There is a story in which a city called Bovadium is killed by its own traffic. The streets silt up until nothing can move along them. The inhabitants are asphyxiated. At the end, the machines responsible explode.

The author of the story is J.R.R. Tolkien. It is called The Bovadium Fragments, and it sat unpublished for sixty years.

The name Bovadium is built from the Latin bos, bovis (an ox), and the city is the place where oxen crossed at a ford. Here, therefore, is Oxford put back into the language its university had spent eight centuries teaching.

The machines are made at Vaccipratum, which is vacca and pratum, cow and meadow, and which is therefore Cowley, the village on Oxford’s edge where the philanthropist Lord Nuffield built his motor works. Their maker is named in the text as the Daemon of Vaccipratum, who “in his secret workshops devised certain abominable machines, to which he gave the name Motores.”

So: a demon in a cow pasture, inventing cars, to destroy the city of the ox-ford. Every proper noun in the thing is a pun, and every pun is in Latin.

Tolkien did not invent the joke. He inherited it

In 1914, motor buses arrived in Oxford, and a classicist there named A.D. Godley wrote a short comic poem about them. The joke of it is that he treats “motor bus” as though it were an ordinary Latin noun and puts it through the cases, declining a piece of modern machinery in the grammar of Cicero. It begins: “What is this that roareth thus? / Can it be a Motor Bus?” It is the best-known comic poem the university has produced and generations of dons had it by heart.

Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, the husband-and-wife bibliographers who compiled the standard reference work on Tolkien’s life and writing, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, identify Godley’s poem as a direct inspiration. That single fact changes what the Fragments are. Tolkien was not striking out alone into an eccentric private genre. He was joining a local habit, already forty-odd years old, of being extremely rude about traffic in the language of the lecture hall.

A demon in a cow pasture, inventing cars, to destroy the city of the ox-ford. Every proper noun is a pun, and every pun is in Latin.

Why it stayed in the box for sixty years

Tolkien’s own verdict on it was that the thing was overelaborated, and he was right. The satire will not stay on its target. It starts on machine-worship and then wanders off to have a go at archaeologists and at college crockery, which are not obviously the same enemy.

There was some interest in publishing it during the 1960s and nothing came of it. The Latin was part of the difficulty, and not only because it is hard. The risk was subtler than that: a reader meeting this much wordplay decides very quickly that the whole thing is a game, and once that decision is made the argument underneath becomes invisible. Tolkien appears to have seen the danger. It is the occupational hazard of the very clever, and he had enough self-knowledge to spot it in his own work.

The row was real, and he was standing in it

Almost none of this is invented.

In the late 1940s, Oxford had a long civic argument about what to do with its traffic, and the sharpest fight was over a 1948 proposal by the planner Thomas Sharp to run a road through the meadows south of the city. In the Fragments the disputing parties are Northerners and Southerners, arguing about where the traffic should be routed. They are not fantasy factions. They are the actual sides of the actual dispute, wearing togas.

Tolkien had been Merton Professor of English Language and Literature since 1945 and lived in the middle of all of it, so what we have here is a professor writing a small apocalypse about his own city’s planning committee. He was in his late sixties by the time he set it down.

Three layers, which must be kept apart

The book does not present itself as a story. It presents itself as fragments, recovered and annotated, complete with a scholarly apparatus written by scholars who do not exist and whose names are themselves jokes running the same trick backwards.

Around that sits genuine editorial commentary, set in smaller type, by Christopher Tolkien: the author’s son, who spent decades editing his father’s unfinished manuscripts. Reading the volume attentively therefore means holding three things apart at once: the fiction, the fictional scholarship about the fiction, and the real scholarship about the fictional scholarship. It is not difficult so much as it is demanding of a particular kind of attention, and a reader who is not expecting it will spend the first twenty pages lost at sea.

It is also unmistakably…Tolkien. Here was a man who could not hand you a text without also handing you the account of how it came down to you. That habit is what produced the Red Book of Westmarch, the invented manuscript tradition standing behind The Lord of the Rings and pretending to be its source. Here the same machinery is wheeled out and pointed at a joke about buses, which is either a waste of a magnificent instrument or the funniest thing in the book, depending on the morning.

What is wrong with the edition

The accompanying essay, “The Origin of Bovadium”, is by Richard Ovenden, who has run Oxford’s Bodleian Library since 2014, and it takes up roughly half of the 144 pages. It is good on Nuffield’s Morris Motors and on the Oxford planning disputes, and it is a great deal of apparatus to build around a short satire that its own author thought overcooked. Hammond and Scull also record a factual slip in it concerning Tolkien’s arrival in Oxford in 1911, which is the sort of thing that matters more in this field than in most.

And the volume is offered as the final work by J.R.R. Tolkien. The estate has described a book that way before. Hammond and Scull’s response to the claim is that they have heard it before, and having read a certain amount of posthumous Tolkien over the years, I would pass that caution straight on to the reader.

What it is actually for

Anyone opening this in hope of Middle-earth should close it again immediately. There are no elves in it, no map, and nothing that touches the invented history of Middle-earth at any point.

What there is instead is the temper, undisguised and without a fantasy between you and it. The man who wrote the Scouring of the Shire, the late chapter in which the hobbits come home to find their country industrialised, the trees felled and a mill fouling the water, was not constructing a literary theme when he wrote it. He believed that, steadily, all his life, and here he is in his late sixties saying the same thing in his own voice, about a bypass, in Latin, to nobody.

Sixty years in a drawer has not improved the satire. It has, though, made the anger legible as a man’s opinion rather than an author’s device, and that is a thing worth having about a writer this heavily mythologised.