Tea at Trianon: Tolkien’s Letters Are Up For Sale

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, August 3, 2024

Tolkien’s Letters Are Up For Sale

From Country Life:

70 years and two days ago, The Fellowship of the Ring, first part of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, was published. To mark the occasion, Bayliss Rare Books has launched ‘the finest collection to come to the market in decades’, with first editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (ranging from £30,000 to just under £80,000), as well as various opinionated letters written by J. R. R. Tolkien to his friends, publisher and the original theatre director of The Hobbit. In these, he discusses theories of language, his thoughts on Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes (‘quite a sniff of priggery about these two precious gents’) and how he named the home of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, Bag-End, after his aunt’s house in Worcestershire.

‘I am well aware that dwarfs is the correct modern English plural of dwarf; but I intend to use dwarves for good reasons of my own,’ wrote Tolkien to his publisher Allen & Unwin on July 22, 1953. ‘I take it harder that my elven and elven-should be replaced, though not consistently, by the detestable Spenserian elfin, which it was specially designed to avoid… I never have voluntarily used, and do not intend (if I can avoid it) to be represented as using the form farther for the older further, and should be grateful if the further of my copy could be left alone… I think it would be much better, and save time and annoyance in the end, if it was assumed that all apparent oddities and idiosyncrasies… were intentional.’ The letters range in price from £15,000 to £40,000. (Read more.)