The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2

The Reeve’s Tale

Reincarnation of Elves

Religion

Research v. Literature

‘Of the Return of the Noldor’

The Return of the Shadow: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part One

Reynolds, Richard William

Rhodes, Philip Grafton Mole

Rice-Oxley, Leonard

Ridley, Maurice Roy

Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age

The Rivers and Beacon-Hills of Gondor

The Road

The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle

Romanticism

Roverandom

‘Of the Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of Fingolfin’

‘Of the Ruin of Doriath’

Salu, Mary Bertha

Sarehole (Warwickshire)

Sauron Defeated: The End of the Third Age (The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Four); The Notion Club Papers and The Drowning of Anadûnê

Sayer, George Sydney Benedict

Science

Scotland

The Sea

The Sea-Bell

The Seafarer

A Secret Vice (lecture)

A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages (book)

Sellic Spell

Shadow-Bride

Shakespeare, Donald William Edward, known as Anthony

Shakespeare, William

The Shaping of Middle-Earth: The Quenta, The Ambarkanta and the Annals Together with the Earliest ‘Silmarillion’ and the First Map

The Shibboleth of Fëanor

The Shores of Faery

‘Sí Qente Feanor’

Sidmouth (Devon)

Sigelwara Land

‘The Silmarillion’ (legendarium)

The Silmarillion (published book)

‘Of the Silmarils and the Unrest of the Noldor’

Simpson, Percy

‘Of the Sindar’

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (poem)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (W.P. Ker Lecture)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo

Sir Orfeo

Sisam, Kenneth

Sketch of the Mythology

Smith, Albert Hugh

Smith, Geoffrey Bache

Smith of Wootton Major

Smithers, Geoffrey Victor

Smoking

Societies and clubs

Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography

Some Notes on ‘Rebirth’

A Song of Aryador

Songs for the Philologists

Source criticism

South Africa

Spiders

Sports

Staffordshire

Staples, Osric Osmumd

Stevens, Courtenay Edward

Stewart, John Innes Mackintosh

The Stone Troll

Stonyhurst (Lancashire)

The Story of Kullervo (book)

Sub-creation

Suffield family

‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’

Sun The Trees Silmarils

Swann, Donald Ibrahim

Switzerland

‘Synopsis of Pengoloð’s Eldarinwe Leperi are Notessi’

Tal-Elmar

The Tale of Years

‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’

Tales from the Perilous Realm

T.C.B.S.

Tengwesta Qenderinwa

St Teresa Gale

‘Of Thingol and Melian’

Thompson, Francis

Thompson, Louis Lionel Harry

Thompson, William Meredith

Tidworth (Wiltshire)

Tinfang Warble

Tolhurst, Bernard Joseph

Tolhurst, Denis Anthony

Tolkien family

Tolkien, Arthur Reuel

Tolkien, Christopher Reuel

Tolkien, Edith Mary

Tolkien, Hilary Arthur Reuel

Tolkien, John Francis Reuel

Tolkien, Mabel

Tolkien, Michael Hilary Reuel

Tolkien, Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel

Tolkien Estate

Tolkien on Tolkien

The Tolkien Reader

‘Tom Bombadil: A Prose Fragment’

The Town of Dreams and the City of Present Sorrow

Translations

Travel and transport

The Treason of Isengard: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Two

Tree and Leaf

The Trees of Kortirion

Trimingham, Harold Gilbert Lutyens

Trought, Vincent

Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin

‘Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin’

‘Of Túrin Turambar’

‘The “Turin Wrapper”’

Turlin and the Exiles of Gondolin

Turville-Petre, Edward Oswald Gabriel

Turville-Petre, Joan Elizabeth

Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth

Unwin, Rayner Stephens

Unwin, Stanley

Valaquenta

Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford

‘Variation D/L in Common Eldarin’

‘Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath’

Wade-Gery, Henry Theodore

Wagner, Richard Wilhelm

Wain, John Barrington

Waldman, Milton

Wales

The Wanderer

The Wanderings of Húrin

War

The War of the Jewels: The Later Silmarillion, Part Two: The Legends of Beleriand

The War of the Ring: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Three

Wardale, Edith Elizabeth

Warwick (Warwickshire)

West Midlands

Weston-super-Mare (Somerset)

Whitby (Yorkshire)

Whitelock, Dorothy

Wilkinson, Cyril Hackett

Williams, Charles Walter Stansby

Wilson, Frank Percy

Windle, Michael William Maxwell

Winter’s Tales for Children I

Wiseman, Christopher Luke

Women and marriage

‘Words of Joy’

Words, Phrases and Passages in Various Tongues in The Lord of the Rings

Wrenn, Charles Leslie

Wright, Joseph

Writing systems

Wyke-Smith, Edward Augustine

Wyld, Henry Cecil Kennedy

The Year’s Work in English Studies

Yorkshire

N

‘Name-List to The Fall of Gondolin’. Unfinished compilation of names in Qenya and Gnomish (Noldorin, later Sindarin; see *Languages, Invented) occurring in The Fall of Gondolin in *The Book of Lost Tales as ‘set forth by Eriol at the teaching of Bronweg’s son … Littleheart’ (*The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 148). Tolkien evidently compiled this list in more or less alphabetical order from the *Official Name List (?1917–?1919), but it extends only as far as the letter L. *Christopher Tolkien incorporated information from the list in the Appendices (‘Names in the Lost Tales’) to *The Book of Lost Tales, Part One and The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two. The complete list was published in Parma Eldalamberon 15 (2004), pp. 19–30, edited with commentary and notes by Christopher Gilson and Patrick H. Wynne.

Included with the ‘Name-List’ proper is another projected list of names, abandoned after only three entries, probably the beginning of a list for The Cottage of Lost Play (The Book of Lost Tales).

The Name ‘Nodens’. Note, first published as Appendix I, pp. 132–7, in the Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire by R.E.M. Wheeler and T.V. Wheeler (Oxford: Printed at the University Press by John Johnson for The Society of Antiquaries, 1932). See further, Descriptive Bibliography B13.

The report is concerned with excavations in 1928–9 of a promontory fort or small embanked hill-town of five acres, established at Lydney in or shortly before the first century BC. ‘Soon after A.D. 364–7 a temple, dedicated to the otherwise unknown deity Nodens, was built within the earthwork, and with the temple, which was of unusual plan, were associated a guest-house, baths, and other structures, indicating that the cult was an important centre of pilgrimage’ (Wheeler and Wheeler, p. 1). Tolkien observes in his note that the name Nodens occurs in three inscriptions; otherwise, ‘from the same place and presumably roughly contemporary, there is in early Keltic [Celtic] material no trace of any such name or stem’ (p. 132). He relates Nodens to Núadu (later Núada) Argat-lám, the king of the Túatha dé Danann, ‘the possessors of Ireland before the Milesians’ (p. 133), and to other Nuadas in Irish. ‘It is possible to see a memory of this figure in the medieval Welsh Lludd Llaw Ereint (“of the Silver Hand”) – the ultimate original of King Lear – whose daughter Creiddylad (Cordelia) was carried off, after her betrothal to Gwythyr vab Greiddawl, by Gwynn vab Nudd, a figure having connexions with the underworld’ (p. 133). The normal Welsh form of Nuada or Nodens is Nudd.

Tolkien researched Nodens and wrote a note on the subject probably in 1929 or 1930, at the request of R.E.M. (later Sir Mortimer) Wheeler, Keeper and Secretary of the London Museum. Wheeler had the finished note in hand apparently well before 2 December 1931, when he informed Tolkien that a report on the Lydney Park excavations was to be issued by the Society of Antiquaries, including Tolkien’s note, and enclosed a proof. Tolkien replied to Wheeler by 9 December, evidently having had related thoughts on the possible evolution of the name Lydney out of Lludd. He wrote at once to his colleague Allen Mawer, then Director of the Survey of English Place-names, about the history of Lydney, but the data Mawer could supply were indeterminate.

Tolkien wrote a paragraph on the subject nevertheless, commenting on the obscurity of the origin of the place-name Lydney, and that it did not shed light on the problem of Nodens. Lydney was an English settlement, not the site of the temple to Nodens, though Tolkien thought that it might contain a pre-English name with a different original focus. Because of the uncertainty of this argument, however, or because production was already too far advanced to permit an addition, the note was omitted from the published report by Wheeler and Wheeler.

See further, comments by Carl Phelpstead in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), ch. 4. A prefatory note in the Report lists those who did the actual work of the excavation and mentions others who visited the site and helped to identify the finds. Among the latter was *R.G. Collingwood who, like Tolkien, was a fellow of Pembroke College, *Oxford, and was almost certainly responsible for Tolkien being asked to help with the mythological–philological problem of Nodens.

Tolkien himself, however, is not named in the list, and there is no evidence that he participated in the dig at Lydney Park, stayed there as a guest of the Wheelers on a number of occasions, or even visited Lydney, the surrounding Forest of Dean, or nearby Puzzlewood, all of which have been suggested as influences on *The Hobbit and *The Lord of the Rings. Mortimer Wheeler’s letters to Tolkien in 1931–2 in fact are formal and courteous, with no sign of the familiarity that would be evident between friends. Nor is there any reason to believe, despite much wishful thinking, that Tolkien was influenced in writing The Hobbit by the folk-connection between Lydney and dwarves, hobgoblins, and little people, or – at an even further stretch – that he took the idea of the ring in The Hobbit (later the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings) from a gold ring lost by the Roman Silvianus at the temple of Nodens at Lydney in the late fourth century, found 100 miles away in 1786, and now at The Vyne near Basingstoke, Hampshire.

The Name ‘Nodens’ was reprinted in Tolkien Studies 4 (2007), pp. 177–83.

The Nameless Land. Poem, first published in *Realities: An Anthology of Verse (1927), pp. 24–5.

The ‘nameless land’ is Eressëa, the home of the Elves in the True West of the world. The poet speaks of its golden ‘lingering lights’, its ‘grass more green than in gardens here’, its ‘dells that immortal dews distill / And fragrance of all flowers that grow’. It is unattainable, ‘a thousand leagues’ distant, a land ‘without a name / No heart may hope to anchor near’, more fair than Tir-nan-Og (the land of youth in Irish legend) and ‘more faint and far’ than Paradise, a ‘shore beyond the Shadowy Sea’. The poet dreams that he sees ‘a wayward star’ – the mariner Eärendel (or Eärendil) sailing the heavens – and refers to ‘beacon towers in Gondobar’ (‘city of stone’), one of the Seven Names of Gondolin.

According to a note on one of its typescripts, Tolkien wrote The Nameless Land at his home in Darnley Road, *Leeds, in May 1924, ‘inspired by reading *Pearl for examination purposes’. Like that medieval poem, The Nameless Land has both rhyme and alliteration, and the last line of each stanza is echoed in the first line of the next (‘And the woods are filled with wandering fire. / The wandering fires the woodland fill’). On 18 July 1962 Tolkien wrote to his Aunt *Jane Neave (Letters, p. 317):

The poem [Pearl] is very well-known to mediaevalists; but I never agreed to the view of scholars that the metrical form was almost impossibly difficult to write in, and quite impossible to render in modern English. NO scholars (or, nowadays, poets) have any experience in composing themselves in exacting metres. I made up a few stanzas in the metre to show that composition in it was not at any rate ‘impossible’ (though the result might today be thought bad) …. I send you the original stanzas of my own – related inevitably as everything was at one time with my own mythology.

Tolkien later revised The Nameless Land as The Song of Ælfwine (on Seeing the Uprising of Eärendel), with the intermediate title Ælfwine’s Song Calling upon Eärendel, tying the poem more explicitly to his mythology. Ælfwine, a mortal mariner who finds the sea-path to Eressëa, figures in *The Book of Lost Tales, *The Lost Road, and *The Notion Club Papers; see *Eriol and Ælfwine. Many texts of The Song of Ælfwine survive in manuscript and typescript. Two of these were published, together with The Nameless Land, in *The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987); see in that volume, pp. 98–104.

See further, Stefan Ekman, ‘Echoes of Pearl in Arda’s Landscape’, Tolkien Studies 6 (2009).

Names. On 4 January 1892, the day after his son was born, *Arthur Tolkien wrote to his mother: ‘The boy’s first name will be “John” after his grandfather, probably John Ronald Reuel altogether. Mab [*Mabel Tolkien] wants to call it Ronald and I want to keep up John and Reuel’ (quoted in Biography, p. 12). Arthur chose ‘John’ for his own father (see *Tolkien family), but Mabel’s father was also a John (John Suffield, see *Suffield family). Tolkien explained the choice of names in a letter to Amy Ronald on 2 January 1969:

I was called John because it was the custom for the eldest son of the eldest son to be called John in my family. My father was Arthur, eldest of my grandfather John Benjamin’s second family; but his elder half-brother John had died leaving only 3 daughters. So John I had to be ….

My father favoured John Benjamin Reuel (which I should now have liked); but my mother was confident that I should be a daughter, and being fond of more ‘romantic’ (& less O[ld] T[estament] like) names decided on Rosalind. When I turned up … Ronald was substituted ….

Reuel … was (I believe) the surname of a friend of my grandfather. The family believed it to be French (which is formally possible); but if so it is an odd chance that it appears twice in the O[ld] T[estament] as an unexplained other name for Jethro Moses’ father-in-law. All my children, and my children’s children, and their children, have the name. [Letters, pp. 397–8]

At his confirmation in 1903 Tolkien took the additional name ‘Philip’ but used it only rarely.

In an autobiographical statement written in 1955 Tolkien explained his surname as ‘a German name (from Saxony), an anglicization of Tollkiehn, i.e. tollkühn. But, except as a guide to spelling, this fact is as fallacious as all facts in the raw. For I am neither ‘foolhardy’ [= tollkühn] nor German, whatever some remote ancestors may have been’ (Letters, p. 218). Tolkien’s aunt Grace Mountain (see *Mountain family) alleged that their surname had originally been von Hohenzollern, after that district of the Holy Roman Empire from which the family had come. ‘A certain George von Hohenzollern had, she said, fought on the side of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria at the Siege of Vienna in 1529. He had shown great daring in leading an unofficial raid against the Turks and capturing the Sultan’s standard. This (said Aunt Grace) was why he was given the nickname Tollkühn, “foolhardy”; and the nickname stuck’ (Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, pp. 18–19). The story was also told of a French variation of the surname, du Téméraire, but may be no more than family lore. Research by Polish Tolkien enthusiasts such as Ryszard Derdzinski, reported on the website Tolknięty (tolkniety.blogspot.com) indicates that certain family members emigrated to England from Gdańsk around 1772, having belonged to a family of Gdańsk (Danzig) furriers whose history reached back into fourteenth-century Prussia and thirteenth-century Saxony.

On a copy of a George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers) press release, not before 1968, Tolkien wrote his surname phonetically and gave instructions for its pronunciation: ‘(tôl kēn) tĺkeen (sc. tolk does not rhyme with yolk; the division is tol–keen in which tol rhymes with doll and kien (NOT KEIN) = keen as ie in field and many other words’ (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). It was, and is, frequently misspelled Tolkein. Tolkien complained of this in a letter to Graham Tayar in June 1971, ‘in spite of all my efforts to correct this – even by my college-, bank-, and lawyer’s clerks!’ (Letters, p. 410). On 12 October 1966 he wrote to Joy Hill at Allen & Unwin about a document from the Performing Rights Society: ‘I wish producers of documents would see to it that they give me my correct name. My third name appears as Revel twice in each of the Deeds. My surname is Tolkein on one of them’ (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). Even on his tombstone Reuel at first was carved Revel.

The phonetic rendering of Tolkien’s surname should be understood to place the stress on the first syllable. The same pronunciation is described by Clyde S. Kilby in ‘Many Meetings with Tolkien’ (an edited transcript of remarks at the December 1966 meeting of the Tolkien Society of America), published in Niekas 19 (c. 1968). Henry S. Resnik, however, in remarks at a July 1966 meeting of the Tolkien Society of America, said on the basis of a half-hour telephone interview that Tolkien ‘pronounces his name tul-KEEN …. His American publisher pronounces it TUL-kin, and I took him as the leading authority, but apparently Tolkien knows’ (‘An Interview with Tolkien’, p. 43).

Arthur and Mabel Tolkien called their son by his second name, Ronald, as did his other relatives and his wife. In his letter to Amy Ronald, Tolkien said that when he was a boy in England Ronald was a much rarer name than it later became: it was shared by none of his contemporaries at school or university ‘though it seems now alas! to be prevalent among the criminal and other degraded classes. Anyway I have always treated it with respect, and from earliest days refused to allow it to be abbreviated or tagged with. But for myself I remained John. Ronald was for my near kin. My friends at school, Oxford and later have called me John (or occasionally John Ronald or J. Rsquared)’ (Letters, p. 398). Tolkien occasionally signed himself ‘John’ to Edith Bratt (*Edith Tolkien) when they were courting.

To intimates such as Edith or his Aunt *Jane Neave he would sign his letters ‘Ronald’. To friends such as *Katharine Farrer and *Donald Swann he signed ‘Ronald Tolkien’, and to *C.S. Lewis ‘J.R.R.T’. His formal signature was ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’. In 1964, when Allen & Unwin wanted to include a facsimile signature on the title-page of *Tree and Leaf, as was their custom for publications in their ‘U Books’ series, and sent Tolkien a sample with ‘Ronald Tolkien’, he wrote to Ronald Eames at Allen & Unwin: ‘I do not and never have used the signature “Ronald Tolkien” as a public or auctorial signature and I do not think it suitable for the purpose’ (3 February 1964, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). In letters from his *T.C.B.S. friends Tolkien was called variously ‘Gabriel’, ‘Gab’, ‘Cludhari’ – nicknames whose origin is obscure and not mentioned in surviving correspondence – but mainly ‘John Ronald’, with isolated instances of ‘Ronald’ or ‘JRRT’. His few surviving letters to the T.C.B.S. are signed ‘John Ronald’. In a letter to *Joy Hill of 26 December 1971 he noted that his contemporaries used to write his initials as ‘JR2T’ and pronounce them ‘to rhyme with dirt’ (collection of René van Rossenberg).

According to Humphrey Carpenter, when Tolkien ‘was an adult his intimates [presumably other than family] referred to him (as was customary at the time) by his surname, or called him “Tollers”, a hearty nickname typical of the period. To those not so close, especially in his later years, he was often known as “J.R.R.T.”’ (Biography, p. 13).

The correspondence between Tolkien and the publishing Unwins, *Stanley and *Rayner, is an interesting lesson in the nuances of methods of address. In 1937 Tolkien wrote to ‘Dear Mr Unwin’ and signed himself ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’; Stanley Unwin replied to ‘Dear Professor Tolkien’. During 1944 they wrote to ‘Dear Unwin’ and ‘Dear Tolkien’. In 1946, after Stanley Unwin received a knighthood, Tolkien began his letters ‘Dear Sir Stanley’, while Unwin continued to write ‘Dear Tolkien’. Despite the fact that he had been addressing letters to ‘Dear Tolkien’ for some time, on 28 July 1947 Stanley Unwin wrote: ‘Dear Tolkien (If I may thus address you in the hope that you will call me “Unwin”)’ (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). Tolkien replied: ‘Dear Unwin, I will certainly address you so, cum permissu [with permission], though it hardly seems a fair exchange for the loss of “professor”, a title one has rather to live down than to insist on’ (Letters, p. 120).