TCG Letter #77

Thanking Chambers for his note and registering his sorrow at Chambers recent ill health. He offers his best wishes for 1934.

He also encloses a report from the previous years 'Examinations in Oxford', which he worked on with Wrenn, Brett-Smith and C.S. Lewis and mentions Lewis's recent publication, Pilgrim's Regress. The report was in the form of a satirical poem called 'Doworst'.

Raymond Wilson Chambers was a British academic who in 1922 published Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem for which Tolkien agreed to review. Some of the notes for that review remain unpublished, the review itself was either not completed or has remained unpublished since.

This letter was reproduced in the 3-1975 issue of Monash Review, along with a page from the poem. In 1978 a facsimile of the first 19 lines were included in A Elbereth Gilthoniel!, and then in 2024 the complete poem with various forms was published in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.