[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by 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, before sending 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.

I think Squatter earns Top Trumps for this post.

After all, all this list business is just that--business--and Tolkien was an academic, devoted to the making of mind-play and not money--at fact which explains why he spent so much time marking exam papers to earn extra money for his family, academics being the poor cousins of the military and the church.

Originally Posted by Lal

However there are some serious drawbacks as the lists say more about those writers' preferences and what they hope every child will have the chance to read. From Motion's list I'd only place the Lyrical Ballads as suitable for young people as while some of the others may be readable, I honestly think some of them can only be truly understood with age and bitter experience (Wuthering Heights is the Bronte novel of choice if you are under 30, Jane Eyre if you are over 30 ).

Actually, I would have thought that Jane Eyre would be the book of choice for those under 18 while Whuthering Heights and Villette would be for those over 30. Of course, reading Jane Eyre while an impressionable teen likely means one misses most of the dark irony at Jane's expense.

I seem to recall a comment somewhere that other than Science Fiction and Fantasy, Tolkien hadn't read much "formal" literature post Wordsworth. Or was that post Pearl and Gawain?