[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Well chosen, lindil. I've always liked the Valedictory Address; particularly these lines, which drip with sarcasm:

On the second occasion, my ineffectiveness as a lecturer was already well known, and well-wishers had made sure (by letter or otherwise) that I should know it too

In his critical work, his role as a reader, as someone who responds to a work of art, was always foremost.

Indeed so, Bethberry. His irritation with other critics of Beowulf reminds me of something else that he wrote, with which most of us will be familiar: "...he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."

My all-time favourite Tolkien essay has to be A Secret Vice. Leaving aside the achingly beautiful examples of Elven poetry and the cheeky Nevbosh limmerick, when Tolkien speaks about inventing languages his tone becomes so celebratory, so joyful, so enthusiastic that we are carried along with him; perhaps even ourselves considering the possibilities presented by linguistic invention. This passage is classic Tolkien:

I shall never forget a little man - smaller than myself - whose name I have forgotten, revealing himself by accident as a devotee, in a moment of extreme ennui, in a dirty wet marqee filled with trestle tables smelling of stale mutton fat, crowded with (mostly) depressed wet creatures. We were listening to somebody lecturing on map-reading , or camp-hygiene, or the art of sticking a fellow through without (in defiance of Kipling) bothering who God sent the bill to; rather we were trying to avoid listening, though the Guards' English, and voice, is penetrating. The man next to me said suddenly in a dreamy voice: 'Yes, I think I shall express the accusitive case by a prefix!'
A memorable remark! Of course by repeating it I have let the cat, so carefully hidden, out of its bag, or at least revealed the whiskers. But we won't bother about that for the moment. Just consider the splendour of the words! 'I shall express the accusitive case.' Magnificent! Not 'it is expressed', nor even the more shambling 'it is sometimes expressed', nor the grim 'you must learn how it is expressed'. What a pondering of alternatives within one's choice before the final decision in favour of the daring and unusual prefix, so personal and so attractive; the final solution of some element in a design that had hitherto proved refractory. Here were no base considerations of the 'practical', the easiest for the 'modern mind', or for the million - only a question of taste, a satisfaction of a personal pleasure, a private sense of fitness.