TCG Letter #668 / Carpenter Letter #295

Tolkien writes to W.H. Auden and remarks that he was delighted to receive his letter, noting that it "did much to restore my spirits". He was pleased that Auden welcomed his Old English poem, included in a festschrift in honour of Auden’s sixtieth birthday.^{Auden had written to praise Tolkien for the poem in Anglo-Saxon (together with a version in modern English) to the journal Shenandoah as part of the festschrift. (It was published in the Winter 1967 issue (Vol. XVIII no. 2, pp. 96–7).) In his letter to Tolkien, he had praised Tolkien’s poem ‘The Sea-bell’ (‘Frodo’s Dreme’), which he called ‘wonderful’.[1]}

In a post script, Tolkien says that he has "a thing" he "did many years ago when trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry" and hopes it is not lost. In January of the following year he writes ^{Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to W. H. Auden • 29 January 1968 (#1925)[2]} again on the poem.