Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Unseen JRR Tolkien poems found in school magazine

Two works by the Lord of the Rings author discovered in the 1936 annual of Our Lady’s School in Oxfordshire


JRR Tolkien.
‘These poems will be enjoyed by lovers of Tolkien everywhere’ ... JRR Tolkien. Photograph: Haywood Magee/Getty Images
Two poems by JRR Tolkien, in which The Lord of the Rings author writes variously of “a man who dwelt alone/beneath the moon in shadow”, and of the “lord of snows”, have been discovered in a school magazine in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

Believed to have been written while Tolkien was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, the poems were found in the 1936 annual of Our Lady’s School in Oxfordshire. The discovery was made when the US Tolkien scholar Wayne Hammond contacted Our Lady’s headteacher, Stephen Oliver. Hammond had found a note from Tolkien in which The Hobbit author mentioned that he had published two poems in a magazine he named as the Abingdon Chronicle.

Hammond realised this was Our Lady’s school magazine, and got in touch with Oliver. Initially, the latter could not locate the correct edition of the magazine, and passed Hammond on to the archives of the Sisters of Mercy, who had founded the school in 1860.  More

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