Lost Tolkien / Lewis manuscript notes found

Archives keep unearthing treasures. Texas State University recently announced that Steven Beebe, Regents’ Professor and Chair of the Texas State Department of Communication Studies, discovered the opening pages of an unpublished manuscript that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were to collaborate on --- to be called Language and Human Nature. The pages were discovered in the Oxford University Bodleian Library. 

According to the story, the partial book manuscript Beebe found was "in a small notebook on which Lewis had written the word “Scraps.” Included in the tattered notebook are early fragments of two Narnia Chronicles, The Magician’s Nephew and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader along with unpublished ideas about a variety of topics."

"What if two of the most famous and widely read 20th Century authors who have each individually sold millions of copies of their books had written a book together?" posits the University News Service. Interesting question.

In Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, I discuss my pilgrimage to Marquette University, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the heart of wargaming country, and an hour from Lake Geneva, where Dungeons & Dragons had been invented. Marquette's Department of Special Collections and University Archives has a J. R. R. Tolkien Collection that includes “holograph renderings (manuscripts in the hand of the author), various sets of typescripts with corrections by Tolkien, and page proofs or galley sheets, also with corrections in the hand of the author” of his major works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, plus two lesser works.

The recent publication of an old and near-vanished work by Tolkien, “The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún," recently edited and published by J.R.R.T.'s son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, makes me wonder what other treasures remain in the Tolkien/Lewis universe, and what corners of their literary creations are still out there to be discovered.