The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 1: Chronology

27 September 1935 Oxford University Press sends Simonne d’Ardenne, and possibly Tolkien, proofs of An Edition of the Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene. To obtain a degree from the University of Liège, d’Ardenne has to present her B.Litt. thesis as a published work.

3 October 1935 Italy invades Ethiopia.

13 October 1935 Michaelmas Full Term begins. Tolkien’s scheduled lectures for this term are: Beowulf: Text on Tuesdays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 15 October; Finn and Hengest on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12.00 noon in the Examination Schools, beginning 15 October; and Old English Texts (Paper B2) on Thursdays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 17 October. He will continue to supervise B.Litt. student M.E. Griffiths.

17 October 1935 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

18 October 1935 In the evening, Tolkien attends a dinner of The Society hosted by R.W. Chapman at Oriel College, Oxford. Fifteen members are present. Chapman speaks about Oxford and Cambridge.

Autumn 1935 *A.H. Smith, on behalf of the Early English Text Society, invites Tolkien to prepare an edition of the Cambridge manuscript of the Ancrene Riwle (MS CCCC 402). Tolkien indicates that he is interested, but will have to rely on the assistance of Elaine Griffiths. He is given until the end of the year to reply formally.

24 October 1935 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Library Committee meeting at 2.15 p.m. in the Library.

1 November 1935 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

28 November 1935 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Library Committee meeting at 2.15 p.m. in the Library.

29 November 1935 Tolkien and C.T. Onions examine E.V. Williams of Jesus College viva voce on his B.Litt. thesis, The Phonology and Accidence of the O.E. Glosses in MS Cotton Vespasian A.1 (Vespasian Psalter), at 2.30 p.m. in the Examination Schools.

30 November 1935 Tolkien and Onions sign their report (written by Tolkien) on the examination of E.V. Williams.

4 December 1935 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

6 December 1935 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Board meeting. – He possibly attends a meeting of the Council for Comparative Philology at 5.15 p.m. in the Delegates Room of the Clarendon Building.

7 December 1935 Michaelmas Full Term ends.

11 December 1935 The Early English Text Society Committee decides that all except the Latin texts of the Ancrene Riwle are to be printed in EETS editions with the capitals and punctuation of the original.

Christmas 1935 Tolkien, as ‘Father Christmas’, writes a four-page letter to ‘My dear children’ (Christopher and Priscilla), dated 24 December. He comments on the cold weather, on the difficulty of the North Polar Bear in returning home from a visit to the Polar Cubs, and on giving his elves magic sparkler spears to frighten the goblins if they should reappear. He sends love to all the children and to Priscilla’s bears, and hopes that they will enjoy the pantomime they are going to see. The letter is interspersed with small illustrations. – Tolkien spends almost the whole of the Christmas vacation until 4 January, except Christmas Day itself, putting into shape the proofs of Seinte Iuliene on behalf of Simonne d’Ardenne, working against a deadline as the work must be printed by a fixed date.

Late December 1935 Mabel Day, Secretary of the Early English Text Society, writes to Tolkien, asking him to confirm his interest in preparing an edition of the Ancrene Riwle (Ancrene Wisse).

1936 (#ulink_a22acb18-6c54-51f2-aea1-1de3dd9d13c3)

?1936–?1937 In 1936 (possibly early to mid-1936) or early 1937, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis agree that there are too few stories of the kind they like to read, and that they will try to write some themselves. They further agree that Lewis should write a ‘thriller’ based on ‘space-travel’, and Tolkien one on ‘time-travel’, with each leading to the discovery of Myth. See note. The effort by Lewis will result in his Out of the Silent Planet, finished by September 1937. Tolkien on his part draws upon his still developing mythology, and upon a dream he has had since early childhood, of a great wave coming out of the sea and towering over the land: his ‘Atlantis-haunting’ (*Atlantis). He produces, first, a brief outline for the story of Atalantë (*Númenor), an island created as a gift to Men who aided in the defeat of the evil Morgoth, but engulfed by the sea when the Númenóreans dare to assail the land of the Gods. Tolkien follows this with a full narrative in manuscript, hastily written and much corrected in the course of composition, and that in turn with a more finished manuscript with the title (added later) The Last Tale: The Fall of Númenor, and with an amanuensis typescript.

After the sketch and first version of *The Fall of Númenor, but contemporary with the second and intimately connected, Tolkien also begins to work on *The Lost Road, ‘of which the end was to be the presence of my hero in the drowning of Atlantis. This was to be called Númenor, the Land in the West’ (letter to Christopher Bretherton, 16 July 1964, Letters, p. 347). He writes two chapters of The Lost Road, introducing a father and son who are to appear and reappear in different phases of Germanic and Celtic legend, and then nearly two chapters of the Númenórean episode before deciding that this should come last. He makes rough notes of what might be included in the intervening parts, but does not write them except for a fragment of an Anglo-Saxon episode which includes prose and alliterative versions of the legend of King Sheave. By autumn 1937, however, he abandons The Lost Road altogether, while The Fall of Númenor will evolve ultimately into the *Akallabêth. – It is probably in association with The Lost Road that Tolkien rewrites his poem The Nameless Land (first composed in May 1924), entitling it Ælfwine’s Song Calling upon Eärendel and The Song of Ælfwine (on Seeing the Uprising of Eärendel).

1936 Two poems by Tolkien, The Shadow Man (see *Shadow-Bride) and *Noel, are published in the 1936 Annual of Our Lady’s School, Abingdon (near Oxford). – Thirteen poems by Tolkien written for the amusement of students at Leeds are published, without his knowledge, in *Songs for the Philologists, a booklet privately printed by students in the Department of English of University College, London. These are: From One to Five; Syx Mynet; Ruddoc Hana; Ides Ælfscyne; Bagme Bloma; Eadig Beo Þu!; Ofer Widne Garsecg; La, Huru; I Sat upon a Bench; Natura Apis; The Root of the Boot (revision of Pēro & Pōdex, later *The Stone Troll), Frenchmen Froth; and Lit’ and Lang’. Some are printed with errors, or altered to remove references to Leeds. They had been provided by A.H. Smith, who had been a student of Tolkien at Leeds. See note.

?By early 1936 Tolkien offers his Modern English translation of Pearl to the London publisher J.M. Dent. It is not accepted, but is seen by Guy Pocock, who in 1936 joins the staff of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and recommends that part of the translation be read on radio.

?Early 1936 Tolkien is asked by the publisher George Allen & Unwin if he would be interested in producing a revised edition of John R. Clark Hall’s Modern English translation of Beowulf and The Fight at Finnesburg. He replies that he does not have time to spare, but suggests that Elaine Griffiths is qualified to undertake the work and offers to read what she produces and to write a preface or introduction. *Susan Dagnall, a member of the Allen & Unwin staff who had been a student in the English School at Oxford, is sent to discuss the project with Griffiths and probably also with Tolkien. While there Dagnall learns of the existence of The Hobbit and borrows a typescript. See note. Upon reading The Hobbit she urges Tolkien to finish the book and to submit it for publication. Tolkien agrees to do so. Returning to the story at the point he seems to have left off some three years earlier, he writes ‘Not at Home’, originally as Chapter 14, and the first part of ‘The Gathering of the Clouds’ (published Chapter 15), but then decides that the structure of the story would be improved if ‘Not at Home’ preceded ‘Fire and Water’. In the course of several months, he works out the remaining text in a new manuscript.

5 January 1936 Tolkien writes to Mabel Day of the Early English Text Society. He apologizes for not having given a firm decision about Ancrene Wisse by 31 December. He explains that Elaine Griffiths, on whose assistance he relies and who has been preparing a diplomatic transcription of MS CCCC 402 and a complete index and glossary, had to go home early in December and has only just resumed her work; while he himself has been busy with Seinte Iuliene. He can now offer to produce an edition of Ancrene Wisse for the Society, but feels that he must explain about work he has already done. He has transcribed 75 of the 117 folios of the manuscript and has almost completed a verbal index. He has also spent time preparing a complete vocabulary and grammar of ‘AB’ (a variant of Middle English related to MS CCCC 402 and MS Bodley 34). Because he has been working from rotographs, he will need to collate his transcriptions with the original manuscript in Cambridge, and intends to begin that work soon. He can let the Society have four requested specimen pages in the following week. He asks what format and what accompanying material will be required for the Society edition. He suggests that the text be printed line by line, as Elaine Griffiths’ glossary is keyed to folio and line as in the original manuscript. As an example of what he would like, he sends a specimen proof of Seinte Iuliene. He inquires also if, after Ancrene Wisse, the EETS would be interested in an edition of the Middle English life of St Katherine (Seinte Katerine), for which he and Simonne d’Ardenne have already prepared the text.

By 14 January 1936 Tolkien assists *R.G. Collingwood, the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford and a colleague at Pembroke College, ‘untiringly with problems of Celtic philology’, as Collingwood will write in the preface (dated 14 January 1936) to Books I–IV of Roman Britain and the English Settlements by Collingwood and J.N.L. Myres (1936; 2nd edn. 1937), p. vii. Collingwood will mention in a footnote regarding Sulis, the goddess of the hot springs at Bath, that ‘she is traditionally called Sul; but Professor Tolkien points out to me that the Celtic nominative can only be Sulis, and our authority for believing that even the Romans made a nominative Sul on the analogy of their own word sol – perhaps meaning the same – is not good. The Celtic sulis may mean ‘the eye”, and this again may mean the sun’ (p. 264).

14 January 1936 Tolkien writes to Mabel Day. Because he has not had time to type the promised specimen pages, he sends pages of manuscript transcription, from which printed specimens may be produced. He asks again about the general editorial policy of the Early English Text Society, and about matters of presentation.

15 January 1936 Mabel Day writes to Tolkien, acknowledging his two letters. She has sent the first to A.W. Pollard, Honorary Director of the Early English Text Society. She explains some points of the Society’s editorial policy, which will be better developed once all of the specimens for proposed editions of Ancrene Riwle manuscripts have been set up. She promises to send Tolkien specimens of the edition of the French manuscript of the Ancrene Riwle. – A.W. Pollard writes to Tolkien. While he can see advantages of reproducing a (prose) text in print line by line, he prefers a uniformity of style in printing editions of the five or six Ancrene Riwle texts, of which the Cambridge manuscript will be only one. It is still to be decided what editorial matter should accompany the texts.

16 January 1936 Tolkien replies to Mabel Day, thanking her for answering his queries and arguing against altering texts, for the sake of future editors who often will be obliged to reconstruct what has been altered, if not driven back to the original manuscripts. He will proceed with an edition of Ancrene Wisse as quickly as he can. – Probably on or soon after this date Tolkien also writes to A.W. Pollard; two versions of a letter survive, one certainly a draft. See note. Although he will bow to the Early English Text Society Committee’s decision, Tolkien puts forward a long and detailed argument in favour of line-by-line transcription. Such a transcription, preserving the arrangement in the original manuscript, has enormous advantages to the scholar. Also, as he has already transcribed most of the Cambridge manuscript by folio and line, and has prepared a nearly complete glossary and index according to this plan, he is reluctant to see this work upset. To follow the EETS plan would require a great deal of labour in recasting references already in being, and would set back other work on Ancrene Wisse and related texts.

19 January 1936 Hilary Full Term begins. Tolkien’s scheduled lectures for this term are: The Legend of Wayland the Smith, followed by a study of the text of Deor’s Lament and of Völundarkviða on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 21 January; and Atlakviða on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12.00 noon in the Examination Schools, beginning 21 January. These are probably cancelled, however, after Tolkien injures his leg on 1 February; he will offer them as classes at his home in Northmoor Road in Trinity Term 1936. He will continue to supervise B.Litt. student M.E. Griffiths.

20 January 1936 Death of George V. Edward VIII succeeds to the throne.

22 January 1936 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

23 January 1936 Members of Convocation (see *Oxford, University of) meet in the Sheldonian Theatre at 12.00 noon to hear the proclamation of Edward VIII, and then walk in procession, led by the Vice-Chancellor and the Proctors, to St Mary’s Church to witness the proclamation there by the City authorities. Lectures which would interfere with attendance at the ceremony are cancelled.

27 January 1936 A.W. Pollard writes to Tolkien. Robin Flower has been asked by the Early English Text Society Committee to take special charge of the Ancrene Riwle editions. Tolkien’s specimens are being forwarded to him.

28 January 1936 Day of mourning for the funeral of George V. Lectures are cancelled. The Vice-Chancellor, Proctors, and graduates, in academic dress, meet in the Divinity School by 11.35 a.m. and process to a Memorial Service at noon in the Church of St Mary the Virgin.

1 February 1936 Warren Lewis notes in his diary that Tolkien has torn a ligament in his leg playing squash and will be in bed for ten weeks. – C.S. Lewis visits Tolkien after tea.

7 February 1936 The Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Liège, authorizes publication of Simonne d’Ardenne’s thesis on Seinte Iuliene. Oxford University Press will print one thousand copies by early March. Librairie E. Droz of Paris will publish it under d’Ardenne’s name only, to satisfy requirements of her degree at Liège; but for this, the book would appear as a joint work by d’Ardenne and Tolkien. Simonne d’Ardenne herself privately refers to it as a joint effort, and some of Tolkien’s colleagues will recognize his contribution. The Seinte Iuliene probably contains more of his views on early Middle English than anything he will ever publish under his own name.

19 February 1936 C.H. Firth dies.

26 February 1936 Mabel Day sends Tolkien a list of possible amendments for A Middle English Vocabulary. She thinks that Robin Flower has seen Tolkien in Oxford to discuss the specimen pages for Ancrene Wisse.

Early March 1936 Tolkien reads The Place of the Lion by *Charles Williams, which C.S. Lewis has recommended.

1 March 1936 By this date Tolkien must have submitted his application for a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, which he will be granted from October 1936 for two years.

7 March 1936 Germany reoccupies the Rhineland.

9 March 1936 Simonne d’Ardenne writes to Tolkien, asking how he is recovering from his leg injury, and referring to his surgeon. She will tell him the date of her viva at Liège when she knows it. A copy of Seinte Iuliene has gone to Tolkien. She regrets that ‘our profit’ will be smaller than they had thought, because of the percentage demanded by Droz (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford).

14 March 1936 Hilary Full Term ends.

30 March 1936 At the suggestion of Elaine Griffiths, C.A. Furth of George Allen & Unwin approaches Tolkien to ask if he would edit the new edition of Clark Hall’s Beowulf, or suggest someone else for the job. The context of his letter suggests that this is not the first time he has made this request. (See entry for ?Early 1936.)

26 April 1936 Trinity Full Term begins. Tolkien’s scheduled lectures for this term are: Outlines of Old English Phonology and Grammar on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12.00 noon in the Examination Schools, beginning 28 April; and Introduction to Old English Poetry on Thursdays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 30 April. But because Tolkien is still recovering from his squash injury, his lectures are cancelled, and instead he reads Old Norse and Old English texts with small classes at home in 20 Northmoor Road: Atlakviða on Tuesdays at 11:00 a.m.; Völundarkviða and Deor’s Lament on Thursdays at 11.00 a.m.; and Andreas with other Old English texts on Thursdays at 5.00 p.m. Undergraduates wishing to attend are required to inform Tolkien in advance, if possible before 28 April. – Tolkien will continue to supervise B.Litt. student M.E. Griffiths, who is required to apply for a certificate during this term (but apparently abandons her thesis, as she is no longer listed in Michaelmas Term 1936).

28 April 1936 Tolkien writes a nine-page historical note on inflexions in Primitive Quendian, entitled *Primitive Quendian Structure.

April or May 1936 The Rev. Adrian Morey writes to Tolkien. He has discovered an Anglo-Saxon version of the Lord’s Prayer (‘Our Father’) in a manuscript in the British Museum, and asks if it is worth publishing. Tolkien suggests that Morey write an article, which would be useful to students.

?May–?June 1936 C.S. Lewis lends Tolkien his copy of The Silver Trumpet by Owen Barfield. It is much appreciated by the Tolkien children.

1 May 1936 In the evening, Tolkien, on crutches, attends a dinner of The Society hosted by Sir Francis Wylie at Brasenose College, Oxford. Nineteen members are present; no paper being presented, they give themselves up to conversation.

9 May 1936 Italy formally annexes Ethiopia. The King of Italy assumes the title ‘Emperor of Ethiopia’.