[Faramir Jones]

Thanks William, for putting up that passage, from Letter 15 of the published Letters, of Tolkien's remarks on the second part of The Hobbit's dust jacket's text.

To help people, I'm just going to add explanations for some of the references in the passage, most of which are endnotes by Humphrey Carpenter, editor of the Letters (referred to as HC), and one footnote by Tolkien:

Line 4: H.M.Co: Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston, Massachusetts, who published The Hobbit in the USA.
Line 15: Miss Griffiths: Elaine Griffiths of St. Anne's College, Oxford, who worked with Tolkien as a research student during the 1930s. (HC)
Line 15: Mr Lewis: C. S. Lewis.
Line 19: *: '*Is the presence of 'conundrums' in Alice a parallel to echoes of Northern myth in The Hobbit?'. (Tolkien's footnote)
Lines 19-20: p. 221 (lines 6-7 from end): 'To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful'. (The Hobbit, Chapter 12)(HC)
Line 20: Barfield: Owen Barfield, friend of C. S. Lewis and author of Poetic Diction (1928), an account of the development of language from its early roots in mythology. (HC)
Line 24: Sir Walter Raleigh: Professor of English Literature at Oxford, 1904-22. (HC)
Line 24: viva: A viva voce is the oral part of Oxford University examinations. (HC)
Line 26: Sylvie and Bruno: Published in 2 volumes in 1889-1893, it was the last work by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) to be published in his lifetime.