Songs for the Philologists

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I've been looking for a copy of this for years. Tom Shippey quotes from it in The Road to Middle-earth, but like many of Tolkien's less well-known work it was published in an obscure place. In this case it was a limited print run of an earlier booklet made as a teaching aid for the B or 'birch' (primarily linguistic) stream of the University of Leeds English school.

It doesn't surprise me that UCL was involved, since it's one of the centres for medieval English studies even today. It turns out that A.H. Smith, a former student at Leeds, was responsible for the printing.

To be fair to HarperCollins, the audience for a teaching aid in medieval studies, largely written in dead languages and long ago overtaken by scholarship, is doubtful. Probably the copyright is disputable between Leeds university and the estates of Tolkien, Gordon and the other contributors, and the questionable marketability of the work has made untangling the legal situation uneconomical. Still, here a copy is. Thanks for that one, hS. Éadig béo þu