22.03.2011, 21:00
Life & Legend :
Citation :248 A.D. Godley's 'Motor Bus'. Tolkien frequently expressed his dislike of the mechanics of industrialization and the machinery of the modern world. Although he briefly owned a car in the 1930s, as he grew older the motor car came to symbolize for him the destructive forces of twentieth-century life. In the early 1960s he wrote an unpublished satire, 'The Bovadium Fragments', in which Oxford is destroyed by the motores from Cowley, which block the streets and suffocate the population (Biography, p.163). He evidently approved of A.D. Godley's prescient poem deploring, in Latin and English, the juggernaut-like progress of an omnibus through Cornmarket and the High in 1914:
How shall wretches live like us Cincti Bis Motoribus ? Domine, defende nos Contra hos Motores Bos!
Tolkien's copy of 'Motor Bus' is a hand-printed single sheet, reprinted from Godley's Fifty Poems (1927) by the Samson Press, Woodstock, and illustrated by
Iain Macnab.
Tolkien A62,fol. 40
What's the point of all this pedantry if you can't get a detail like this right?