Christina Scull - The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide - Volume 2 - Reader’s Guide PART 1

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Published by HarperCollins Publishers 2017

Copyright © Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond 2006, 2017

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Source ISBN: 9780008214524

Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008273484

Version: 2017-10-20

In Memory of

RAYNER UNWIN

Mentor and Friend

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

I

PREFACE

CHRONOLOGY

NOTES

INDEX

II

PREFACE

LIST OF ARTICLES

READER’S GUIDE A–M

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

III

READER’S GUIDE N–Z

FAMILY TREES

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Published Writings & Art Poetry & Translations

WORKS CONSULTED

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

OTHER BOOKS BY

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

THIS BOOK has been designed, in both its original edition (2006) and the present revised and expanded edition, to serve as a reference of (at least) first resort for the study and appreciation of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is meant to be a companion to his readers, and a basic guide to his writings and ideas, his life and times, his family, friends, and colleagues, and the places he knew and loved. It is not, despite a similarity of titles, a handbook of his invented lands and characters in the manner of Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-earth or J.E.A. Tyler’s Complete Tolkien Companion . Nor is it a substitute for standard works such as Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography and Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth , or for the vast body of critical literature about Tolkien. Although it often will be found useful by itself, in particular where it presents new research and scholarship, its purpose is equally to point to other resources in which a subject is more fully considered or differing points of view are expressed.

The length of this work may surprise readers who, familiar with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , have been less aware of Tolkien’s other writings, or who, perhaps misled by the biographies of our subject that have followed Carpenter (and are largely derived from his book), have thought that Tolkien lived in a simple circumscribed world in which little happened beyond his writing, his teaching, his immediate family, and the Inklings. In fact his life was remarkably full, his circle of friends was wide and varied, and his tales of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins exist alongside other works of fiction and poetry, not least the ‘Silmarillion’ mythology, and next to significant contributions to Old and Middle English studies. In consequence, there is so much to say about Tolkien that we have had to divide our book into parts, two volumes in the original edition, and now three.

The first volume is an extensive Chronology of Tolkien’s life and works. This has allowed us reasonably to assemble – as a biographical essay would not have done, demanding more selection and brevity – many of the miscellaneous details about Tolkien we have gathered in the course of research, details which individually may be of little moment, but in relation to one another can be illuminating. Altogether these form a picture of a extraordinarily busy man: Tolkien the scholar, Tolkien the teacher and administrator, Tolkien the husband and father, Tolkien the creator of Middle-earth. His critics have not always appreciated how busy he truly was – those who claim that he should have published more in his academic fields had he not wasted his time writing fantasy, or those who fault him for not completing The Silmarillion as if he had nothing else to do even in his retirement. One of our aims in this book is to show that Tolkien neither wasted his time nor shirked his responsibilities – to document how much, on a regular basis, duties in connection with his academic career (lectures, classes, supervision of postgraduate students, examinations, committee meetings) occupied his waking hours; how often he and his family were beset by illness and injury; how, to pay doctors’ bills in the years before the National Health Service was established (in 1948) and to provide for his children’s education, he added to an already heavy workload; how he was almost constantly under the threat of deadlines, and if he did not meet them all it was not because he did too little, but because he did so much.

The Chronology also allows us to see when, as sometimes happened, Tolkien’s many responsibilities came into collision. In April 1937, for instance, within the space of a day or two he received for correction proofs of both The Hobbit and his British Academy lecture, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics ; while in the summer and autumn of 1953 he prepared simultaneously The Lord of the Rings for publication and his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for radio broadcast, and also wrote two talks to accompany the latter.

The Chronology is not – could not be – a complete day-to-day reconstruction of Tolkien’s life; nevertheless we have been reasonably inclusive, according to the information available to us, for the sake of a fuller picture. This is particularly so during the period from 18 January 1944 to early 1945, when Tolkien frequently described his daily chores, as well as the progress of The Lord of the Rings , in a series of letters to his youngest son, Christopher, then posted abroad in the Royal Air Force (see Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien , pp. 67 ff.).