The Heroes of Asgard: Tales from Scandinavian Mythology (T.S. Eliot's copy)
Philadelphia: The Rogers Company, [No date].
From the childhood library of T.S. Eliot, signed by him on the front free endpaper in pencil and dated 1898, when he was ten. Additional inscription apparently from Eliot's first cousin once removed, Henry Eliot Scott, noting that the book was gifted to him by the poet June 1930. 256 pp. Second American edition. Sextodecimo, bound in pale blue cloth with decorative stamping in dark blue and silver. Near Fine with light rubbing and moderate soiling to covers, faint foxing to endpapers. Binding starting at p. 161.
A rare signature from a very young Thomas Stearns Eliot, who struggled to align his precise and delicate letters on ruled lines. Eliot had access to his parents’ library, but this child-sized book, an adaptation of Norse myths by the English sisters Annie and Eliza Keary, was all his own. He wrote down the address of his childhood home, a large brick house on Locust Street in St. Louis (“I am very well satisfied at having been born in St. Louis,” he later said) and the year, 1898. Eliot turned ten in 1898, the year he wrote his first surviving letter and began attending the formative Smith Academy, and the book may have been a birthday present. As an adult Eliot demonstrated a deep and abiding interest in mythology, drawing heavily on Eastern and Western myths for symbols of decay and renewal in “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets.” That Eliot kept the book and presented it to a relative thirty years later indicates that it was of some importance to him.
The young relative, Henry Eliot Scott, was the grandson of T.S. Eliot’s uncle Thomas Lamb Eliot. The elder Eliot was a pioneering minister who headed to Oregon long before his nephew was born. He became a city father of Portland, serving on the board of almost every major public institution and bringing in the Olmsted brothers to design Forest Park. His greatest achievement was convincing the wealthy pioneers Simeon and Amanda Reed to leave a bequest that would finance an institute of learning, which he then molded into the liberal arts school Reed College, the educational crown jewel of Portland.
Thomas Lamb Eliot’s grandson Henry Eliot Scott became a jobbing artist who briefly taught Art History at Reed in the 1930s. He would have been around twenty-one when T.S. Eliot gave him this book, which twines together several strands of the poet’s life: his family loyalty, his midwestern origins, and his dominant spiritual and literary interests. The book is a testament to the childhood that shaped the writer, and the man’s signature can be seen in the boy’s.
Price: $15,000