This text is known from a 1965 letter to Zillah Sherring by J. R. R. Tolkien (n° 272 in Humphrey Carpenter’s edition of his letters). She had found curious inscriptions in a second-hand copy of the Fifth Book of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War that she had bought in Salisbury. After she saw Tolkien’s name among those the flyleaf, she wrote to him and asked whether the inscriptions were his work, especially the longest one on the back, of which she sent him a transcript. We reproduce it here with Tolkien’s own translation, except the macrons on the words þō, þūsundi and Þūkydidja. Philologists sometimes use macrons in Gothic to mark long vowels, but they have no counterpart in Wulfila’s spelling. Tolkien used them inconsistently here, for most long vowels remain unmarked in the text.

Tolkien discovered Gothic in Joseph Wright’s A Primer of the Gothic Language and developed a passion for this language. In 1910 he was still struggling with it, and there are several errors in his approximation of Gothic. He commented some in the 1965 letter: hundai should be hunda and frumins probably frumist. He also pointed out oddities with the number of the word boka and suggested that þizo boko “of those books” must stand for þizos bokos “of this book” and in bokos meinos “in my books” should rather be in boka meina “in my book”. It is worth noting, however, that Gothic boka “letter” is also attested with the meanings “written thing, document”... and “book”, but then only as a plural used in all situations (grammatically, this is called a plurale tantum), quite like Latin litterae and Greek γράμματα “letters (of the alphabet) = a letter (sent to somebody)”. Tolkien may have remembered this detail in 1910 while still learning the language and overlooked it in 1965 when answering to Zillah Sherring!

There are also semantic inaccuracies. He noted himself that he had used lisan for “read” like its German and Old Norse cognates (lesen and lesa, respectively), but unlike them Gothic had not extended to this use the original meaning “gather”: the true Gothic word was ussiggwan, literally “sing out, recite”. Another similar instance is þairhlesjau “I had read through”, which is an obvious calque from English. An amusing calque is the gothicized form of his own name, that he also revealed in this letter: Ruginwaldus Dwalakoneis “Ronald Tolkien”.

On the whole, Tolkien in 1965 was quite dismissive of his youthful effort, referring to it as “Gothic, or what I thought was Gothic or might be” and even “bad Gothic”.

The value of the spellings ai and au is debated: some scholars consider that everywhere they denote open varieties of e and o, long or short, while others assign them at times these values, at times the value of diphthongs, on etymological criteria. The first of these positions has been adopted here.

The text is transcribed in the Gothic alphabet invented by Wulfila. We made use of George Douros’ typeface Analecta.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe