Tolkien on Mercury

 So I see that there is a crater named Tolkien near the north pole of Mercury.  What about Lessingham? 

Ray Bradbury on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis

In 2023, Jonathan R. Eller edited and published a thick volume Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury, which I'm just getting around to reading.* Not much on the Tolkien and C.S. Lewis front, but there is one interesting and relevant exchange. 

Russell Kirk wrote to Bradbury on 12 September 1967, asking: 

have you been influenced at all by William Morris, George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien? (p. 153)

Bradbury replied on 16 September 1967:

No, I haven't been influenced by Morris, MacDonald or Tolkien, though I have read and enjoyed Lewis' Screwtape Letters; however he has not been any influence that I know of. (p. 154-155)  

Kirk had already written on Bradbury in his 4 April 1967 column in the National Review, "From the Academy: Count Dracula and Mr. Ray Bradbury"--according to Eller, this column was reworked in Kirk's book Enemies of Permanent Things (1969). But Kirk's questions in this letter were for another piece, "The Revival of Fantasy", which appeared in Triumph, May 1968, and which was itself revised for Enemies of Permanent Things. Despite Bradbury's disavowal of influence, Kirk repeatedly compares Bradbury with Lewis and Tolkien and others. Kirk even quotes from an earlier passage out of the same Bradbury letter, but does not even hint at Bradbury's disavowal. 

* The book is very oddly arranged, and the footnotes at the back are keyed to twelve different chapters, none of which are designated in the page headers, making the reader look back to the contents page to see which chapter contains page, say, 153, and then on to the back of the book to find where the Notes to that chapter begin (again, there are no designations in the page headers to help). I can think of many punishments the designer should endure--the first being unemployment. That the copyright page credits one Ruth Lee-Mui as interior designer, as though her work is something to be proud of, is mind-boggling.

How to Correctly Pronounce Names Like Cabell, Dunsany, Machen, Powys and Tolkien

The Literary Digest was a weekly American magazine published by the Funk & Wagnalls Company of New York. It began in 1890, and by mid 1937 it was evidently stumbling, for in February 1938 it folded.  One of its editors in the 1930s had responsibility for a filler column called “What’s the Name, Please?” This editor, Charles Earle Funk, wrote to various prominent or up-and-coming people with names that could be easily mispronounced, asking them how their name should be pronounced. A number of the responses appeared in issues of The Literary Digest, and the column was reportedly popular. Funk decided to make a book of the responses, including names which were yet expected to appear in the future issues of The Literary Digest. The book was titled What’s the Name, Please? A Guide to the Correct Pronunciation of Current Prominent Names, published by Funk & Wagnalls Company in May 1936.  A second printing came out in June, but the overall sales were evidently small, for the book is rare today.

A number of writers of fantasy with easily mispronounced names appear in the book.  (I do not know if their notes ever appeared in The Literary Digest.) Here are the entries for James Branch Cabell, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, John Cowper Powys, and J.R.R. Tolkien.  

I've written about the pronunciation of Cabell previously on this blog, here. 

Here's is Lady Dunsany's reply:

Arthur Machen's entry (which crosses over two pages) also includes notes on the American J. Gresham Machen, who had a different pronunciation of his last name:

John Cowper Powys's entry includes his brother Llewellyn Powys:

And it seems early for Tolkien (here, in the never-used form of "John R.R. Tolkien") to have appeared in such a formulation. When Funk's book was published in May 1936, Tolkien was six months from delivering his landmark British Academy lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, and The Hobbit wouldn't be published in England until September 1937, and in the U.S. in March 1938.

 

 

 

Roger Dean's Gollum

Roger Dean (b. 1944) is a British artist perhaps best known for his album covers, especially those for the band Yes. I knew that he did at least one Tolkien-related illustration, a painting of Gollum, done at the suggestion of a friend.  It's a bit dark (in appears in Views, published in 1975), but I rather like it.

Poetic Elves in the 1920s

I was discussing "twee" with a friend and remembered a nifty poem I read about thirty-five years ago.  Of course I had to go find it, and it's as good as I recall, so I'll share it here.

How to Treat Elves

by Morris Bishop

I met an elf-man in the woods,
the wee-est little elf!
Sitting under a mushroom tall—
'twas taller than himself.

"How do you do, little elf," I said,
"and what do you do all day?"
"I dance 'n fwolic about," said he,
"'n scuttle about and play;

"I s'prise the butterflies, 'n when
a katydid I see,
'Katy didn't!' I say, and he
says 'Katy did!' to me!

"I hide behind my mushroom stalk
when Mister Mole comes froo,
'n only jus' to fwighten him
I jump out 'n say, 'Boo!'

"'N then I swing on a cobweb swing,
up in the air so high,
'N the cwickets chirp just to hear me sing,
'Upsy-daisy-die!'

"'N then I play with the baby chicks,
I call them, chick chick chick!
'N what do you think of that?" said he.
I said, "It makes me sick."

"It gives me sharp and shooting pains
to listen to such drool."
I lifted up my foot, and squashed
the God damn little fool. *

The poem first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post for 3 April 1926 (it was reprinted in an anthology edited by Thomas L. Masson, Laughs: A Sovereign Remedy for Boredom, published in November 1926). That makes it nearly contemporary with Lord Dunsany's poem, "Ode to a Dublin Critic," apparently first published in Fifty Poems (1929). Here are the first two stanzas (of five):

        Ode to a Dublin Critic

 

        Through steely gaps that I have known 

           In mirage mountains, upon wings 

        Has my imagination flown 

          To bring you news of magic things.

        And lesser journalists have said, 

          That cannot see such things themselves, 

        The man is clearly off his head 

          To write of things like gods and elves

Of course earlier in the same decade, J.R.R. Tolkien was writing of 'Tinfang Warble" in a fairy poem first published in 1927. It is a conception Tolkien would (thankfully) abandon.  Here are the first eight lines.

Tinfang Warble

O the hoot! O the hoot!

How he trillups on his flute!

O the hoot of Tinfang Warble!

Dancing all alone,

hopping on a stone, 

Flitting like a fan, 

In the twilight on the lawn, 

And his name is Tinfang Warble!

 

* The text of "How to Treat Elves" is that given in Bishop's collection Spilt Milk (1942). The poem also appears in Bishop's earlier collection Paramount Poems (1929), but I have not seen that appearance.