he sent his manuscript to Tolkien for comment and revision, and suggested a date by which the work should be done. (Gordon’s actions in this paragraph, and much else in our account of the edition of Pearl, are documented in correspondence held in the Oxford University Press archives, Oxford.)
Sisam, Gordon’s editor, thought that the edition needed cutting. Gordon, reasoning that it is much easier to cut someone else’s work than to reduce one’s own, hoped that Tolkien would be willing to do so with Pearl. In December 1937 Tolkien replied that he was willing to attempt to reduce its length, but was opposed to the drastic reduction that had been suggested. It was agreed that Gordon and Tolkien together would work on the revision; but Gordon wrote to Sisam that he feared it would take a long time.
On 29 July 1938 E.V. Gordon died. Tolkien then began to help in the settling of his friend’s affairs and academic obligations, as far as he was able to do so. Among these was the edition of Pearl, which was still in abeyance when Tolkien wrote to Stanley Unwin c. 18 March 1945 that he was ‘in trouble with the widow of Professor E.V. Gordon of Manchester, whose posthumous work on Pearl I undertook, as a duty to a dead friend and pupil, to put in order; and have failed to do my duty’ (Letters, p. 114). By mid-1947 Gordon’s widow, Ida, a scholar of Middle English in her own right (see entry for *E.V. Gordon), herself took over the task of completing the edition of Pearl for publication. As she later wrote in its preface, at the time of her husband’s death ‘the edition was complete – complete, that is, in that no part was missing and all had been put into form, if not final form’ (p. iv). On c. 22 July 1947 Tolkien sent Mrs Gordon a revised introduction to the work, and by early August sent her related linguistic matter as well as general comments and suggestions. In a return letter she asked for Tolkien’s advice about preparing the manuscript for publication, and he agreed to assist her further. He did not do so at once, however, much to the consternation of Mrs Gordon and Oxford University Press. Kenneth Sisam warned her that Tolkien was a perfectionist; but his busy Oxford schedule, and matters such as the completion of The Lord of the Rings, also contributed to delay. On 13 June 1949 Tolkien advised D.M. Davin at Oxford University Press that only half of the glossary for Pearl remained to be done – referring, presumably, to his review of the glossary for revision. Probably in June 1950 Tolkien at last completed his revisions. In her preface Mrs Gordon wrote: ‘Many factors combined to delay publication, and … I started the work of final revision in 1950 …’ (p. iv).
On 19 August Ida Gordon sent the manuscript, now finished except for the introduction, to Oxford University Press; in this she incorporated Tolkien’s suggestions and corrections, as well as notes left by her husband. She herself made emendations to the text, restored one reading on Tolkien’s advice, and in general brought order to the material. Tolkien also suggested two changes of punctuation, and wrote one note that Mrs Gordon could not read. During September 1950 Tolkien replied to further queries about the work. On 13 September Mrs Gordon wrote to Tolkien that she was still worried about the introduction to Pearl, though a section which Tolkien had rewritten simplified the task considerably; and in other sections she felt that there may be some unnecessary detail, which she would try to reduce.
But more drastic cuts were called for by the publisher. On 6 June 1951 Ida Gordon commented to D.M. Davin at Oxford University Press that although she could understand some of the suggestions he sent her in regard to Pearl, she felt that the work would suffer if its associated matter were cut in half, as Davin had asked on the advice of Kenneth Sisam. The section Davin targeted in particular, including a discussion of problems involved with the work (‘Form and Purpose’, pp. xi–xix), was contributed by Tolkien, and was already a reduced revision. Davin discussed Mrs Gordon’s letter with Tolkien, who was happy to give her a free hand to condense or omit any parts of his contribution, in the interests of brevity; it is not known if any change was made in Tolkien’s text, though some parts of the introduction were omitted from the published work. Mrs Gordon stated in her preface that she wished to reduce the length of the book ‘in a way that would sacrifice as little as possible of the original material’, and that this ‘made it necessary to make extensive alterations in the form’ (p. iv).
Later, when the question arose about whether his name should appear on the title-page of Pearl, Tolkien declined, giving full credit to his late friend; nor did Ida Gordon sign her name except to the Preface. The edition was published at last at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in June 1953; see further, Descriptive Bibliography B22. It is still well respected as a standard text.
‘FORM AND PURPOSE’
A central feature of Tolkien’s part of the introduction to Pearl is a discussion of *allegory and symbolism in relation to the poem. ‘It is proper, or at least useful,’ he writes, ‘to limit allegory to narrative, to an account (however short) of events; and symbolism to the use of visible signs or things to represent other things or ideas …. To be an “allegory” a poem must as a whole, and with fair consistency, describe in other terms some event or process; its entire narrative and all its significant details should cohere and work together to this end.’ Pearl contains ‘minor allegories’; ‘but an allegorical description of an event does not make that event itself allegorical’ (pp. xi–xii). In the poet’s day
visions … allowed marvels to be placed within the real world … while providing them with an explanation in the phantasies of sleep, and a defence against critics in the notorious deception of dreams …. We are dealing with a period when men, aware of the vagaries of dreams, still thought that amid their japes came visions of truth. And their waking imagination was strongly moved by symbols and the figures of allegory …. [pp. xiv–xv]
This text was later printed also as part of the introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, pp. 18–23.
The Peoples of Middle-earth. The twelfth and final volume of *The History of Middle-earth, edited with notes and commentary by *Christopher Tolkien, first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, London, in September 1996, and in the United States by the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, in December 1996. See further, Tolkien Collector 14 (October 1996), pp. 7–8, and Tolkien Collector 15 (February 1997), pp. 5–6.
Part One, ‘The Prologue and Appendices to The Lord of the Rings’, is divided into nine parts: ‘The Prologue’; ‘The Appendix on Languages’; ‘The Family Trees’; ‘The Calendars’; ‘The History of the *Akallabêth’; ‘The Tale of Years of the Second Age’; ‘The Heirs of Elendil’; ‘The Tale of Years of the Third Age’; and ‘The Making of Appendix A’ (‘The Realms in Exile’, ‘The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen’, ‘The House of Eorl’, ‘Durin’s Folk’). Christopher Tolkien did not realize when he brought the story of *The Lord of the Rings to an end in *Sauron Defeated (1992) that his father had done much work on the Prologue and the Appendices possibly even while writing the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings in the summer of 1948, and certainly immediately after that time, until by the middle of 1950 he had a series of fair copy texts which might provide the necessary background to the story. He probably did little more with this until 1952, when he began to prepare The Lord of the Rings for publication, and most of the final work on the Appendices was accomplished in 1954–5.
Part Two, ‘Late Writings’, contains works from the final years of Tolkien’s life, c. 1967–1973: *Of Dwarves and Men; *The Shibboleth of Fëanor; *The Problem of Ros; *Glorfindel, together with extracts from two versions of a discussion of the Dwarves’ tradition that the spirits of their Seven Fathers were from time to time reborn (drawn from a larger discussion mainly on the reincarnation of Elves, hence see *Some Notes on ‘Rebirth’); *The Five Wizards (‘Note on the landing of the Five Wizards and their functions and operations’); and *Círdan. This was a time, Christopher Tolkien comments, when his father ‘was moved to write extensively, in a more generalised view, of the languages and peoples of the Third Age
