An Update on Things Tolkien- and Inklings-Related

My short note "Tolkien's Friend Selby" on Tolkien's correspondence with G.E. Selby (1909-1987) was just published by The Tolkien Society in a recent issue of Mallorn issue 62, Winter 2021 (pp. 34-35). Selby's bookplate, at right, appears here courtesy of Oronzo Cilli. 

I'm very sad to report on the passing of my friend of over forty years, Tim Wickham-Crowley, in late October, after a battle with cancer. Tim was a sociologist, specializing in Latin America, but also a keen Tolkien fan (whose wife, Kelley, is a noted medievalist and Tolkien scholar). I commissioned his one contribution to Tolkien scholarship, a book review of Tolkien through Russian Eyes (2003), by Mark T. Hooker, which appeared in Tolkien Studies: Volume II (2005). Tim is greatly missed by all who knew him. A full obituary from The Washington Post appears at Legacy.com here. 

Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley

 A recent mailing of the Friends of Arthur Machen had an interesting notice in Machenalia about an "Inklings Festival and Arthur Machen" that took place in Wichita, Kansas, in October 2021. One of the speakers was Christopher Tompkins, of the Darkly Bright Press (a small US press specializing in Arthur Machen), who discussed the fact that Victor Gollancz, when reading the manuscript of Charles Williams's War in Heaven [then titled The Corpse] in March 1930, called upon Arthur Machen to be an outside reader for it. In the summer of 1927, when Gollancz worked as an editor at the publisher Ernest Benn, he had hired Machen to be a regular reader for Benn. Gollancz soon left Benn to found his own publishing firm, and since Williams's novel, like Machen's The Great Return (1915), has the Grail showing up in contemporary Britain, Machen clearly seemed to Gollancz a good outside reader. According to the report in Machenalia, "Machen made corrections to some Hebrew and Latin in the MS, corrections that appear in the final version. Since, in the correspondence with his publisher, Williams expressed an interest in seeing The Great Return, it seems he hadn't yet read it" (p. 6).  I look forward to Christopher Tompkins writing this all up.  

It's hard to believe that Chris Mitchell, Director of the Wade Center for nearly twenty years, died at age 63 as long ago as 2014. I can still hear his quite distinctive voice in my head from our many meetings. Recently published is a tribute volume, The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis: Essays in Memory of Christopher W. Mitchell (Winged Lion Press, 2021), edited by Bruce R. Johnson. Of course the content heavily favors C.S. Lewis, but there is one article on Tolkien, "Across Western Seas: Longing for the West in Tolkien's Legendarium," by Laura Schmidt, Archivist at the Wade Center (who worked alongside Chris for many years). And other Inklings are represented too, including Nevill Coghill, who appears in Walter Hooper's contribution (probably Hooper's final writing before his death in December 2020). In all it's a fine tribute to Chris, who passed away at far too young an age.

I note here the recent publication of Tolkien & The Lizard: Tolkien in Cornwall 1914 (2021) by David Haden. It is published only as a pdf--ordering information here. This is an independent offshoot of a larger project that Haden is current engaged on. Haden also maintains a fascinating Lovecraft blog, Tentaclii, which I recommend. And he has a further offshoot Tolkien publication, Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth, which he describes as:

 "a fully annotated and indexed list of ‘Untold Tales’ in Middle-earth, pointing out the ‘cracks’ where new fan-fiction might be developed. There are 125 entries and these usually lightly suggest ideas for story development. It will also be useful for scholars seeking to understand what Tolkien “left out” and why, or those interested in ‘transformative works’ and fandom." 

Available as a Lulu trade paperback, or an ebook version via Amazon, the fuller details (and link to a sample pdf) are here.

Some Tolkienian updates: "lost" poems and secret vices

Note: as per my previous January 9th blog post on the sale of hardcovers of Tales Before Tolkien, I should have enough remaining copies of this book to extend the sale through the end of March.  Same terms and ordering procedure as in the original post.[update March 31st, 2016. This special has now ended.]



After all the media nonsense in the last few weeks about newly discovered "lost" Tolkien poems (actually discovered three years ago), I commend Troels Forchhammer for correcting the record in his post here.  The little bit I can add is to say that the first fruit of Humphrey Carpenter sharing with me his notes on then-undiscovered Tolkien appearances were the poems in Leeds University Verse 1914-1924 (1924). This booklet includes three Tolkien poems, "An Evening in Tavrobel," "The Lonely Isle," and "The Princess Ni."  The table of contents to a proposed collection of Tolkien's poems that Troels suggests was The Adventures of Tom Bombadil was for an entirely different collection.  Tolkien's first planned poetry collection was The Trumpets of Faerie, which was turned down one hundred years ago by Sidgwick & Jackson on March 31st 1916 (no doubt some journalist will seize upon this apparent "anniversary" and inflict an inaccurate puff-piece upon the world). After this rejection, Tolkien kept a kind of working collection through the 1920s and late 1930s, intending this collection to become a published volume, which he submitted to two publishers in the 1920s. The proposed table of contents that gives the publication information on "Shadow-Bride" ("The Shadow Man") probably dates to the very late 1930s.

It's great to see Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins's edition of A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages announced for publication in the UK on 7 April 2016, in hardcover and ebook formats.  The publisher's description notes that:

This new critical edition, which includes previously unpublished notes and drafts by Tolkien connected with the essay, including his ‘Essay on Phonetic Symbolism’, goes some way towards re-opening the debate on the importance of linguistic invention in Tolkien’s mythology and the role of imaginary languages in fantasy literature.

And due out next week is a new collection of fifteen essays on science fiction by Tom Shippey, Hard Reading, from Liverpool University Press at some hideous price (£75.00, hardcover, same price for the ebook!). The publishers description reads:

The fifteen essays collected in Hard Reading argue, first, that science fiction has its own internal rhetoric, relying on devices such as neologism, dialogism, semantic shifts, the use of unreliable narrators. It is a “high-information” genre which does not follow the Flaubertian ideal of le mot juste, “the right word”, preferring le mot imprévisible, “the unpredictable word”. Both ideals shun the facilior lectio, the “easy reading”, but for different reasons and with different effects. The essays argue further that science fiction derives much of its energy from engagement with vital intellectual issues in the “soft sciences”, especially history, anthropology, the study of different cultures, with a strong bearing on politics. Both the rhetoric and the issues deserve to be taken much more seriously than they have been in academia, and in the wider world. Each essay is further prefaced by an autobiographical introduction. These explain how the essays came to be written and in what ways they (often) proved controversial. They, and the autobiographical introduction to the whole book, create between them a memoir of what it was like to be a committed fan, from teenage years, and also an academic struggling to find a place, at a time when a declared interest in science fiction and fantasy was the kiss of death for a career in the humanities.

Grevel Lindop's long-anticipated biography Charles Williams: The Third Inkling came out in late 2015, and I've been reading it, with admiration for the biographer, and enlightenment (as well as bewilderment) on the subject. I've just seen the first (to me) extensive review of it, by A.N. Wilson in First Things (click here to read it).  It's got the usual dose of Wilsonian pronouncements and his bombastic tone, but overall I tend to agree with much of what he says.