The Letters of J. R. R.Tolkien
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[The draft ends with a discussion of the nature of the istari and the death and reincarnation of Gandalf which resembles the passage on this subject earlier in the letter.]
157 From a letter to Katherine Farrer
[The second volume of The Lord of the Rings was published, under the title The Two Towers, on 11 November.]
27 November 1954
I have felt very mean indeed, since I have known that you have both been ill and troubled, and I have never written, or called, or made any offer of help (or even sympathy). Always meaning to, of course! To any eyes but those of your charity I shd. have appeared the sort of 'friend' that dumps his works on you when you are already overloaded, sucks up praise and encouragement, expects reviews, and then departs when you begin to break down. ....
Of course I understand the financial difficulties. For a real holiday it shd. be not only 'with pay' but 'with more than pay'. I am sure there must be funds somewhere that are meant for such a purpose. If they cannot be found or tapped, nothing would give me more pleasure than to become one. I could for instance well spare £50 (and more if this rise in my wages occurs). But perhaps this will seem rather impertinent. Forget it, if it does. (I can only say that Trinity was very kind to me when I was in a dreadful pinch in the early war years, and I should prefer this way of being grateful – by helping far its most distinguished member and wife 'towards the sun'.) Bless you both. ....
I return a copy of Lewis. Also I send a copy of 'Encounter' in which one of Auden's volleys occurred: much the same but longer than the N.Y.S. Times. I got 'Encounter' for you, so you need not return it. The Ents seem to have been a success generally (even with Muir); but A. is a better critic. As usually with me they grew rather out of their name, than the other way about. I always felt that something ought to be done about the peculiar A. Saxon word ent for a 'giant' or mighty person of long ago — to whom all old works were ascribed. If it had a slightly philosophical tone (though in ordinary philology it is 'quite unconnected with any present participle of the verb to be') that also interested me.
I am hopelessly behind with the 'Appendices' to Vol. III; but I have been be-bothered with many things; and Chris, too overwhelmed to help with maps. It just can't be helped. I am at it.
158 From a letter to Rayner Unwin
[A comment on the 'blurb' on the dust-jacket of Houghton Mifflin's edition of The Two Towers.]
2 December 1954
I have only just had time to glance at the H.M. 'jacket' stuff. .... This account must have been written by someone who has not read the book, but relied on hearsay inaccurately remembered. The 'giving away of the plot' is, of course, a silly (and unnecessary) procedure; but at least the plot given away might be that of the book described. Or is that part of the game?
159 From a letter to Dora Marshall
[A reply to a letter from a reader of The Lord of the Rings.]
3 March 1955
I had great difficulty (it took several years) to get my story published, and it is not easy to say who is most surprised at the result : myself or the publishers! But it remains an unfailing delight to me to find my own belief justified: that the 'fairy-story' is really an adult genre, and one for which a starving audience exists. I said so, more or less, in my essay on the fairy-story in the collection dedicated to the memory of Charles Williams. But it was a mere proposition – which awaited proof. As C. S. Lewis said to me long ago, more or less – (I do not suppose my memory of his dicta is any more precisely accurate than his of mine: I often find strange things attributed to me in his works) – 'if they won't write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves; but it is very laborious'. Being a man of immense power and industry, his 'trilogy' was finished much sooner amidst much other work; but at last my slower and more meticulous (as well as more indolent and less organized) machine has produced its effort. The labour! I have typed myself nearly all of it twice, and pans more often; not to mention the written stages ! But I am amply rewarded and encouraged to find that the labour was not wasted. One such letter as yours is sufficient – and 'furnishes more than any author ought to ask'.
I knew Charles Williams well in his last few years: partly because of Lewis's good habit of writing to authors who pleased him (which put us both in touch with Williams); and still more because of the good fortune amid disaster that transferred Williams to Oxford during the War. But I do not think we influenced one another at all! Too 'set', and too different. We both listened (in C.S.L.'s rooms) to large and largely unintelligible fragments of one another's works read aloud; because C.S.L. (marvellous man) seemed able to enjoy us both. But I think we both found the other's mind (or rather mode of expression, and climate) as impenetrable when cast into 'literature', as we found the other's presence and conversation delightful.
160 From a letter to Rayner Unwin
[Tolkien had handed over some of the material for the Appendices to Volume III of The Lord of the Rings, and Allen & Unwin were pressing him for the remainder. On 2 March, Rayner Unwin wrote to plead for it to be delivered, saying that otherwise the publishers would have to 'yield to the intense pressure that is accumulating and publish [the third volume] without all the additional material'.]
6 March 1955
I must accept your challenge. We must make do with what material I can produce by your return. I hope the Map, which is really the most necessary, will be included.
I now wish that no appendices had been promised! For I think their appearance in truncated and compressed form will satisfy nobody: certainly not me; clearly from the (appalling mass of) letters I receive not those people who like that kind of thing – astonishingly many; while those who enjoy the book as an 'heroic romance' only, and find 'unexplained vistas' part of the literary effect, will neglect the appendices, very properly.
I am not now at all sure that the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good – cert. not for me, who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive. It is, I suppose, a tribute to the curious effect that story has, when based on very elaborate and detailed workings of geography, chronology, and language, that so many should clamour for sheer 'information', or 'lore'. But the demands such people make would again require a book, at least the size of Vol. I.
In any case the 'background' matter is very intricate, useless unless exact, and compression within the limits available leaves it unsatisfactory. It needs great concentration (and leisure), and being completely interlocked cannot be dealt with piecemeal. I have found that out, since I let part of it go.
161 From a letter to Rayner Unwin
14 April 1955
The map is hell ! I have not been as careful as I should in keeping track of distances. I think a large scale map simply reveals all the chinks in the armour — besides being obliged to differ somewhat from the printed small scale version, which was semi-pictorial. May have to abandon it for this trip!
162 From a letter to Rayner Unwin
18 April 1955
I have sent, registered under separate cover, Christopher's beautiful re-drawing of the large scale draft-map I made of the area with which Vol. III is mainly concerned.
I hope it will be approved..... The scale (which I noticed he had not inserted) is 5 times enlarged exactly from that of the general map.
163 To W. H. Auden
[Auden, who had reviewed The Fellowship of the Ring in the New York Times Book Review and Encounter, had been sent proofs of the third volume, The Return of the King. He wrote to Tolkien in April 1955 to ask various questions arising from the book. Tolkien's reply does not survive (Auden usually threw away letters after reading them). Auden wrote again on 3 June to say that he had been asked to give a talk about The Lord of the Rings on the BBC Third Programme in October. He asked Tolkien if there were any points he would like to hear made in the broadcast, and whether he would supply a few 'human touches' in the form of information about how the book came to be written. Tolkien's reply survives b
ecause on this occasion – and when he subsequently wrote to Auden – he kept a carbon copy, from which this text is taken.]
7 June 1955
76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford
Dear Auden,
I was very pleased to hear from you, and glad to feel that you were not bored. I am afraid that you may be in for rather a long letter again; but you can do what you like with it. I type it so that it may at any rate be quickly readable. I do not really think that I am frightfully important. I wrote the Trilogy as a personal satisfaction, driven to it by the scarcity of literature of the sort that I wanted to read (and what there was was often heavily alloyed). A great labour; and as the author of the Ancrene Wisse says at the end of his work: 'I would rather, God be my witness, set out on foot for Rome than begin the work over again!' But unlike him I would not have said: 'Read some of this book at your leisure every day; and I hope that if you read it often it will prove very profitable to you; otherwise I shall have spent my long hours very ill.' I was not thinking much of the profit or delight of others; though no one can really write or make anything purely privately.
However, when the BBC employs any one so important as yourself to talk publicly about the Trilogy, not without reference to the author, the most modest (or at any rate retiring) of men, whose instinct is to cloak such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under mythical and legendary dress, cannot help thinking about it in personal terms – and finding it interesting, and difficult, too, to express both briefly and accurately.
The Lord of the Rings as a story was finished so long ago now that I can take a largely impersonal view of it, and find 'interpretations' quite amusing; even those that I might make myself, which are mostly post scriptum: I had very little particular, conscious, intellectual, intention in mind at any point.41 Except for a few deliberately disparaging reviews – such as that of Vol. II in the New Statesman, in which you and I were both scourged with such terms as 'pubescent' and 'infantilism' – what appreciative readers have got out of the work or seen in it has seemed fair enough, even when I do not agree with it. Always excepting, of course, any 'interpretations' in the mode of simple allegory: that is, the particular and topical. In a larger sense, it is I suppose impossible to write any 'story' that is not allegorical in proportion as it 'comes to life'; since each of us is an allegory, embodying in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time and place, universal truth and everlasting life. Anyway most people that have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings have been affected primarily by it as an exciting story; and that is how it was written. Though one does not, of course, escape from the question 'what is it about?' by that back door. That would be like answering an aesthetic question by talking of a point of technique. I suppose that if one makes a good choice in what is 'good narrative' (or 'good theatre') at a given point, it will also be found to be the case that the event described will be the most 'significant'.
To turn, if I may, to the 'human Touches' and the matter of when I started. That is rather like asking of Man when language started. It was an inevitable, though conditionable, evolvement of the birth-given. It has been always with me: the sensibility to linguistic pattern which affects me emotionally like colour or music; and the passionate love of growing things; and the deep response to legends (for lack of a better word) that have what I would call the North-western temper and temperature. In any case if you want to write a tale of this sort you must consult your roots, and a man of the North-west of the Old World will set his heart and the action of his tale in an imaginary world of that air, and that situation : with the Shoreless Sea of his innumerable ancestors to the West, and the endless lands (out of which enemies mostly come) to the East. Though, in addition, his heart may remember, even if he has been cut off from all oral tradition, the rumour all along the coasts of the Men out of the Sea.
I say this about the 'heart', for I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. Possibly inherited, though my parents died too young for me to know such things about them, and too young to transfer such things by words. Inherited from me (I suppose) by one only of my children, though I did not know that about my son until recently, and he did not know it about me. I mean the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. (I bequeathed it to Faramir.) I don't think I have had it since I wrote the 'Downfall of Númenor' as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age.
I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it), but perhaps a fact of my personal history may partly explain why the 'North-western air' appeals to me both as 'home' and as something discovered. I was actually born in Bloemfontein, and so those deeply implanted impressions, underlying memories that are still pictorially available for inspection, of first childhood are for me those of a hot parched country. My first Christmas memory is of blazing sun, drawn curtains and a drooping eucalyptus.
I am afraid this is becoming a dreadful bore, and going on too long, at any rate longer than 'this contemptible person before you' merits. But it is difficult to stop once roused on such an absorbing topic to oneself as oneself. As for the conditioning: I am chiefly aware of the linguistic conditioning. I went to King Edward's School and spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek; but I also learned English. Not English Literature! Except Shakespeare (which I disliked cordially), the chief contacts with poetry were when one was made to try and translate it into Latin. Not a bad mode of introduction, if a bit casual. I mean something of the English language and its history. I learned Anglo-Saxon at school (also Gothic, but that was an accident quite unconnected with the curriculum though decisive — I discovered in it not only modern historical philology, which appealed to the historical and scientific side, but for the first time the study of a language out of mere love: I mean for the acute aesthetic pleasure derived from a language for its own sake, not only free from being useful but free even from being the 'vehicle of a literature').
There are two strands, or three. A fascination that Welsh names had for me, even if only seen on coal-trucks, from childhood is another; though people only gave me books that were incomprehensible to a child when I asked for information. I did not learn any Welsh till I was an undergraduate, and found in it an abiding linguistic-aesthetic satisfaction. Spanish was another: my guardian was half Spanish, and in my early teens I used to pinch his books and try to learn it : the only Romance language that gives me the particular pleasure of which I am speaking-it is not quite the same as the mere perception of beauty: I feel the beauty of say Italian or for that matter of modern English (which is very remote from my personal taste): it is more like the appetite for a needed food. Most important, perhaps, after Gothic was the discovery in Exeter College library, when I was supposed to be reading for Honour Mods, of a Finnish Grammar. It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an 'unrecorded' Germanic language, and my 'own language' – or series of invented languages – became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure.
That is of course long past now. Linguistic taste changes like everything else, as time goes on; or oscillates between poles. Latin and the British type of Celtic have it now, with the beautifully co-ordinated and patterned (if simply patterned) Anglo-Saxon near at hand and further off the Old Norse with the neighbouring but alien Finnish. Roman-British might not one say? With a strong but more recent infusion from Scandinavia and the Baltic. Well, I daresay such linguistic tastes, with due allowance for school-overlay, are as good or better a test of ancestry as blood-groups.
All this only as background to the stories, though languages and names are for me inextricable from the stories. They are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of linguistic taste could have a functi
on. The stories were comparatively late in coming.
I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.
I mentioned Finnish, because that set the rocket off in story. I was immensely attracted by something in the air of the Kalevala, even in Kirby's poor translation. I never learned Finnish well enough to do more than plod through a bit of the original, like a schoolboy with Ovid; being mostly taken up with its effect on 'my language'. But the beginning of the legendarium, of which the Trilogy is pan (the conclusion), was in an attempt to reorganize some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless, into a form of my own. That began, as I say, in the Honour Mods period; nearly disastrously as I came very near having my exhibition taken off me if not being sent down. Say 1912 to 1913. As the thing went on I actually wrote in verse. Though the first real story of this imaginary world almost fully formed as it now appears was written in prose during sick-leave at the end of 1916: The Fall of Gondolin, which I had the cheek to read to the Exeter College Essay Club in 1918. I wrote a lot else in hospitals before the end of the First Great War.