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

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СКАЧАТЬ to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (1962), and another, ‘Beowulf Lines 3074–3075’, to J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam, ed. Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (1979).

      Bloemfontein see South Africa

      Blomfield, Joan Elizabeth see Turville-Petre, Joan Elizabeth

‘The Bodleian Declensions’. The earliest extant chart of noun inflections in Quenya (*Languages, Invented), edited with analysis by Patrick Wynne, Christopher Gilson, and Carl F. Hostetter, published in Vinyar Tengwar 28 (March 1993), pp. 8–34.

      The chart is so called because it was found among Tolkien’s manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives), neatly written in ink c. November 1936 on one page within a draft of Beowulf and the Critics (*Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics). Like *‘The Plotz Declension’, the Bodleian manuscript is concerned with a Quenya word for ‘ship’, here kirya, but also with pole (probably ‘oat’).

Bombadil Goes Boating. Poem, first published in *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), pp. 17–23.

      Bombadil Goes Boating is a sequel of sorts to *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. The new poem follows merry Tom as he rows a boat down stream on an autumn day, intending to meet his friend Farmer Maggot (from *The Lord of the Rings). Along the way a wren, a kingfisher, an otter, a swan, the hobbit-folk of Hays-end and Breredon, and finally Farmer Maggot scold with insults, but Tom gives back as good as he gets. At last Tom goes to Maggot’s home: there ‘songs they had and merry tales, the supping and the dancing’, and they swap ‘all the tidings / from Barrow-downs to Tower Hills’. Tom returns home unseen. Later the boat he left at Grindwall is taken back up the Withywindle by Otter-folk, the Old Swan, and the King’s fisher, but they forget to bring the oars.

      Tolkien developed Bombadil Goes Boating for the 1962 volume from an earlier, isolated poem, or fragment of a poem, which he called the ‘germ of Tom Bombadil’ (‘Ho! Tom Bombadil / Whither are you going / With John Pompador / Down the River rowing?’); this was first published in *The Return of the Shadow (1988), pp. 115–16, and printed also in the expanded edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014), pp. 138–9.

      In the process, Tolkien called the work variously The Fliting of Tom Bombadil, The Merry Fliting of Tom Bombadil, and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil II: The Merry Fliting before settling on its final, more prosaic title. Fliting, from the Old English for ‘strive’ or ‘quarrel’, refers to a contest of insults, such as the exchange in *Beowulf between Beowulf and Unferth before Beowulf faces Grendel. The insults traded by Tom and the others in Bombadil Goes Boating parallel his challenges in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but here the exchanges are light and laced with humour, without the menace that underlies the earlier poem (‘Ho there! beggarman tramping in the Marish!’ ‘Well, well, Muddy-feet! From one that’s late for meeting /away back by the Mithe that’s a surly greeting!’).

      In a letter to his publisher *Rayner Unwin on 12 April 1962 Tolkien allowed that an understanding of Bombadil Goes Boating required a knowledge of The Lord of the Rings: ‘at any rate it performs the service of further “integrating” Tom with the world of the Lord of the Rings into which he was inserted.’ He felt that it tickled his ‘pedantic fancy’ because it contains an echo of the Norse Nibelung legends and ‘one of the lines comes straight … from The Ancrene Wisse [*Ancrene Riwle]’ (Letters, p. 315). On 1 August 1962 he wrote to *Pauline Baynes that he had placed the fictional time of the poem ‘to the days of growing shadow’, that is, before Frodo’s departure from Hobbiton in The Lord of the Rings (Letters, p. 319).

The Book of Lost Tales. Series of tales in which a traveller, Eriol (*Eriol and Ælfwine), having come to the Lonely Island (or Isle) of the Elves, Tol Eressëa, is told of the Creation of the World and the history of the Elves until the time of his arrival in their midst. For convenience in *The History of Middle-earth, the tales were published in two volumes, *The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (1983) and *The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (1984): these follow the chronology of events within the mythology, but not the order of writing of the tales, nor necessarily Tolkien’s original plan for the order of their telling. Each volume also includes descriptions and commentary by Christopher Tolkien, poems by Tolkien related to the tales, and appendices on the meanings of names within his invented languages. In the Reader’s Guide summaries of the tales and consideration of their place in the evolution of the mythology are dealt with in relation to the chapters of the published *Silmarillion (1977); these are listed, with cross-references, in the separate entries for Part One and Part Two.

      HISTORY

      In Christopher Tolkien’s words, The Book of Lost Tales was ‘the first substantial work of imaginative literature by J.R.R. Tolkien, and the first emergence in narrative of the Valar, of the Children of Ilúvatar, Elves and Men, of the Dwarves and the Orcs, and of the lands in which their history is set, Valinor beyond the western ocean, and Middle-earth, the “Great Lands” between the seas of east and west’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 1). It was also the first expression of the *‘Silmarillion’ mythology in prose. Poems, drawings, and references in letters from the years preceding its writing, however, show that many of its elements had already been developing in Tolkien’s thoughts. Among the more significant of these poems were The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star (*Éalá Éarendel Englo Beorhtast, September 1914); *The City of the Gods (earlier Kôr, April 1915); *The Happy Mariners (July 1915); and Kortirion among the Trees (November 1915, later *The Trees of Kortirion). In 1915 Tolkien also made several watercolours which suggest that he was visualizing particular places: Tanaqui (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 43) almost certainly depicts Kôr. Most significant are a watercolour dated 10 May 1915, *The Shores of Faery (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 44), with an accompanying poem, each showing or referring to Kôr and to the Sun and Moon forming from the Two Trees.

      Tolkien may have begun to write The Book of Lost Tales while still in the First Southern General Hospital (*Birmingham and environs) in November 1916, or during his sick leave in *Great Haywood (Staffordshire) from mid-December that year. There is no clear evidence for this, nor for whether The Cottage of Lost Play or The Fall of Gondolin came first among the tales. Tolkien several times referred to The Fall of Gondolin as the first to be written; but he may not have considered The Cottage of Lost Play a tale. It introduces the framework of the tales, and Eriol who hears them; and although Eriol survived as a transmitter of documents and traditions in later texts of the mythology, the Cottage of Lost Play itself did not appear again after The Book of Lost Tales. This interpretation might seem to be strengthened by Tolkien’s description of The Fall of Gondolin as ‘the first real story of this imaginary world’ in a letter to W.H. Auden (7 June 1955, Letters, p. 215); but a note by Tolkien, probably from 1919, which reads ‘Link between Cottage of Lost Play and (Tale 2) Music of Ainur’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 45) suggests that at that early date he did consider the former a ‘tale’ (although The Music of the Ainur was certainly not the second tale written, it was the first told to Eriol).

      Whenever he began it, Tolkien completed the first pencil version of The Cottage of Lost Play on loose sheets by early February 1917, when *Edith Tolkien wrote on the cover of the exercise book in which she made a fair copy ‘her initials, E.M.T., and a date, Feb. 12th 1917’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 13) – either the date she began the copy, or the date she finished it. Either then or at some later date, Tolkien made a few emendations. As early as April 1915 he had written a poem, You & Me and the Cottage СКАЧАТЬ