THE PUBLICATION OF LETTERS BY twentieth-century scholars is an uncommon enterprise, especially when they are issued by a trade press. But then Tolkien was an uncommon scholar. “I was brought up on the Classics,” he recalled later in life, “and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.” At school he also learned Anglo-Saxon and Gothic, and in the latter found “for the first time the study of a language out of mere love: I mean for the acute aesthetic pleasure derived from a language for its own sake”.
At Exeter College, Oxford, while preparing for examinations in 1913, he chanced on a Finnish grammar, and became intoxicated: “my ‘own language’ … became heavily Finnicised in
