Rescued from the bonfire, the lost work of C S Lewis - News, Books - The Independent

"By what seems more than coincidence, I appeared at The Kilns that very day and learned that unless I carried the papers away with me that afternoon they would indeed be destroyed," Hopper wrote. "There were so many that it took all my strength and energy to carry them back to Keble College." For the past 46 years, Hopper has spent his time sifting through the saved material before it is transported to Oxford's Bodleian Library. Four years ago, he realised that fragments of the famous Aeneid translation, referred to by Tolkien in his own letters, had escaped his attention. Since then he has worked with Reyes to piece together the translation, which exists in fragments spread across several notebooks.