TOLKIEN, John Ronald Reuel (1892-1973). Author of The Lord of the Rings .
Autograph Card Signed ("J.R.R.T.") to Miss Levinson, sending his greetings and asking if "there is anything that you would like as a token - gift" with four lines from the Crist of Cynewulf in Anglo-Saxon on the recto.
2 pages small oblong 8vo, Merton College, Oxford, 20 December 1956.
The poem, written in Anglo-Saxon script, begins:
"Eala Earendel engla beorhtast ofer middan geard monnu sended . . ."
On the verso, Tolkien sends his greetings, continuing, "Also it would be kind of you to let me know if there is anything that you would like as a token - gift - from one who has (in every way) so far received more than given."
In 1913, Tolkien, then a student of English Language at Oxford, first discovered Cynewulf's Crist , an Anglo-Saxon religious poem. Two lines especially stayed with him, translated as "Hail Earendel brightest of angels / above the middle-earth sent unto men". Earendel has been variously associated with the dawn star, Venus, or with John the Baptist. For Tolkien, the discovery was a revelation, and in his biography of Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter quotes a later remark by the writer that "I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep." A year later, Tolkien wrote a poem which began "Earendel sprang up from the Ocean's cup / In the gloom of the mid-world's rim". Tolkien's still-potent mythology was to grow from those few lines.
The ink on the message has been slightly smudged in two places, but the quotation is in excellent condition in Tolkien's distinctive hand, made even more decorative by the Middle English script.
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