Goblin caves at the North Pole! The Father Christmas letters penned by Tolkien tell us some surprising things about the Arctic. They borrow penguins from Antarctica and feature a polar bear who can speak, write and draw. The North Pole is an actual pole and there’s no sign whatsoever of an ocean under all that ice.   Writing these letters to his children gave Tolkien licence to be wildly counterfactual. This was an old desire that also gave his more serious legendarium a flat earth, an earthly paradise and trees that bore the sun and moon. But in these gossipy, funny, episodic mini-tales ..read more

Part two, in which we wet our wonges Tolkien’s paper ‘Chaucer as a Philologist’ (1934) is an analysis of northern English dialect in the Reeve’s Tale, one of the Canterbury Tales. Tolkien argues that Geoffrey Chaucer displays a philological interest in the dialect, as shown by the speech of two Northern clerks in the tale. I’ve never read this paper closely before copy-editing OUP’s forthcoming Tolkien on Chaucer, edited by John Bowers and Peter Steffenson. So last week I enlarged on the comments about the name Wetwang that I’ve made in The World of J.R.R. Tolkien. Before we reach Wetwang in ..read more

Part One, in which the vicar entertains I’m in the middle of copy-editing an upcoming edition of Tolkien’s work on Chaucer, edited with commentary by John Bowers and Peter Steffenson, for Oxford University Press. Tolkien on Chaucer (Opens in a new window)will include the complete text of ‘Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeves Tale’, first published in Transactions of the Philological Society in 1934. Working on it has brought to my attention a reference by Tolkien to the Yorkshire place-name Wetwang which I didn’t take into account when writing about this name in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien ..read more

It’s not every day that you receive an award also given to the director-general of Syrian antiquities, the director of archaeology at Troy and the director of the Colosseum in Rome. But that day came for me on 3 September. Before I get onto that, I want to mention some other great news, which will have an ongoing impact on my work on Tolkien. I’ve been elected a member of the Senior Common Room (SCR) of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. I’ve also joined Oxford Tolkien 50, ‘a project of Tolkien scholars and students in the University of Oxford, featuring a series of conferences, events, and exhib ..read more

In a guest post, Allan Turner, Tolkien scholar and formerly Lecturer in English at the University of Jena, Germany, provides a musical insight into A Spring Harvest, the 1918 anthology of Geoffrey Bache Smith’s poetry co-edited by his friend J.R.R, Tolkien. Smith, a member of Tolkien’s T.C.B.S. circle and a ‘wild and wholehearted admirer’ of his early mythological writings, died of wounds on the Western Front in 1916. Just months later, Tolkien wrote his creation myth, The Music of the Ainur. Several of the poems in the poems of Geoffrey Bache Smith, edited posthumously by his friends J.R ..read more

I’ve posted this on social media already but I’m going to put it here too because, well, I like it. Writing about Tolkien’s unfinished Númenor time-travel novel The Lost Road, I almost inevitably mistype it as “The Lost Toad”. That would be rather a different story. His driving (“Charge ’em and they’ll scatter!”) is said to have reminded Oxford contemporaries of Mr Toad in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Mr Toad took out his map and spread it with a flourish on the shiny bonnet of his new car while he held up the damp and mouldy invitation in his other hand. “You see, Ratty? I kne ..read more

In a guest post, Oxford English Dictionary historian and lexicographer Peter Gilliver sheds new light on one of the most curious characters to cross the young J.R.R. Tolkien’s path The classical scholar E.R. Dodds, who matriculated at Oxford a year after Tolkien, wrote in his autobiography Missing Persons: ‘If on leaving Oxford I had been asked which of my English contemporaries were most likely to achieve fame as writers I should have named without hesitation T.W. Earp and Aldous Huxley.’ He would surely have been surprised to learn that the fate of achieving fame as a writer was to fall ..read more

It’s not often you stumble upon a piece of writing by a key member of Tolkien’s school circle, the T.C.B.S. Today I am pleased as Punch to be able to present such a piece by G.B. Smith, to mark his 127th birthday. G.B. Smith in his army days – with added colour Our memory of Smith is burdened with poignancy. He survived the entire five-month Battle of the Somme only to be hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell days after it the battle had finished and miles from the trenches. The wound was so light that he walked to the casualty clearing station. Three days later he was dead from an infection ..read more

[This was published in Oxford Today, the university’s alumni magazine, ahead of the 2012 London Olympics. The most dated things about it are the reference to a certain Mayor of London by the name of Boris, and Oxford Today itself, which has since been replaced by Quad magazine.] Mexico, 1968. The world watches as athletes of 108 nations file in. Past or future Oxford students step forward for Britain, including David Hemery (St Catherine’s) who will win gold in the men’s 400m hurdles; and also for Sierra Leone, New Zealand, the United States, and Norway (King Harald no less, Balliol). The fla ..read more

Even after 30-odd years it still happens. I’m in the middle of dusty nowhere trying to lug a broken television set across Spain, or I’m arguing with some bureaucrat who won’t let me get going, or I’m hopelessly lost in a labyrinthine building, probably still in my pyjamas. When finally I hurry breathless into the exam room and turn over the exam paper, I realise the awful truth. I can’t possibly answer these questions because I haven’t done any revision, I’ve come to the wrong exam, or I’m just incompetent. These are just bad dreams, of course. I’m extraordinarily lucky that I don’t have more ..read more