Tolkien's Library

[Chrysophylax Dives]

So I discovered a recently published book that lists Tolkien's library. Ever since I started studying Tolkien I've been looking for such a list and, to the dedicated ('fanatical') Tolkien scholar this book, which is as dry as dust, is gold.

Tolkien's Library: An Annotated Checklist, Oronzo CILLI, 2019.

I'm putting up a post in the hope people might use it to flag and discuss various books in the Professor's library.

[Dorwiniondil]

Actually this isn't just books that were in Tolkien's personal library, but includes all sorts of works he referenced at one time or another, in one way or another - and yes, it is like gold to us Tolkien-obsessives! So far I have only used it seriously to check on how well Tolkien knew the work of the German philologist Max Forster (quite well, unsurprisingly, but with only the barest reference to the work I was especially interested in). Congratulations and thanks to Oronzo Cilli for this excellent reference work.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Actually this isn't just books that were in Tolkien's personal library, but includes all sorts of works he referenced at one time or another, in one way or another.

Right, that makes sense (I dived right in without looking at the introduction, but saw, for example, that several books fairy stories were borrowed from the library in Feb 1939 - one month before the St Andrews lecture).

Anything you can tell me about Max Forster would be gratefully received at my end. From my first skim I was most taken with the various German philological works that I'd never heard of before. I'd love to have a sense of what Tolkien got from them.

[Dorwiniondil]

Max Forster 1869-1954. "Anglist". Magnum opus: 'Der Flussname Themse und seine Sippe' -and at 900+ pages it really is magnum! His career culminated in 1934 as Professor of English at Munich, when he was eased out through pressure from the Nazis, abetted apparently by an ambitious underling. Nothing daunted, he took up a visiting fellowship at Yale until 1936, when he was forbidden from foreign travel. So he stayed at home, with his apparently massive library, and produced Der Flussname Themse in 1941. Word of this got to Britain, and scholars particularly of late British antiquity were agog to see it, which they did only after the war, and then with some difficulty - Kenneth Jackson, in his own masterly work 'Language and history in early Britain' (1953), comments that he didn't get to see it until 1947.
Unfortunately in 1944 Forster's library took a direct hit, and was destroyed. After the war, having apparently sailed through denazification, he was appointed to reconstruct the English faculty at Munich, but retired after a few years. He received many gifts of books from American and British scholars in an attempt to rebuild his library at least partially; unfortunately they had to be sold off after his death to pay for his funeral. :-( .

[Dorwiniondil]

I was looking at 'Tolkien's Library' a few months ago, when I was thinking about Thame with a h. I knew that Forster mentions it, but wasn't sure if Tolkien would have seen that. Unfortunately Tolkien's only reference to Der Flussname Themse is in a very small footnote to 'English and Welsh' - but since Tolkien refers to 9 other works by Forster, it may be in one of them as well.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

:) Thank you @Dorwiniondil (on reading the last I smiled and looked up the line and posted it on the 'favorite quote' thread. If Der Flussname Themse was published in 1941 then it will postdate Farmer Giles. I've started my second read through (I have yet to look at the various other, lessor lists). I am seeing that there is much in Tolkien's mind that is not covered in this reading material (the residue of many an Oxford conversation). It is also frustrating not having the physical books, if not to hand then at least to sight. I assume that many appear well browsed and some barely opened. All that aside, though, its peculiarly enjoyable to take a leisured tour of Professor Tolkien's bookshelves.

[FireroseArien]

I hadn't seen this before, but this looks really cool! It's similar to historiography in a sense - you can only really evaluate the arguments of other historians if you know what sources they used, and knowing what Tolkien drew from to create his Middle Earth mythology can help color our understanding of it. Definitely going to have to pick up a copy - and probably copies of some of the cited books....

[Flame Fried Ent]

I've already got this in my Amazon cart.

@FireroseArien, now you're giving me flashbacks to university, where I spent a lot of time chasing footnotes and bibliographic entries for long history papers....thanks for that.

It's always interesting to see what influences the people who influence us.

[Lord of the Rings]

It's a great book. To be taken with a grain of salt in some cases, but it's already become one of my go-to books on Tolkien. There's also an addenda & corrigenda section on Cilli's website, which is an important continuation of the whole thing: https://tolkienslibrary.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html

On the grains of salt, Hammond & Scull have a helpful review in JTR: https://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewconte ... enresearch

[Androthelm]

On the grains of salt, Hammond & Scull have a helpful review in JTR: https://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewconte ... enresearch

I think this article did a good job in calling to attention some challenges in any work endeavoring to index a library in this way. Perhaps it's better to think of any "Tolkien's Library" project as better suited to determining the broad literary context in which he was moving and developing, rather than his strict engagement with any particular text.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

On the grains of salt, Hammond & Scull have a helpful review in JTR: https://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewconte ... enresearch

I think this article did a good job in calling to attention some challenges in any work endeavoring to index a library in this way. Perhaps it's better to think of any "Tolkien's Library" project as better suited to determining the broad literary context in which he was moving and developing, rather than his strict engagement with any particular text.

Agreed. If a book is listed and contains annotations in Tolkien's hand then we know something certain. But if a book is not listed we cannot conclude that he did not read it.

On context, I think the peculiar organization of Oxford (and Cambridge) into colleges is an important factor. While Tolkien's life witnessed an intensification of the division of academic labour, with the development of autonomous faculties or departments, and academics consequently becoming ever more astute at dealing with one little part of the world and ever more ignorant about the rest of it, these colleges have remained home to students and teachers from all disciplines and subsequently remained the site of what today would be called 'interdisciplinary' conversations. (It is significant, for example, that JRRT gave his 'A Secret Vice' talk at Pembroke College rather than, say, a meeting held under the auspices of the English faculty). I am firmly of the opinion that Tolkien saw elements of reality that nobody sees today in part because his mind was relatively free of the borders and blinkers imposed by modern disciplinary divisions. (Lewis Carroll is a similar case.)

[Saranna]

@simon for everything in this thread!

[Dorwiniondil]

Looking back at this thread, I belatedly realise that I was wrong to refer to 'Forster'. It should in fact be Förster. Apologies.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I'm glad to hear that @Dorwiniondil. I've been losing sleep worrying about that missing umlaut.

[Dorwiniondil]