Fragments...I see what they did there. Very unusual cover for a HC Tolkien publication.

The original watercolour was painted on the 8th July 1913 at Bilberry Hill - The picture is "King's Norton from Bilberry Hill" pg 21 Artist & Illustrator by Hammond & Scull

Trotter wrote:

The original watercolour was painted on the 8th July 1913 at Bilberry Hill - The picture is "King's Norton from Bilberry Hill" pg 21 Artist & Illustrator by Hammond & Scull

Well spotted. I was looking around and completely missed it was so early. Thank you for the details.

Tolkien’s road goes on – but there’s traffic ahead at Bovadium
John Garth

https://steadyhq.com/en/john-garth-on- ... f3-42d8-a6ec-cf40e9efd5b4

Morris Motors boss may have inspired Tolkien villain

Fascist-sympathising William Morris thought to be basis for soulless industrialist in The Bovadium Fragments

The Bovadium Fragments reflects Tolkien’s mastery of Latin. Bovadium was the Latinised name for the village of Oxford, and the Daemon of Vaccipratum translates as “the demon of the cow pasture”, or Cowley – where Morris had established his motor manufacturing plant.

In one passage of the unearthed story, Tolkien writes: “But it came to pass that a Daemon (as popular opinion supposed) in his secret workshops devised certain abominable machines, to which he gave the name Motores.”

The Bovadium Fragments was among Tolkien manuscripts either donated or deposited posthumously by his estate to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. It will be published in October by Harper Collins.

Chris Smith, the Harper Collins publishing director, described it as “a sharply satirical account of the perils of allowing car production and machine-worship to take over your town, where things ultimately all go to hell, in a very literal sense”.

Tolkien’s son and literary executor, Christopher, had edited the text before his death in 2020.

The book will include an essay by Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s librarian, who has conducted extensive research into the planning controversy, having established its inspiration for Tolkien’s story.

Mr Ovenden said it is about a scholar in the future looking at evidence of a society that is now lost, having “worshipped the motor car”, adding: “Tolkien was deeply affected by the way that the motor industry was changing his city, and that shines through.”

Asked why The Bovadium Fragments had not been published before, Mr Ovenden said: “Christopher’s priority in publishing his father’s unpublished works was on the Middle Earth-related material. This material didn’t really fit with that or with his father’s more scholarly pieces, and so it got left.

“I would visit Christopher and his wife Baillie in France every year. On one of those visits, he drew this to my attention and said, ‘What’s all this about, what do you think the background of this was?’”

Mr Ovenden described it as “a contribution to environmental literature and the conservation of historic cities”. “It was written in the late 1950s and 1960s, but it has this extraordinary contemporary resonance,” he said.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/ ... inspired-tolkien-villain/