What would Tolkien say?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Tolkien would have written an initial list, then broken off to re-write the Grey Annals in Middle High German and prepare a series of lectures on Beowulf. He would then have returned to the list, changed most of the books on it, and translated it - first into fourteenth-century ecclesiastical Latin then into Quenya. Having finished this, and thirteen years after the other lists had been published, he would have decided that this sort of work could only ever have been written in Sindarin, but that he would need to revise the vocabulary in order to render some of the titles. This would inevitably have led him to a complete re-appraisal of the theological implications of the Silmarillion and a lecture about Celtic personal names in Icelandic saga.

Twenty years after having begun his list, Tolkien would have started again, this time writing entirely in modern English, but would have sent the only legible copy to his publishers and forgotten what it contained. The result, on the return of his original manuscript, would have been two lists, one of which would have lapsed into indeterminate West Saxon and a highly personal set of abbreviations. Satisfied with neither, he would finally have written another list containing every children's book published between 1840 and 1950, then spent four years revising it to include every book, myth, legend, poem and essay that his own children had ever liked. Eventually Tolkien would have sent the original commissioners of the list two-hundred pages of typescript, half of which would have consisted of footnotes and a significant proportion of which would have been written in classical or medieval languages. The bemused return of this list would have set him off on a completely new line of enquiry, the final result of which would have been a digest in Gothic of the sources for Bede's biblical commentaries. Whether or not any version of the list would have contained any of his own books is highly debatable.