* I’ve realised that 2024 will mark the 111th (“eleventy-first”) birthday of the birth of Tolkien’s legendarium, which sprang from his first encounter with the Old English word earendel.
* Did Tolkien’s Aunt Jane own a cottage on Dartmoor, Devon, in the early 1923? An old ad I found in Country Life suggests she did…
From Country Life magazine, 21st April 1923, ads supplement page xlii. Tolkien’s Aunt Jane had moved to Dormston Manor farm in 1922 after “living briefly in Devon” (Reader’s Guide) and had re-named the farm ‘Bag End’ based on an old name for part of the immediate area. Tolkien came to visit the farm in 1923, seemingly in July, once she’d settled in and when he had fully recovered from severe pneumonia. Given the above advert I think it’s fairly safe to assume that this Dartmoor cottage was the same place in Devon she is known to have been “briefly” living in 1922. It was evidently on Dartmoor rather than on the coast, and she later she let it out for parts of the summer. It sounds quite sizeable and habitable, enough to let out as a 1920s holiday-let. 1923 was the time when the new-fangled ‘automobiles” and motorised charabancs took off, bringing remote places within reach, so she was prescient in anticipating this new business opportunity.
* Schreiner University presents the Margaret Syers Lecture for 2023, Dr. Martin Lockerd on “The Stolen Gift: Tolkien and the Problem of Suicide”. To be given on 28th April 2023 in Texas.
* My new post on “On Stocc and Stoke”, with reference to Tolkien and LoTR.
* And finally, “The Repair Shop applauded for ‘astonishing’ restoration” of letters from J.R.R. Tolkien. These being… “two notebooks with the letters, taken to bookbinder Chris Shaw who was able to work his own form of magic to revive the notes, which had fallen into disrepair after 55 years.”