272 From a letter to Zillah Sherring

 20 July 1965

[In a second-hand bookshop in Salisbury, Wiltshire, Zillah Sherring found and bought a copy of The Fifth Book of Thucydides which contained a number of strange inscriptions that had been written in it by a previous owner. Finding Tolkien's name among those on the flyleaf, she wrote to him asking if the inscriptions, particularly a long one at the back, had possibly been his work. She sent him a transcript of it. This is a facsimile of the inscription:]

The book certainly once belonged to me. .... The writing on the back page is in Gothic, or what I thought was Gothic or might be. I had come across this admirable language a year or two before 1910 in Joseph Wright's Primer of the Gothic Language (now replaced by A Grammar of the Gothic Language). It was sold to me by a school-friend interested in missionary work, who had thought it a Bible Society product and had no use for what it was. I was fascinated by Gothic in itself: a beautiful language, which reached the eminence of liturgical use, but failed owing to the tragic history of the Goths to become one of the liturgical languages of the West. At the time I had only the Primer with its small vocabulary, but I had learned from it some of the technique necessary for converting the words of other Germanic languages into Gothic script. I often put 'Gothic' inscriptions in books, sometimes Gothicizing my Norse name and German surname as Ruginwaldus Dwalakoneis. The inscription you cite is at fault (by accident) in HVNDAI which should be HVNDA. It is also bad Gothic in other respects, but was intended to mean: I read the words of these books¹⁰⁴ of Greek history ('year-writing') in the sixth month of this year: thousand, nine hundreds, ten, of Our Lord: in order to gain the prize given every year to the boy knowing most about Thucydides, and this I inscribed in my books¹⁰⁵ on the twelfth of the sixth (month) after I had already ? first read through all the words carefully. Frvmins is probably an error for frumist 'first'.

You probably will not be interested in other 'errors'. The inscription presented some problems to one having only the vocabulary of short specimens of the fragments of the Gothic versions of the New Testament to go upon. The Gothic word for 'read' was not lisan, las, galisans, which still had only its original meaning 'gather' (a sense which its German and Norse equivalents, lesen and lesa, still retain in addition to the sense 'read' imitated from Latin lego). The Gothic word was ussiggwan 'recite' (sing out). The an of private reading, silent, and with the use only or chiefly of the eyes, was if practised by the 'ancients' mostly forgotten. I believe it is reported that St Ambrose (in the same century as the Gothic versions were made) astonished observers who saw him reading by only moving his eyes from side to side, without moving his lips or at least murmuring. ....

I still feel no compunction in writing in my own books, though I now usually put only notes supposed to be of use – if I can later decipher them.