On termine avec deux bonnes nouvelles. La première va réjouir les millions de fans du Seigneur des anneaux. France Soir révèle que l'on vient de découvrir dans les travées poussiéreuses de la bibliothèque d'Oxford, un manuscrit inédit de Tolkien. 2.000 pages. A Londres comme à Hollywood, on se frotte les mains écrit Arianne Dolfuss. La trilogie du Seigneur des anneaux a été vendu à 50 millions d'exemplaires.

The _Sunday Times_ article -- posted in full elsewhere on this newsgroup -- evidently conflates Prof. Drout's story of his coming upon Tolkien's essay "Beowulf and the Critics" (the precursor of his British Academy lecture, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"), Drout's edition of which has just been published, with the fact that he is now working on an edition of Tolkien's Modern English (alliterative and prose) translations of _Beowulf_. The article gets a number of other things wrong too. Not to diminish Michael Drout's moment of personal discovery at the Bodleian, or his achievement in his new book which is very welcome, but the existence of "Beowulf and the Critics" was known before he saw it: it was listed long ago in a public catalogue of the Tolkien papers at the Bodleian. It just wasn't published. As for Tolkien's _Beowulf_ translation, this has been even better known -- cited three times, for example, in my 1993 Tolkien _Descriptive Bibliography_ -- and brief portions of it have been published, e.g. in Tolkien's "Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of 'Beowulf'", originally his preface to the 1940 edition of _Beowulf_ translated by John R. Clark Hall, and in Hammond and Scull, _J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator_ alongside two drawings by Tolkien of Grendel's Mere. The translation makes very fine reading. Wayne Hammond

This is typically overblown media nonsense. The manuscript is well-known to Tolkien scholars, and has been available in the Bodleian Library for many years. The report conflates Drout's new book, an edition of Tolkien's lecture series "Beowulf and the Critics" (out of which came the essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"), which was just published this month, with Drout's work on the Beowulf translation, which will definitely not come out next summer, and probably won't come out for three or four years. Douglas A. Anderson