Tolkien’s road goes on – but there’s traffic ahead at Bovadium

I’ve been waiting for Tolkien’s Bovadium Fragments since 1976, when I first read about it in Humphrey Carpenter’s Tolkien biography. It’s published on 9 October, fully 52 years after its author’s death. Remarkably, this will also be five years after the death of its editor, Tolkien’s son Christopher.

Between his father’s death in 1973 and his own in 2020, Christopher Tolkien personally brought us 23 posthumous J.R.R. Tolkien books (including the volume of letters co-edited with Carpenter). So the road goes on, as Bilbo Baggins would say.

Most of that editorial journey passed through Middle-earth. But it began in England, with 1975’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo – translations of exquisite and anonymous 13th- or 14th-century verse.

And there – assuming this is the very last of Christopher’s editions – the road also ends. And in Bovadium, it is jammed with cars.

The story satirises the worship of the motores manufactured by the Dæmon of Vaccipratum. Non-latinists (like me) will immediately see that motores means motor vehicles but will be grateful to know that Vaccipratum means ‘cow-meadow’. In other words, this is Cowley, the seat of the motor-works established in the 1920s by William Morris, later Lord Nuffield. Cowley stands on the outskirts of Oxford, whose name Tolkien turns into Latin as Bovadium.

Cars jam the streets of Bovadium, asphyxiate its inhabitants, and explode. And that’s pretty much all we know about the story, though the American scholar Clyde S. Kilby, who read it and comments on it in his 1976 book Tolkien and the Silmarillion, reports liberal use of Latin.

Characters’ names cited by Kilby show it’s not all Latin, though…