A Northern Venture

From Tolkien Gateway
A Northern Venture: Verses by Members of the Leeds University English School Association
A Northern Venture.jpg
AuthorEdited by Sydney Matthewman(?)[1]
PublisherLeeds: The Swan Press
ReleasedJune 1923
FormatBooklet (green card wrappers)

A Northern Venture: Verses by Members of the Leeds University English School Association is collection of twenty-three poems by ten different authors. The booklet contains three poems by J.R.R. Tolkien:

  1. "Tha Eadigan Saelidan: The Happy Mariner"
  2. "Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon"
  3. "Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo"

Other noteworthy authors include Tolkien's friends and colleagues Wilfred Rowland Childe (contributing two poems) and E.V. Gordon (two poems), and his student A.H. Smith (two poems).

A 2nd impression of the booklet, dated July 1923, was also issued. It is essentially identical to the 1st impression.[2]

Review[edit | edit source]

"The pictures, brightly tinted, of Mr. W.R. Childe's fancy, the dialect verses of Mr. A.H. Smith, who knows his Yorkshire, and a couple of riddles in Saxon by Mr. J.R.R. Tolkien are perhaps the outstanding things in this unpretentious anthology" (Times Literary Supplement of July 12, 1923).

References

  1. Presumably, according to Douglas A. Anderson (see J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, p.459
  2. An Illustrated Tolkien Bibliography at Tolkienbooks.net