TCG Letter #40

Touching on poems about dragons, Beowulf, and fellow Inkling C. S. Lewis. This letter to Prof. Henry Bosley Woolf thanks him for sending a copy of a paper he had written on Beowulf. Tolkien also answers a question that seems to have been about a remark he made concerning dragons. He then refers Woolf to a passage in Pilgrim's Regress by C.S. Lewis and slyly recommends one of his own poems, 'Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden', without disclosing his authorship. The title of the poem comes from a line in Beowulf and the verse is best-known today under the title, 'The Hoard.' It was first published in 1923, this letter refers to the 1936 revision. Under the title 'The Hoard', Tolkien republished it in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.