John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

Further works compiled by Christopher Tolkien

Date	Title	Description
2007	The Children of Húrin	tells the story of Túrin Turambar and his sister Nienor, children of Húrin Thalion.^[145]
2009	The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún	retells the legend of Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs from Germanic mythology as a narrative poem in alliterative verse, modelled after the Old Norse poetry of the Elder Edda.^[146]
2013	The Fall of Arthur	is a narrative poem that Tolkien composed in the early 1930s, inspired by high medieval Arthurian fiction but set in the Post-Roman Migration Period, showing Arthur as a British warlord fighting the Saxon invasion.^[147]
2014	Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary	is a prose translation of Beowulf that Tolkien made in the 1920s, with commentary from Tolkien's lecture notes.^[148][149]
2015	The Story of Kullervo	is a retelling of a 19th-century Finnish poem that Tolkien wrote in 1915 while studying at Oxford.^[150]
2017	The Tale of Beren and Lúthien	is one of the oldest and most often revised in Tolkien's legendarium; a version appeared in The Silmarillion.^[151]
2018	The Fall of Gondolin	tells of a beautiful, mysterious city destroyed by dark forces; Tolkien called it "the first real story" of Middle-earth.^[152][153]

Manuscript locations

Before his death, Tolkien negotiated the sale of the manuscripts, drafts, proofs and other materials related to his then-published works—including The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham—to the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Marquette University's John P. Raynor, S.J., Library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.^[154] After his death his estate donated the papers containing Tolkien's Silmarillion mythology and his academic work to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.^[155] The Library held an exhibition of his work in 2018, including more than 60 items which had never been seen in public before.^[156]

In 2009, a partial draft of Language and Human Nature, which Tolkien had begun co-writing with C. S. Lewis but had never completed, was discovered at the Bodleian Library.^[157]

Languages and philology

Linguistic career

Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialized in English philology at university and in 1915 graduated with Old Norse as his special subject. He worked on the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918 and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, including walrus, over which he struggled mightily.^[158] In 1920, he became Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".^{[T 12]} He also had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of Finnish.^[159]

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak.^[160] He considered the West Midlands dialect of Middle English to be his own "native language", and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)."^{[T 13]}