Two Gems

I.  POW Education in WWII

The preface to Oronzo Cilli's Tolkien's Library: An Annotated Checklist introduces one very special secondary source of information about books Tolkien owned or read in his lifetime:

"Germany and Britain agreed in 1941 to allow prisoners of war to sit examinations, and an international inter-library loan system was organised by the Bodleian Library.  Several institutions were involved, including the University of Oxford, which instituted a special Honours Examination in English Literature and Language, granting a certificate or diploma. The 'course has been specially prepared by Professor Tolkien and Mr. C. S. Lewis of Magdalen which would bring a student up to Honours standard if carefully studied.' (British Red Cross Society, 1942).  [...]  In March 1943, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Leonard Rice-Oxley were appointed to be examiners of Allied prisoners of war in Germany who had worked on the Board's set syllabus."

Apparently there are 17 reported awards to POWs who sat examinations under the program, as attested by the signatures of Tolkien, Lewis, and Rice-Oxley.  The examination schemes Tolkien and Lewis prepared were published in 1949; they appear to have encompassed B.1 Old English and B.2 Chaucer and his Contemporaries.

II. An Indirect Pre-History of "The Root of the Boot"?

Dr Dimitra Fimi gave a keynote address at Tolkien 2019 about possible vulpine predecessors and analogues of "The Root of the Boot" in song/poetry and folktale ("Tolkien, Folklore, and Foxes: a
thoroughly vulpine talk in which there may be singing!").

It's well-known, I believe, that "The Root of the Boot" is sung to the folk tune ''The Fox Went Out," but Fimi traces the origins of that song back to a Middle English poem (albeit one that was languishing unpublished in the 1920's when Tolkien first started working on his song):

"In 1952, two scholars published their respective editions of a 15th century Middle English poem found in a manuscript in the British Museum, conventionally called 'The Fox and the Goose.' The first scholar was called Rossell Hope Robbins in his 'Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries'. The second was R. H. Bowers in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. The poem begins like this: 'Pax uobis,' quod the ffox, 'for I am comyn to toowne.' It fell ageyns the next nyght the fox yede to with all his myghte, with-outen cole or candelight, whan that he cam vnto the toowne."

After a sing-along, Fimi continues:

"Bowers himself [...] pointed straightaway to the similarities between the Middle English poem with 'The Fox Went Out', while in 1961, George Perkins wrote the definitive article that proved that the Middle English poem is indeed the ancestor of this folk song. [...] The poem is written in the dialect of East Midlands, with perhaps some northern influences. The manuscript is dated within 25 years either way of 1500, although probably it's existed long before that. As Robbins notes, it would have been a very popular song, as it is one of the songs quote which would be sung at popular gatherings in the hall, in the inn or on the green or on the road unquote. It's clearly incomplete, as you see it's missing its beginning there, its opening, and it contains a number of irregularities [...] and therefore it seems to have been remembered, with some omissions, from oral tradition. It could well be a hundred years older than the manuscript, it could be older than that yet." 

(Source note: Transcribed from https://youtu.be/rAAYOnkVnwk?t=699; the second segment, following the sing-along, starts at t=780.  The Bowers edition of the poem -- a scant two pages -- is available on JSTOR.)

We know from Tolkien's Library: An Annotated Checklist that Tolkien mentioned a 1959 work by Robbins, Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries.  But I don't see any reference to George Perkins or R. H. Bowers.