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Lot 382

TOLKIEN (J.R.R.)
SOMNER (WILLIAM) Dictionarium Saxicono-Latino-Anglicum, FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN on the front free endpaper, above a note concerning the work by his pupil David M. Lee (see footnote), Oxford, William Hall, for the Author, 1659

4 December 2019, 11:00 GMT
London, Knightsbridge

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TOLKIEN (J.R.R.)

SOMNER (WILLIAM) Dictionarium Saxicono-Latino-Anglicum, FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN on the front free endpaper, above a note concerning the work by his pupil David M. Lee (see footnote), title printed in red and black, slip pasted over marginal note on a4r, list of names on 3T2v has additional name of William Retchford pasted in (next to ink name of Thomas Water, or Papworth), piece of upper margin on title and dedication torn away with small loss to 2-line fillet border, contemporary calf, rebacked and recornered in calf, worn, upper cover detached [ESTC S4663; Madan, III, 2458], folio (325 x 215mm.), Oxford, William Hall, for the Author, 1659

Footnotes

ANGLO-SAXON DICTIONARY SIGNED BY TOLKIEN, who was elected to the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925, subsequently becoming Merton chair of English language and literature at Oxford from 1945 to his retirement in 1959. In 1657 William Somner was gifted the Anglo-Saxon lectureship at Cambridge, providing the financial support for "his most important work, the magisterial Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum..., the dictionary [which] enabled Anglo-Saxon studies to flourish" (ODNB). At one stage Tolkien had been preparing his own English to Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, and a group of more than 400 slips of entries, arranged alphabetically according to Modern English, are held at the Bodleian Library,.

Provenance: J.R.R. Tolkien, signature on front free endpaper; David M. Lee, ownership inscription and lengthy note on the text beneath Tolkien's signture. Lee was a student at St. John's College, Oxford in the 1950s; by family descent to the present owner, who recalls that as part of his undergraduate studies Lee "attended a number of J.R.R. Tolkien's final lectures and recalled them vividly, even decades later; it was no coincidence that he would often reference Tolkien's work when teaching English and Drama at Secondary and Higher education levels".

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