You’ve all seen the articles like the one in the Guardian proclaiming “Unseen JRR Tolkien poems found in school magazine.”
As a news item, this story is a curious thing.
What’s just now been discovered is the school’s copy of the magazine with the poems in it. As the article makes clear, when Wayne G. Hammond inquired about the magazine, having found a reference elsewhere to Tolkien poetry being in it, the school could not find a copy of that issue and passed Wayne on to the archives of the Sisters of Mercy, the controlling order.
They had one, so that’s when the poems were found, some three years ago, and one of them has since been reprinted. But perhaps the school personnel did not know any of that, and now they’ve found it too. Good for them, but the only actual news here is, “So that’s where our copy was hiding!”
Daniel Helen has the whole story, with links to Wayne’s blog posts with more details.
