Tolkien Archive and Exhibition at Bodleian (Part 1)

I'm Catherine McIlwaine, I'm the Tolkien archivist at the public library at the University of Oxford. OK, so could you tell me what actually entails being the token archivist? Well, I'm responsible for the creation of the Tolkien archive, which we hold of the Bodleian, which is the largest Tolkien archive in the world. We have about 500 boxes of tokens, manuscripts and over 300 volumes from this academic working library. So part of my job is to catalogue that material in archival terms.

This means to look through every box of manuscripts, describe what's there, put it into an intellectual order that's going to make sense to the user and then to help the end user in the reading rooms and academic researchers can come to the party and to consult the archive. I also deal with researchers from further afield who can't make it into the library answering their queries because the archive is still quite a modern collection.

It's still in copyright. So my job entails quite a lot of liaison with the Tolkien estate who and administrate the archive. And so requests for any publications or for images to go into publications and involves quite a liaison between me and the estate and the user. So it's quite a varied job. I also do outreach connected to the collection. Obviously, Tolkien is of great interest beyond the academic community and the public interest in his work as well.

So we've done displays, major exhibitions, books. I do sometimes school groups and sometimes virtual sessions with students from overseas. And well, during the pandemic I have sometimes they can come into the library and we'll do acquisitions of virtual sessions. And so, yeah, it's nice to have some outreach as well beyond the academic researchers. And and yeah, that gives us is quite a rounded job in terms of

an archivist. We've touched on it and the events of 20-21 with the pandemic, and has that really impacted on your ability to do your job because you've had to almost physically separate it from the archive? It's been interesting, actually. We've all learnt to use technologies that had been around but that we hadn't really grappled with before.

So zoom meetings and and team sessions and some of it has been really fantastic statement that I could reach out to groups overseas, much bigger groups than could travel to Oxford. And so you feel like you're reaching out not to just people who can afford to get on a plane from America and come to Oxford for two weeks. But anyone who can just show up in their university room and I also did a book club recently for children aged eight to 14.

And that was a session that we conducted across the UK and everybody could kind of dial in via Zoom and they could see me chatting and they could ask me questions. And that was really lovely to get that sort of interactive. And I don't think I would ever have done something like that before the pandemic. But we've all got so used to different ways of working that there's really some positive things about it and it hasn't greatly affected my work.

And although some of my work is hands on, I need to consult the archive and I need to do some of my cataloguing work. A lot of what I do is set at my desk and just sat at the computer answering enquiries. It's dealing with copyright issues. It's liaising with the estate. So during the pandemic, really, when I've been able to access the library, I've stored up and test, I need to do where I actually need to consult the archive.

And I've probably done a bit more work for researchers who are unable to get the book in than I would usually. Usually I would just facilitate the research and tell them what they can find, which box it would be in, and because research so been able to travel to the UK, I've done more of going down to look at that material, getting out of the stacks and sending them information or sending them scans with the approval of the Tolkien estate.

So a little bit different, but it hasn't greatly affected my day to day work. OK, thank you. I'm just wondering if it's OK just in the now and the here and now because it is such an extraordinary time.

And have you noticed an increase in interest in Tolkien? Because one of the things people are saying is, you know, people have returned to books a lot more. They've and they've also returned to books which, well, in Tolkien's world allows you to escape the prison cell and imagine a better world around.

Have you seen a bigger increase in interest? Not in terms of the enquiries coming to me, which a lot of the enquiries are from academics and the exhibition that we held at the Bodleian 2018 and then Follow-On exhibitions in New York and Paris hugely increased interest in our collection and raised its profile.

But in terms of the pandemic, it was interesting because the schoolchildren who did the book club event with one of the questions from a girl in that group was and did I think that Tolkien's work - particularly looking at The Hobbit rather than the Lord of the Rings, which is more appropriate for their age group - did I think that it had a particular message for us during the pandemic. And so, yeah, that was interesting that people, even children, were reading it with a different slant.

Now looking at it and from a period of of danger and fear for everyone that we've all lived through. And I think even though children weren't getting sick and dying as adults were, they were still affected by the fear. And how did you reply or did she also have a view? Yeah, I think it was really interesting. I hadn't really thought of it myself. But of course, The Hobbit and the main character and Bilbo Baggins is not really heroic character, is he?

But he grows during this journey. He goes through fearful episodes and he has to overcome that. And and it all comes right. In the end, he finds inner strength that he never knew he had and he finds his own moral compass and he comes back safe, which I think is important for the age group reading that book. So, yeah, I thought it was it did have a message during this, this period that, um.

Yeah. That we can all look into our own personal resources, you know, look within ourselves and we can find that we have more strengths than we realised. And that, you know, through very difficult times, we could come out on the other side into better times.

Yeah, well, let's hope so. Thank you. Yeah. And so returning to the collection itself from the archives, could you say a bit about the history of how it actually came to Bodley and also the relationship between the collection and the collection at Marquette? Yes. So the collection that we have at the Bodleian came after Tolkien died. So Tolkien died in 1973 at that point and some he'd already sold part of his archive to.

So maybe should I deal with the market first in sort of chronological order that that came first. And so Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings, you know, three volumes, 1954 and 1955. And he was he was quite near retirement, actually, when the book was published. It had taken an awful long time to write. And then he had taken him another five years to get published. And so he was quite an elderly professor who was in his 60s by that time.

And Marquette University in the state of Wisconsin, in America, in Milwaukee. In fact, they have appointed a new director of the library service called William Reedy, and they were building a new memorial library. And at that time and they wanted to fill it with collections and so really was employed. I think he had come from Stanford University, where he was an acquisitions librarian, and he was employed by Marquette University to acquire new collections.

This is in 1956. So he sought a number of different collections. He did not seem to have a theme to me. There was lots to eat and sort didn't get. He did get the papers of the US politician McCarthy, and he got the papers of a Catholic activist, Dorothy Day, and for some reason known only, I suspect, William Ready. He went after the papers of JRR Tolkien. And the dates are quite important here because it's only a year after the publication of The Return of the King, the final volume.

And so it really is very quick off the blocks, if you like. And he gets in touch with Tolkien via a London book dealer called Bertram Rota and offers to purchase his manuscripts. I think even in America, this is quite, quite a new era over there where they're starting to purchase archives of living individuals,

not just authors, but writers and academics. And Tolkien's age, again, as I mentioned, is important because when he's approached by Bertram Rota at the end of 1956, he's coming towards retirement. He doesn't have a lot of money. There's been quite a lot of discussion in the talking community about this, but he absolutely didn't have a lot of money at that time. And he'd only received one royalty payment from the Lord of the Rings.

So in 1954, he didn't receive it in 1955, didn't receive any payments because he was on a profit sharing deal with the publisher. It was a huge undertaking to publish his book and thousand pages long and three volumes. It was an adult fantasy novel in an era when this wasn't really even a genre fantasy wasn't a genre, and they didn't know who was going to sell to who was going to buy this massive fairy story for adults.

And but they knew The Hobbit sold. Well, that was that the first publication. And when the publisher really liked the Lord of the Rings and they thought they'll go for it, they thought they were going to lose money on it. Definitely. And the head of the firm, Stanley Unwin, said you can lose a thousand pounds on it. If you think it's a work of genius, you can thousand pounds. So they're prepared to publish it even at a loss.

And so to cut down the risks and what they said to Tolkien, you won't get any royalties. That would be sort of seven to 11 percent would be an average royalty for an author. This you won't get any royalties that will put you on a profit sharing 50/50 deal once production costs have been paid off. If it makes any money after that point, then you get half that. Well, knowing what we know now and the sales of Lord of the Rings, phenomenal.

They would never have offered him that deal if they thought he was going to sell anything like it does. So this was to reduce their risk. And this is why Tolkien didn't receive any money until May 1956 when he received a royalty check. Quite a hefty one. And he's surprised by that.

He is so surprised that he was selling. And so shortly after that, at the towards the end of that year, actually he was approached by Marquette University through Bertram Rota and offered 1500 pounds for his manuscripts of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. And this sounds derisory now. It really wasn't. It was equivalent to his annual salary as a professor at Oxford at the time. He was the professor of professor of English language and literature, about £80,000 or something like that.

Right. Yeah. So, um, and Tolkien didn't jump at this. He took advice. He asked his publishers for their advice. I don't think they had any idea of what manuscripts were worth. And they hadn't been involved in this before. But they they thought if you checked out the tax situation, was he going to be taxed on that lump sum and as capital gains or was it going to be taxed as ink? And so he obviously took advice from his financial adviser as well, and he decided to go for it.

As I say, at that time, they would he had one payment from the books, but no one had written to him and said, we think this is really the peak in sales. We don't think you can do anything like this again. And so they weren't expecting to make any more money from it. And he thought, why not, you know, take this lump sum now, he'd actually just agreed to do two additional years as professor at Oxford. He should have retired in 57 and he'd agreed to go on until 1959.

And so after he agreed the deal with and Bertram Rota to sell not only The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, but also to throw in and Farmer Giles of Ham and Mr. Bliss, which was an unpublished children's picture book. And he got another royalty payment on a royalty payment and he got another and Profit-Sharing payment from the publisher in 57. And they said, we think this is definitely it, you know, you can't get anymore.

And but in fact, he continued to get a large payment and every year that followed throughout his life. And so everybody was wrong about that. But this is why he sold the manuscripts, because then they came to him and they offered him money at a time when he certainly needed money and when he was worried about. A retirement without any income. Not a very small pension. I heard people say that they would deliberately targeting Catholic writers, but that was the theme, right?

OK, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And and I don't know whether it was put to him that to talk in that it was a Catholic university, it was founded by Jesuits. It's a private Catholic university. And that might have had an impact on him as well as his Catholic faith was hugely important to him. Yeah. So to be clear, Bodley never asked for the manuscripts or offered him anything. No. I mean, at that time, I don't think anybody in the UK would have thought of trying to buy Tolkien's papers.

And the only book before that as sort of a fiction book was The Hobbit in 1937, which it continued to sell well. And then this huge gap until 1954, 55, and the Lord of the Rings came out. And although, you know, it was it was successful from the start, it was all it was kind of a slow burner in the U.K. and really took off 10 years or so later with the U.S. market and increasing sales and increasing publicity for Tolkien Tolkien's name.

So even at the time of his death in 73, I don't think it would have been anybody crowding round asking whether any of the papers. Were coming back to Oxford and the Bodley.

And it was several years after Tolkien died and the Bodleian was looking to increase its literary holdings of authors with an Oxford connexction. So it was specifically wanting to boost that area of our collections and the head of the keeper of the manuscripts, as it was called then, was David Vaizey, who went on to become Bodley's librarian and.

I don't know if it was David Vaizey's suggestion, but certainly he approached Christopher Tolkien and asked if he would ever consider giving these father's papers to the body. And there's quite a lovely phrase in the letter, the original letter from David Vaizey, Christopher Tollien, I'll have to paraphrase it now, but it's something along the lines of, you know, as a as a fellow of Exeter College and a reader and and an academic who needs no persuading of the genius of Tolkien.

And we really hope, you know, that this collection could come to the Bodleian. So Christopher was very happy to get that letter, very pleased by the idea and consulted with his siblings, who obviously have a stake in it as well, and everybody was agreed that they would like the collection to come to it.

And obviously, it's a natural home for it because it's Oxford University is where Tolkien came as a student and where he spent most of his academic career, apart from his five year stint at the University of Leeds, is where he wrote his books. And so there's a huge connexion in Tolkien's life to the university and to the library.

And I think that the family also felt that not only would the collection be safeguarded at the Bodleian, but it would also that also be an academic focus on the research. We wouldn't, in a way, sort of over use the collection or use it in an inappropriate way. So at that time, Christopher Tolkien was working on the Silmarillion and still had a need to use the manuscript material. So it was a little while before it was finalised and came to about it.

And so we got our first tranche of material in 1979. And then there's been quite a number of donations and deposits of further material over the years. And yeah, right almost up to the present day really, and we take him material from the family. And very occasionally we look to purchase material and of course, Tolkien and manuscripts or any items associated with talking about enormously high monetary value now, which makes it quite difficult to purchase items.

And we wouldn't for example, I think we wouldn't go for an individual letter and a letter from Tolkien, depending on the subject matter, would go between five and ten thousand pounds for an individual letter. And so bear in mind, the whole of our collection, we wouldn't go through something like that, Recently it was the Pauline Baynes map with annotations by Tolkien. But yeah, so we don't have a huge acquisitions fund as a lot of American universities do.

And so in order to purchase the it was a printed map of Middle-earth that was taken from the back of The return of the king. What was taken out of the Lord of the Rings, cut out from Pauline Bayne's copy and then her and Tolkien annotated it, and this was to help her visualise her illustration for the post a map of Middle-earth.

And so, yeah, it's fascinating to see what Tolkien's written on it about the flora and fauna, what the ships would look like in the sales and and different place names that he's written on that map. So it just shows there's so much more in his mind that they can put down into the published work at that stage. So that was a really lovely item. As soon as I saw that, I took with me as well Judith Priestman, who's curator of literary manuscripts at the time, the Bodleian.

And we went to look at it and we thought, oh gosh, I would love to have this item. This is very special and to have in the collection, but that entailed grant applications and asking friends of the Bodleian and to support it and financial way. And so there's quite a lot of effort involved and quite a lot of time went into that.

So it's about six months before we acquired that map. If we were to describe the archive now under the major headings that we have, you mentioned the Silmarillion manuscripts, academic papers, is that right? And what will be the main categories that it falls under?

Yeah, I have it into academic papers and academic books, literary papers and personal papers and artwork. And they art work is such a large section that I just get it into a separate section. And so the academic papers are mostly available to researchers and these range from Tolkien's and notes that he took as a student at Oxford. And when he changed the English course way through his degree, I don't know what he did with these classics notebooks.

I think he slung them because we only have it from when he started the English degree in 1913. So they go, yeah, from his own and student notes to the academic lecture notes and research that he did for his own lectures. Well, from Leeds onwards, from 1920 onwards, and quite a large section of his working library is. His books of old middle English edition, some dictionaries and Philological works, and they're interesting for his annotations in those books.

So that's his academic work and that's available to researchers and the literary papers, obviously, of great interest. And a small amount of those are available for researchers to consult. That is the non-Middle-earth material, I would say. So that's Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major?

You can look at the draught manuscripts of that and see you was going with that before it came to publication. draft And this is important essays and lectures that he gave, like 'on fairy-stories' and Sir Gawaian and the monsters and the critics , which are really his academic papers, but cross over section as well. fairy stories.

Which gives Tolkien's views on fairy stories were telling when he was at the beginning of writing The Lord of the Rings and trying to assess in his own mind what their stories were and whether they were appropriate material for adults to read. It's really interesting. So the Middle-earth material, which is really from the earliest writings in the Silmarillion and when Tolkien is a student at Oxford, right through to his later writings on.

Reincarnation of elves and. Some linguistic work in that he wrote towards the end of his life. All that material and is at the Bodleian but isn't available yet to researchers. Some of that going to be in Carl Hostetter's new book. Yes, that's true. Yes. I was just looking yesterday to see if that was. Published, and I think it's due out soon. Yeah, so publication date of September, but I thought it was June, but yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing that.

Yes, so Carl had permission to publish some of that material in the nature of Middle Earth, which is quite exciting.

So that's literary papers. And all the personal papers that we hold are still closed to researchers. And just because of the personal nature of them and because, you know, close members of Tolkien's family are still alive. So at some point in the future and hopefully that material be de- restricted, the artwork is not available in a way because it's so fragile and that we don't produce it in the reading room.

And I often get asked, well, you know, people sat there looking at mediaeval manuscripts, you know, and illuminated manuscripts. Why can't I look at Tolkien's drawings? And the reason is that, you know, mediaeval manuscripts are on really durable material with parchment and thick paper and Tolkien throughout his life, Just used anything that came to hand. He didn't even go to the art shop and buy, you know, good quality paper and then start on the,

you know, the Hobbit dust jacket, which was going to be published. He just didn't he just picked up some notes and student examin script or, you know, the drawing of Xanadu and which is on the back of his Taylor's receipt Yeah. So he continually uses recycled material. And the material that in itself is is not going to last unless it's preserved in optimum conditions. And the more that it's handled and exposed to light and handled by people, the worse it becomes.

And also some of the artwork is fragile. So if you've got, like soft jokes and soft pencil on the surface every time that's moved around or handled, that can actually be taken off the surface. So we're very careful with the artwork and only surrogates are made available. And fortunately, that's less of a problem now because a lot of the artwork has been published in quality and reproduction.

And that was one of the things that's so nice about the exhibition here and elsewhere, is that we were able to showcase so much of that material, which is usually just kept hidden in the dark, underground in the strongroom. And so it was really lovely to be able to share that material. But with art work and I remember you helped me when I was doing my analysis of Shelob's Lair chapter and I'd got some facsimile manuscripts from Marquette,

which is the text. But then because he'd drawn the illustration of Cirith Ungol that was in Bodley. So was that common that there was a split? Every time he dida drawing something like that, it'd end up here. I think that's that's an unusual piece in our collection. And for us, it's highly prized because it has this two pages of manuscript writing from the Lord of the Rings and the rest of it is at Marquette University.

And so that is unusual. I think probably what it comes down to is in the correspondence with Bertram Rota when he's negotiating the sale Tolkien and like most authors or academics, wants to sort out the papers before and they go to market, which is always hugely busy and he's always delayed. And he can see this throughout his correspondence. And he's always apologising for being late with things weeks, months, years later in some cases. And so this doesn't get done.

And they take, I think, The Hobbit and Farmer Giles and Mr Bliss in 1957, and he's still hanging on to the Lord the Rings. He still wants to sort it out and they come back to him and eventually he has to just let it go without ever sorting through it. And that material, one year later, 1958, still not having been sorted. And so I think, yes, he did remove that. Shelob's Lair He must have removed it because of the artwork on it and then never realised when the manuscript was sold.

I know that many years later, Christopher Tolkien and discovered a number of boxes of material that were revisions and draughts of Lord of the Rings, and he felt that they should have been included in the sale to market. And so he donated them at that point. And I can keep in their collection of Lord of the Rings complete which is nice. Again, I'm sorry to say we just have that one. Great for us but not so great for Marquette.