Tolkien posed as the editor of two other published works as well. He revised his still unpublished Farmer Giles of Ham several times, most notably to read to the Lovelace Society at Worcester College, *Oxford, on 14 February 1938 in lieu of a talk on *fairy-stories. For this occasion he enlarged the story by half, adding names and allusions directed at an Oxford academic audience. The narrator is now anonymousm but obviously shares Tolkien’s interest in names, lexicography, and word-play. Nearly ten years later, when preparing it for publication, Tolkien made further additions and changes. The story now begins:
Ægidius de Hammo was a man who lived in the midmost parts of the Island of Britain. In full his name was Ægidius Ahenobarbus Julius Agricola de Hammo; for people were richly endowed with names in those days in those days, now long ago, when this island was still happily divided into many kingdoms: There was more time then, and folk were fewer, so that most men were distinguished. …
Farmer Giles had a dog. The dog’s name was Garm. Dogs had to be content with short names in the vernacular: Book-latin was reserved for their betters. Garm could not talk even dog-latin; but he could use the vulgar tongue (as could most dogs in his day) either to bully or to brag or to wheedle in. [p. 9]
And the first mention of the blunderbuss is followed by: ‘Some may well ask what a blunderbuss was. Indeed, this very question, it is said, was put to the Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford, and after thought they replied: “A blunderbuss is a short gun with a large bore firing many balls or slugs, and capable of doing execution within a limited range without exact aim. (Now superseded in civilized countries by other firearms.)”’ (p. 15) Thus he gives the Oxford English Dictionary definition, alluding to its four editors and perhaps sardonically wondering what firearms have to do with civilization.
Tolkien also added a foreword, or rather a mock foreword, to fit his mock-heroic story, in which he adopts the pose of a scholar who has translated and is editing an obscure document, not for its story but for the crumbs of information it provides. He does not rate it highly:
Of the history of the Little Kingdom few fragments have survived; but by chance an account of its origin has been preserved: a legend, perhaps, rather than an account; for it is evidently a late compilation, full of marvels, derived not from sober annals, but from the popular lays to which its author frequently refers. For him the events that he records lay already in a distant past. …
An excuse for presenting a translation of this curious tale out of its very insular Latin into the modern tongue of the United Kingdom, may be found in the glimpse that it affords of life in a dark period in the history of Britain, not to mention the light that it throws on the origin of some difficult place-names. Some may find the character and adventures of its hero attractive in themselves. [p. 7]
In our fiftieth anniversary edition of the work we remarked that ‘many who have written about Farmer Giles of Ham have interpreted its foreword as a satirical extension by Tolkien of his British Academy lecture, *Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. … In that landmark work he criticized the critics who approached Beowulf only as a historical document, not as a poem worthy of attention for its literary merits’ (p. viii). Here, in his foreword, Tolkien pretends to be just such a critic.
He adopted an editorial pose again in 1962 for *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book. Tolkien, in response to a suggestion from his Aunt *Jane Neave, had suggested to his publisher an illustrated edition of the poem *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. *Rayner Unwin liked the idea but wanted a longer book, and asked if Tolkien had other poems suitable for inclusion. Tolkien found several but was not entirely happy with them, as shown in a letter to illustrator *Pauline Baynes: ‘Alas! you put your finger unerringly on a main difficulty: they are not a unity from any point of view, but made at different times under varying inspiration’ (6 December 1961, Letters, p. 312). In a letter to Rayner Unwin on 12 April 1952 he suggested a possible solution:
The various items … not really ‘collect’. The only possible link is the fiction that they come from the Shire from about the period of The Lord of the Rings. But that fits some uneasily. I have done a good deal of work, trying to make them fit better. …
Some kind of foreword might possibly be required. The enclosed is not intended for that purpose! Though one or two of its points might be made more simply. But I found it easier, and more amusing (for myself) to represent to you in the form of a ridiculous editorial fiction what I have done to the verses, and what their references now are. [Letters, p. 315]
Unwin was amused by the foreword and approved it. Tolkien provided a short blurb which, adapted by Allen & Unwin (*Publishers), was used for advance publicity and on the dust-jacket, which includes the phrase: ‘during his renewed study of the “Red Book”, the editor of The Lord of the Rings became interested in verses that are to be found in it, apart from those included in the various tales and legends: pieces written out on loose leaves, crowded into blank spaces, or scrawled in margins’.
As ‘editor’ of the book Tolkien again suggests a superior attitude. Some of the more (as he describes them) carelessly written poems
are nonsense, now often unintelligible even when legible, or half-remembered fragments. … The present selection is taken from the older pieces, mainly concerned with legends and jests of the Shire at the end of the Third Age, that appear to have been made by Hobbits, especially by Bilbo and his friends, or their immediate descendants. Their authorship is, however, seldom indicated. Those outside the narratives are in various hands, and were probably written down from oral tradition. [1962 edn., p. 7]
Tolkien then proceeds to assign authorship of selections specifically to Bilbo or to Sam, including *Errantry to Bilbo because of its relationship with his poem in Rivendell (The Lord of the Rings, Book II, Chapter 1). For some of the poems he suggests influences from outside the Shire: *The Hoard, for example, ‘depends on the lore of Rivendell, Elvish and Númenorean, concerning the heroic days at the end of the First Age; it seems to contain echoes of the Númenorean tale of Túrin and Mim the Dwarf’ (p. 8). His comment that Hobbits ‘are fond of strange words, and of rhyming and metrical tricks’ applies equally to himself.
Christopher Tolkien notes that in his father’s unfinished time-travel story *The Lost Road the biography of Alboin Errol is in many respects modelled closely on Tolkien’s own life. From childhood waking and dreaming, strange names come into Alboin’s mind, which he perceives as two related languages he calls Eressëan, or Elf-latin, and Beleriandic. He studies Latin and Greek at school, but, like Tolkien, spends time learning other languages, especially those of the North:
Alboin liked the flavour of the older northern languages, quite as much as he liked some of the things written in them. He got to know a bit about linguistic history, of course; he found that you rather had it thrust upon you by the grammar-writers of ‘unclassical’ languages. Not that he objected: sound-changes were a hobby of his. … The languages he liked had a definite flavour – and to some extent a similar flavour which they shared. It seemed too, in some way related to the atmosphere of the legends and myths told in the languages. [*The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 39]
Like Tolkien, Alboin wins a scholarship to university, apparently only at his second attempt, he reads Classics but changes to a different school after ‘Honour Mods’ (but History rather than English), and achieves a First. He begins to hear fragments of some form of an old Germanic language, one phrase of which he translates as ‘a straight road lay westward, now it is bent’ (p. 43) Also like Tolkien, Alboin eventually becomes a professor, but at a less prestigious university. He continues to have dreams, and in addition to his professional duties, to pursue his interest in myth and language. He has one son, Audoin, who shares many of his interests; Audoin also has dreams, but sees pictures rather than hear languages: ships, battles and ‘the great temple on the mountain, smoking like a volcano’, and an ‘awful vision of the chasm in the seas, a whole land slipping sideways’ (p. 52). Alboin wonders much about the past and has a desire ‘to go back. To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads … to see the lie of old and even forgotten lands, to behold