Tolkien wrote a paragraph on the subject nevertheless, commenting on the obscurity of the origin of the place-name Lydney, and that it did not shed light on the problem of Nodens. Lydney was an English settlement, not the site of the temple to Nodens, though Tolkien thought that it might contain a pre-English name with a different original focus. Because of the uncertainty of this argument, however, or because production was already too far advanced to permit an addition, the note was omitted from the published report by Wheeler and Wheeler.
See further, comments by Carl Phelpstead in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), ch. 4. A prefatory note in the Report lists those who did the actual work of the excavation and mentions others who visited the site and helped to identify the finds. Among the latter was *R.G. Collingwood who, like Tolkien, was a fellow of Pembroke College, *Oxford, and was almost certainly responsible for Tolkien being asked to help with the mythologicalphilological problem of Nodens.
Tolkien himself, however, is not named in the list, and there is no evidence that he participated in the dig at Lydney Park, stayed there as a guest of the Wheelers on a number of occasions, or even visited Lydney, the surrounding Forest of Dean, or nearby Puzzlewood, all of which have been suggested as influences on *The Hobbit and *The Lord of the Rings. Mortimer Wheelers letters to Tolkien in 19312 in fact are formal and courteous, with no sign of the familiarity that would be evident between friends. Nor is there any reason to believe, despite much wishful thinking, that Tolkien was influenced in writing The Hobbit by the folk-connection between Lydney and dwarves, hobgoblins, and little people, or at an even further stretch that he took the idea of the ring in The Hobbit (later the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings) from a gold ring lost by the Roman Silvianus at the temple of Nodens at Lydney in the late fourth century, found 100 miles away in 1786, and now at The Vyne near Basingstoke, Hampshire.
The Name Nodens was reprinted in Tolkien Studies 4 (2007), pp. 17783.
The Nameless Land. Poem, first published in *Realities: An Anthology of Verse (1927), pp. 245.
The nameless land is Eressëa, the home of the Elves in the True West of the world. The poet speaks of its golden lingering lights, its grass more green than in gardens here, its dells that immortal dews distill / And fragrance of all flowers that grow. It is unattainable, a thousand leagues distant, a land without a name / No heart may hope to anchor near, more fair than Tir-nan-Og (the land of youth in Irish legend) and more faint and far than Paradise, a shore beyond the Shadowy Sea. The poet dreams that he sees a wayward star the mariner Eärendel (or Eärendil) sailing the heavens and refers to beacon towers in Gondobar (city of stone), one of the Seven Names of Gondolin.
According to a note on one of its typescripts, Tolkien wrote The Nameless Land at his home in Darnley Road, *Leeds, in May 1924, inspired by reading *Pearl for examination purposes. Like that medieval poem, The Nameless Land has both rhyme and alliteration, and the last line of each stanza is echoed in the first line of the next (And the woods are filled with wandering fire. / The wandering fires the woodland fill). On 18 July 1962 Tolkien wrote to his Aunt *Jane Neave (Letters, p. 317):
The poem [Pearl] is very well-known to mediaevalists; but I never agreed to the view of scholars that the metrical form was almost impossibly difficult to write in, and quite impossible to render in modern English. NO scholars (or, nowadays, poets) have any experience in composing themselves in exacting metres. I made up a few stanzas in the metre to show that composition in it was not at any rate impossible (though the result might today be thought bad) . I send you the original stanzas of my own related inevitably as everything was at one time with my own mythology.
Tolkien later revised The Nameless Land as The Song of Ælfwine (on Seeing the Uprising of Eärendel), with the intermediate title Ælfwines Song Calling upon Eärendel, tying the poem more explicitly to his mythology. Ælfwine, a mortal mariner who finds the sea-path to Eressëa, figures in *The Book of Lost Tales, *The Lost Road, and *The Notion Club Papers; see *Eriol and Ælfwine. Many texts of The Song of Ælfwine survive in manuscript and typescript. Two of these were published, together with The Nameless Land, in *The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987); see in that volume, pp. 98104.
See further, Stefan Ekman, Echoes of Pearl in Ardas Landscape, Tolkien Studies 6 (2009).
Names. On 4 January 1892, the day after his son was born, *Arthur Tolkien wrote to his mother: The boys first name will be John after his grandfather, probably John Ronald Reuel altogether. Mab [*Mabel Tolkien] wants to call it Ronald and I want to keep up John and Reuel (quoted in Biography, p. 12). Arthur chose John for his own father (see *Tolkien family), but Mabels father was also a John (John Suffield, see *Suffield family). Tolkien explained the choice of names in a letter to Amy Ronald on 2 January 1969:
I was called John because it was the custom for the eldest son of the eldest son to be called John in my family. My father was Arthur, eldest of my grandfather John Benjamins second family; but his elder half-brother John had died leaving only 3 daughters. So John I had to be .
My father favoured John Benjamin Reuel (which I should now have liked); but my mother was confident that I should be a daughter, and being fond of more romantic (& less O[ld] T[estament] like) names decided on Rosalind. When I turned up Ronald was substituted .
Reuel was (I believe) the surname of a friend of my grandfather. The family believed it to be French (which is formally possible); but if so it is an odd chance that it appears twice in the O[ld] T[estament] as an unexplained other name for Jethro Moses father-in-law. All my children, and my childrens children, and their children, have the name. [Letters, pp. 3978]
At his confirmation in 1903 Tolkien took the additional name Philip but used it only rarely.
In an autobiographical statement written in 1955 Tolkien explained his surname as a German name (from Saxony), an anglicization of Tollkiehn, i.e. tollkühn. But, except as a guide to spelling, this fact is as fallacious as all facts in the raw. For I am neither foolhardy [= tollkühn] nor German, whatever some remote ancestors may have been (Letters, p. 218). Tolkiens aunt Grace Mountain (see *Mountain family) alleged that their surname had originally been von Hohenzollern, after that district of the Holy Roman Empire from which the family had come. A certain George von Hohenzollern had, she said, fought on the side of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria at the Siege of Vienna in 1529. He had shown great daring in leading an unofficial raid against the Turks and capturing the Sultans standard. This (said Aunt Grace) was why he was given the nickname Tollkühn, foolhardy; and the nickname stuck (Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, pp. 1819). The story was also told of a French variation of the surname, du Téméraire, but may be no more than family lore. Research by Polish Tolkien enthusiasts such as Ryszard Derdzinski, reported on the website Tolknięty (tolkniety.blogspot.com) indicates that certain family members emigrated to England from Gdańsk around 1772, having belonged to a family of Gdańsk (Danzig) furriers whose history reached back into fourteenth-century Prussia and thirteenth-century Saxony.
On a copy of a George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers) press release, not before 1968, Tolkien wrote his surname phonetically and gave instructions for its pronunciation: (tôl kēn) tĺkeen (sc. tolk does not rhyme with yolk; the division is tolkeen in which tol rhymes with doll and kien (NOT KEIN) = keen as ie in field and many other words (TolkienGeorge Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). It was, and is, frequently misspelled Tolkein. Tolkien complained of this in a letter to Graham Tayar in June 1971, in spite of all my efforts to correct this even by my college-, bank-, and lawyers clerks! (Letters, p. 410). On 12 October 1966 he wrote to Joy Hill at Allen & Unwin about a document from the Performing Rights Society: I wish producers of documents would see to it that they give me my correct name. My third name appears as Revel twice in each of the Deeds. My surname is Tolkein on one of them (TolkienGeorge Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). Even on his tombstone Reuel at first was carved Revel.
The phonetic rendering of Tolkiens surname should be understood to place the stress on the first syllable. The same pronunciation is described by Clyde S. Kilby in Many Meetings with Tolkien (an edited transcript of remarks at the December 1966 meeting of the Tolkien Society of America), published in Niekas 19 (c. 1968). Henry S. Resnik, however, in remarks at a July 1966 meeting of the Tolkien Society of America, said on the basis of a half-hour telephone interview that Tolkien pronounces his name tul-KEEN . His American publisher pronounces it TUL-kin, and I took him as the leading authority, but apparently Tolkien knows (An Interview with Tolkien, p. 43).
Arthur and Mabel Tolkien called their son by his second name, Ronald, as did his other relatives and his wife. In his letter to Amy Ronald, Tolkien said that when he was a boy in England Ronald was a much rarer name than it later became: it was shared by none of his contemporaries at school or university though it seems now alas! to be prevalent among the criminal and other degraded classes. Anyway I have always treated it with respect, and from earliest days refused to allow it to be abbreviated or tagged with. But for myself I remained John. Ronald was for my near kin. My friends at school, Oxford and later have called me John (or occasionally John Ronald or J. Rsquared) (Letters, p. 398). Tolkien occasionally signed himself John to Edith Bratt (*Edith Tolkien) when they were courting.
To intimates such as Edith or his Aunt *Jane Neave he would sign his letters Ronald. To friends such as *Katharine Farrer and *Donald Swann he signed Ronald Tolkien, and to *C.S. Lewis J.R.R.T. His formal signature was J.R.R. Tolkien. In 1964, when Allen & Unwin wanted to include a facsimile signature on the title-page of *Tree and Leaf, as was their custom for publications in their U Books series, and sent Tolkien a sample with Ronald Tolkien, he wrote to Ronald Eames at Allen & Unwin: I do not and never have used the signature Ronald Tolkien as a public or auctorial signature and I do not think it suitable for the purpose (3 February 1964, TolkienGeorge Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). In letters from his *T.C.B.S. friends Tolkien was called variously Gabriel, Gab, Cludhari nicknames whose origin is obscure and not mentioned in surviving correspondence but mainly John Ronald, with isolated instances of Ronald or JRRT. His few surviving letters to the T.C.B.S. are signed John Ronald. In a letter to *Joy Hill of 26 December 1971 he noted that his contemporaries used to write his initials as JR2T and pronounce them to rhyme with dirt (collection of René van Rossenberg).