The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 1: Chronology. Christina Scull

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СКАЧАТЬ June 1935 Trinity Full Term ends.

      26 June 1935 Encaenia.

      9 August 1935 Tolkien writes to R.W. Chambers. The latter having sent a copy of his biography of Sir Thomas More – in fact, two copies by mistake – and evidently a letter as well, Tolkien belatedly expresses gratitude. Despite the press of examinations at the end of term, he has been able to read Thomas More twice, and finds it ‘overwhelmingly moving: one of the great sagas, those rarely felicitous events produced by the meeting of the great subject and the uniquely fitted author’. Since his son John has the work available to him at school, Tolkien has given the spare copy to Simonne d’Ardenne, ‘a Catholic in origin’. He wonders how Chambers knows ‘that I was this year foisted upon the University Education council…. Not that I am likely to be of any use. I meet other more able and more apostolic men. But I never can make head or tail of “public business” even of a minor sort’ (quoted in Caroline Chabot, ‘Raymond Wilson Chambers (1874–1942)’, Moreana 24, no. 94 (June 1987), pp. 85–6).

      Beginning of September 1935 The Tolkien family take a two-week holiday at Sidmouth. They stay again at ‘Aurora’.

      15 September 1935 In Nazi Germany the Nürnberg Laws deprive Jews of rights of citizenship. Intermarriage of Jews and non-Jews is forbidden.

      17 September 1935 Tolkien and C.L. Wrenn examine A.M. Morton of St Hugh’s College viva voce on her B.Litt. thesis, William Morris’s Treatment of His Icelandic Sources, at 12.00 noon in the Examination Schools. Tolkien writes out their undated report.

      27 September 1935 Oxford University Press sends Simonne d’Ardenne, and possibly Tolkien, proofs of An Edition of the Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene. To obtain a degree from the University of Liège, d’Ardenne has to present her B.Litt. thesis as a published work.

      3 October 1935 Italy invades Ethiopia.

      13 October 1935 Michaelmas Full Term begins. Tolkien’s scheduled lectures for this term are: Beowulf: Text on Tuesdays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 15 October; Finn and Hengest on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12.00 noon in the Examination Schools, beginning 15 October; and Old English Texts (Paper B2) on Thursdays at 11.00 a.m. in the Examination Schools, beginning 17 October. He will continue to supervise B.Litt. student M.E. Griffiths.

      17 October 1935 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

      18 October 1935 In the evening, Tolkien attends a dinner of The Society hosted by R.W. Chapman at Oriel College, Oxford. Fifteen members are present. Chapman speaks about Oxford and Cambridge.

      Autumn 1935 *A.H. Smith, on behalf of the Early English Text Society, invites Tolkien to prepare an edition of the Cambridge manuscript of the Ancrene Riwle (MS CCCC 402). Tolkien indicates that he is interested, but will have to rely on the assistance of Elaine Griffiths. He is given until the end of the year to reply formally.

      24 October 1935 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Library Committee meeting at 2.15 p.m. in the Library.

      1 November 1935 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

      28 November 1935 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Library Committee meeting at 2.15 p.m. in the Library.

      29 November 1935 Tolkien and C.T. Onions examine E.V. Williams of Jesus College viva voce on his B.Litt. thesis, The Phonology and Accidence of the O.E. Glosses in MS Cotton Vespasian A.1 (Vespasian Psalter), at 2.30 p.m. in the Examination Schools.

      30 November 1935 Tolkien and Onions sign their report (written by Tolkien) on the examination of E.V. Williams.

      4 December 1935 Tolkien attends a Pembroke College meeting.

      6 December 1935 Tolkien attends an English Faculty Board meeting. – He possibly attends a meeting of the Council for Comparative Philology at 5.15 p.m. in the Delegates Room of the Clarendon Building.

      7 December 1935 Michaelmas Full Term ends.

      11 December 1935 The Early English Text Society Committee decides that all except the Latin texts of the Ancrene Riwle are to be printed in EETS editions with the capitals and punctuation of the original.

      Christmas 1935 Tolkien, as ‘Father Christmas’, writes a four-page letter to ‘My dear children’ (Christopher and Priscilla), dated 24 December. He comments on the cold weather, on the difficulty of the North Polar Bear in returning home from a visit to the Polar Cubs, and on giving his elves magic sparkler spears to frighten the goblins if they should reappear. He sends love to all the children and to Priscilla’s bears, and hopes that they will enjoy the pantomime they are going to see. The letter is interspersed with small illustrations. – Tolkien spends almost the whole of the Christmas vacation until 4 January, except Christmas Day itself, putting into shape the proofs of Seinte Iuliene on behalf of Simonne d’Ardenne, working against a deadline as the work must be printed by a fixed date.

      Late December 1935 Mabel Day, Secretary of the Early English Text Society, writes to Tolkien, asking him to confirm his interest in preparing an edition of the Ancrene Riwle (Ancrene Wisse).

1936

      ?1936–?1937 In 1936 (possibly early to mid-1936) or early 1937, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis agree that there are too few stories of the kind they like to read, and that they will try to write some themselves. They further agree that Lewis should write a ‘thriller’ based on ‘space-travel’, and Tolkien one on ‘time-travel’, with each leading to the discovery of Myth. See note. The effort by Lewis will result in his Out of the Silent Planet, finished by September 1937. Tolkien on his part draws upon his still developing mythology, and upon a dream he has had since early childhood, of a great wave coming out of the sea and towering over the land: his ‘Atlantis-haunting’ (*Atlantis). He produces, first, a brief outline for the story of Atalantë (*Númenor), an island created as a gift to Men who aided in the defeat of the evil Morgoth, but engulfed by the sea when the Númenóreans dare to assail the land of the Gods. Tolkien follows this with a full narrative in manuscript, hastily written and much corrected in the course of composition, and that in turn with a more finished manuscript with the title (added later) The Last Tale: The Fall of Númenor, and with an amanuensis typescript.

      After the sketch and first version of *The Fall of Númenor, but contemporary with the second and intimately connected, Tolkien also begins to work on *The Lost Road, ‘of which the end was to be the presence of my hero in the drowning of Atlantis. This was to be called Númenor, the Land in the West’ (letter to Christopher Bretherton, 16 July 1964, Letters, p. 347). He writes two chapters of The Lost Road, introducing a father and son who are to appear and reappear in different phases of Germanic and Celtic legend, and then nearly two chapters of the Númenórean episode before deciding that this should come last. He makes rough notes of what might be included in the intervening parts, but does not write them except for a fragment of an Anglo-Saxon episode which includes prose and alliterative versions of the legend of King Sheave. By autumn 1937, however, he abandons The Lost Road altogether, while The Fall of Númenor will evolve ultimately into the *Akallabêth. – It is probably in association with The Lost Road that Tolkien rewrites his poem The Nameless Land (first composed СКАЧАТЬ