[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I've never read H. P. Lovecraft, so that all went right over my head !

Well this is a Tolkien forum. I'm still not sure that it wasn't bad form to start talking about other authors, but I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. The Necronomicon is a book containing the insane ramblings of a mad Arab called Abdul Alhazred, which provides a lot of information about Lovecraft's various unwholesome gods. He quoted it so convincingly that there are still people who believe that it actually exists. I was just musing that JRRT always went that little bit further with his mythologies, so that he might even have left a copy, had he invented it, but I expect that Mister Underhill's right: We'd have some vast collection of disjointed notes and prose, with endless comments about the great burden of editing a dead author's work. I think that the comment about tentacles is a sideswipe at the Balrog's wings debate (Cthulhu's nickname at school was probably 'Squid-face' if you take my meaning).

Yeah, I've read the actual Beowulf, there's a relatively new translation by Seamus Heaney (I think that was the name) that was very good IMHO. Can't wait to read the Tolkien essay !

That's the fellow: Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate, and author of poems about bog corpses. I'm looking forward to reading my new copy of that, as it comes so highly recommended: I went out looking for the anthology of lectures on Saturday and came back with a couple of maps, some HoME volumes, that translation of Beowulf and a John Betjeman anthology, but no lectures. Apparently Tolkien's academic writings haven't yet been recognised as a source of film-related income by our local bookshops.

Pity I can't use Amazon really: I knew there had to be a reason why people applied for credit cards. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]