm Brown (2002), The Battle of the Somme: A Topographical History by Gerald Gliddon (1996), and The Somme: The Day-by-Day Account by Chris McCarthy (2002). Some are devoted to specific conflicts during the Battle, such as La Boiselle, Ovillers, Contalmaison and Thiepval, both by Michael Stedman (1996), but we have also collected some more general treatments, including Tommy Goes to War by Michael Brown (2001) and Notes on Trench Routine & Discipline by a Second in Command, a reprint of a tiny booklet from 1916.
Another factor of significance in Tolkien’s life was his long relationship with his primary publishers, George Allen & Unwin. We have almost all of the books about this firm and its principals, most of them written by members of the Unwin family. Our copy of Sir Stanley Unwin’s The Truth about a Publisher (1960) is inscribed by him to his kinswoman, Lady Tweedsmuir (wife of John Buchan). Rayner Unwin kindly sent us a copy of his privately printed George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer with a note warning us that we would find much of the book rather boring, but might like the two chapters on Tolkien. In fact, we found the whole of the book fascinating, and it has been an invaluable resource.
We also first borrowed and eventually managed to obtain our own copies of Whitaker’s Almanac for 1942 and 1943, which together with Tolkien’s chronologies for The Lord of the Rings enabled us to work out the phases of the moon in that book.
Many of our books on children’s literature or fantasy (in three bookcases in the sitting room) contain sections on or brief mentions of Tolkien, discussing his works in the context of these genres. We have several shelves of translations of medieval literature, especially Old English, Middle English, Norse, and Arthurian, together with relevant critical works, and many volumes on myths and legends. Some of these are of interest in relation to what Tolkien taught and to his academic writings, or to what contributed to the ‘leaf mould’ of his imagination. Others, meanwhile, help to explain his academic significance and his uncertain status in some critical circles. Still another section deals with C.S. Lewis and Tolkien’s other fellow Inklings.
I will conclude by mentioning a few examples from other collections scattered throughout the house. Books on late 19th- and early 20th-century art and book illustration, and books on medieval manuscripts, were consulted when dealing with Tolkien’s own art such as his page from the Dangweth Pengoloð (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 198) and some of the decorations in the letters he wrote in the persona of Father Christmas. From our natural history section, we consulted various books on trees, shrubs, and flowers when dealing with flora in The Lord of the Rings. From our large collection of history books (mainly covering the ancient and medieval periods) we cited in the Reader’s Companion, to give just a few examples, Adrienne Mayor’s Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (2003) for the use of elephants in battle and throwing heads or bodies over the walls of a besieged city; The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England (1999) on Offa’s Dyke, for the dyke on the northern edge of the Barrow-downs; and Byzantium: The Decline and Fall by John Julius Norwich (1995) to compare the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the siege of Minas Tirith.
We are sometimes asked, why do we clutter our house with these books when we have a large academic library nearby at Williams College? One answer, of course, is that the resource we want is always close at hand. But also, despite the excellence of the Williams library, many of the works mentioned above are not on the college’s shelves, being very esoteric – some, indeed, are quite rare. And only a few are fully available in electronic form on the Internet. We do not, in any case, consider books clutter, but rather a convenience, a comfort, and endless inspiration in our work.
Images, from top: Christina’s desk in the Tolkien Library; a few of the books in Wayne’s studio; some of our books on ancient and medieval history.
A Working Library, Part One
Christina writes: A large part of our personal library helps us to write about J.R.R. Tolkien, Pauline Baynes, and Arthur Ransome, among other subjects in which we’re interested. We consider our ‘working library’ to include works by or about these authors and artists, as well as books which help to place the subjects within their contemporary setting, illuminate special aspects of their lives and work, and deal with their creative and publishing history. Added to these are works which may have influenced them or show their influence. In this and a second post, I want to give our readers an idea of that part of our collections on which Wayne and I have been able to base much of our Tolkien-related work (that is, exclusive of our research trips to libraries to study original material).
Although I first read Tolkien in 1955 and bought my own copy of The Lord of the Rings in 1956, by the beginning of 1981 my Tolkien collection filled probably no more than two feet of shelf space. Then, the BBC dramatization of The Lord of the Rings having reinvigorated my interest, I set out to acquire original printings or photocopies of Tolkien’s writings listed by Humphrey Carpenter in Appendix C of his biography. In conjunction with the BBC broadcasts, many bookshops had Tolkien displays: I can still visualize such a table in London’s Foyles Bookshop. I already had two sets of The Lord of the Rings (including the second edition of 1966), but now I wanted the single volume on India paper, and the three-volume paperback set with cover art adapted from Pauline Baynes’ triptych painting of Middle-earth. I had set my foot on the slippery slope and become a collector! More than that, I became interested in all aspects of Tolkien: his academic works, biography, bibliography and textual changes, translations, influences on him, his contribution to general culture. I used my collection in writing articles for Tolkien journals, but it really came into its own when Wayne and I began to receive book commissions from HarperCollins and the Tolkien Estate.
Wayne, on his part, from 1970 had been buying Tolkien purely as an interested reader, not yet a scholar, but began to collect more ambitiously once he decided to write a descriptive bibliography of Tolkien’s works and found that a personal collection of them, in both British and American editions, was necessary for the task, public and university library copies being often rebound, lacking a jacket, stolen, or otherwise unavailable in original condition. Since a bibliographer should examine as many copies of an item as possible to look for variations, Wayne also sought out other private collectors – and that’s how we met, in spring 1983, agreeing both to exchange information and to help each other fill gaps in our respective Tolkien libraries. (Such arrangements were common among Tolkien collectors at that time, in the days before Internet shopping, to overcome the difficulties of ordering from abroad and paying for publications in a foreign currency.) Of course, when we started this friendly exchange, we had no idea that our collections would someday merge; when they did, we sold most of our duplicates (after checking carefully to see that they really were duplicates) except for those of frequently used items which we kept as working copies to save wear and tear on our main collection. Wayne has about 5 linear feet (1.5 metres) of working copies in the studio where he works, and I have about the same on a cart in the room we call the Tolkien Library but which by no means contains the whole of our Tolkien collection.
By now, most of the editions and many printings of Tolkien’s works documented in Wayne’s Descriptive Bibliography are present in our collection. We have also continued to acquire new books by Tolkien, which have been documented in The Tolkien Collector and eventually will be described more fully in a second edition of the Bibliography.
We made extensive use of our multiple editions of The Lord of the Rings when working on the 50th anniversary edition of that work and when giving an account of its textual changes over the years in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. I spent much time tracing typos and variants back to their source, with several key editions spread out on a table. Having pinpointed a change, I would then follow it through intervening printings to date it more precisely. While doing this, I soon found that the quickest way to find the reference in a different typesetting was to look for the first few words of the paragraph in which it occurred, and this was the way we eventually identified annotations in the Reader’s Companion.
We also have a large collection of books and theses in English, entirely or significantly about Tolkien and his work. These, together with volumes containing at least one substantial chapter or essay on Tolkien, occupy nearly 21 linear feet (6.4 metres) in a bookcase in our sitting room which adjoins the Tolkien Library, and another three feet of folio volumes in the Library proper. Our original intention was to have every book entirely on Tolkien, but partly because of the increasing rate of publication of these, and because of their widely varying quality (especially among self-published books), we no longer automatically order everything in this line that we see listed on Amazon.
Our collection of fanzines and scholarly journals devoted wholly or partly to Tolkien, mainly in English but some in other languages, is similarly extensive. While writing our J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide we both looked through these publications, making notes of important articles and significant information. Most of those that can stand upright, thicker volumes such as Tolkien Studies, VII, and the Inklings Jahrbuch, are shelved in the Tolkien Library, while others are stored in archival pamphlet or print boxes in a ground-floor closet or in the basement. During the 1980s and most of the 90s, I tried to make as complete a collection of Tolkien-related periodicals as possible, beginning with the earliest fanzines. I bought back issues, took out subscriptions, and with the help of Charles Noad and Gary Hunnewell filled in earlier issues partly with photocopies or printouts from microfilm. Wayne and I still subscribe to many English-language periodicals as well as a few in other languages, but although the number of publications is now greater than ever, they no longer give a complete picture of Tolkien groups since so much activity takes place on the Internet. We now restrict ourselves to the more significant print journals as time, money, and space are all increasingly limited.
Works on Tolkien in other languages and some near-duplicates of volumes in English (e.g. earlier texts now replaced by a revised edition) are shelved in the basement together with translations of Tolkien’s works, books on the films, interpretations by various artists, graphic novel versions, calendars, posters, etc. Boxes of cassettes, compact discs, videocassettes, and DVDs sit on top of the bookshelves in the Tolkien Library.
The BBC dramatization also inspired me to collect any mention of Tolkien and his works in newspapers and magazines: reviews, interviews, biographical details, comments on his popularity and the Tolkien cult, and so forth. In 1981 this still seemed a reasonable aim, at least in the form of photocopies. I made lists of items mentioned in Richard West’s Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist (1981) and anything I saw mentioned in old or current magazines, and made multiple visits to the British Library in Bloomsbury and its newspaper branch at Colindale, and to the University of London’s library in Senate House. Charles Noad also supplied many items, and in about 1985 Rayner Unwin gave Charles and me permission to photocopy Allen & Unwin’s files of Tolkien-related press cuttings which had been provided to them by a professional agency. For this, we had to go to Allen & Unwin’s office at Hemel Hempstead, about twenty miles north of central London. We made several visits, taking an early train from Euston station, and would arrive at the office soon after nine o’clock and work through without a break until closing just before five. Most of the cuttings were scrunched up and pushed into envelopes, so we had to flatten them carefully, and since many were quite small we fitted as many as possible onto each sheet to save time and money (we paid for the copies).
I then had to decide what to do with these copies so that they could be easily used. A friend with whom I shared a flat at the time had a collection of cuttings and articles about Maria Callas which she had stuck in scrapbooks using Uhu brand glue, and I followed her example. A professional conservator might not find the result ideal, but it’s user-friendly since the scrapbooks are divided by subject, e.g. all of the interviews, or biographical items, or reviews of The Hobbit, or suggested sources for Tolkien’s writings are together in one or more volumes, and so far, neither the photocopies nor the scrapbook paper to which they’re pasted shows any sign of deterioration. In the documentary made in 1992 to celebrate the Tolkien centenary, Tom Shippey is seen reading a review of The Lord of the Rings from one of my scrapbooks, since by that time Allen & Unwin’s press cuttings had disappeared, apparently discarded after the firm’s merged with Bell Hyman.
Since I came to the USA, Wayne and I have continued to collect cuttings – or, more recently, printouts from the Internet – but apart from those acquired on visits to Dick Blackwelder, Marquette, and the Wade Center, we have relied mainly on what is easily obtainable: original items, copies provided by other collectors, and articles or images on the Web. We were too busy to do much with these until late last year, when I began to sort them into categories. An on-going project is to file most of the additions in archival folders – rather than continue to paste into scrapbooks – and to make an electronic catalogue of them as well as of the items in my 200 scrapbooks. The latter have been accessible only through a typed list of the contents of the scrapbooks and an alphabetical manuscript list by title of newspaper or magazine.
Images: part of the west wall of our Tolkien Library; some of our Tolkien scrapbooks, which are covered in a variety of decorative papers.
Harper Insider
HarperCollins have been doing a fine job of publicizing The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. One of their most impressive efforts is a snazzy full-page feature in HI: The Harper Insider, a tabloid produced exclusively for the U.K. bookseller Waterstone’s. This issue (no. 4) advertises autumn books and gifts for the holidays, and looks ahead to new fiction coming along next spring. Completist Tolkien collectors will want to note that the Harper Insider article includes the first publication – before The Art of The Hobbit was released – of the verso of the picture Death of Smaug, which Tolkien used to practice calligraphy (some of it in tengwar) and to try out paint colours. We were also pleased to see two pages on another favourite author, the late Diana Wynne Jones, whose Earwig and the Witch was published at the end of September.
For anyone who would like to see sample pages of The Art of The Hobbit before buying, a few photos have been posted on Carina’s Craftblog along with some very flattering comments.
Geek Out!
A few days ago, we replied to five questions sent us by a writer for the CNN blog Geek Out! Excerpts from our response appear in an article posted today, combined with comments by Clifford Broadway and Larry Curtis of theonering.net and with copy drawn from elsewhere on the Web. Some of the latter is nonsense we’ve seen now on many sites, such as that Tolkien’s Hobbit pictures were recently ‘unearthed’ at the Bodleian during preparations for the Hobbit 75th anniversary celebration – a so-called ‘happy accident’ that wasn’t – and that The Hobbit as originally published had ‘about twenty original drawings’ by Tolkien, when in fact it had only ten, plus two maps, the binding design, and the dust-jacket art. When we first read the Geek Out! article, there were three instances of ‘Tolkein’ for ‘Tolkien’; later, two of these had been corrected, and it may be that some of the errors we called to the blogger’s attention this evening will have been corrected even by the time we upload the present post.
At any rate, here are our interview responses as provided (using American spelling for an American site), with the original questions paraphrased:
What do we hope for our readers?
We hope that those who know only the text of The Hobbit will be excited to discover that it was originally an illustrated book, and that those who have read The Hobbit with its usual set of pictures will be glad to find that Tolkien made many more.
How did we design the book?
For the most part, we laid out the pictures in the order of events in The Hobbit, and different versions of illustrations in the order that Tolkien made them, as far as we can work that out. He drew a series of pictures of the hill where Bilbo the hobbit lived, for example, and of Rivendell, the entrance to the Elvenking’s halls, and Bilbo on the Forest River. Our publisher asked us to include four fold-outs, each of which allowed us to show four or five illustrations in a sequence side by side and in a large size. We have separate sections for the several maps that Tolkien drew, and for his binding and dust-jacket designs. We had the most fun, though, in putting together on one page details from the illustrations showing Bilbo at home and having his adventures.
What did we find most striking about Tolkien’s vision, and why have generations of readers identified with The Hobbit?
Tolkien filled his most finished pictures with so many details that they’re of interest no matter how many times we look at them. Of course, he did the same thing with his stories, which is one reason why they’re read over and over again. The Hobbit in particular appeals because we can all identify with little Bilbo, who discovers a wide world outside his comfortable home and hidden abilities within himself.
Do we think that the Hobbit illustrations add an extra dimension to Tolkien, and what do we think about so much Tolkien material being issued posthumously?
We would all be much the poorer if we couldn’t read posthumously published works by Tolkien such as The Silmarillion, and Roverandom and Mr. Bliss, and of course the invaluable manuscripts collected by his son Christopher as The History of Middle-earth. All of these reveal new aspects of his genius. It’s important also to see his paintings and drawings, because Tolkien’s powers of invention as an artist equaled his skill with words. His art for The Hobbit expands upon his story – his final illustration of Hobbiton, for instance, includes details not put into a text until The Lord of the Rings – and as assembled in The Art of The Hobbit, helps to show how the story was written. In our new book, we’ve been able to include many more Hobbit pictures than we had room for in our earlier book, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, many that have not been previously published, and all of them in color.
The Art of The Hobbit, and the film adaptation of The Hobbit due next year, are likely to spark renewed interest in the work. Will our book shed new light on Tolkien and The Hobbit?
We hope that Tolkien’s visions for The Hobbit will impress themselves upon readers, as a contrast to however the filmmakers interpret his work, and that our book will lead still more to read The Hobbit and to form their own personal visions of its characters and world.
