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

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СКАЧАТЬ text more than ten years after the first edition of our Companion and Guide. By 2016 stocks of the book were exhausted, and we agreed with our editors at HarperCollins, David Brawn and Chris Smith, who thought that a new edition would be better than a reprint. Because the existing Reader’s Guide was already more than 1,200 pages, and we estimated off the cuff that we would be able to add to it at least 100 pages (in the event, more than 300), it was clear that the new edition would need to expand from two volumes to three, with the Chronology remaining one volume. And because the Chronology itself was long, and would itself grow by more than fifty pages, we needed to move appended material (family trees and bibliographies) previously in the Chronology to the end of the expanded Reader’s Guide.

      There was no lack of new material to be considered. In the decade since 2006 at least a standard shelf of new works or new editions of works by Tolkien were published, and at least three shelves of works about him (with no sign of this ceasing anytime soon). And as we reviewed our existing text, we saw that some portions needed to be enlarged, and a few points reconsidered. We also saw that here and there we could improve readability by dividing long paragraphs.

      As in 2006, we had to choose not only what to include in our coverage but what to omit. Was an event of sufficient moment? Was a person or place of sufficient importance in Tolkien’s life? No doubt some of our necessarily subjective decisions will seem arbitrary, perhaps even to us once this new edition is in print. We might, for instance, have included a biographical article for Ursula Dronke (née Brown) as we did for Stella Mills, both students of Tolkien, but Mills was demonstrably close to Tolkien and his family, and in the end one has to set some limits, according to one’s judgement at the moment. In any case, we have added a number of articles to the Reader’s Guide, for persons associated with Tolkien, influences and analogues, and concepts such as ‘authorial presence’ and Tolkien’s manner of composition in writing.

      At the beginning of our preface to the Companion and Guide we state that although our book ‘often will be found useful by itself … its purpose is equally to point to other resources in which a subject is more fully considered or differing points of view are expressed’ (p. ix). That is, we cite works of reference or criticism upon which we drew for our text or which expand upon what we wrote, by authors whose points of view may differ one from the other. In doing so, we have tried not to impose a particular interpretation – in cases of interpretation rather than of fact – and were careful not to cite only those references which support our personal views, if we have any. We could not, of course, cite every work which touches upon a given subject, and we felt that in choosing works to cite we should apply our expertise in Tolkien studies and mention only those resources which were especially useful, cogent, or well written – and so to this extent, at least (and in our notation of important writings in our list of ‘Works Consulted’), we express our own opinion.

      We would also like to point out, in reply to a criticism we received after publication of the Companion and Guide, that it is in no way feasible to cite our precise source for every piece of data. We have done so to the extent possible, identifying sources of quoted matter and documenting (at some length) the printed and principal online resources upon which we relied; but to do more would have needed another volume for that purpose alone. A single sentence in the Chronology, for instance, might be drawn from two or three sources, while some Reader’s Guide articles are based on dozens.

      As always, we are grateful to members of the Tolkien family for their assistance and support. For the original edition, Christopher Tolkien acted as our mentor, a greater task than could be imagined when this book was first proposed (as a single volume), and with his sister Priscilla shared memories of their father. Priscilla Tolkien also read parts of the first edition text in draft, and suggested valuable additions and improvements. Joanna Tolkien, Michael George Tolkien, and Simon Tolkien were also of assistance.

      We would like to thank David Brawn at HarperCollins for his suggestion that we write for J.R.R. Tolkien the equivalent of Walter Hooper’s excellent C.S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide, and Chris Smith for help in matters of production. Thanks are due as well to Cathleen Blackburn of Maier Blackburn, legal representatives of the Tolkien Estate, who has guided us in matters related to copyright and permissions to quote from Tolkien’s writings.

      Also for the original edition, we owe special thanks to Arden R. Smith, who kindly read most of the book in typescript and advised us especially on matters concerning Tolkienian linguistics; to Douglas A. Anderson, for reading parts of the Companion and Guide, for sharing with us information about Tolkien’s early poetry, and for supplying other useful details; and to John Garth, for allowing us to read an early draft of part of his Tolkien and the Great War (2003) and for saving us time during our own early research in the National Archives by supplying us with pertinent reference numbers.

      We are deeply grateful to the highly knowledgeable staff of many libraries and archives, including: Owen Dobbs, Blackwell’s Bookshops; Neil Somerville, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham Park, Reading; Philippa Bassett, University of Birmingham Archives; Sandy Botha, Bloemfontein Cathedral; Judith Priestman, Colin Harris, Catherine McIlwaine, and other staff of the Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford; the staff of Duke Humfrey’s Library, Bodleian Library; the staff of the Bodleian Law Library; Angela Pusey, British Academy; the staff of the Department of Manuscripts, British Library, London; John Wells, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cambridge University Library; the staff of the Centre for Oxfordshire Studies, Oxford Central Library; Richard Hamer, Vincent Gillespie, and Judith Curthoys of the library of Christ Church, Oxford, for the Early English Text Society archive; the staff of Christie’s, South Kensington; Thomas Lecky and Francis Wahlgren of Christie’s, New York; Christine Butler, archives of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Susan Usher, the English Faculty Library, Oxford; Paul Cavill, the English Place-Name Society; Lorise Topliffe and John Maddicott, Exeter College Library, Oxford; Natalie Milne, Glasgow University Archive Services; the staff of HarperCollins, London; the staff of the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Ólöf Dagný, Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag (Icelandic Literary Society), Reykjavík; Kerry York, King Edward’s School, Birmingham; Ann Farr and Sarah Prescott, Brotherton Library, the University of Leeds; Mark Shipway, Leeds University archives; Charles Elston, Matt Blessing, William Fliss, and others in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Fiona Wilkes and Sarah Bendall, Merton College Library, Oxford; the staff of the National Archives, Kew (formerly the Public Record Office); Tony Cadogan, National Sound Archives, British Library, London; John Foley, National University of Ireland; Simon Bailey and Alice Blackford, Oxford University Archives; Martin Maw and Jenny McMorris, Oxford University Press Archives; Rob Wilkes, Oxford Theses (Humanities), Bodleian Library; Naomi Van Loo and Ellena J. Pike, McGowin Library, Pembroke College, Oxford; the staff of the Radcliffe Science Library, Oxford; Michael Bott, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, University of Reading; Meic Pierce Owen, University of St Andrews Library; David Smith, St Anne’s College Library, Oxford; Carolyn Warne, St Leonard’s School, Fife; Claire Goodwin, Simmons College Archives, Boston, Massachusetts; Roger Dalrymple, Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature; Sister Helen Forshaw, archives of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus; Phillip Errington, Sotheby’s, London; the staff of the Staffordshire Archives Service; the staff of the Taylor Institution Library, Oxford; Lucy Wright, the library of University College, London; Kirsten Williams, Viking Society for Northern Research; Christopher Mitchell, Marjorie Mead, and the staff of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois; the libraries of Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts; and Joanna Parker, Worcester College Library, Oxford.

      For assistance in ways both large and small, we are grateful to Mikael Ahlström; Chris Anderson; Pauline Baynes; Paula Bergstrom; Craig Bowen; David Bratman; Denis Bridoux; Hugh Brogan; John Buckelew; Maggie Burns; Marjorie Burns; Raymond Chang; Joe R. Christopher; Oronzo Cilli; ‘Darkstone’; David ‘Hisilome’; Merlin DeTardo; Michaël Devaux; ‘diedye’; David Doughan; Brad Eden; Jeremy Edmonds; Julian Eilmann; John Ellison; Andrew Ferguson; Jason СКАЧАТЬ