by J. R. R. Tolkien; Christopher Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter
(What happens when the culprit is genuinely repentant, but the sufferer is deeply resentful and witholds all 'forgiveness'? It is a terrible thought, to deter anyone from running the risk of needlessly causing such an 'evil'. Of course, the power of mercy is only delegated and is always exercised with or without cooperation by Higher Authority. But the joys and healing of cooperation must be lost?)
While I was thinking of all this, I came across a passage dealing with the charming relations between G. M. Hopkins and his 'pen-friend' Canon Dixon. Two men starved of 'recognition'. Poor Dixon whose History of the Church of England (and whose poems) received but a casual glance, and Hopkins unappreciated in his own order. H. seems clearly to have seen that 'recognition' with some understanding is in this world an essential part of authorship, and the want of it a suffering to be distinguished from (even when mixed with) mere desire for the pleasures of fame and praise. Dixon was rather bowled over by being appreciated by Hopkins; and much moved by Burne-Jones' words (said to H. who quoted them) that 'one works really for the one man who may rise to understand one'. But H. then demurred, perceiving that Bume-Jones' hope can also in this world be frustrated, as easily as general fame: a painter (like Niggle) may work for what the burning of his picture, or an accident of death to the admirer, may wholly destroy. He summed up: The only just literary critic is Christ, who admires more than does any man the gifts He Himself has bestowed. Then let us 'bekenne either other to Crist'. God keep you.
I write only because I find it easier so to say such things as I really want to say. If they are foolish or seem so, I am not present when they fall flat. (My whispering asides are most often due to sheer pusillanimity, and a fear of being laughed at by the general company.)
This requires no answer. But as for yourself: rest in peace, as far as I am any 'critic' of behaviour. At least you are the fautlest freke that I know. 'Loudness' did you say? Nay! That is largely a self-defensive rumour put about by Hugo. If it has any basis (for him), it is but that noise begets noise. We are safe in your presence and presidency from contention, ill will, detraction, or accusations without evidence. Doubtless, as you say, I have as a member of me brotherhood a right to criticize, an I please. But I shall not lightly forget my vision of the wounds; and I shall be deterred from rash dispraise, for myself. Indeed, I do not really think that for any man valuable 'criticism' is usually to be attained hot on the spot: it is then too mixed with mere reaction. Let us listen again more patiently. And let me beg of you to bring out OHEL, with no coy ness.
But I warn you, if you bore me, I shall take my revenge. (It is an Inkling's duty to be bored willingly. It is his privilege to be a borer on occasion). I sometimes conceive and write other things than verses or romance! And I may come back at you. Indeed, if our beloved and esteemed physician is to pose us with problems of the earth as a dynamo, I can think of other problems as intricate if more petty to present to his notice – if only for the malicious delight of seeing Hugo (if present), slightly heated with alcohol, giving an imitation of the intelligent boy of the class. But Lord save you all! I don't find myself in any need of practising forbearance towards any of you – save on the rarest occasions, when I myself am tired and exhausted: then I find mere noise and vulgarity trying. But I am not yet so hoar (nor so refined) that that has become a permanent state. I want noise often enough. I know no more pleasant sound than arriving at the B. and B. and hearing a roar, and knowing that one can plunge in.
Yours
J.R.R.T.
As you see, I have delayed nearly a week in sending this. Re-reading it, I do not think it will do any harm. And in any case, I send it lest you shd. think that my recent absences from the Inklings are in any way connected. I have missed three: one because I was desperately tired, the others for domestic reasons – the last because my daughter (bless her! always mindful of Thursdays) was obliged to go out that evening.
114 From a letter to Hugh Brogan
[Brogan, then a schoolboy, had written to Tolkien praising The Hobbit and asking for more information about the world it described.]
7 April 1948
I am glad you enjoyed 'the Hobbit'. I have in fact been engaged for ten years on writing another (longer) work about the same world and period of history, in which at any rate all can be learned about the Necromancer and the mines of Moria. Only the difficulty of writing the last chapters, and the shortage of paper have so far prevented its printing. I hope at least to finish it this year, and will certainly let you have advance information. I wrote long ago (and passed the proofs a year ago) another (short) work on a rather different period: Farmer Giles of Ham. I don't know what, beyond paper, is holding it up, but it should appear this autumn or winter. But it will not satisfy any curiosity about the older world. I am afraid you would not find any information about that in ordinary works of reference, since I possess all the documents, and publishers won't publish them. What you really require is The Silmarillion, which is virtually a history of the Eldalië (or Elves, by a not very accurate translation) from their rise to the Last Alliance, and the first temporary overthrow of Sauron (the Necromancer): that would bring you nearly down to the period of The Hobbit'. Also desirable would be some maps, chronological tables, and some elementary information about the Eldarin (or Elvish) languages. I have got all those things, of course, and they are known in a small circle which includes my sons (all once at the Dragon School). If I can find some time and way of reproducing them, or part of them, say in typescript, and you remain interested in this little-explored region of pre-history, I will let you have some of the documents.
115 To Katherine Farrer
[Mrs Farrer had apparently expressed a desire to read The Silmarillion and related manuscripts.]
15 June [year not given; possibly 1948]
Merton College, Oxford
Dear Mrs Farrer,
I am sorry that I have been so long in replying and so may have seemed ungrateful, when I was really very touched by your kind letter – and also excited. For though I have (in the cracks of time!) laboured at these things since about 1914,1 have never found anyone but C.S.L. and my Christopher who wanted to read them; and no one will publish them. I have spent what time I could spare since you wrote in collecting out of the unfinished mass such things as are more or less finished and readable (I mean legible). You may find the 'compendious history' or Silmarillion tolerable – though it is only really half-revised.
The long tales out of which it is drawn (by 'Pengolod') are either incomplete or not up to date.
The Fall of Gondolin
The Lay of Beren and Lúthien (verse)
The Children of Húrin
I am distressed (for myself) to be unable to find the 'Rings of Power', which with the 'Fall of Númenor' is the link between the Silmarillion and the Hobbit world. But its essentials are included in Ch. II of The Lord of the Rings. That book would, of course, be easier to write, if the Silmarillion were published first!
I will bring you round some unique MSS. some time to-day.
Thank you for your remembrance in prayer.
Yrs sincerely
Ronald Tolkien.
116 From a letter to Allen & Unwin
[The artist Milein Cosman had been chosen to illustrate Farmer Giles of Ham, and the publishers had asked Tolkien for his opinion of some specimen drawings, which Miss Cosman had only provided after many delays.]
5 August 1948
I am not for myself much interested in the fashionableness of these drawings, or in their resemblance to Topolski or Ardizzone. I find their lack of resemblance to their text more marked. This is a definitely located story (one of its virtues if it has any): Oxfordshire and Bucks, with a brief excursion into Wales. The places in it are largely named, or fairly plainly indicated. There is no attempt by the illustrator to represent any of this. The incident of the dog and dragon occurs near Rollright, by the way, and though that is not plainly stated at least it clearly takes place in Oxfordshire.
The giant is passable – though the artist is a poor drawer of trees. The dragon is absurd. Ridiculously coy, and quite incapable of performing any of the tasks laid on him by the author. I cannot help wondering why he should be so fatuously looking over his right shoulder SE when an obvious if sketchy dog is going off NW. In defiance of the fact that me dog happily did not come on the head end first, but turned his own tail as soon as he came on the dragon's. The Farmer, a large blusterer bigger than his fellows, is made to look like little Joad at the end of a third degree by railway officials. He would hardly have used as a cowshed the shambling hut at which the miller and parson are knocking. He was a prosperous yeoman or franklin.
I gather you do not share my sentiments. Well, if you think that illustrations of this sort, wholly out of keeping with the style or manner of the text, will do, or will for reasons of contemporary taste be an advantage, I am so far in your hands. But are you ever going to induce Miss C. to impart such finish as will not exhaust her or make her too unhappy – in fact to finish the job? And when do you expect to get this book out?
117 From a letter to Hugh Brogan
31 October 1948
I managed to go into 'retreat' in the summer, and am happy to announce that I succeeded at last in bringing the 'Lord of the Rings' to a successful conclusion. Also, it has been read and approved by Rayner Unwin, who (the original reader of 'The Hobbit') has had time to grow up while the sequel has been made, and is now here at Trinity. I think there is a chance of it being published though it will be a massive book far too large to make any money for the publisher (let alone die author): it must run to 1200 pages. However length is no obstacle to those who like that kind of thing. If only term had not caught me on the hop again, I should have revised the whole – it is astonishingly difficult to avoid mistakes and changes of name and all kinds of inconsistencies of detail in a long work, as critics forget, who have not tried to make one – and sent it to the typists. I hope to do so soon, and can only say that as soon as I have a spare copy you shall have the loan of one, plus a good deal of explanatory matter, alphabets, history, calendars, and genealogies reserved for the real 'fans'. I hope this may be possible soon, so that you could have it during the Christmas holidays; but I cannot promise. This university business of earning one's living by teaching, delivering philological lectures, and daily attendance at 'boards' and other talk-meetings, interferes sadly with serious work.
118 To Hugh Brogan
[A note of Christmas greetings, not dated but possibly written at Christmas 1948. It is in a form of Angerthas or dwarf-runes close to that used m The Lord of the Rings but not identical, and in two versions of Fëanorian script, the first using tehtar (marks above the consonants) to indicate vowels, the second with vowels represented by full letters. For a transcription, see p. 442].
119 From a letter to Allen & Unwin
28 February 1949
I have not time to type [Farmer Giles] again, and I don't think it is really necessary. I am finding the labour of typing a fair copy of the 'Lord of the Rings' v. great, and the alternative of having it professionally typed prohibitive in cost. .... I believe that after 25 years service I am shortly going to be granted a term of 'sabbatical' leave, partly on medical grounds. If so, I may really finish a few things.
120 From a letter to Allen & Unwin
[The services of Milein Cosman had now been dispensed with, and Pauline Baynes had been contracted to illustrate Farmer Giles of Ham.]
16 March 1949
Miss Baynes' pictures must have reached Merton on Saturday; but owing to various things I did not see them till yesterday. I merely write to say that I am pleased with them beyond even the expectations aroused by the first examples. They are more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme. I showed them to my friends whose polite comment was that they reduced my text to a commentary on the drawings.
121 From a letter to Allen & Unwin
[On the subject of a sequel to Farmer Giles of Ham.]
13 July 1949
As for further 'legends of the Little Kingdom' : I put a reference to one in the Foreword, in case they should ever come to anything, or a manuscript of the fragmentary legend should come to light. But Georgius and Suet remains only a sketch, and it is difficult now to recapture the spirit of the former days, when we used to beat the bounds of the L.K. in an ancient car. The 'children' now range from 20 to 32. But when I have at last got the 'Lord of the Rings', of which I have nearly completed a final fair copy, the released spring may do something.
122 To Naomi Mitchison
[Mrs Mitchison had written in praise of Farmer Giles of Ham, which was published in the autumn of 1949.]
18 December 1949
3 Manor Road, Oxford
Dear Mrs Mitchison,
It was extremely kind of you to write to me. .... As for 'Farmer Giles' it was I fear written very light-heartedly, originally of a 'no time' in which blunderbusses or anything might occur. Its slightly donnish touching up, as read to the Lovelace Soc., and as published, makes the Blunderbuss rather glaring — though not really worse than all mediaeval treatments of Arthurian matter. But it was too embedded to be changed, and some people find the anachronisms amusing. I myself could not forgo the quotation (so very Murrayesque) from the Oxford Dictionary. Greek Fire must have been more like a flammenwerfer: as used on their ships it seems to have been quite deadly. But in the Isle of Britain in archaeological fact there can have been nothing in the least like a fire-arm. But neither was there fourteenth century armour.
I find 'dragons' a fascinating product of imagination. But I don't think the Beowulf one is frightfully good. But the whole problem of the intrusion of the 'dragon' into northern imagination and its transformation there is one I do not know enough about. Fafnir in the late Norse versions of the Sigurd-story is better; and Smaug and his conversation obviously is in debt there.
I know Icelandic pretty well (as I should), and a little Welsh, but in spite of efforts I have always been rather heavily defeated by Old Irish, or indeed its modern descendants. The mix-up was politically and culturally great and complex — but it left very little linguistic trace on Icelandic, save in the borrowing of certain names notably Brian and Niai which became used in Iceland. On Irish the influence was more considerable. But in any case names that were at all similar in sound tended to be equated or confused. ....
I hope to give you soon two books, about which at least one criticism will be possible: that they are excessively long! One is a sequel to 'The Hobbit' which I have just finished after 12 years (intermittent) labour. I fear it is 3 times as long, not for children (though that does not mean wholly unsuitable), and rather grim in places. I think it is very much better (in a different way). The other is pure myth and legend of times already remote in Bilbo's days.
Thank you again for writing. I hope the reply is in places legible. With best wishes.
Yours sincerely,
J. R. R. Tolkien.
123 From a draft to Milton Waldman
[At about the time that he was finishing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was introduced to Milton Waldman, an editor with the London publisher Collins. Waldman expressed great interest in the new book, and also in The Silmarillion, which Tolkien hoped would be published in conjunction with The Lord of the Rings. As Allen & Unwin had not accepted The Silmarillion when Tolkien offered it to them in 1937, he now believed that he should try to change his publisher; accordingly he showed Waldman those parts of The Silmarillion of which there were fair copies. Waldman said he would like to publish it if Tolkien would finish it. Tolkien then showed him The Lord of the Rings. Waldman was again enthusiastic, and offered to publish it providing Tolkien had 'no commitment either moral or legal to Allen & Unwin'. The reply that Tolkien sent cannot be traced, but what follows is pan of a draft for it.]
5 February 1950
I am sorry that the days have slipped by since I got your note. .... As soon as I had dumped the MS. [of The Lord of the Rings] on you
, I felt bad about it: weighing down your holiday with a labour that only an author's egotism could have inflicted at such a time. And examining my conscience I had to confess that – as one who has worked alone in a comer and only had the criticism of a few like-minded friends – I was moved greatly by the desire to hear from a fresh mind whether my labour had any wider value, or was just a fruitless private hobby.
All the same I don't think that in fact I burdened you under false pretences. .... I believe myself to have no legal obligation to Allen and Unwin, since the clause in The Hobbit contract with regard to offering the next book seems to have been satisfied either (a) by their rejection of The Silmarillion or (b) by their eventual acceptance and publication of Farmer Giles. I should (as you note) be glad to leave them, as I have found them in various ways unsatisfactory. But I have friendly personal relations with Stanley (whom all the same I do not much like) and with his second son Rayner (whom I do like very much). It has always been supposed that I am writing a sequel to The Hobbit. Rayner has read most of The Lord of the Rings and likes it – as a small boy he read the MS. of The Hobbit. Sir Stanley has long been aware that The Lord of the Rings has outgrown its function, and is not pleased since he sees no money in it for anyone (so he said); but he is anxious to see the final result all the same. If this constitutes a moral obligation then I have one: