Christmas Came A Little Early This Year!

No sooner had I revealed the existence of and my desire for the latest Tolkien publication, The Bovadium Fragments, but my brother John knew what he could get me for a Christmas present. Yesterday evening, a mere two days after I knew that there was such a thing, John delivered it to my eager hands, still wrapped in its Amazon shipping package. He cautioned me not to read it all at once. A warning I promptly ignored.

Which was not hard to do, as the original writing by Tolkien only took up about 53 pages, and those were plumped out by editor’s notes and some variorum versions. Most of the rest is a publisher’s note, an introduction by Christopher Tolkien, and a section by scholar Richard Ovenden on ‘The Origin of Bovadium,’ which takes up from pages 55 to 124, in which he undertakes to explain Tolkien’s satirical intent and the controversy in Oxford (the production and proliferation of cars in the bucolic college area) that gave it rise. Like most efforts to explain a joke, it is rather ‘like dissecting a rubber ball in search of it bounce.’

The Tolkien section is illustrated by artwork from Tolkien himself, not produced for the work but felt to be appropriate to the subject, some of which pictures have never been published before. The Ovenden section is illustrated by photos and diagrams of the time. These do a job of plumping out this slight offering, which was never intended as a book, but rather as a magazine article. Although titled as 'Fragments' the writing is itself a finished work.

All of which is gratifying to a Tolkien fan but may be a bit of a shock to a Middle-earth fan, with its lack of hobbits or elves. It does emphasize Tolkien’s ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental’ concerns (to use rather cold terms; perhaps emotional or aesthetic would be closer to the mark), concerns obvious throughout most of his fictional work and in his personal opinions. Ovenden does his best to connect this with Middle-earth, but these connections feel rather tenuous, if expected.

The book itself is beautiful, bound underneath the jacket in what I’ve come to consider a ‘Tolkien Green,’ and supplied with a bookmark. A must-have, in fact, for anyone having an interest in Tolkien or any pretensions to being a Tolkien scholar, but (I would imagine) a rather puzzling artifact to a casual reader. But I love getting a new Tolkien book at Christmas; it's getting to be quite a tradition.