295 To W.H.Auden

[Auden had written to praise Tolkien for the poem in Anglo-Saxon which Tolkien had contributed (together with a version in modern English) to the journal Shenandoah as part of a festschrift for Auden's sixtieth birthday. (It was published in the Winter 1967 issue (Vol. XVIII no. 2, pp. 96-7).) In his letter, Auden had praised Tolkien's poem 'The Sea-bell' ('Frodo's Dreme'), which he called 'wonderful'.]

29 March 1967

76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dear Wystan,

I was equally delighted by your letter. It arrived very quickly (on Good Friday) and it did much to restore my spirits, as by the same post I received a very distressing letter. I was greatly cheered not only by your pleasure in having an Old English poem (I thought this would be appropriate) but also by your praise of Frodo's Dreme. That really made me wag my tail. I hope we can meet again soon.

Yours ever,
[signature not on carbon]

P.S. Thank you for your wonderful effort in translating and reorganising The Song of the Sibyl. In return again I hope to send you, if I can lay my hands on it (I hope it isn't lost), a thing I did many years ago when trying to learn the an of writing alliterative poetry: an attempt to unify the lays about the Völsungs from the Elder Edda, written in the old eight-line fornyrðislag stanza.