Not a Tolkien quote: "I wrote the Oxford English Dictionary, don't correct me."

Yesterday I sent out no. 61 of my Roving Ranger (Opens in a new window) newsletter and it reminded me of a small detail I had forgotten for a few weeks that I would like to share with you now. 

Obviously, y'all know that one of my pet peeves in Tolkiendom is fake quotes/ half-truths/ incorrectly attributed text passages and pictures etc. Colour me surprised when I saw the most excellent John D. Rateliff - who wrote, among many other amazing things, The History of the Hobbit -, take up the gauntlet against one of the most popular memes (Opens in a new window) in recent months (see above.)

It has been around as a fake quote for quite a long time but let's face it - pictures, that is, memes are simply more successful in being noticed. And this one is huge. 

Now, just hop on over to John's initial post (Opens in a new window) to this, making clear that it basically does not make any sense at all. (And I would just like to add that at the time when Tolkien worked on the dictionary it had not yet taken its official and today well-known title of OED, it was still called the New English Dictionary.)

I then added my five cents which was this New York Times articl (Opens in a new window)e from 1977 which included the quip And Tolkien responded, 'Why, I wrote the O.E.D.!' and then proceeded to mention The Remembrancer (Opens in a new window) which I had just read and John was able to determine where the origin to this meme seems to lie:

"There is a possibly apocryphal anecdote attached to this incident.  Puffin's  printers rashly defended their action by quoting The Oxford  English Dictionary. Tolkien, with lordly exaggeration, replied 'I wrote  the Oxford English DIctionary.' " Rayner Unwin, GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN: A REMEMBRANCER (Merlin Unwin Books, 1999), page 111).

However, this isn't all about this meme. Because, first of all, this is basically its second incarnation.

The other one was this, coming into being (Opens in a new window) around 2015:

And I will now show you where the image to it came from:

This is the title page to the May 2013 Brazilian edition of Michael White's sub-par 'biography' of Tolkien's life, published by Darkside Books (Opens in a new window).

See for the comparison:

And the original photograph (Opens in a new window) is from Dec 2, 1955, taken at Tolkien's Merton rooms by Haywood Magee.

So the way of this particular meme to its recent sucess is:

- Haywood Magee takes pictures of J.R.R. Tolkien in 1955 at Merton College. He seems to have been an outstanding photographer for the Picture Post (Opens in a new window) but seems to be mostly forgotten these days (Opens in a new window). His work is now owned by Getty Images who bought the rights after the BBC had sold them in 1996. The photos were digitised and finally moved to the Getty Images website in 2003.

- The photo, originally unpublished (Opens in a new window), was used by a Brazilian publishing house that decided to use a photo of Tolkien on the cover to Michael White's biography. It had a designer rework the original to make it more magical (I will have to find out who the designer was; I knew it in 2013 but have since lost the contact.) 

- The positioning of the titling lent itself to the picture being redistributed on the internet quickly and easily in truncated fashions. It has become so popular that one of the largest Twitter accounts - run by the owner of eucastraphe.com (Opens in a new window), Dan Cruver - used it without acknowledging (Opens in a new window) the original photographer, the re-designer of the book cover.

And then the memes happened, of course. Thanks, internet!

But just to be clear: The text in the meme at the top of this post is nonsense. 😁

Why? Because Tolkien complained about changes made to The Hobbit, not the Fellowship. It was the 1961 Puffin edition that made these changes (Opens in a new window) which Tolkien only found out afterwards. Thanks to my friend David Doughan for reminding me of this!

This post was originally published (Opens in a new window) on November 4th, 2021.
It was posted 9 days early for my then patrons.