Who Was "Mr Rang" in Tolkien's Letters?

In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981), there is about eight pages worth of text comprising "Drafts for a letter to 'Mr Rang'" (Letter no. 297, pp. 379-387). I never knew there was any mystery about the identity of Mr. Rang until my friend Jessica Yates just sent me a draft of her short piece on this topic (now published here). My research of some ten years ago identified a different person. With Jessica's permission, I present my findings here. 

According to the Humphrey Carpenter's headnote to the letter, Tolkien had written at the top: "Some reflections in preparing an answer to a letter from one Mr Rang about investigation into my nomenclature. In the event only a brief (and therefore rather severe) reply was sent, but I retain these notes". Tolkien had added the date of August 1967. 

I have long believed that this Mr. Rang was Jack C. Rang, who delivered a talk "Two Servants" (on Niggle and Sam Gamgee) at the Tolkien Symposium at Mankato, Minnesota (somewhat south and west of Minneapolis) on 28-29 October 1966. This talk was subsequently published in February 1967 in "The Tolkien Papers", an issue of Mankato Studies in English.  Here we have a Mr. Rang who showed considerable interest in Tolkien in 1966, the year before Tolkien dated his notes in reply to a letter from a Mr. Rang. It has always seemed to me likely that these two Rangs were one and the same person.

Jack Charles Rang was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 27 September 1923. He was the only child of Carl John Rang (1890-1944), a bank cashier, and his wife Lena B. Willey (1888-1976). Jack died at the age of 87 in Centerville, Ohio, on 7 February 2011. On obituary in the Dayton News (11 February 2011) tells us that:

He served in the U.S. army during World War II and was a graduate of Northwestern University [B.S. 1948], receiving advanced degrees from Aquinas College [M.A. 1965] and Northwestern. Jack had a life-long love of the theatre and was involved in acting and directing many educational and community theatre productions. He was a radio and television personality and taught broadcasting courses, most recently at the University of Dayton, from which he retired in 1994 with the rank of Professor Emeritus.

Jack C. Rang had married in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1948, and was survived by his wife, Mary Ruth Rang (b. 1927), and their son, daughter and grandson. 

If this isn't the Mr. Rang that Tolkien wrote to in 1967, it is undoubtedly the Jack C. Rang who presented on Tolkien at Mankato in 1966.

Fairy-tale Versions of Beowulf

In Tolkien On Fairy-Stories (2008), Verlyn Flieger and I noted that in Tolkien's research notes for his famous lecture/essay, Tolkien queried himself twice about whether on not Andrew Lang had included a retold Beowulf in any of his Fairy Books--the first time briefly, but in the second instance with a bit of commentary: 

A Fairy Story. But when retold (seldom) it is not retold as such. For what the poet did to it was for his own purposes--rel[ated] to the substance but not the manner of the story. It should be retold as a fairy-story. [Tolkien On Fairy-stories, p. 100]

Verlyn and I suggested that this note (probably dating from 1943) might have been the germ for Tolkien's fairy story version "Sellic Spell" (in existence by the summer of 1945), which was unpublished at the time our book came out. "Sellic Spell" has since been published in Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell (2014), edited by Christopher Tolkien. It appears there in final form (occupying 26 pages by itself), with additional material including an introduction and commentary on the drafts by Christopher, and a version by Tolkien in Old English. 

I checked the twelve Andrew Lang colored fairy books when researching Tolkien On Fairy-stories, but found no fairy tale version of Beowulf. Since then I have worked with others of Lang's various anthologies for children and, oddly (considering its title), in Lang's The Red Book of Animal Stories (1899), I found two chapters covering the Beowulf story. As usual, Lang was the compiler of stories written by other people, and the Beowulf sections, and other stories about "unscientific animals" (to use Lang's phrase) were told by Mr. H.S.C. Everard, or Harry Stirling Crawfurd Everard (1848-1909), who was best known as a writer of columns on golf, for newspapers, magazines, and specialist journals. 

Everard's "The Story of Beowulf, Grendel, and Grendel's Mother" and "The Story of Beowulf and the Fire Drake" were illustrated with plates by H.J. Ford--two for the first story, one for the second. (I  copy all three along with this posting.) Both stories are short, and you can read the first here, and the second here. Both of the Everard versions have some interesting Tolkienian aspects, in details that do not come from the original. Enjoy.

Tolkien and A.E. Coppard

I have long wondered whether Tolkien had ever read anything by A.E. Coppard. In the rear of my anthology Tales Before Tolkien (2003), I included a note on Coppard in the final section, “Author Notes and Recommended Reading.” It reads:

Coppard, A[lfred]. E[dgar]. (1878-1957)

British writer, who specialized in the short story, many of which fancifully describe rural England. While Coppard published numerous collections, his own selection of his best work, The Collected Tales of A.E. Coppard (1948), was very successful, and it provides a good introduction to the author’s writings. (p. 429)

In his Foreword to his Collected Tales, Coppard noted that the short story “is an ancient art originating in the folk tale, which was a thing of joy before writing. . . . The folk tale ministered to an apparently inborn and universal desire to hear tales, and it is my feeling that the closer the modern short story conforms to that ancient tradition of being spoken to you, rather than being read to you, the more acceptable it becomes.” It is a view with which Tolkien would have felt some affinity.

Recently, Andoni Cossio discovered a photograph of Tolkien at an Oxford party for the writer A.E. Coppard. It appeared in The Tatler and Bystander of  Wednesday, 11 February 1953. We haven’t have an exact date yet for the party, but it was in honor of Coppard’s 75th birthday on Sunday, 4 January 1953. Oxford would not have been in session that early in January, and the Hilary Full Term actually began on 18 January 1953, so the party would seem to have been sometime in late January or early February (before the 11th, when the photograph was published).  

There are actually four photographs published from the event, accompanying the “Talk Around the Town” column by Gordon Beckles in that issue of The Tatler and Bystander. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

 

In one photograph, we see Tolkien standing with Richard Hughes, who reviewed The Hobbit favorably in 1937, and who would provide a blurb that would be used on the flaps of all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). Other literary figures seen in the photographs include Enid Starkie, Louis Golding and C. Day Lewis. The caption to the photograph with Tolkien notes it was taken in the Beckington Room at Lincoln College, Oxford, presumably the place where the reading and reception took place.

Coppard did not study at Oxford, but he lived in the Oxford area from 1907 through 1919, when he was a clerk and an accountant at the Eagle Ironworks. In Oxford he met for the first time other people interested in books, and he began writing. His first of many books of short stories, Adam & Eve & Pinch Me, was published in 1922 by the Golden Cockerel Press.

There is some correspondence files, held at Texas A & M University, of the American poet and academic David Louis Posner (1921-1985) from the time when he was at Wadham College, Oxford. Apparently, he was responsible for planning a dinner for Coppard, probably separate from the public reading and reception. There are a number of cards and letters sent to Posner at Wadham dating from 1 December 1952 through 24 January 1953. Jonathan Cape, who had over the years published a number of Coppard’s books, was the first to accept, writing on 1 December 1952 and suggesting other people to invite. Those who declined the invitation included Leonard Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Robert Gibbings (who had joined the Golden Cockerel Press in 1924, and who had published a number of Coppard’s books), and Christopher Sandford (who took over the Golden Cockerel Press in 1933, and published one further Coppard title, Tapster’s Tapestry,  in 1938). The final letter in the collection declining the invitation to the dinner was dated 24 January 1953, so the dinner and the public reading seem to have been not long afterward. We can narrow this down a bit further owing to the discovery of an article on the “Short Story” in the Liverpool Daily Post for Monday, 2 February 1953, which mentions the “birthday tribute paid during the past week by Oxford University to a famous short story writer on reaching the age of seventy-five” (Coppard is later named as “the recipient of the Varsity honour”). The “past week” would have been from Sunday the 25th to Saturday the 31st of January. (Readers of the Liverpool Daily Post may have seen this article as a follow-up to one “Remembered Veterans” by “Brother Savage”, from 3 January 1953, in which it states, “the approach of his [Coppard’s] birthday on January 4 has prompted Cecil Hunt, a literary colleague, to suggest that there must be many who would wish this milestone in Coppard’s life to be ‘garlanded by gratitude for the pleasure his work has released.’”)  At present, the week of January 25th is the closest we can get to the specific date of the event.

What short story did Coppard read?  It would be interesting to know, but so far there is no firm evidence on the matter. That Posner kept a single Coppard autograph manuscript with his  letters about the dinner might suggest that he obtained the manuscript from Coppard at this time. The story is catalogued as “Chinfeather,” dated 3 November 1939, and comprises eleven leaves, heavily corrected. It was published in the Coppard collection Ugly Anna and Other Tales (1944).   

If Coppard had read a recently completed story, then the likely candidate would be “Lucy in Her Pink Jacket,” written in a few versions between 18 November 1952 and 17 January 1953, when the latest draft was typed. It was published in Esquire in December 1953, and collected in an eponymous volume in 1954.

Of course it needn’t have been either story, which are here entertained merely as possibilities with some slight circumstantial evidence. Hopefully, future research will fill in the gaps about this occasion.

Thanks to Andoni Cossio (ORCID: 0000-0003-2745-5104) and John Locke for assistance on this piece.

RIP: J. S. Ryan

 J.S.Ryan (top left) and J.R.R. Tolkien (bottom right) 

A quick note to remark on the passing of Tolkien's former student, J.S. Ryan, who later published a number of books on Tolkien. Ryan died in early July at the age of approximately 93. I say approximately because Ryan himself had a policy of never giving out his birthyear ("lest it be used against me" he once wrote me). However, as his parents were married in 1928, and considering genealogical records (including ship's passenger lists from the 1950s), it seems pretty certain that his birthyear was 1929. John Sprott Ryan was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, educated in New Zealand, England and Australia. He spent most of his academic teaching career at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia. 

He was a student at Merton College, Oxford, under Tolkien, from 1954 through 1957 (both appear in the 1955 Merton College photo, above) , and later went on to write many articles on Tolkien. The first of these, "Germanic Mythology Applied: The Extension of the Literary Folk Memory", appeared in Folklore, Spring 1966; Tolkien himself found it "nonsensical". It was reprinted in Ryan's 1969 volume Tolkien - Cult or Culture?, one of the earliest book-length studies of Tolkien. From there, Ryan published a large number of articles, often elaborating on small points in Tolkien's life, in diverse venues such as Anor, Inklings-Jahrbuch, Ipotesi, Orana, Quadrant, The Ring Bearer, and others, as well as in fanzines such as Minas-Tirith Evening-Star (of the American Tolkien Society), and scholarly journals such as Mythlore (the journal of the Mythopoeic Society). Several of his contributions to Minas Tirith Evening-Star were collected as The Shaping of Middle-eath's Maker: Influences on the Life and Literature of J.R.R. Tolkien (1992), as by John S. Ryan ["J.S. Ryan" being his usual byline], edited by Philip W. Helms and published by the American Tolkien Society. 

His most significant collections for the Tolkien scholar remain the two published by Walking Tree Publishers (edited and prefaced by Peter Buchs), Tolkien's View: Windows into His World (2009) and In the Nameless Wood: Explorations in the Philological Hinterland of Tolkien's Literary Creation (2013).  

 2012 edition

In 2012, a slightly-corrected reprint of Tolkien - Cult or Culture? was issued through the Heritage Futures Research Centre at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, in a reportedly very small edition, which received little attention. (My copy was expensive and not easily procured.) 

Ryan's studies of Tolkien are not without frustrations. As pioneering works, he often missed vital connections in order to focus on less significant ones, and beyond a small essential core of Tolkien scholarship, Ryan rarely engaged with the publications of other Tolkien scholars. Yet his essays are well-worth reading for the inspiration they can give for further research. 

A fuller appreciation of his life and career (with photos), appears here in Pulse News of the University of New England in Armidale.

Tolkien and Sterling Lanier: the "Lord of the Rings" Figurines

The details of Tolkien's epistolary friendship with the US editor, writer and sculptor Sterling Lanier (1927-2007) are difficult to ascertain, and various accounts differ as to the chronology and extent of their correspondence.  In 1973, Lanier wrote that "it began in 1951" and amounted to some "dozen or so letters we exchanged over the years." In a 1974 fanzine profile of Lanier by Piers Anthony, it notes that Lanier had had "ten years of correspondence" with Tolkien. In 2016,  a book dealer had for sale six letters from Tolkien to Lanier, plus one from Tolkien's wife. That batch began in 1965, when Tolkien had received a second batch of Lanier's sculptures of characters from The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's wife wrote that Tolkien thought the dwarf very good. Though Lanier sculpted professionally, and made his living at it for years, the Lord of the Rings figurines were never released publicly and photographs of them have been few and hard to find. 

Now the same book dealer who had the Tolkien-Lanier letters, has a set of the Lord of the Rings figurines for sale. Here is the page from the recent catalog, along with details of the seller. (Full disclosure: I have no relationship with the seller, nor any involvement with the sale. I am publicizing it here solely because of the chance, at long last, to see the set of figurines and share the photographs with other Tolkien fans. So far as I know, only one photograph--of the Legolas figurine--appeared in print previously, and that as long ago as 1974.) Click on the images to make them larger.

The obituary of Lanier (quoted in the listing) from the Sarasota Herald Tribune is inaccurate in many ways, particularly with regard to the legalities involved in officially licensing any reproduction of the figurines.  Tolkien himself did not control such rights, and his publisher told him (a fact related by Tolkien to Lanier) that such merchandising rights were controlled by United Artists, who--at that time, subsequent to a 1969 contract--owned the film rights to The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien noted that it would please him if it proved possible for Lanier to market his figures subject to paying a small fee to United Artists. But it appears that Lanier never attempted to do so.

How many figures Lanier did of Lord of the Rings characters, or how many sets, is not known for certain. Clearly some of the ones he first sent to Tolkien were trials. As late as November 1972 Tolkien was thanking Lanier for a new bronzed set.

The above set for sale shows nine figures, Gandalf at the left in pewter, with the other eight in bronze, left to right, an orc, Samwise, another orc, Frodo, a third orc, Gimli, Legolas and a hooded Nazgul.

Charles Roberts has an interesting post at the Wonder Book Blog on Lanier, titled "A Sterling Character." Here's the direct link.  (Lanier was a regular customer at Wonder Books beginning around 1985 or so.) I reproduce below two of the photos from that blog, one with several figurines that Lanier had given to Roberts, in the middle of which you can see Legolas, Frodo, and a hooded Nazgul.  Roberts quotes a previous sale listing for a set of figurines as one of only three sets.  The second photo is one of Lanier himself.

Finally, here is a photograph of Lanier's sculptures for three other famous literary characters, Ratty, Toad, and Mole from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.

Tolkienian Resonances

My messy year of 2019 actually began in the summer of 2018, after a close lightning strike fried the electronics in my house, including my computer (despite it being hooked into a surge suppressor). Regaining equilibrium has been a slow process, for many reasons that I need not recount here. For now I'm dipping my toe back into the Tolkienian blog waters . . .

I'm using the term "Tolkienian resonances" in this post's title to refer to some things that predate Tolkien's own relevant works, but are certainly not influences. They could perhaps be called precursors, but that seems too expansive a term. In any case, a few of these works with such resonances are interesting, and I recount them here.

First, there is the discovery by Mark Hooker of the poem "The Orc and His Globular Island." Hooker wrote about it in the November 2019 issue of Beyond Bree. The poem is interesting not only for its use of the word orc, but for the orc's similarities to Gollum in The Hobbit. This orc lives on an island, where he is "exceedingly lonely." He is long-lived (and hasn't had an adventure for a century), always short on food, and to pass time he "thinks up a comical riddle, and guesses it."

"The Orc and His Globular Island" was published in the American magazine for children, St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks, in October 1913 (Volume 40, p. 1070). It was written by E.L. McKinney, a recent Harvard University graduate (Class of 1912) whose full name was Edward Laurence McKinney (1891-1968). He was apparently a lifelong resident of Albany, New York, where in the 1910s he was employed at his father's iron-works. He contributed to The Harvard Advocate in 1911, and also to The Century, and St. Nicholas. Most of his publications were of light verse. His only-known volume was a fine press miniature book, The King of Indoor Sports (1963), containing  humorous anecdotes about typewriting. Here is the page from St. Nicholas with his poem (click on the image to make it larger). Even the image of the Orc seems almost Gollum-like.

Interestingly, the same issue of St. Nicholas also contains some of "The Nursery Rhymes of Mother Goose," illustrated (mostly in black and white) by Arthur Rackham. But there is one color plate, an illustration for "Hey! Diddle, Diddle," which of course can be related to Tolkien's famous poem "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late," published in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), which first appeared in Yorkshire Poetry in 1923 under the title "The Cat and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked." Anyway, just for fun, here's the Rackham illustration. (Rackham's texts and illustrations were collected in 1913 in his book Mother Goose: The Old Nursery Rhymes.)

Tolkien's ring of invisibility (as found first in The Hobbit) is often sourced back to the Ring of Gyges in Plato's Republic,  though I think this instance is more of a precursor than an actual source. I've recently discovered in an Edwardian children's book an exceptionally good and what seems to be a likely source for several of the qualities of Tolkien's (pre-Lord of the Rings) ring of invisibility. I'll write more about this in another place, but here I'd like to share a story from 1943 about a ring that brings power to its bearer, as well as working disaster, in the way of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings. The story, by Nelson Bond (1908-2006), was first published as "The Ring of Iscariot" in The Blue Book Magazine, June 1943. Bond collected it under the title "The Ring" in his 1949 collection, The Thirty-First of February.

The story is set after W.W. I. where the main character, Otto Muller, is the Berlin correspondent for a New York newspaper. At an auction Muller becomes obsessed with acquiring a ring, reputed to have come from the Kaiser's personal collection. The bidding goes high, and his competition, a priest, pleads with him to cease, saying that it is of utmost importance that he --the priest-- buy the ring. In the end, Muller wins the bidding for ring, and his luck quickly changes. His misfortunes turn out dramatically for the better. But the ring, a trifle large, has a tendency to slip off his finger, so he instructs his wife to send it to a jeweler. Meanwhile, the priest tracks him down, offering to buy the ring at over three times the price paid, but Muller refuses, noting that is has become a good-luck piece. The priest retorts, "Not good luck, no! The reverse." The priest wants the ring to exorcise it, noting that a force of evil is embodied in the ring, for it is the Ring of Judas:  "The history of this ring's ownership is one of terrible, brief grandeur followed by black tragedy." The curse of Iscariot's ring is that "he who wears it shall aspire and win to world-shaking greatness." Muller recognizes the effect that the ring has had on himself, and promises to give the ring to the priest. Returning to his wife, he discovers that she hasn't yet gone to the jeweler, but the ring is now missing, evidently stolen by the assistant to the old paperhanger who is working in that room. The assistant has departed, but the old man says, "he is a bad one, that one. I curse the day I ever laid eyes upon him . . . common little thief! His name is Shicklgruber. But it is Hitler he calls himself these days . . . Adolf Hitler." The story ends here.  (Note: the idea that Hitler had been born Adolf Shicklgruber has been debunked, but was a common belief in the 1940s. See this entry at the OUP blog.)

*

I've been asked a few times in the last few years if I am the same "Doug Anderson" who did artwork for the Middle-earth game from the late 1990s. Nope, that's not me.  And I'd never seen the artwork until one of the people who asked sent me a sample.  Here it is. Far better art than anything I could produce.

The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun: The Breton Ballad

Since the publication of Verlyn Flieger's edition of The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun in 2016, there has been much renewed attention to Tolkien's five-hundred and six line poem, originally published in The Welsh Review in December 1945.  Little notice, however, has been made of the fact that the original Breton poem was sung to a ballad.  Last year I got a copy of Miracles & Murders: An Introductory Anthology of Breton Ballads (Oxford University Press, 2017), by Mary-Ann Constantine and Éva Guillorel.  Besides a long introduction, this anthology contains some thirty-five Breton ballads (or gwerz), with musical scores, and, most significantly, a CD containing recordings of twenty-two of the ballads.

The first gwerz in the anthology, and the first on the CD, is "Lord Count and the fairy." Constantine and Guillorel note that "the tune is an old one, in three musical phrases with repetition of the second line of text. On the whole this is a stable gwerz with relatively few variables; though it is often known by the Barzaz-Breiz title 'Lord Nann and the Fairy', most versions have a 'Lord Count' or a 'Count Tudor' as their protagonist" (pp. 38-39).

Towards the end of her edition, Flieger gives the opening verses from Breton, French and English versions of the ballad.  I reproduce her page 97 here:

In Miracles & Murders, a Breton original is given as well as an English translation.  It consists of some twenty-six stanzas, most of which are of three lines, with the third line in most stanzas (but not all) being the repetition of the second line, as noted above by Constantine and Guillorel.  Here, for comparison, are the first two verses of "Lord Count and the fairy," in Breton and below it in English:

An ôtrou kont hag e bried
Oa abredig mad o daou dimet
Oa abredig mad o daou dimet

Un daouzeg vla, 'n heiñall trizeg
Eur mab bihan a zo ganet
Eur mab bihan a zo ganet

Lord Count and his bride
Were married very young
Were married very young

One was twelve; the other thirteen
A little boy was born to them
A little boy was born to them

And here is the music:

From the CD I have excerpted the first stanza of the gwerz as sung.  If I've done this right, you can access it here:

What is most interesting to note is that the lines from Tolkien's poems also scan with the music, if you follow the same formula of repeating every second line.  Try it for yourself.  Here follows the appropriate lines from the beginning of Tolkien's poem:

In Britain's land beyond the seas
the wind blows ever through the trees
the wind blows ever through the trees

Tolkien was known to use folk-songs as tunes for some of his poems, most notably those in Songs for the Philologists.  One suspects he might have known this tune as well.