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.…
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I don’t, as a rule, discuss personal or family matters here; that’s the role for my personal blog. Nevertheless, I feel I should mention that I’m more-or-less “back” from an unexpected journey health-wise. Details — no doubt too many for some readers, and never enough for others — are at a specialized set of pages at PostHope.com. No more need be said here.
To celebrate, …
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Paper given at the 15th annual Tolkien in Vermont conference at UVM:
Mapping Mordor: Normalizing Tolkien’s maps as the first step in examining his worldbuilding method of construction-by-revision; or, Yet further confirmation (as if we needed it) that Tolkien had no master plan, did not “first make a map and make the narrative agree,” and, in fact, never did produce a map that exactly portrays what’s described in The Lord of the Rings
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My friend and colleague Andrew Peterson visited this last weekend to help with the initial work on my new pagination cross-reference for The Lord of the Rings. … I’ve built a database which will contain one record per paragraph of The Lord of the Rings, containing the first few words of the paragraph, the paragraph number within the chapter and book (watch for a posting soon describing how this is assigned), and the page number on which the paragraph begins in each of the five editions listed above. In addition, there are spots to put the correlative page in Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull’s The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (if there is one) and Words, Phrases and Passages in The Lord of the Rings (in Parma Eldalamberon XVII. … Once we’ve entered the rest of the data, I’ll make everything available freely in spreadsheet form. I may also have the time to create an on-line pagination converter and companion iOS app.…
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