of Oxford University Press approved the publication of his book, supported by Tolkien and Wrenn; but Tolkien took more than a year to look over and approve the manuscript, and the finished work was not sent to the printers until the end of August 1957.
Wrenn complained to Oxford University Press about Tolkien’s delay, which was the more unfortunate because a German work with the same text of Apollonius (ed. Josef Raith) had been published in 1956. In his prefatory note Tolkien wrote that ‘the [series] editors feel justified … in publishing Mr. Goolden’s work, since it is independent, and differs from Dr. Raith’s edition in treatment and in some points of opinion,’ and because it was specifically designed for English students and ‘provides a conflated text of the Latin source, notes, and glossary’ (p. iii).
In his preface Goolden thanks C.L. Wrenn as ‘the prime mover of the work’, and ‘Professor J.R.R. Tolkien who kindly suggested revisions in presentation and style’ (p. vi).
The Old English Exodus. Edition of the Old English poem Exodus, with a Modern English translation and commentary, assembled from Tolkien’s lecture notes and other papers by his former B.Litt. student *Joan Turville-Petre, published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford in 1982 (despite imprint and copyright dates of 1981).
The Old English Exodus is a free paraphrase of that portion of the Old Testament book (ch. 13–14) which deals with the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea and the destruction of Pharaoh’s host. A single instance of the work survives, in an eleventh-century manuscript, Junius 11 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives). It is considered one of the most difficult Old English texts to interpret, in part because it is incomplete, and it contains many words that are otherwise unrecorded.
Tolkien lectured on the Old English Exodus at *Oxford for many years, beginning in Michaelmas Term 1926. Joan Turville-Petre comments that his papers concerning the poem were ‘never intended as an edition, although the lecturer scrupulously drew up an edited text as the basis of his commentary. It is an interpretation of the poem, designed to reconstruct the original (as far as that is possible), and to place it in the context of Old English poetry’ (p. v). And yet, on 25 October 1932 Tolkien noted in a letter to R.W. Chapman at Oxford University Press that
both Elene [a poem by Cynewulf] and Exodus will remain set books in the English School. They both need editing. I have commentaries to both. I should like very much after Beowulf [i.e. after he completes his Modern English translation of *Beowulf] to tackle a proper edition of O.E. Exodus. The Routledge edn. of Ms. Junius 11 by Krapp [The Junius Manuscript, 1931] is thoroughly bad, and virtually negligible for our students, though admittedly better than nothing. Sedgefield is of course merely laughable (he does a large chunk of Exodus in his miserable Anglo-Saxon verse-book [An Anglo-Saxon Verse Book (1922)]). [Oxford University Press archives]
Tolkien’s surviving lecture notes on Exodus represent ‘the discourse of a teacher among a small group of pupils, expressing his understanding of the text in the circumstances of that time.’ Joan Turville-Petre therefore reduced ‘diffuse comments and some basic instruction … such as observations on phonology and morphology’ (p. v).
A manuscript page by Tolkien showing the opening of the Old English Exodus, with his notes, is reproduced in Life and Legend, p. 81.
In Notes and Queries for June 1983 Peter J. Lucas harshly criticized The Old English Exodus for its manner of presentation, lack of an introduction and glossary, numerous errors and omissions, and unnecessary emendations. ‘As an editor Tolkien emerges as an inveterate meddler who occasionally had bright ideas’ (p. 243). Nevertheless, Lucas was himself indebted to Tolkien in his own edition of Exodus (1977; rev. edn. 1994): ‘In the preparation of this edition I have had access to notes taken from lectures given by J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford. Two of the emendations adopted in the text … were, as far as I know, first suggested by him in these lectures …. His comments or suggestions are also incorporated in the Commentary from time to time …’ (p. x).
In another review, D.C. Baker commented in English Language Notes for March 1984 that ‘lesser mortals, in their preparation for lecturing undergraduate students, do not prepare themselves in this way; they do not edit the texts on which they are to expound; they do not provide a commentary exhaustive in its learning together with original criticisms and suggestions. These are the work of a master, a master of all he surveyed’ (p. 59).
See further, T.A. Shippey, ‘A Look at Exodus and Finn and Hengest’, Arda 3 (1986, for 1982–83), and his ‘Tolkien as Editor’ in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Stuart D. Lee (2014).
‘Old English Verse’. Extracts from a lecture, published as an appendix to the volume *The Fall of Arthur (2013), edited by *Christopher Tolkien, pp. 223–33. The text provides ‘some indication’ of the ‘essential nature’ of the Old English alliterative verse form used in the poem *The Fall of Arthur (p. 223). The lecture originated in the radio talk Anglo-Saxon Verse, the sixth in the series Poetry Will Out: Studies in National Inspiration and Characteristic Forms, broadcast on the BBC National Programme on 14 January 1938. Tolkien expanded it for another talk in 1943, and with revisions for further delivery in 1945 and 1948.
He begins by quoting lines from the tenth-century Old English poem The Battle of Brunanburh, followed by his own Modern English alliterative version. He explains the background to the poem and something about the Anglo-Saxon period, then deals with the alliterative metre which he finds ‘worthy of study by poets today as a technique. But it is also interesting as being a native art independent of classical models …. It was already old in Alfred’s day. Indeed it descends from days before the English came to Britain, and is almost identical with the metre used for Old Norse (Norwegian and Icelandic) poems’ (p. 227). After explaining the metre, he describes the use of archaisms and ‘kennings’, and suggests that attempting to translate Old English Verse ‘is not a bad exercise for training in the full appreciation of word …’ (p. 230).
Appended by Tolkien to the lecture were four examples of his own alliterative verse: Winter Comes to Nargothrond (*The Lays of Beleriand, p. 129), lines 1554–70 of *The Lay of the Children of Húrin (with minor variations from the text printed in The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 129–30), and two extracts from The Fall of Arthur, both with minor differences from the text as published in 2013. Against the extract from Canto I, lines 183–211, Tolkien ‘wrote the relevant letters referring to the patterns of strong and weak elements (“lifts” and “dips”) in each half-line’ as described in the lecture (p. 231).
Oliphaunt. Poem, first published in *The Lord of the Rings, Book IV, Chapter 3. It was later printed with the title Oliphaunt (i.e. an elephant) in *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), p. 47.
In the former work, Sam Gamgee describes the poem as ‘a rhyme we have in the Shire. Nonsense maybe, and maybe not.’ Tolkien included it, with three minor textual differences, as ‘a hobbit nursery-rhyme’ in a letter to his son Christopher, 30 April 1944 (Letters, p. 77). Although in another letter, to Mrs Eileen Elgar, 5 March 1964, he wrote that Oliphaunt was ‘my own invention entirely’, unlike *Fastitocalon which was ‘a reduced and rewritten form, to suit hobbit fancy, of an item in old “bestiaries”’ (Letters, p. 343), in fact Oliphaunt had a similar origin.
An earlier and much longer version, Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt, composed probably in the 1920s, was first published as one of the Adventures in Unnatural History and Medieval Metres, Being the Freaks of Fisiologus, as by ‘Fisiologus’ in the Stapeldon Magazine (Exeter College, *Oxford) 7, no. 40 (June 1927), pp. 125–7, and also in the expanded edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other
