The ‘later’ Annals of Valinor show little development from the ‘earliest’ Annals. The ending of the section written as if by Rúmil is clearly marked. This work was now considered part of ‘The Silmarillion’, to be placed between the *Quenta Silmarillion and the *Annals of Beleriand.
Tolkien began work on the Annals of Aman by heavily emending his manuscript of the ‘later’ Annals of Valinor. But before he had proceeded very far he began a new manuscript, adding much material as he wrote. *Christopher Tolkien has noted that from the birth of Fëanor this new version ‘bears no comparison with the cursory [“later” Annals of Valinor], and represents a wholly different impulse; indeed, in this section we see the annal form disappearing as a fully-fledged narrative emerges. As was often the case in my father’s work, the story took over and expanded whatever restrictions of form he had set for it’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 102). Tolkien divided these annals into two sections, beginning a new reckoning with the creation of the Two Trees (Valian Year 3501 = Year 1 of the Trees). He made frequent changes to dates after the creation of the Trees; only the final form has been published. He also began a typescript of the work, making many changes of varying significance, but abandoned it before the awakening of the Elves.
A preamble to the ‘earliest’ Annals of Valinor states that both this work and the Annals of Beleriand were written by ‘Pengolod the Wise of Gondolin, before its fall, and after at Sirion’s Haven, and at Tavrobel in Tol Eressëa after his return unto the West, and there seen and translated by Eriol of Leithien, that is Ælfwine of the Angelcynn’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 263); but by an addition, the original authorship of all of the entries up to and including the Doom of Mandos is transferred to Rúmil the Elfsage of Valinor. The preamble in Tolkien’s typescript of the Annals of Aman gives a different ‘provenance’ for the work: ‘Rúmil made them in the Elder Days, and they were held in memory by the Exiles. Those parts which we learned and remembered were then set down in Númenor before the Shadow fell upon it’ (Morgoth’s Ring, pp. 64–5). A section in the manuscript, ‘Of the Beginning of Time and its Reckoning’, is said to have been ‘drawn from the work of [Eldarin loremaster] Quennar Onótimo’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 49); it was later transferred to *The Tale of Years.
For the part played by the Annals in the evolution of Tolkien’s mythology, see entries for the separate chapters of *The Silmarillion.
Appearance. Photographs of Tolkien at school and university – see especially Biography, The Tolkien Family Album, and John Garth, Tolkien and Exeter College (2014) – show a serious young man of medium height, slender, clean-shaven, hair parted in the middle. By 1916, in Army uniform, he had a more conventional haircut and a moustache – the latter was compulsory for British soldiers of Tolkien’s time until October 1916. The image of Tolkien most familiar to his readers, however, is that of the author in his later years. Richard Plotz, who visited him in 1966, described Tolkien as ‘a medium-sized man … [who] looks much younger than his seventy-four years. Like one of his creations, the Hobbits, he is a bit fat in the stomach …’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien Talks about the Discovery of Middle-earth, the Origins of Elvish’, Seventeen, January 1967, p. 92). In a letter of 8 February 1967 to interviewers Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, Tolkien stated that he was not ‘tall, or strongly built. I now measure 5 ft 8½, and am slightly built, with notably small hands. For most of my life I have been very thin and underweight. Since my early sixties I have become “tubby”. Not unusual in men who took their exercise in games and swimming, when opportunities for these things cease’ (Letters, p. 373). In ‘The Man Who Understands Hobbits’ (Daily Telegraph Magazine, 22 March 1968) the Plimmers wrote that Tolkien had ‘grey eyes, firm tanned skin, silvery hair and quick decisive speech’ (p. 31).
When Tolkien was a pupil at *King Edward’s School, Birmingham there was no uniform except for the school cap, but when he attended a function at the School in 1944 he found that some of his contemporaries remembered him for his taste in coloured socks. As an undergraduate at *Oxford, and later as a professor, he wore the appropriate gown when concerned with academic matters. Richard Plotz noted on his visit in 1966 that Tolkien ‘wore a conservative English suit which fitted impeccably’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien Talks …’, p. 92). Clyde S. Kilby, who spent some time with Tolkien in the summer of 1966, noted that he ‘was always neatly dressed from necktie to shoes. One of his favorite suits was a herringbone with which he wore a green corduroy vest [waistcoat]. Always there was a vest, and nearly always a sport coat. He did not mind wearing a very broad necktie which in those days was out of style’ (Tolkien & the Silmarillion (1976), p. 24). He had a particular liking for decorative waistcoats: he told one correspondent that he had ‘one or two choice embroidered specimens, which I sometimes wear when required to make a speech, as I find they so fascinate the eyes of the audience that they do not notice if my dentures become a little loose with excitements of rhetoric’ (letter to Nancy Smith, 25 December 1963, Special Collections and University Archives, John P. Raynor, S.J., Library, Marquette University).
Desmond Albrow recalled (‘A Brush with Greatness’, Catholic Herald, 31 January 1997) his first meeting with Tolkien at the latter’s home in 1943, when Albrow was an eighteen-year-old student at Oxford. Tolkien ‘was the first Oxford professor that I had ever met face to face and the delightful fact was that he had behaved to me like a true scholar-gentleman.’ ‘Here’, Albrow thought,
was a professor who looked like a professor (C.S. Lewis looked more like an intellectual butcher). Tolkien wore cords [corduroy trousers] and a sports jacket, smoked a reassuring pipe, laughed a lot, sometimes mumbled when his thoughts outstripped words, looked in those days to my idealistic eyes like the young Leslie Howard, the film actor. There was a sense of civilisation, winsome sanity and sophistication about him.
Adele Vincent, a student at Oxford in the mid-1950s who heard Tolkien lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, described his appearance thus: ‘He was a robust-looking man, with a kindly face. … He wore dull, academic tweeds rather than the brightly colored clothes that the Hobbits favored and he was quite a bit taller than they were. … Like the Hobbits he smoked a pipe and like them, too, he wore life lightly, enjoying a jest, scorning pedantry’ (‘Tolkien, Master of Fantasy’, Courier-Journal & Times (Louisville, Kentucky), 9 September 1973, reproduced in Authors in the News, vol. 1 (1976)).
Interviewers have noted that Tolkien almost clung to his pipe, cradling it in his hand, or speaking with it in his mouth, sometimes making him difficult to understand. One of these, Richard Plotz, wrote that Tolkien ‘took out a pipe as he entered his study, and all during the interview he held it clenched in his teeth, lighting and relighting it, talking through it; he never removed it from his mouth for more than five seconds’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien Talks …’, p. 92). See also *Smoking.
LATER PHOTOGRAPHS
Among the best known photographs of Tolkien are those in which he poses with trees. In May 1971 Lord Snowdon photographed him seated against the roots of a great tree in Branksome Chine, behind his home in *Poole. Billett Potter captured him seated on the ground and leaning against a tree trunk. And his grandson, Michael George, took a photograph of Tolkien in the Oxford Botanic Garden, standing by his favourite tree, a Pinus Nigra, only a few weeks before his death. Snowdon also photographed Tolkien standing on a cliff, silhouetted against the sea.
Other photographs often show Tolkien with a pipe in his hand or mouth, or just lighting it, sometimes producing a waft of smoke: a 1972 sequence of such photos by Billett Potter, of Tolkien in his study in Merton Street, Oxford, is reproduced in Biography. Also in 1972, possibly on the same day, Potter photographed Tolkien in academic robes on the occasion of his award of an Honorary D.Litt. from Oxford University.
Photographer