I’ve had a chance to peruse Oronzo Cilli’s excellent new second edition of his Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist. Here are my brief notes, and I’ll take the items in date order.
1908-09. These are the dates given in the new book as likely for Tolkien’s fateful purchase of the Gothic Grammar, in Birmingham.
1912. Halldor Hermannsson’s third Bibliography of the mythical-heroic sagas. One would have expected some of the historical atlases from this late-Edwardian period, but they’re not listed.
1914. He borrows the hefty journal Anglia: Zeitschrift fur englische Philologie in Vol. IX (1886). This is in German, devoted to philology dealing with English material. I would imagine he also had the separate Supplement volume, containing an organised bibliographic survey of the year’s work. A little digging shows me that the main volume has Felix Liebermann on “Gerefa”, this being the history of the tradition of the local English sheriff, and Sherrazin on “Beowulf and Kynewulf”.
1915. One of his Oxford Exams was on the Prose Edda. Also Old English texts, part of The Amazons and The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan.
1921. John Masefield’s Reynard the Fox (1921). Not, as it turns out from my quick perusal, the classic medieval tale of the wily anti-hero. Rather, a long modern poem on the ancient tradition of English fox hunting.
1922. Acquires the Book of Taliesin (Facsimile and text) by John Gwenogvryn Evans. Dated “1910” in Tolkien’s Library, but Celli has not discovered that the volume was issued in 1916, although dated on the title page as “1910”. Tolkien had many other books by Evans, but apparently not his companion volume of translations Poems from the Book of Taliesin (also 1916), which would have given him far easier access to the gnomic poem ‘The Battle of the Trees’. One would have expected both books to sit on the shelf together, although I know of no other evidence that Tolkien was aware of Taliesin’s ‘The Battle of the Trees’ (which centres on Ent-like trees marching into battle).
1922. Yes, he had a copy of E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, and in the “very limited” first edition of 1922. He also had Eddison’s Egil’s Saga (1930).
1923. Locally, I spotted E.W. Bowcock’s Shropshire place names (1923). This was unknown to me, and is also unknown to Archive.org. Not online.
1930. An amusing sidelight on Tolkien in 1930. He played the part of ‘the tobacconist’ in Linguaphone’s recorded course for foreign students learning conversational English for use in shops and workplaces. Sadly it appears that the audio recording has not survived.
1935. In 1938 Tolkien cited Joseph Neill’s novel Land under England (1935) as a “weak” example of a genre of which he is “extremely fond”. He then presumably means a certain type of imaginative early British science-fiction with underground adventures (the Morlocks of The Time Machine, Fowler Wright’s The World Below etc). In this case Neill imagines a nightmare authoritarian dystopia, surviving underground from Roman times, discovered by a son searching for his missing archaeologist father. Deep underground ‘the common good’ has become the only principle, and an excuse for ‘Master Minds’ to telepathically control brainwashed and emotionless workers. The young discoverer escapes, but can he be sure his memories have not been telepathically tampered with?
1958. Tolkien has Joaquin Verdaguer’s The Art of Pipe Smoking (Curlew Press, 1958). Said elsewhere to be a booklet of 60 pages, illustrated throughout. Not online, as far as I can see. One would have expected a reprint, by now.
1967. The evidence for Tolkien liking at least one of R.E Howard’s better Conan tales, in later life, is still incredibly slim. No new evidence here. L. Sprague de Camp remembered in 1983 a snatch of conversation had with Tolkien in his suburban garage-study in 1967. That was it, so far as I can tell.
1971. “A statement by Tolkien describing his reading habits as a teenager”, published in Attacks of Taste and then Beyond Bree. One source has the contribution as “one page”, another as “one paragraph”. Neither 1971 publication is online.
And finally, a lovely quote from Tolkien…
“English is an instrument of very great capacity and resources, it has long experience not yet forgotten, and deep roots in the past not yet all pulled up. It can, if asked, still play in modes no longer favoured and remember airs not now popular; it is not limited to the fashionable cacophonies.” (comment on Burton Raffel’s Poems from the Old English, 1961).
