W.H. Auden’s hand-corrected page proofs of his Afterword to George Macdonald’s fairy stories The Golden Key, a commission he over on after his friend J.R.R. Tolkien felt unable to finish writing it.
 
Foolscap page proofs, 2pp, stapled and folded. Titled in holograph by Auden’s editor Michael Di Capua “For Mr Auden”, with four corrections by Di Capua to the text, correcting a typo in the spelling of “Tolkien”, querying the pluralisation of “dwarves”, adding a capital letter, and hyphenating “air fish”.
Auden quashes Di Capua’s query on “dwarves” in an annotation at the base of the first page, “I prefer dwarves but perhaps this is British English WHA”. He then writes “OK” to the head of the page.
 
Housed in the original mailing envelope, addressed in Auden’s hand to Di Capua’s office, stamped, and postmarked February 2nd 1967. In very good condition, folded several times.
 
In 1964 Michael Di Capua of Farrar Strauss and Giroux commissioned J.R.R. Tolkien to contribute an introductory essay to George Macdonald’s The Golden Key. However, when Tolkien went to write the essay he discovered that the intervening decades had soured Macdonald’s work in his mind, writing:
“I discovered that I no longer liked George MacDonald or even esteemed him. In fact I felt and feel an active dislike for his “fairy-story” work, including most of The Golden Key... I feel obliged to ask you to allow me to withdraw from this project.” (Letter to Michael Di Capua, 2nd March 1966).
 
Now needing to replace Tolkien as the writer of an essay to accompany a new edition of George Macdonald’s The Golden Key, Di Capua turned to Tolkien’s friend and correspondent W.H. Auden. Auden produced an valedictory afterword praising Macdonald, present here at the page proofs stage. Tolkien is mentioned by name and quoted from, although the spelling of his name had to be corrected in a marginal annotation.
 
Auden also uses a marginal note to defend Tolkien’s plural spelling of “dwarves”, writing “I prefer dwarves but perhaps this is British English”. This is a decision that Tolkien too defended in Appendix F of The Lord Of The Rings:
“I have ventured to use the form dwarves, and so remove them a little, perhaps, from the sillier tales of these latter days”.