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

When Rayner Unwin began to correspond with Tolkien in 1952 he addressed him as ‘Dear Professor Tolkien’, and Tolkien replied to ‘My dear Rayner’ or ‘Dear Rayner’. At first Tolkien signed his letters ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’, but by about 1960 he began to sign ‘Ronald Tolkien’. On 15 December 1965 Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin:

Do you think you could mark the New Year by dropping the Professor? I belong to a generation which did not use Christian names outside the family, but like the dwarves [in his mythology] kept them private, and for even their intimates used surnames (or perversions of them), or nicknames, or (occasionally) Christian names that did not belong to them. Even C.S. Lewis never called me by a Christian name (or I him). So I will be content with a surname. I wish I could get rid of the “professor” altogether, at any rate when not writing technical matter. It gives a false impression of “learning”, especially in “folklore” and all that. It also gives a probably truer impression of pedantry, but it is a pity to have my pedantry advertised and underlined, so that people sniff it even when it is not there. [Letters, pp. 365–6]

From that point Rayner wrote to ‘Dear Tolkien’. Seven years later, on 30 March 1972, Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin: ‘Would it be possible for you to use my Christian name? I am now accepted as a member of the community here [Merton College] – one of the habits of which has long been the use of Christian names, irrespective of age or office – and as you are now a v[ery] old friend, and a very dear one, I should much like also to be a “familiaris”’ (Letters, p. 418).

He did not care whether he was addressed as ‘Professor’ or ‘Mr’; on 12 December 1955 he wrote to Mr Smith at Allen & Unwin that ‘there is no need to alter “Mr” to “Professor”. In proper Oxford tradition professor is not a title of address – or was not, though the habit has drifted in from places where “professors” are powerful little domestic potentates’ (Letters, p. 230).

Names and Required Alterations. Parallel list of names in Qenya (later Quenya, see *Languages, Invented) from The Cottage of Lost Play (*The Book of Lost Tales), with equivalents in Gnomish (Goldogrin, later Sindarin), published in Parma Eldalamberon 15 (2004), pp. 5–18, edited with commentary and notes by Patrick H. Wynne.

This work appears to date from ?1917–?1919. An appendix ‘assembles a variety of isolated words, linguistic notes, and phonological charts from the Lost Tales [Book of Lost Tales] notebooks that could not be conveniently presented in previous issues of Parma Eldalamberon’ (p. 6).

‘Names of the Valar’. List of names of the Valar (*‘The Silmarillion’), arranged by gender, published as part of ‘Early Qenya Fragments’ in Parma Eldalamberon 14 (2003), pp. 11–15, edited with commentary and notes by Patrick Wynne and Christopher Gilson.

Originally written only in Qenya (later Quenya, see *Languages, Invented), Gnomish (Goldogrin, later Sindarin) forms were added later by Tolkien. The work is contemporary with *The Book of Lost Tales, but probably later than *Corrected Names of Chief Valar, i.e. from the ?first half of 1919.

Napier, Arthur Sampson (1853–1916). A.S. Napier, educated at Owens College, Manchester and Exeter College, *Oxford, taught at Berlin and Göttingen before becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford in 1885. In 1903 he became, as well, Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon. Napier’s appointment to the Merton Professorship, on the establishment of that chair, strengthened the language side of English studies at Oxford – he was one of three professors of *Philology, together with John Earle and F. Max Müller – to the regret of those who pictured the philologists ‘lecturing simultaneously on Beowulf to empty benches, while there was no one to lecture on Shakespeare and Milton’ (D.J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (1965), p. 87). In fact, Napier would later play a key role, with *Walter Raleigh, in bifurcating the Oxford English syllabus to make it more attractive to students whose primary interest was literature rather than language (from 1908 only four of ten papers were required in common of all students reading English, with the other six oriented to suit the language or literature specialty).

Never robust, during the last ten years of his life Napier was frequently in ill health, but was ably assisted by *Kenneth Sisam, whose B.Litt. thesis Napier supervised. Tolkien later recalled meeting Napier when, as an undergraduate at Oxford, he changed his course of study from Classics to English Language and Literature: ‘I recall that I was ushered into a very dim room and could hardly see Napier. He was courteous, but said little. He never spoke to me again. I attended his lectures, when he was well enough to give them’ (letter to *N.R. Ker, 22 November 1970, Letters, p. 406). These definitely included, in Michaelmas Term 1913, lectures on English Historical Grammar and on Old English Dialects, and in Michaelmas Term 1914 and Hilary Term 1915, on *Pearl and *Beowulf (see further, Chronology).

Narn i Chîn Húrin. Prose narrative of the story of Túrin (see *‘Of Túrin Turambar’), published with notes and commentary in *Unfinished Tales (1980), pp. 57–162, as Narn i Hîn Húrin: The Tale of the Children of Húrin (see below). Some sections of draft and further commentary were included in the account of the Grey Annals in *The War of the Jewels (1994).

When *Christopher Tolkien edited Unfinished Tales he thought that the whole of the Narn was a work of the late 1950s, but during the writing of *The History of Middle-earth he realized that the latter part of the Narn, from the section headed ‘The Return of Túrin to Dor-lómin’ to ‘The Death of Túrin’ (Unfinished Tales, pp. 104–46), was written c. 1951 and in close association with the Grey Annals (*Annals of Beleriand). ‘The manuscript was headed (later) “The Children of Húrin: last part”, and at the top of the first page my father wrote “Part of the ‘Children of Húrin’ told in full scale”’ (The War of the Jewels, p. 144). Up to the point where the Men of Brethil discuss what action to take against Glaurung, preliminary drafting for the manuscript text ‘consists of little more than scribbled slips. From here on … there are in effect two manuscripts’, one of which Christopher Tolkien calls ‘the draft manuscript’, being a ‘continuation of the original, which became so chaotic with rewriting’ that Tolkien made a fair copy (The War of the Jewels, p. 152). In his comments on the relevant portion of the Grey Annals in The War of the Jewels (pp. 144–65) Christopher Tolkien includes comparisons of various versions of the story of Túrin, lengthy extracts from drafts for the Narn, and synopses for the end of the story which show Tolkien hesitating over the dénouement.

Tolkien possibly chose to begin this prose account part way through the story because he had already written a lengthy account of Túrin’s earlier life in alliterative verse in the 1920s (*The Lay of the Children of Húrin), but nothing at length of his later life since *The Book of Lost Tales. The part of the Narn dealing with Túrin’s earlier life, however, is a work of the late 1950s.

In The War of the Jewels Christopher Tolkien describes ‘a twelve-page typescript composed ab initio by my father and bearing the title “Here begins the tale of the Children of Húrin, Narn i Chîn Húrin, which Dírhaval wrought”’ (p. 314). This provided the text for the first part of the Narn (Unfinished Tales, pp. 57–65), but two passages describing the sojourn of Húrin and Huor in Gondolin and an account of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad were omitted, since similar texts taken from the Grey Annals had appeared in *The Silmarillion. Christopher Tolkien comments at length on differences between these passages in the Narn and the Grey Annals, and his use of elements from both in The Silmarillion (The War of the Jewels, pp. 165–70, 314–15). He notes in Unfinished Tales that the next section

(to the end of Túrin in Doriath) required a good deal of revision and selection, and in some places some slight compression, the original texts being scrappy and disconnected. But the central section (Túrin among the outlaws, Mîm the Petty-dwarf, the land of Dor-Cúarthol, the death of Beleg at Túrin’s hand, and Túrin’s life in Nargothrond) constituted a much more difficult editorial problem. The Narn is here at its least finished, and in places diminished to outlines of possible turns in the story. My father was still evolving this part when he ceased to work on it ….

For the first part of this central section, as far as the beginning of Túrin’s sojourn in Mîm’s dwelling on Amon Rûdh, I have contrived a narrative, in scale commensurate with other parts of the Narn, out of the existing materials (with one gap …). [p. 6]

But from that point he found the task of compiling a continuous narrative impossible, and instead published a series of disconnected fragments and notes as an Appendix.

For the part played by Narn i Chîn Hurin in the evolution of Tolkien’s mythology, see entries for *‘Of Túrin Turambar’ and other chapters of The Silmarillion.

Christopher Tolkien returned to the story of Túrin in *The Children of Húrin (2007), re-editing the Narn i Chîn Húrin and associated material to provide a continuous narrative with a minimum of editorial presence. Although this involved reworking in some parts, changes to the actual story were few and not of great significance. In *The Lost Road and Other Writings Christopher explains that in Unfinished Tales he ‘improperly’ replaced [Elvish] Chîn with Hîn ‘because I did not want Chîn to be pronounced like Modern English chin’ (p. 322; in Exilic Noldorin ch is pronounced as in Scottish loch). In The War of the Jewels (pp. 142, 145, 146, 149, 151) he notes editorial changes he made in the text published in Unfinished Tales, as well as authorial emendations.

Tolkien also wrote two versions of an introductory note to the Narn, probably c. 1958, which explains its origins within the context of the *‘Silmarillion’ mythology. A brief summary appeared in Unfinished Tales (p. 146); both texts, under the title Ælfwine and Dírhaval, were published with commentary and notes in The War of the Jewels, pp. 311–15. The Narn began as a lay in an Elvish mode of verse written in Sindarin (*Languages, Invented) by Dírhaval, a Man who lived at the Havens towards the end of the First Age and gathered all the information he could about the House of Hador. According to the first version, Ælfwine (see *Eriol and Ælfwine) translated the lay into the English of his time as a prose narrative, from which the Modern English version is said to have been made. The second version is purported to be written by Ælfwine himself, explaining that he did not feel able to translate the work into verse.

The first version is a manuscript with the title Túrin Turumarth; the second is an untitled, much shorter typescript which Tolkien attached to the twelve-page typescript he had made of the opening of the Narn.

See also *‘The “Túrin Wrapper”’.

CRITICISM

In his review of Unfinished Tales (‘Dug Out of the Dust of Middle-earth’, Maclean’s, 26 January 1981) Guy Gavriel Kay wrote that

Túrin Turambar is Tolkien’s most tragic character – perhaps his only tragic figure. His story is told in The Silmarillion: victim of the curse of a fallen god, condemned to bring evil on those who aid him, tangled in a web that leads to a bitter ending of unwitting incest with a long-lost sister and ultimate suicide. Here the same tale is retold, at three times the length and in detail that would have overwhelmed the spare narrative style and the overriding shape of The Silmarillion. The story was inspired by a part of the Finnish myth-cycle, *The Kalevala, but in the fated inevitability of its conclusion, Túrin’s saga moves and feels like something out of Greek tragedy. The reader’s affinity for the longer or the shorter version will depend on whether he prefers his tragedy austere or baroque. [p. 46]

Thomas M. Egan in his review ‘Fragments of a World: Tolkien’s Road to Middle-earth’, Terrier 48, no. 2 (Fall 1983), wrote:

Adventure tales like ‘Narn I Hîn Húrin’ … grip us with the moral drama of Good and Evil involved. The language … is almost always quasi-Biblical, elegant in tone and forcing us to slow down in our reading habits. It is the context the author uses to explore a human soul, when it ultimately finds despair and loss, rather than the optimistic triumph of the Ring heroes [in *The Lord of the Rings] …. The mood is sometimes bitter but never cynical. Incest, rape, murder are all here as Tolkien explores his version of the modern anti-hero. Túrin Turambar seems cursed by fate …. But Tolkien adds the depths of his convictions to the tale. The respect for the power of human free will, that which links the soul to God (Eru) Himself … appears here as always operating. Even when it is denied or misused, the author always puts in the concrete details of other characters or situations to remind us that things could have gone so differently – if the dominating figure was willing to curb his pride, chastise his lust for revenge (even when severely provoked) and especially, learn the elusive art of possessions (rather than letting things control the individual). [p. 10]

Narqelion. Poem in Qenya (later Quenya, see *Languages, Invented), a lament to autumn, with passing references to Eldamar and the Gnomes (a kindred of the Elves) from the *‘Silmarillion’ mythology, inspired by the poem Kortirion among the Trees (*The Trees of Kortirion). (Compare Quenya Narquelië ‘sun-fading’, the name of the tenth month given in The Lord of the Rings, Appendix D.) A single text survives, apparently begun in November 1915 and completed in March 1916. Four lines were published in Biography (1977). The complete poem was first published, with a commentary, in ‘Narqelion: A Single, Falling Leaf at Sun-fading’ by Paul Nolan Hyde, Mythlore 15, no. 2, whole no. 56 (Winter 1988), pp. 47–52. The poem, with extracts from Hyde’s article, was also printed in Vinyar Tengwar 6 (July 1989), pp. 12–13.

A fuller linguistic analysis of the poem, ‘Bird and Leaf: Image and Structure in Narqelion’ by Patrick Wynne and Christopher Gilson, was published in Parma Eldalamberon 3, no. 1, whole no. 9 (1990); it includes an English translation from Qenya. A facsimile of the manuscript of Narqelion was published (p. 5) in Vinyar Tengwar 40 (April 1999), which number also includes ‘Narqelion and the Early Lexicons: Some Notes on the First Elvish Poem’ by Christopher Gilson, a new linguistic analysis made in light of Elvish lexicons published in 1995 and 1998 (see *Gnomish Lexicon and *Qenyaqetsa). Gilson provides both a literal translation of the poem into English prose and a fresh translation in verse.

Natura Apis see Songs for the Philologists

Nature. Tolkien’s love of and delight in all aspects of the natural world – plants, trees, birds, weather, sky, the changing seasons – as they appear in a rural or even a town landscape, is made abundantly clear in his correspondence. To quote only a few examples from letters to his son *Christopher: ‘A lovely morning dawned …. A mist like early Sept[ember] with a pearl-button sun … that soon changed into serene blue, with the silver light of spring on flower and leaf. Leaves are out: the white-grey of the quince, the grey-green of the young apple, the full green of hawthorn, the tassels of flower even on the sluggard poplars. The narcissuses are a marvellous show …’ (18 April 1944, Letters, p. 73); ‘The most marvellous sunset I have seen for years: a remote pale green-blue sea just above the horizon, and above it a towering shore of bank upon bank of flaming cherubim of gold and fire, crossed here and there by misty blurs like purple rain’ (22 August 1944, Letters, p. 92);

It froze hard with a heavy fog, and so we have had displays of Hoarfrost such as I only remember once in *Oxford before … and only twice before in my life. One of the most lovely events of Northern Nature. We woke … to find all our windows opaque, painted over with frost-patterns, and outside a dim silent misty world, all white, but with a light jewelry of rime; every cobweb a little lace net, even the old fowls’ tent a diamond-patterned pavilion …. The rime was yesterday even thicker and more fantastic. When a gleam of sun … got through it was breathtakingly beautiful: trees like motionless fountains of white branching spray against a golden light and, high overhead, a pale translucent blue. It did not melt. About 11 p.m. the fog cleared and a high round moon lit the whole scene with a deadly white light: a vision of some other world or time. [28 December 1944, Letters, p. 107]

Towards the end of his life, in a letter to *Rayner Unwin, Tolkien described a more formal display in the Fellows’ Garden at Merton College: ‘The great bank … looks like the foreground of a pre-Raphaelite picture: blazing green starred like the Milky Way with blue anemones, purple/white/yellow crocuses, and final surprise, clouded-yellow, peacock, and tortoiseshell butterflies flitting about’ (16 March 1972, Letters, p. 417). And his delight in watching birds is shown in another letter to Christopher:

There is a family of bullfinches, which must have nested in or near our garden, and they are very tame, and have been giving us entertainment lately by their antics feeding their young, often just outside the dining-room window. Insects on the trees and sowthistle seeds seem their chief delight. I had no idea they behaved so much like goldfinches. Old fat father, pink waistcoat and all, hangs absolutely upside down on a thistle-spray, tinking all the while. [7 July 1944, Letters, p. 87]

In turn Tolkien applied his keen interest in the world around him, observed in minute detail and vividly described, to the invented landscapes of his fiction, giving them the substance of reality. *The Lord of the Rings is particularly rich in this regard, from Goldberry’s gown ‘green as young reeds, shot with silver like beads of dew’ and her belt ‘of gold, shaped like a chain of flag-lilies set with the pale-blue eyes of forget-me-nots’ (bk. I, ch. 7), to elanor, athelas, niphredil, and mallorn, to landscapes like that in Book I, Chapter 6, where the four hobbits approach the River Withywindle:

Coming to the opening they found that they had made their way down through a cleft in a high steep bank, almost a cliff. At its feet was a wide space of grass and reeds; and in the distance could be glimpsed another bank almost as steep. A golden afternoon of late sunshine lay warm and drowsy upon the hidden land between. In the midst of it there wound lazily a dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, arched over with willows, blocked with fallen willows, and flecked with thousands of faded willow-leaves. The air was thick with them, fluttering yellow from the branches; for there was a warm and gentle breeze blowing softly in the valley, and the reeds were rustling, and the willow-boughs were creaking.

The scene is not unlike that Tolkien would have found on the banks of the River Cherwell near Oxford, which he and his family would occasionally explore. Cerin Amroth, on the other hand, has no analogue in our world, but Tolkien permits his reader to stand in its midst through vivid description of its natural features:

They were standing in an open space. To the left stood a great mound, covered with a sward of grass as green as Springtime in the Elder Days. Upon it, as a double crown, grew two circles of trees: the outer had bark of snowy white, and were leafless but beautiful in their shapely nakedness; the inner were mallorn-trees of great height, still arrayed in pale gold …. At the feet of the trees, and all about the green hillsides the grass was studded with small golden flowers shaped like stars. Among them, nodding on slender stalks, were other flowers, white and palest green: they glimmered as a mist amid the rich hue of the grass. Over all the sky was blue, and the sun of afternoon glowed upon the hill and cast long green shadows beneath the trees. [bk. II, ch. 6]

Tolkien devotes almost a page to describing Ithilien in close detail, its abundance of plant life seeming Edenic after the Dead Marshes and the approaches to Mordor:

All about them were small woods of resinous trees, fir and cedar and cypress … with wide glades among them; and everywhere there was a wealth of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs …. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf ….

Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjoram and new-sprouting parsleys …. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-open heads in the grass …. [bk. IV, ch. 4]

Above all, Tolkien felt a deep affection for trees. Photographs often show him in their company: of these the most notable are Lord Snowdon’s portrait of Tolkien reclining against the roots of a great tree behind his home in *Poole, and the last photograph of him taken by his grandson Michael George (see *Michael Tolkien) on 9 August 1973, in the Botanic Garden, Oxford, standing with his hand on the trunk of a Pinus nigra, one of his favourite trees (now unfortunately no longer standing). *Joy Hill recalled that the last time she visited him in August 1973 he did not want to work, but took her on a long walk. They visited the Botanic Garden, walked by the river to look at willows, then went through the Botanic Garden again. He asked her to bring a camera on her next visit, so that he could have photographs of the trees.

Tolkien was saddened to see so many trees ill-treated or felled in both countryside and town. He wrote in an autobiographical note for the Houghton Mifflin Company in the summer of 1955: ‘I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals’ (Letters, p. 220). His friend *George Sayer noted that Tolkien, during walks in the country while on a visit to *Malvern in 1947, ‘liked to stop to look at the trees, flowers, birds and insects that we passed’, but

his greatest love seemed to be for trees …. He would often place his hand on the trunks of ones that we passed. He felt their wanton or unnecessary felling almost as murder. The first time I heard him say ‘ORCS’ was when we heard not far off the savage sound of a petrol-driven chain saw. ‘That machine,’ he said, ‘is one of the greatest horrors of our age.’ He said that he had sometimes imagined an uprising of the trees against their human tormentors. [‘Recollections of J.R.R. Tolkien’, in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995), p. 22]

By 1947 Tolkien had already written the chapters in The Lord of the Rings dealing with the march of the Ents on Isengard. Many readers have found the Ents, the shepherds of the trees, among Tolkien’s most original and most vivid creations. The chapter ‘Treebeard’ (bk. III, ch. 4), he said, seemed to write itself; and there the Ent Quickbeam’s lament for the rowan trees cut down by Saruman’s orcs certainly echoes Tolkien’s feelings. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph he wrote: