The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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Rita Ricketts, Adventurers All: Tales of Blackwellians, of Books, Bookmen, and Reading and Writing Folk (2002), and Ricketts, Scholars, Poets & Radicals: Discovering Forgotten Lives in the Blackwell Collections (2015).
Bliss, Alan Joseph (1921–1985). Having received his B.A. at King’s College, University of London, Alan Bliss studied at *Oxford for a B.Litt. from 1946 to 1948. His thesis, supervised by Tolkien, was an edition of the Middle English poem *Sir Orfeo. In Hilary Term 1948 he delivered a series of lectures on that work, and in Trinity Term 1948 lectured on ‘The West Saxon Dialect in Middle English’, on both occasions acting on Tolkien’s behalf. Bliss later taught at Malta and Istanbul before taking up appointments in Old and Middle English at University College, Dublin. He succeeded to the Chair of Old and Middle English at Dublin in 1974.
Revised for publication, his Sir Orfeo appeared in 1954 in the *Oxford English Monographs, of which Tolkien was a general editor. In his introduction to Sir Orfeo Bliss thanks Tolkien, ‘whose penetrating scholarship is an inspiration to all who have worked with him’ (p. vi). Among other works Bliss wrote or edited are The Metre of Beowulf (1957); A Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases in Current English (1966); Spoken English in Ireland, 1600–1740 (1979); and *Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode (1982), an edition of Tolkien’s lectures on the ‘Finnesburg Fragment’ and the related episode in *Beowulf. In his preface to Finn and Hengest Bliss relates that in 1966 Tolkien had offered him all of his material on the story, to use in preparing for publication a paper on ‘Hengest and the Jutes’. Bliss did not receive the papers until 1979, however, after Tolkien’s death; and when he read Tolkien’s lectures ‘it became obvious to me that I could never make use of his work in any work of my own: not only had he anticipated nearly all my ideas, but he had gone far beyond them in directions which I had never considered’ (p. v). Bliss agreed instead, in response to a proposal by *Christopher Tolkien, to prepare Tolkien’s lectures for publication, with added notes and comments.
Bliss contributed an essay, ‘The Appreciation of Old English Metre’, to the Festschrift *English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (1962), and another, ‘Beowulf Lines 3074–3075’, to J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam, ed. Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (1979).
Bloemfontein see South Africa
Blomfield, Joan Elizabeth see Turville-Petre, Joan Elizabeth
‘The Bodleian Declensions’. The earliest extant chart of noun inflections in Quenya (*Languages, Invented), edited with analysis by Patrick Wynne, Christopher Gilson, and Carl F. Hostetter, published in Vinyar Tengwar 28 (March 1993), pp. 8–34.
The chart is so called because it was found among Tolkien’s manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives), neatly written in ink c. November 1936 on one page within a draft of Beowulf and the Critics (*Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics). Like *‘The Plotz Declension’, the Bodleian manuscript is concerned with a Quenya word for ‘ship’, here kirya, but also with pole (probably ‘oat’).
Bombadil Goes Boating. Poem, first published in *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), pp. 17–23.
Bombadil Goes Boating is a sequel of sorts to *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. The new poem follows merry Tom as he rows a boat down stream on an autumn day, intending to meet his friend Farmer Maggot (from *The Lord of the Rings). Along the way a wren, a kingfisher, an otter, a swan, the hobbit-folk of Hays-end and Breredon, and finally Farmer Maggot scold with insults, but Tom gives back as good as he gets. At last Tom goes to Maggot’s home: there ‘songs they had and merry tales, the supping and the dancing’, and they swap ‘all the tidings / from Barrow-downs to Tower Hills’. Tom returns home unseen. Later the boat he left at Grindwall is taken back up the Withywindle by Otter-folk, the Old Swan, and the King’s fisher, but they forget to bring the oars.
Tolkien developed Bombadil Goes Boating for the 1962 volume from an earlier, isolated poem, or fragment of a poem, which he called the ‘germ of Tom Bombadil’ (‘Ho! Tom Bombadil / Whither are you going / With John Pompador / Down the River rowing?’); this was first published in *The Return of the Shadow (1988), pp. 115–16, and printed also in the expanded edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014), pp. 138–9.
In the process, Tolkien called the work variously The Fliting of Tom Bombadil, The Merry Fliting of Tom Bombadil, and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil II: The Merry Fliting before settling on its final, more prosaic title. Fliting, from the Old English for ‘strive’ or ‘quarrel’, refers to a contest of insults, such as the exchange in *Beowulf between Beowulf and Unferth before Beowulf faces Grendel. The insults traded by Tom and the others in Bombadil Goes Boating parallel his challenges in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but here the exchanges are light and laced with humour, without the menace that underlies the earlier poem (‘Ho there! beggarman tramping in the Marish!’ ‘Well, well, Muddy-feet! From one that’s late for meeting /away back by the Mithe that’s a surly greeting!’).
In a letter to his publisher *Rayner Unwin on 12 April 1962 Tolkien allowed that an understanding of Bombadil Goes Boating required a knowledge of The Lord of the Rings: ‘at any rate it performs the service of further “integrating” Tom with the world of the Lord of the Rings into which he was inserted.’ He felt that it tickled his ‘pedantic fancy’ because it contains an echo of the Norse Nibelung legends and ‘one of the lines comes straight … from The Ancrene Wisse [*Ancrene Riwle]’ (Letters, p. 315). On 1 August 1962 he wrote to *Pauline Baynes that he had placed the fictional time of the poem ‘to the days of growing shadow’, that is, before Frodo’s departure from Hobbiton in The Lord of the Rings (Letters, p. 319).
The Book of Lost Tales. Series of tales in which a traveller, Eriol (*Eriol and Ælfwine), having come to the Lonely Island (or Isle) of the Elves, Tol Eressëa, is told of the Creation of the World and the history of the Elves until the time of his arrival in their midst. For convenience in *The History of Middle-earth, the tales were published in two volumes, *The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (1983) and *The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (1984): these follow the chronology of events within the mythology, but not the order of writing of the tales, nor necessarily Tolkien’s original plan for the order of their telling. Each volume also includes descriptions and commentary by Christopher Tolkien, poems by Tolkien related to the tales, and appendices on the meanings of names within his invented languages. In the Reader’s Guide summaries of the tales and consideration of their place in the evolution of the mythology are dealt with in relation to the chapters of the published *Silmarillion (1977); these are listed, with cross-references, in the separate entries for Part One and Part Two.
HISTORY
In Christopher Tolkien’s words, The Book of Lost Tales was ‘the first substantial work of imaginative literature by J.R.R. Tolkien, and the first emergence in narrative of the Valar, of the Children of Ilúvatar, Elves and Men, of the Dwarves and the Orcs, and of the lands in which their history is set, Valinor beyond the western ocean, and Middle-earth, the “Great Lands” between the seas of east and west’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 1). It was also the first expression of the *‘Silmarillion’ mythology in prose. Poems, drawings, and references in letters from the years preceding its writing, however, show that many of its elements had already been developing in Tolkien’s thoughts. Among the more significant of these poems were The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star (*Éalá Éarendel Englo Beorhtast, September 1914); *The City of the Gods (earlier Kôr, April 1915); *The Happy Mariners (July 1915); and Kortirion among the Trees (November 1915, later *The Trees of Kortirion). In 1915 Tolkien also made several watercolours which suggest that he was visualizing particular places: Tanaqui (Artist and Illustrator,