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noWizardme
Gondolin
Nov 12 2025, 12:13pm
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New Tolkien book (of a sort): The Bovadium Fragments
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A new Tolkien book (of a sort) published on October 9th. - publisher's web page here: https://harpercollins.co.uk/...riant=55509575926139
A review by Shaun Gunner probably explains handily enough what it is about:
“The End of Bovadium” (or called “The Bovadium Fragments”) was likely written in the last 1950s and early 1960s and follows on from Mr. Bliss as a comment on the use of automobiles. Humphrey Carpenter made brief reference to it in J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography: “‘The Bovadium Fragments’ (perhaps composed early in the nineteen-sixties) is a parable of the destruction of Oxford (Bovadium) by the motores manufactured by the Daemon of Vaccipratum (a reference to Lord Nuffield and his motor-works at Cowley) which block the streets, asphyxiate the inhabitants, and finally explode.”
The Bovadium Fragments was not published during Tolkien’s life, and Clyde S. Kilby explained why: “It was full of the inventiveness to be expected of Tolkien. [.] 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 a 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.” This story was not previously published due to Christopher Tolkien’s focus on his father’s writings set in Middle-earth and Arda.
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"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
(This post was edited by dernwyn on Nov 12 2025, 9:07pm)
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CuriousG
Gondolin
Nov 12 2025, 3:23pm
Post #2 of 7
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We trees drop limbs on cars for a reason.
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noWizardme
Gondolin
Nov 12 2025, 6:41pm
Post #3 of 7
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Or if a tree is feeling very rock and roll, it can...
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Or if a tree is feeling very rock 'n' roll, it can chuck berry.
Quickbeam would certainly do that, I think.
I wonder whether Our Favourite Author was an early proponent of the Oxford Congestion Charge. ...
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Toll-keen, you see....
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"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
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Hamfast Gamgee
Dor-Lomin
Nov 26 2025, 9:29am
Post #4 of 7
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Odd that people where protesting about urbanisation and pollution even in the fifties and sixties! It was happening though I suppose
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noWizardme
Gondolin
Nov 26 2025, 4:34pm
Post #5 of 7
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I think a lot was happening then
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.Odd that people where protesting about urbanisation and pollution even in the fifties and sixties! It was happening though I suppose
We are talking about the post-war reconstuction period. So not only was there the necessity of replacing bombed-out housing to solve a housing crisis, but there was a consensus for a lot of expansion in services and the infrastructure to support them. Universal secondary education required new schools; universal health care required new hospitals, doctors surgeries and the like. More tertiary education meant a lot of university building.
And the new things were often new in kind as well asjust newly built. For example, tower blocks and new materials such as ferro-concrete. Architects influenced by Modernism and Brutalism, working to complete structures quickly with materials that had little or no tradition in England. So that meant things that looked jarringly new. And some of the experimental building methods and materials (and some of the ideas about how people would live in the new communities) didn't work out.
It wasn't all bad, of course (the National Theatre, Coventry Cathedral...).
Add to that the rise of Tolkien's second bugbear, the motor car. Britain's first motorway, the Preston by-pass, opened in 1958. Parts of what is now the M1 opened the next year. Loss-making rail lines are being shut down (to the ire of communities who liked having their own branch line) and the authorities are trying to work out how to accommodate all the cars people want to drive, and the lorries businesses want to use.
Meanwhile in the countryside it's a period of mechanising agriculture: tractors replace horse-plows, and the grubbing out of hedgerow to make fields bigger and more efficient for the new ways. In forestry, The Forrestry Commission was grubbing out old woodlands, blitzing them with herbicide and then planting rows upon rows of conifer.
Lots of stuff I can imagine Tolkien finding confusing and alarming.
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"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
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cats16
Gondolin
Dec 24 2025, 7:54pm
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Thanks for the post. I saw this in a bookstore a couple of weeks ago and kept blinking at it with some confusion, having never seen/heard of it before.
Join us every weekend in the Hobbit movie forum for this week's CHOW (Chapter of the Week) discussion!
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Feb 10, 1:31pm
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The Bovadium Fragments and Clark Ashton Smith
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I still haven't read The Bovadium Fragments, but I read some more about them, and what I read reminded me of The Great God Awto, a satirical minor work by Clark Ashton Smith, who could also go for lighter and more comedic tones when he wanted to do so. I wonder if anyone here can clarify how close the two works are. I suppose I'll eventually end up finding out for myself, though, and can make a post about that then.
I looked around, and apparently Tolkien didn't like the one CAS story that he is known to have read. However that doesn't need to mean that Tolkien categorically didn't like or read the works of Clark Ashton Smith, as those can be highly varied in tone and quality and I also have similar complaints of that particular story and consider it forgettable at best, especially when compared to the actually good CAS stories.
For example, I would be interested in learning about Tolkien would have seen something like The Dark Eidolon and its thoughtful examination on the nature of evil. Or did he actually read it at some point and there simply is no record of that?
A potential issue to explore would also be how immeasurably powerful fictional sorcerers like Namirrha in The Dark Eidolon could have influenced Tolkien's depictions of Saruman and Sauron as threats in The Lord of the Rings, but I suppose it would be exceedingly difficult to reach any sort of firm conclusion on that.
(The possibility of Morgoth in his guise of a black-armored, mace-wielding warrior being influenced by CAS's lord of evil Thasaidon unfortunately runs into timeline issues unless Christopher's dating of The Lay of Leithian is a few years off at the end range.)
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