had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English’ until, as it seems, the early 1920s. Whatever his thought or intent, he had much less to work on than Lönnrot, and his ‘Silmarillion’ is almost an entirely new creation, incorporating only a few fragmentary remains of lost English tales and legends. Its main connection with England is the recording and transmission of the history of the Elves by a man of Anglo-Saxon race and, temporarily, Tol Eressëa physically becoming England (see further, entries for *The Book of Lost Tales and *England).
On Translating Beowulf
see Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of ‘Beowulf’
Once upon a Time. Poem, first published in *Winter’s Tales for Children 1 (1965), pp. 44–5. It was printed also in the expanded edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014), pp. 280–2.
In the first of three stanzas, ‘once upon a day on the fields of May’, Goldberry is ‘blowing away a dandelion clock’ and ‘stooping over a lily-pool’. In the second, ‘once upon a night in the cockshut light’, Tom walks ‘without boot or shoe, / with moonshine wetting his big brown toes’. In the third, ‘once upon a moon on the brink of June’, Tom speaks to the ‘lintips’, but they are ‘the only things that won’t talk to me, / say what they do or what they be.’ Goldberry and Tom (Bombadil) first appeared in the 1934 poem *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and later more famously in *The Lord of the Rings (1954–5).
Rhona Beare suggests in an unpublished lecture that the ‘lintips’ are a development from the tiny spirits depicted by Tolkien in *An Evening in Tavrobel, published in *Leeds University Verse 1914–24 (1924); the two poems share similar imagery, and there seems a strong possibility that Once upon a Time was developed from the earlier poem. This was done probably later than 1962, since Tolkien did not suggest the poem for inclusion in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962).
See further, Douglas A. Anderson, ‘The Mystery of Lintips’, Tolkien Fantasy blog, 22 July 2013; and Kris Swank, ‘Tom Bombadil’s Last Song: Tolkien’s “Once upon a Time”’, Tolkien Studies 10 (2013).
Onions, Charles Talbut (1873–1965). Following education at Mason College (later the University of Birmingham), C.T. Onions joined the staff of the *Oxford English Dictionary in 1895 as an assistant, first to Sir James A.H. Murray, and then to *Henry Bradley. He was co-editor from 1914 to 1933, during which period he and *Sir William Craigie brought the original OED to completion. Some of Tolkien’s work for the Dictionary was done under Onions’ supervision. In his *Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford Tolkien recalled his ‘first glimpse of the unique and dominant figure of Charles Talbut Onions, darkly surveying me, a fledgling prentice in the Dictionary Room’ in 1919. Onions was also responsible for the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1933) and the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966, with the assistance of *R.W. Burchfield), and produced a Shakespeare Glossary (1911, etc.) which was an offshoot of his work on the OED.
He was no less valuable to Oxford University Press as an advisor and editor concerned with Old and Middle English texts and readers. He revised Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader (1922, 1946, etc.), urged Tolkien to undertake an edition of *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925), and supported Tolkien and his collaborator *E.V. Gordon in disputes with the Press on the length and contents of Sir Gawain. From 1932 to 1956 he was editor of the distinguished journal of medieval studies Medium Ævum (latterly with *J.A.W. Bennett), and from 1944 to 1957 served on the Council of the Early English Text Society (*Societies and clubs), from 1945 as its Honorary Director.
Onions was also on the faculty of the Oxford English School, as Lecturer in English (1920–27) and Reader in English Philology (1927–49). He had therefore the added responsibilities of lectures to be delivered in term, notably on Middle English texts, and (often in company with Tolkien) administrative duties on the English Faculty Board and various committees. In 1923 he was made a fellow of Magdalen College. In 1925 he was an elector for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship when Tolkien was chosen for that chair. As a member of the Kolbítar (*Societies and clubs) Onions, like Tolkien, had the advantage of existing knowledge of Icelandic in translating the sagas and Eddas.
On 9 January 1965 Tolkien wrote to his son Michael: ‘My dear old protector, backer, and friend Dr C.T. Onions died on Friday at 91 1/3 years. I had not seen him for a long while. [Excepting Kenneth Sisam] he was the last of the people who were “English” at Oxford and at large when I entered the profession’ (Letters, p. 353).
According to Tom Shippey, C.T. Onions pronounced his surname not like the vegetable but ‘On-aye-ons’, and ‘unlike Tolkien he retained a Birmingham accent through his life’ (‘History in Words: Tolkien’s Ruling Passion’, in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2006), p. 26).
See further, J.A.W. Bennett, ‘Charles Talbut Onions, 1873–1965’, in Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1979).
Orcs. Two essays, a note, and an extract, published with notes and commentary as texts VIII, IX, and X in the section ‘Myths Transformed’ of *Morgoth’s Ring (1993), pp. 408–24.
Text VIII is a short essay, entitled Orcs, which *Christopher Tolkien describes as ‘very much a record of “thinking with the pen”’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 409). The Orcs posed a major problem for Tolkien as he recognized at the beginning of the essay: ‘Their nature and origin require more thought. They are not easy to work into the theory and system …. As the case of Aulë and the Dwarves shows [see *‘Of Aulë and Yavanna’], only Eru could make creatures with independent wills, and with reasoning powers. But Orcs seem to have both …’ (p. 409). In September 1954 Tolkien had written to Peter Hastings that because Eru had given
special ‘sub-creative’ powers to certain of His highest created beings: that is a guarantee that what they devised and made should be given the reality of Creation. Of course within limits, and of course subject to certain commands or prohibitions. But if they ‘fell’, as the Diabolus Morgoth did, and started making things ‘for himself, to be their Lord’, these would then ‘be’ real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove …. They would be … creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote ‘irredeemably bad’; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good.) But whether they could have ‘souls’ or ‘spirits’ seems a different question; and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible ‘delegation’, I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them. [Letters, p. 195]
In other words, the Orcs were not ‘made’ by Morgoth but only corrupted and, as Tolkien describes them elsewhere in the letter, ‘fundamentally a race of “rational incarnate” creatures’ (p. 190). The only question was whom or what had Morgoth corrupted to produce them.
Up until at least 1954 Tolkien’s solution was that Morgoth transformed captured Elves into Orcs. Towards the end of the 1950s his opinion seems to have shifted, however, to the idea that Orcs had been bred from both Elves and Men, but primarily Men (see *Notes on Motives in the Silmarillion, another of the texts in ‘Myths Transformed’). Probably at this time he also added a note in the Annals of Aman (*Annals of Valinor), originally written c. 1951,
