A Mr. C. Hostetter (!) who is highly knowledgeable about these matters, points out an error in the post I derived from the Times Literary Supplement.  Tolkien had nothing to do with Early English Lyrics: Amourous, Divine, Moral, and Trivial. I’ve fixed the old post.

Digitizing old magazines is a tricky business. In this case, the review was of two different books. The scanner put the two titles together up front and the authors’ names together at the end. This happens often enough in that database that I’ve been unable to do a graph analysis like I did with the London Review of Books, by the way.

While I was fixing that, I chased down all the other pre-Hobbit references. That brought me to a later review1 of what seems to be the same work. This reviewer was in a more eupeptic mood, I suppose, because “above average” has been superseded.

Mr Tolkien’s vocabulary affords an excellent handmaiden, not standing in the way, while decidedly more than an appendix. The scholar will enjoy the explication of, inter plurima, ‘knacke,’ ‘lay,’ ‘sentence.’

Now I find myself wanting to track down those explications.

Notes

  1. “Early English Verse”. Contributors: E. H. W. Meyerstein. Date: Thursday,  Nov. 13, 1924. The Times Literary Supplement (London, England) Issue 1191.