JRR Tolkien's Merton College desk, £260,000 at Christie's.
It came for sale at Christie's on December 11 from the descendants of fellow British author and philosopher Dame Iris Murdoch.
Tolkien used the mid-Victorian roll-top mahogany and satinwood desk throughout his tenure as Merton professor of English language and literature at Oxford between 1945 and 1959.
While Tolkien worked on the initial composition of his epic fantasies at home, the Merton desk would likely have been used during proof corrections and the extensive correspondence that accompanied its publication of The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955).
Images taken by Picture Post photographer Haywood Magee on December 2, 1955, show Tolkien in his book-lined Merton College study seated beside the desk with pipe in hand.
Sale to Murdoch
The desk continued to serve as a primary work station when, after retirement in 1959, it moved to the Tolkien family home at 76 Sandfield Road, Headington. It was only in 1968, when Tolkien and his wife Edith moved from Oxford to Bournemouth, that he sold it to Iris Murdoch.
It came for sale with a guide price of £50,000 to £80,000 as part of an auction titled Groundbreakers: Icons Of Our Time.
Christie’s said that “as one of two desks known to have belonged to the author, and the only one in private hands, it constitutes one of the most important artefacts of Tolkien’s career that is ever likely to be offered for sale.”
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and large portions of The Lord of the Rings on his ‘first’ desk, purchased for him by Edith in 1927. Tolkien sold this desk in 1972 with the proceeds of £340 going to the Help the Aged Housing Association in Oxford. In 1987 it was purchased by the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Illinois.
