2024: My year of Tolkien and tribulation

I’ve been extremely quiet online this year, but I have not been idle. In fact, up to the end of September I was having a very productive time researching and writing on Tolkien – and that is what I want to tell my supporters about here. But just when I was ready to complete several projects, disaster struck. Literally.

Hurricane Helene sent a mini-tsunami of seawater and sewage through my mother-in-law’s Florida house. It’s single-storey, so most of the contents and fittings were ruined. I immediately flew over from England. Dealing with the aftermath (including gutting the house completely) has taken up almost all of the remainder of the year.

That has meant a halt to almost all writing and research, including a planned trip to study the Lord of the Rings manuscripts at Marquette University, Milwaukee, in November.

The hurricane also forced me to cancel a string of talks. Some of these were paid gigs, so I lost virtually all income apart from what my wonderful crowdfunders provide via Steady (currently about £200 a month). Another was to have been at the Malvern Literary Festival; another, my contribution to the centenary conference on Christopher Tolkien held in Oxford in November. I’m especially grieved that I could not speak about the debt owed to Christopher by me and by scholarship in general.

But I could not contribute to that conference because the hurricane disaster had suddenly been compounded by a much deeper grief.

On 14 November, my mother died back home in England. So my only break from my post-hurricane efforts was for her funeral, on what would have been her 90th birthday. We gave her a good send-off – but we miss her terribly. ‘If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world,’ Thorin tells Bilbo in The Hobbit. If he’d also added dancing, and had specified the songs of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, he might have been thinking of Mum.

But I’m here to tell you what had I been working on before all this happened. If you’ve missed out on regular updates on this blog, I hope you’ll take comfort from the fact that any time not spent blogging went into the kind of work that this crowdfunding project is intended to support.

My most visible new work of 2024 was divided into three articles, a talk, and contributions to a television documentary.

The latter, Tolkien: The True Story of the Rings (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), was released online on 5 December. I’m one of several expert commentators popping up throughout the 90-minute documentary, made by Jean-Christoph Caron for ARTE. It’s in German with English subtitles, though of course I speak English in it anyway. (In May, I also spoke with Sarah Walker on BBC Radio Berkshire about Tolkien’s local inspirations.)

My first article of 2024 was published way back in January, in the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen. I argue that Queen Margrethe’s well-known devotion to Tolkien’s works may have contributed to her decision to abdicate that month. You can read it in English on my Steady crowdfunding blog (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre).

My second 2024 article, published exclusively on this same blog (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), asked ‘Where did Tolkien’s Silmarillion hero Beren get his name?’ I show that the young Tolkien had good reason to know Berinshill or Beren’s Hill in the Chilterns, a site hitherto overlooked as a possible inspiration.

My third article, in September, was an extensive Times Literary Supplement review of the Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. You may be able to read my review here (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) if you can get past the paywall. The editors’ work is thorough and meticulous, even by their own impressive standards. The three-volume collection will be an essential and fruitful tool for scholarship, and I see many ways that it will shape my own work to come. As an expression of Tolkien’s musicality and mythopoeia, it is also a delight. I’m pleased that the TLS used the Macbeth-echoing headline I proposed: ‘Full of sound and Faërie’.

My major 2024 lecture was delivered back in February. I explored how the Riders of Rohan suddenly became Anglo-Saxon. This was for a seminar series showcasing the Tolkien research of Oxford University members. I was able to take part because I’m currently a member of Corpus Christi College’s senior common room.

The Rohan talk was a direct result of my efforts to provide material for my crowdfunding supporters at Steady. I realised the questions were worth investigating while rereading The Treason of Isengard for several Steady posts about Tolkien’s philological imagination and the invention of Rauros and environs. I thought Anglo-Saxon Rohan might make a further series of Steady blog posts. But the work was intensive, the telling took time, and what I discovered demanded a wider audience. So a talk it became.

In a nutshell, although Tolkien first conceived a land of horse-lords in 1939, when he had brought the Fellowship to Eregion, he only anglosaxonised them in 1942 at the very brink of introducing Éomer and his éored in ‘The Riders of Rohan’. The reason for the sudden change is tied up with why he had recently renamed Aragorn Elfstone – a decision I explain for the first time. It’s also tied up, I argue, with one of Britain’s darkest hours in the Second World War. You can watch me explain on the seminar YouTube page (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). Since the talk, I’ve corrected one key point (thanks to Tom Hillman (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)). A journal editor is eager to publish my text.

That particular research project also counts as work towards Tolkien’s Mirror, my book-length study (long in progress) on the contemporary real-world inspirations for the legendarium. Here’s my underlying principle: to fully understand why Tolkien invented something, you need to establish when he did so.

The same need drove me this year to write a long paper, ‘Revealed: Tolkien’s 1939 lecture on fairy-stories’. This entailed intensive study of the MSS, housed among the Bodleian’s special collections in the Weston Library, Oxford. Tolkien lectured on the topic at St Andrews University, Scotland, in March 1939. He turned his lecture into an essay, first published in 1946 and now (in somewhat revised form) famous as his definitive statement on fairy-stories and why we tell them.

Verlyn Flieger, who co-edited the manuscripts for publication in 2008 as Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, has characterised his lecture/essay as a creative manifesto for The Lord of the Rings. However, no one has been able to definitively identify the actual text of the 1939 lecture among Tolkien’s MSS. The consensus (held by Verlyn’s co-editor Douglas A. Anderson, as well as by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond) is that this crucial text is wholly or substantially lost.

My own substantial essay on this marshals a large body of evidence from Tolkien’s MSS, his Bodleian Library borrowing records, and contemporary news reports. Together they show that, in fact, we do have the 1939 lecture text itself.

When the hurricane struck, I had to pause my plan for final revisions. Once I’ve made them, journal publication will follow.

New insights from re-reading On Fairy-Stories prompted me to propose a further talk, for an autumn series of Oxford Tolkien seminars, under the title ‘Quisling and prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard’. Before I had the chance to start work on this, the hurricane intervened. I hope I’ll have the chance to write and deliver the talk in the coming year.

I’m pleased to have written another paper which is already due to be published – though currently only in Italian, not English. ‘Tolkien’s aim and the death of Smaug’ shows how, at a fork in the road for The Hobbit, he had planned to model the dragon-slaying on the Germanic Saga of the Volsungs but abruptly adapted an incident from Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha instead. Yet I also find signs that this incident – the death of Megissogwon – had shaped relevant aspects of The Hobbit almost from the beginning, and long before Tolkien’s sudden change of mind at the fork in the road. I offer insights into his statement, ‘I have long ceased to invent… I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself.’

A separate 2024 project relates to Tolkien and the Great War. With Peter Gilliver, I’ve been investigating the period from autumn 1918, when the War Office released Tolkien for civilian work, and the start of his first actual job, at the Oxford English Dictionary. With new evidence from Tolkien’s academic papers and elsewhere, we fill in vital details pertaining both to my book and to The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, which Peter co-wrote with fellow OED editors Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner. We hope our essay, ‘The wanderer’s return: new findings on Tolkien in Oxford 1918–19’, will appear in an upcoming Tolkien Studies.

Another paper, due to appear in the next volume of Arda Philology (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), also originated with research for Tolkien and the Great War. It’s a comparison between Tolkien’s tengwar and Shorthand Signalling, a phonetic semaphore system published by an anonymous army officer. When I stumbled on this rare publication years ago at the British Library, I was very struck by the visual and methodological similarities between the two systems. I’m glad to have finally put my thoughts into publishable form.

These papers (Rohan, On Fairy-stories, Smaug, ‘The wanderer’s return’ and Shorthand Signalling) currently run to a total of roughly 43,500 words. That’s half a book’s worth. Shorthand Signalling aside, all this is essential work towards my actual book, Tolkien’s Mirror – on which I also made even more crucial progress.

Back in May I shared a photo here showing my handwritten revisions on a page from my Tolkien’s Mirror proposal. Soon after, I submitted the book proposal to my agent. He was pleased with it, but he asked a question about structure that had been nagging at the back of my mind for a long time. The hurricane has forced me to postpone experimenting with a reorganised structure – but I’ll get back to it as soon as I can. The process should be less complex than it sounds, because my chapters are fairly modular.

Other work behind the scenes – mostly from the previous year – bore fruit in October with the publication of Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913–1959 (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). I was the copy-editor appointed by Oxford University Press at the request of the principal author, Professor John Bowers. As he notes in his acknowledgements, I voluntarily took my work far beyond copy-editing, by going to the Bodleian Library, checking his transcriptions against Tolkien’s own MSS, and even identifying further passages that deserved a place in the book. These included material of characteristically Tolkienian philological insight.

This is far from the first time I’ve assisted other scholars with interpreting Tolkien’s handwriting, which can vary enormously in quality from calligraphic to electrocardiographic. Over the years I’ve come to be able to read much that I would once have thought impenetrable. This kind of work draws heavily on my wide and often intimate familiarity with the whole gamut of Tolkien’s work, both philological and creative. Without this kind of experience – a knowledge of his interests, opinions, and range of reference – you can look at a word or phrase forever without recognising what it actually says.

So that’s how 2024 went for me. It’s been a disorientating mixture of pleasure, trials and sorrow. As you can see, much of my recent research and writing should bear public fruit in 2025. And I hope to pursue more work on Tolkien – especially for Tolkien’s Mirror.

I thank my Steady supporters for giving me the opportunity to develop my ideas and for funding some of my research and writing time – although in truth for every hour the crowdfunding actually supports, I’ve probably worked 10 more hours without financial support of any kind.

Clearly I need to review what I offer you through Steady. I think you’ll probably agree that small, frequent posts would be better than long, infrequent ones. This one, for instance, has taken several hours’ intermittent work over several days. Far better, on the whole, that I spend such hours on the writing and research that my supporters are actually here to fund, no?

I also need to think about how much material I should make accessible only to members or to other visitors too. And in an ideal world, I would merge my Steady blog, my other blog (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), and my website (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). But that will take time, money and expertise that I don’t currently have.

This Steady crowdfunding project has been vital in what (despite appearances) has been one of my most productive years’ work on Tolkien so far. I thank all my supporters again!

So if you can continue your support, or you are contemplating joining us here, or if you know others who might wish to back my work, please do! You can consider this retrospective of 2024 as both a pledge of my side of the bargain and an appeal for further help! It will be more than welcome.

Happy New Year! Stay tuned in 2025.