Mary: Mary Incledon, 1895–1940. JRRT’s cousin, the younger daughter of his mother Mabel’s older sister, May Suffield Incledon. Co-creator, with her sister Marjorie, of ‘Animalic’ and collaborator with Tolkien in the creation of his first invented language, Nevbosh. Godmother of JRRT’s oldest son, Fr. John Tolkien.
Chambers: R. W. (Raymond Wilson) Chambers, 1874–1942. Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London, who in 1925 had refused the Rawlinson & Bosworth chair of Anglo Saxon at Oxford, thus opening the way for JRRT’s election to that post. A colleague of A. E. Housman and W. P. Ker, he was considered by Tolkien ‘the greatest of living Anglo-Saxon scholars’ (Beowulf & the Critics, ed. Michael Drout [2002], page 32). Among his major publications are Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend [1912], Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem [1921, rev. ed. 1932], ‘Beowulf and the Heroic Age’ [1925; called by Tolkien ‘the most significant single essay on the poem that I know’], and a biography of Sir Thomas More [1935] which is said to have aided the cause of More’s canonization. As documented by Douglas A. Anderson (‘R. W. Chambers and The Hobbit’, in Tolkien Studies Vol. III, pages 137–147), Tolkien and Chambers regularly exchanged publications; Chambers is one of the three people to whom Tolkien is known to have shown his alliterative Arthurian poem ‘The Fall of Arthur’ (the others being E. V. Gordon and C. S. Lewis), and Tolkien also presented Chambers with a fine calligraphic copy of his still-unpublished poem ‘Doworst’.
Tolkien’s letter to Chambers of 8th February 1937 promising to send him the book is now in the Special Collections of University College London (Chambers Papers 101); his letter to Allen & Unwin requesting Chambers be sent a copy (JRRT to Ch. Furth, 13th August 1937) with an enclosed note that seems not to have survived, and Allen & Unwin’s response (Furth to JRRT, 16th August 1937), are in the Allen & Unwin archives. Chambers’ two brief notes of thanks upon the book’s actual arrival, the first of which Tolkien forwarded to Allen & Unwin (see Letters, page 20), are in the Bodleian (MS. Tolkien 21, folios 45 [undated] & 46 [postmarked 7 Sep 1937]).
Jennings: Aileen Jennings (born circa 1924) & Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001). The two daughters of Dr. H. C. (Henry Cecil) & Madge Jennings, family friends of the Tolkiens who attended the same church. Born in Boston (Lincolnshire, not Massachusetts), the Jennings sisters moved to Oxford with their parents in December 1932/January 1933 when their father became Medical Officer of Health and School Medicine for the County of Oxford, a post which he held for many years. Aileen Jennings, the older sister, may possibly be the ‘girl of 12–13’ to whom Tolkien referred as having read The Hobbit before its submission to Allen & Unwin (Letters, page 21).
While Aileen’s interests lay in medicine and science, Elizabeth, the younger sister, became a librarian and also a fairly well-known poet who published more than two dozen collections of her poetry. She was associated with ‘The Movement’, a loose group of poets contemporary with, and sharing some of the same members as, the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the early 1950s (e.g., Kingsley Amis and Inkling John Wain); they are remembered today primarily for including among their number the poet Philip Larkin. After her death, she was commemorated in her hometown by having a street named after her in north Oxford, ‘Elizabeth Jennings Way’ in Summertown (not far from Wolvercote Cemetery, where Tolkien is buried).
Aunt Mabel: Mabel Tolkien Mitton, circa 1858–1937, sister of Tolkien’s father Arthur. According to Scull & Hammond, the Mittons remained in the Moseley area outside Birmingham (Companion & Guide Vol II, page 1009). It is not clear whether Mabel Mitton died before being sent her copy of the book; her sister Florence (see below) complains in her letter to JRRT early the next year that Mabel’s death delayed her learning of the book’s existence (‘I . . . felt if Aunt Mabel had been alive she would have sent it to me’—MS. Tolkien 21, folio 120).
Aunt Florence: Florence Tolkien Hadley, circa 1863–?? [death date unknown], sister of Tolkien’s father Arthur. Having immigrated to Canada, she did not learn of the book’s existence until early the next year; her letter from Victoria, British Columbia, dated 13th February 1938 and thanking Tolkien and Edith on behalf of herself and her daughter Midge, is now in the Bodleian (MS. Tolkien 21, folio 120).
Note that although she is not included in either list, Tolkien also seems to have sent a copy to his third surviving Tolkien aunt, Grace Tolkien Mountain (born circa 1861, death date unknown); her postcard from Newcastle-on-Tyne is also in the Bodleian (MS. Tolkien 21, folio 88); furthermore, in her letter (folio 120) Florence Hadley mentions ‘writ[ing to] Aunt Grace for particulars’ about the book after she had heard about its existence from a friend.
Wrenn: C. L. (Charles Leslie) Wrenn, 1895–1969. Fellow Inkling and colleague of Tolkien’s in teaching medieval language and literature at Oxford. Previously a lecturer at Leeds (1928–1930), though after Tolkien’s time there, at the time of The Hobbit’s writing and publication he was University Lecturer in English Language at Oxford (1930–1939). Ultimately, after several years at the University of London, he returned to Oxford, where he succeeded to Tolkien’s chair as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1946. The Wrenns (Charles, Agnes, and their daughter Carola) and Tolkien family were close enough to vacation together at Lamorna Cove near Land’s End in Cornwall in the summer of 1932, an occasion from which the character ‘Gaffer Gamgee’ entered the family’s private mythology, having a cameo in Mr. Bliss not long after; a photograph from this vacation appears in the Family Album, page 62. When Elaine Griffiths proved unable to complete the revision of the Clark Hall Beowulf [circa 1938], Tolkien recommended Wrenn for the project, which he completed in short order; it was published in 1940 with Tolkien’s ‘Prefatory Remarks’, which Wrenn praised as ‘the most permanently valuable part of the book’ (1950 edition, page vi). In the early to mid-1950s Wrenn is said to have described Tolkien as ‘the one man of genius then teaching in the English School’ (Scull & Hammond, Companion & Guide Vol. II, page 1124), and despite Tolkien’s giving Wrenn as an example in 1956 of those fellow academics who disapproved of his writing The Lord of the Rings instead of devoting all his time to scholarly work (Letters of JRRT, page 238) Wrenn was ultimately co-editor of Tolkien’s festschrift, English and Medieval Studies: Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday [1962]. The Clark Hall collaboration with Tolkien seems to have been his first book; other major works include an edition of Beowulf [1953], An Old English Grammar (with Randolph Quirk) [1957], and A Study of Old English Literature [1967]. For more on Wrenn, see David Bratman’s Appendix (‘The Inklings: Their Lives and Works’) to Diana Pavlac Glyer’s The Company They Keep [2007], pages 247–8, and the entry in Scull & Hammond’s Companion & Guide (Vol. II, pages 1123–25).
D’Ardenne: Simone d’Ardenne, 1899–1986; student, family friend, and collaborator of Tolkien’s, first on an edition of The Life and Passion of St. Juliene [1936], which at Tolkien’s insistence appeared only under her name (in order to boost her career), and on an unfinished edition of Seinte Katerine, which they proposed to the Early English Text Society in 1936 and later expanded to include Sawles Warde as well but ultimately abandoned because of the war and Tolkien’s absorption in his fiction (e.g., The Lord of the Rings). They did publish several minor articles arising out of the latter project (‘“Iþþlen” in Sawles Warde’ [1947], ‘MS. Bodley 34: A Re-Collation of a Collation’ [1947–8]). A native Belgian who became Professor of Comparative Grammar at Liège in 1938, d’Ardenne lived with the Tolkien family at Northmoor Road for a year starting in October 1932; she would thus have been a member of the household at the time Tolkien completed The Hobbit. In addition to translating Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham into French [tr. 1937, published 1975], d’Ardenne wrote a warm memoir of Tolkien, ‘The Man and the Scholar’, that appears in the memorial festschrift J. R. R. Tolkien: Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam, ed. Mary Salu & Robert T. Farrell [1979], pages 33–7. A photo appe
ars in the Family Album (page 68); for more on d’Ardenne, see the account in Scull & Hammond’s Companion & Guide, Vol. II, pages 202–204.
Helen B: Helen Buckhurst, 1894–1963, a resident student, English language tutor, and Icelandic scholar who had been a Fellow and Tutor at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford (1926–1930). Tolkien had been appointed to supervise Buckhurst’s thesis, The Historical Grammar of Old Icelandic, in December 1927 (Scull & Hammond, Companion & Guide Vol. I, page 143), and like so many of his students she became a family friend; she was also a friend of the American medievalist Kemp Malone and his family. An adult convert to Catholicism, in June 1929 she became Priscilla Tolkien’s godmother. At the time of The Hobbit’s publication she was teaching at Loreto College in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, a Catholic girls’ school founded in 1922; her letter of thanks to ‘Dear Ronald’, dated 23rd September [1937], praises The Hobbit as ‘delightful . . . my only complaint is that there are not more illustrations. I only hope it is the first of many such books’ (MS. Tolkien 21, folio 117). See page 110 and The Annotated Hobbit for a discussion of her paper on ‘Icelandic Folklore’ and the belief that trolls turn to stone in daylight (DAA.80–82).
Aunt Jane: Jane Suffield Neave, 1872–1963, the younger sister of Tolkien’s mother Mabel, whose farm in Worcestershire provided the name ‘Bag-End’ for Bilbo’s home (Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, page 106). As a teacher who was both college-educated, receiving a Bachelor of Science in 1895, and at one point warden of a women’s college in St. Andrews Scotland (circa 1911), she not only helped tutor him as a child (Letters, page 377) but might have helped inspire his lifelong interest in women’s education; he wrote of her in 1961: ‘The professional aunt is a fairly recent development, perhaps; but I was fortunate in having an early example: one of the first women to take a science degree. She is now ninety, but only a few years ago went botanizing in Switzerland’ (Letters, page 308). Jane Neave was among the party of eight who had toured Switzerland with Tolkien in the summer of 1911, the trip which inspired some incidents and scenery in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. During the War years and afterwards she lived (sometimes with Tolkien’s brother Hilary) on farms in Nottinghamshire (circa 1914) and Worcestershire (circa 1923); in later life she lived near Evesham (outside Birmingham) and in Wales. In 1961 Tolkien prepared the poetry collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil [1962] in response to her request that he ‘get out a small book . . . that we old ’uns can afford to buy for Christmas presents’ (Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, page 244). At the time of The Hobbit’s publication she was still living on the farm in Worcestershire, but because of her having changed its name she did not receive her copy until early October, after Tolkien had obtained her current address from Hilary. Her letter of 1st October [1937] asking about the book and her letter-card of 9th October 1937 expressing her delight in it (‘It is marvellous. I had to stop reading it in the bus this morning because I laughed so much I feared I might be seized as an inebriate or needing other asylum. The origin of Golf finished me.’) and calling it ‘a great joy’ are now in the Bodleian (MS. Tolkien 21, folios 125 & 126). For more on Jane Neave, see Scull & Hammond, Companion & Guide, Vol. II, pages 637–8, and Andrew H. Morton’s two little books, Tolkien’s Gedling–1914 [2008, with John Hayes] and Tolkien’s Bag End [2009].
Rattenbury: a colleague of Tolkien’s, probably R. M. (Robert Mantle) Rattenbury, 1901–1970, a noted classical scholar who was for many years Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and later Senior Tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge. Longtime editor of the Classical Review, in addition to having contributed a chapter on ‘Romance: Traces of Lost Greek Novels’ to New Chapters in the History of Greek Literature, Third Series, ed. J. U. Powell [1933], he is best known for having published, with T. W. Lumb, what was for many years the standard edition of the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, a third- or fourth-century Greek romance [three volumes: 1935, 1938, & 1943]. Aside from his appearance on this list, his only known connections with Tolkien are having been an Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the University of Leeds from 1924 to 1927, thus overlapping with Tolkien’s final two years there, and also being a friend of E. V. Gordon.
Livesleys or Livesey: friends of the Tolkien family, probably the Mr. & Mrs. Livesey who, along with their son Edgar, then a teenager, ran a guest house called ‘Aurora’ in Sidmouth on the Devonshire coast, where the Tolkien family stayed during their summer holiday each year between 1934 and 1937 (it is not clear if they also stayed at the Liveseys’ during their 1938 visit). See the Family Album (pages 64–5) for a description of these family vacations. Some of the Allen & Unwin correspondence is actually sent from or to ‘Aurora’, such as Tolkien’s letter to Furth on 13th August 1937, in which he notes ‘I shall be at above address until Sat. Aug 21’, and Furth’s reply of 16th August 1937 (Allen & Unwin archives).
A H Smith: A. H. (Hugh) Smith, 1903–1967, a student of Tolkien’s at Leeds who married another of Tolkien’s Leeds students, Helen Tomlinson. After teaching in Birmingham and Upsalla, in 1930 he joined the English faculty at University College, London, first as Reader and later Lecturer in English, ultimately (after a hiatus of several years doing intelligence work during the War, for which he was decorated) succeeding R. W. Chambers as the Quain Professor in English (in 1949). A specialist in the study of place-name origins from the time of his Ph.D. thesis at Leeds (1926, published in 1928 as The Place-names of the North Riding [Yorkshire], with an acknowledgment to Tolkien for his encouragement and philological help), he published many more volumes on the subject covering Yorkshire’s East Riding and York itself [1937], Yorkshire’s West Riding [1961–63], Gloucestershire [1964–65], and Westmorland [1967], as well as English Place-Name Elements [1955], ultimately becoming Director of the English Place-Name Society [1951]. Other significant publications include assisting in the English translation of Erling Monsen’s edition of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla: The Lives of the Norse Kings [1932], an edition of the earliest surviving manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (The Parker Chronicle [1935]), and helping to launch Methuen’s Old English Library [1933ff]. Smith’s interest in printing led him to build an Elizabethan-style hand press which he used to teach students how books like Shakespeare’s quartos were made; each seminar created its own little booklet as a class project. The second book thus printed was Tolkien’s Songs for the Philologists [1936], for which Smith apparently rewrote several of Tolkien’s Leeds-era originals.
J. Grove: ‘Aunt’ Jennie Grove, 1864–1938, a cousin of Tolkien’s wife Edith. Jennie Grove lived with Edith Bratt and her mother Francis until the latter’s death in 1903, when Edith was sent to a boarding school. She and Edith resumed living together upon Edith’s engagement to Tolkien in 1913 and she continued to live with Edith, JRRT, and later young John Tolkien as well until the family’s move to Leeds in 1921. She often returned at Christmastime in later years, having become ‘a substitute mother to Edith and the nearest thing her four children had to a grandmother’ (Family Album, page 36; her photograph appears on the same page). Her letter of thanks, dated 23-9-37 (i.e., 23rd September), expressing how ‘I am more than delighted with your lovely book . . . you clever old thing, I don’t know how you do it’, is now in the Bodleian (MS. Tolkien 21, folios 122–4).
S. Mills: Stella M. Mills, 1903–1989, a research student who became a friend of the family. Another of Tolkien’s students from his Leeds days, like Tolkien she worked at one time on the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) under C. T. Onions, who completed the original edition of the OED in 1933. Her major academic work was a translation of The Saga of Hrolf Kraki [1933] – the same work which probably inspired the figure of Beorn Medwed; see the commentary on Chapter VII – which appeared with an introduction by E. V. Gordon (who supervised the work); Mills dedicated the volume to JRRT, EVG, and Onions. According to Scull & Hammond’s Companion & Guide, she later joined the staff of St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School in Oxford (C&G, Vol. II, page 590). Mills’ copy of The Hobb
it recently surfaced in a rare book dealer’s catalogue; although extravagantly rebound, it still includes Tolkien’s inscription: ‘Stella Mills/from her old friend/J. R. R. Tolkien’.
WR Childe: W. R. (Wilfred Roland) Childe, 1890–1952, a colleague of Tolkien’s at Leeds from 1922 onwards as Lecturer on the ‘Lit’ (literature) side of the English School (as opposed to Tolkien’s own ‘Lang’ or language side). Godfather to Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher. He was best known as a poet, one of the Georgian Poets – indeed, the compiler of the online index to the Oxford Poetry series describes him as ‘almost too Georgian to be true’ (http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/oxpoetry/index/ic.html).
Among his books of poetry are The Little City [1911], The Happy Garden [n.d.], The Gothic Rose [1922], The Hills of Morning [1923], Ivory Palaces [1925], and Selected Poems [1936]; he was also either a contributor or co-editor of Oxford Poetry for all the volumes between 1910 and 1919, except for 1914 and 1915 (the volume in which Tolkien’s own ‘Goblin Feet’ appeared), contributing pieces such as ‘The Fairy Land of Shipscar’, ‘The Lost Abbot of Gloucester’, and ‘Sea Fairy’. Tolkien noted in his request for Childe to be sent a copy of The Hobbit that Childe ‘is an old personal friend. He is specially interested in elves and related creatures. He was (once at any rate) a fairly well-known poet, and is still a good one’ (JRRT to A&U, 7th September 1937; A&U archive). In the same letter, Tolkien also notes that Childe ‘saw the MS and is well disposed’ – i.e., that he read the manuscript of The Hobbit before its publication. This is confirmed by Childe’s letter of thanks on 27th September 1937, in which he notes ‘It is a great pleasure to have it and I shall certainly read it again . . . I wish it all possible success, – which it fully deserves.’ (MS. Tolkien 21, folio 41). He follows this up with a postcard (dated 9-10-1937; i.e., 9th October) congratulating Tolkien on the reviews in the Times and Times Literary Supplement (ibid.).
The History of the Hobbit Page 108
