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another Tolkien review, if you want it
Nov. 21st, 2025 09:28 amJ.R.R. Tolkien,The Bovadium Fragments, edited by Christopher Tolkien (Morrow, 2025)
One more tiny fragment from Tolkien. Nothing to do with Middle-earth, it's a sour joke complaining about Oxford traffic in the format of a mock-medieval scholarly manuscript study. The main text by Tolkien, written about 1960, is maybe six thousand words, not counting some draft material, a fair amount of commentary by the editor - which, interspersed as it is with other layers of JRRT's fictional scholars commenting on the fictional manuscripts, is enough to make the head spin - and a background essay on the traffic problem and relief road proposals of the time, by Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian, that's twice as long as JRRT's text.
If it takes twice as long to explain a joke as it does to make it, it probably wasn't worth the trouble of reading. This book is only worthwhile if you're a Tolkien completist or really interested in the history of Oxford city planning. Weirdly, I am both, but there aren't many of me. A friend to whom Tolkien showed the story told him that readers would be put off by the large amount of Latin (though most of it is translated elsewhere in the text) and probably wouldn't get the point, so he gave up any idea of publishing it. Originally he'd wanted to send it to a literary magazine called Time and Tide, and we're told more than once that Tolkien inquired plaintively of his publisher to find out who the current editor was. He couldn't have found an issue and looked at the masthead?*
To my mind, as intimidating as the Latin is the weight of the highly true-to-life mock-scholarly commentary that Tolkien - a scholar of medieval texts himself - loaded the text down with, a trick he also pulled, though less weightily in relation to the 'manuscript' part, in The Notion Club Papers. The idea is that they're far-future scholars trying to understand these cryptic records of the fall of our civilization. That the scholars are named Sarevelk, Gums, Rotzopny, Dwarf, and Sugob (read them backwards) and that Bovadium is "Oxford" translated into Latin are the most amusing part.
The three fragments themselves tell, in a vaguely formal and distant but not strongly medieval style, of Bovadium being taken over by the rising tide of Motores, to which the people become less masters than servants - I remember reading an SF story also using that conceit - and leading to total gridlock. In one fragment the inhabitants all die of the fumes, and in another a gas tank explodes, leading to a city-wide conflagration. The End, and good riddance.
*Despite the extent of the commentary, this book doesn't explain that Tolkien had published a poem - "Imram," extracted from the also then-unpublished Notion Club Papers - in Time and Tide a few years earlier, but the long-time editor had since died, thus presumably Tolkien not knowing who'd taken over.
One more tiny fragment from Tolkien. Nothing to do with Middle-earth, it's a sour joke complaining about Oxford traffic in the format of a mock-medieval scholarly manuscript study. The main text by Tolkien, written about 1960, is maybe six thousand words, not counting some draft material, a fair amount of commentary by the editor - which, interspersed as it is with other layers of JRRT's fictional scholars commenting on the fictional manuscripts, is enough to make the head spin - and a background essay on the traffic problem and relief road proposals of the time, by Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian, that's twice as long as JRRT's text.
If it takes twice as long to explain a joke as it does to make it, it probably wasn't worth the trouble of reading. This book is only worthwhile if you're a Tolkien completist or really interested in the history of Oxford city planning. Weirdly, I am both, but there aren't many of me. A friend to whom Tolkien showed the story told him that readers would be put off by the large amount of Latin (though most of it is translated elsewhere in the text) and probably wouldn't get the point, so he gave up any idea of publishing it. Originally he'd wanted to send it to a literary magazine called Time and Tide, and we're told more than once that Tolkien inquired plaintively of his publisher to find out who the current editor was. He couldn't have found an issue and looked at the masthead?*
To my mind, as intimidating as the Latin is the weight of the highly true-to-life mock-scholarly commentary that Tolkien - a scholar of medieval texts himself - loaded the text down with, a trick he also pulled, though less weightily in relation to the 'manuscript' part, in The Notion Club Papers. The idea is that they're far-future scholars trying to understand these cryptic records of the fall of our civilization. That the scholars are named Sarevelk, Gums, Rotzopny, Dwarf, and Sugob (read them backwards) and that Bovadium is "Oxford" translated into Latin are the most amusing part.
The three fragments themselves tell, in a vaguely formal and distant but not strongly medieval style, of Bovadium being taken over by the rising tide of Motores, to which the people become less masters than servants - I remember reading an SF story also using that conceit - and leading to total gridlock. In one fragment the inhabitants all die of the fumes, and in another a gas tank explodes, leading to a city-wide conflagration. The End, and good riddance.
*Despite the extent of the commentary, this book doesn't explain that Tolkien had published a poem - "Imram," extracted from the also then-unpublished Notion Club Papers - in Time and Tide a few years earlier, but the long-time editor had since died, thus presumably Tolkien not knowing who'd taken over.
