As many of you will know already, another posthumous Tolkien publication is on the horizon, this time also posthumously edited by his son, Christopher. Is that a first, I wonder? A posthumous work posthumously edited?
This work is a short satire about the dangers of mechanization called “The Bovadium Fragments” or “The End of Bovadium”. A number of people have shared
the news — for example, David Bratman and John Garth [1] — and many of them say that the first ever mention of “Bovadium”
was in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography. But I don’t think that’s correct. The biography was
published on May 5, 1977, but I know of one reference to the work that appeared
a little over a year earlier.
Clyde Kilby’s Tolkien and
The Silmarillion was published in April, 1976. In it, Kilby writes:
Though the reading of The Silmarillon was proving about as much as I could handle during that summer of 1966, Tolkien from time to time handed me other shorter pieces and asked me about their publishability. One was called “The Bovadium Fragments”, a satire written long before and having as its main point the worship of the Motores, i.e., automobiles, and the traffic jams blocking the roads in and around Oxford. It was full of the inventiveness to be expected of Tolkien. Some of the characters are Rotzopny, Dr. Gums, and Saravelk. I judged that it had two elements that would make it unpublishable. One was the more than liberal use of Latin, and the other the probability that the reader’s eye would focus on its playfulness rather than its serious implications. Actually it was an early comment on the commercialization of our world. [2]
Regardless of this, it’s something to look forward to! After 60 or more years, Tolkien’s publishers have evidently deemed it publishable at last. While some of the posthumous publications have felt a bit thin, like “butter scraped over too much bread”, this is not likely to be one of those. Short, yes, but thin, I don’t expect so. It’s of additional interest as one of a relatively small number of works set entirely outside Middle-earth — along with Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major, Roverandom, and Mr. Bliss. This last, in fact, seems perhaps the most closely connected to “Bovadium”, since it too involves high jinks with motorcars.
[1] John mentions Kilby in his post too (though I had thought
of his book before I found John’s post), but even so, he says he “first read about [Bovadium] in
Humphrey Carpenter’s Tolkien biography” in 1976. But to my knowledge, the
biography was not published until mid-1977 — unless John had access to an
advance copy.
[2] Kilby, Clyde S. Tolkien and The Silmarillion. Harold Shaw Publishers, 1976, p. 36.
