blog entries: verse
… I knew some of Le Guin’s work as a pre-teen as early as the mid-70s, and have always enjoyed her writing — I’d read and enjoyed some of her work even before I’d discovered The Lord of the Rings, though I’d known The Hobbit well already at the time. But it is only with this essay that I realize how well Le Guin knew Tolkien’s work, or how much she appreciated it.…
RR Auction Company, who previously auctioned Tolkien’s letter to H. Cotton Minchin which I wrote about in 2014, now has several more letters up for auction. As before, they have posted lovely scans of the letters — affording us the opportunity of transcribing them for posterity.
I’ll get the ball rolling here with a letter that was previously auctioned in 2009, written by Tolkien on 16 December, 1963, to Baronne A. Baeyens. According to the Tolkien Gateway, the (hopefully temporarily) erstwhile Lord of the Rings Plaza published an extract from this letter at that point, which the Tolkien Gateway has quoted.…
The Guardian reports that HarperCollins will be releasing Tolkien’s latest posthumous work, The Fall of Arthur, this coming May. … [The] article quotes Christopher Tolkien:
It is well known that a prominent strain in my father’s poetry was his abiding love for the old Northern alliterative verse. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight he displayed his skill in his rendering of the alliterative verse of the 14th century into the same metre in modern English. To these is now added his unfinished and unpublished poem The Fall of Arthur. …