The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  Do ‘ramble on’. Letters need not be only about exterior events (though all details are welcome). What you are thinking is just as important: Christmas, bee-noises, and all the rest. And why you should think the encounter with the chemist-botanist. . . . unworthy of record, I can’t say. I thought it most interesting It is not the not-man (e.g. weather) nor man (even at a bad level), but the man-made that is ultimately daunting and insupportable. If a ragnarök6 would burn all the slums and gas-works, and shabby garages, and long arc-lit suburbs, it cd. for me burn all the works of art – and I’d go back to trees.

  84 From an airgraph to Christopher Tolkien

  12 October 1944 (FS 55)

  I began trying to write again (I would, on the brink of term!) on Tuesday, but I struck a most awkward error (one or two days) in the synchronization, v. important at this stage, of movements of Frodo and the others, which has cost labour and thought and will require tiresome small alterations in many chapters; but at any rate I have actually begun Book Five (and last: about 10 chapters per ‘book’). I have today sent Leaf by Niggle to Dublin Review, as the editor wrote asking for verse or narrative.

  85 From an airgraph to Christopher Tolkien

  16 October 1944 (FS 56)

  I have been struggling with the dislocated chronology of the Ring, which has proved most vexatious, and has not only interfered with other more urgent and duller duties, but has stopped me getting on. I think I have solved it all at last by small map alterations, and by inserting an extra day’s Entmoot, and extra days into Trotter’s chase and Frodo’s journey (a small alteration in the first chapter I have just sent: 2 days from Morannon to Ithilien). But now I have lectures again, and also Pearl.

  86 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  23 October 1944 (FS 57)

  I have just been out to look up: the noise is terrific: the biggest for a long time, skywide Armada. I suppose it is allright to say so, as by the time that this reaches you somewhere will have ceased to exist and all the world will have known about it and already forgotten it. . . . .

  There seems no time to do anything properly; and I feel tired all the time, or rather bored. I think if a jinn came and gave me a wish – what would you really like? – I should reply: Nothing. Go away!. . . .

  With regard to the blasphemy, one can only recall (when applicable) the words Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do – or say. And somehow I fancy that Our Lord actually is more pained by offences we commit against one another than those we commit against himself, esp. his incarnate person. And linguistically there is not a great deal of difference between a damn you, said without reflection or even knowledge of the terror and majesty of the One Judge, and the things you mention. Both the sexual and the sacred words have ceased to have any content except the ghost of past emotion. I don’t mean that it is not a bad thing, and it is certainly very wearisome, saddening and maddening, but it is at any rate not blasphemy in the full sense.

  87 To Christopher Tolkien

  25 October 1944

  20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

  Dearest man, Here is a little more of ‘the Ring’ for your delectation (I hope), and criticism, but not for return. Two more chapters to complete the ‘Fourth Book’, & then I hope to finish the ‘Fifth’ and last of the Ring. I have written a long airletter today, & shall write again (of course) before your birthday. I am afraid this little packet won’t get to you in time for it.

  ‘Dear Mr Tolkien, I have just finished reading your book The Hobbit for the 11th time and I want to tell you what I think of it. I think it is the most wonderful book I have ever read. It is beyond description … Gee Whiz, I’m surprised that it’s not more popular … If you have written any other books, would you please send me their names?’

  John Barrow 12 yrs.

  West town School, West town, Pa.’

  I thought these extracts from a letter I got yesterday would amuse you. I find these letters which I still occasionally get (apart from the smell of incense which fallen man can never quite fail to savour) make me rather sad. What thousands of grains of good human corn must fall on barren stony ground, if such a very small drop of water should be so intoxicating! But I suppose one should be grateful for the grace and fortune that have allowed me to provide even the drop. God bless you beloved. Do you think ‘The Ring’ will come off, and reach the thirsty?

  Your own Father.

  It’s nice to find that little American boys do really still say ‘Gee Whiz’.

  88 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  28 October 1944 (FS 58)

  This empty year is fading into a dull grey mournful darkness: so slow-footed and yet so swift and evanescent. What of the new year and the spring? I wonder.

  89 To Christopher Tolkien

  7–8 November 1944 (FS 60)

  20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

  . . . . Your reference to the care of your guardian angel makes me fear that ‘he’ is being specially needed. I dare say it is so. . . . . It also reminded me of a sudden vision (or perhaps apperception which at once turned itself into pictorial form in my mind) I had not long ago when spending half an hour in St Gregory’s before the Blessed Sacrament when the Quarant’ Ore1 was being held there. I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it. (Not that there were individual rays issuing from the Light, but the mere existence of the mote and its position in relation to the Light was in itself a line, and the line was Light). And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized. And I do not mean ‘personified’, by a mere figure of speech according to the tendencies of human language, but a real (finite) person. Thinking of it since – for the whole thing was very immediate, and not recapturable in clumsy language, certainly not the great sense of joy that accompanied it and the realization that the shining poised mote was myself (or any other human person that I might think of with love) – it has occurred to me that (I speak diffidently and have no idea whether such a notion is legitimate: it is at any rate quite separate from the vision of the Light and the poised mote) this is a finite parallel to the Infinite. As the love of the Father and Son (who are infinite and equal) is a Person, so the love and attention of the Light to the Mote is a person (that is both with us and in Heaven): finite but divine: i.e. angelic. Anyway, dearest, I received comfort, part of which took this curious form, which I have (I fear) failed to convey: except that I have with me now a definite awareness of you poised and shining in the Light – though your face (as all our faces) is turned from it. But we might see the glimmer in the faces (and persons as apprehended in love) of others. . . . .

  On Sunday Prisca and I cycled in wind and rain to St Gregory’s. P. was battling with a cold and other disability, and it did not do her much immediate good, though she’s better now; but we had one of Fr. C’s best sermons (and longest). A wonderful commentary on the Gospel of the Sunday (healing of the woman and of Jairus’ daughter), made intensely vivid by his comparison of the three evangelists. (P. was espec. amused by his remark that St Luke being a doctor himself did not like the suggestion that the poor woman was all the worse for them, so he toned that bit down). And also by his vivid illustrations from modern miracles. The similar case of a woman similarly afflicted (owing to a vast uterine tumour) who was cured instantly at Lourdes, so that the tumour could not be found, and her belt was twice too large. And the most moving story of the little boy with tubercular peritonitis who was not healed, and was taken sadly away in the train by his parents, practically dying with 2 nurses attending him. As the train moved away it passed within sight of the Grotto. The little boy sat up. ‘I want to go and talk to the little girl’ – in the same train there was a little girl who had been healed. And he got up and walked there and played with the littl
e girl; and then he came back, and he said ‘I’m hungry now’. And they gave him cake and two bowls of chocolate and enormous potted meat sandwiches, and he ate them! (This was in 1927). So Our Lord told them to give the little daughter of Jairus something to eat. So plain and matter of fact: for so miracles are. They are intrusions (as we say, erring) into real or ordinary life, but they do intrude into real life, and so need ordinary meals and other results. (Of course Fr. C could not resist adding: and there was also a Capuchin Friar who was mortally ill, & had eaten nothing for years, and he was cured, and he was so delighted about it that he rushed off and had two dinners, and that night he had not his old pains but an attack of plain ordinary indigestion). But at the story of the little boy (which is a fully attested fact of course) with its apparent sad ending and then its sudden unhoped-for happy ending, I was deeply moved and had that peculiar emotion we all have – though not often. It is quite unlike any other sensation. And all of a sudden I realized what it was: the very thing that I have been trying to write about and explain – in that fairy-story essay that I so much wish you had read that I think I shall send it to you. For it I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary ‘truth’ on the second plane (for which see the essay) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love. Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story. But since the author if it is the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality, this one was also made to Be, to be true on the Primary Plane. So that in the Primary Miracle (the Resurrection) and the lesser Christian miracles too though less, you have not only that sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Anankê2 of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us. I was riding along on a bicycle one day, not so long ago, past the Radcliffe Infirmary, when I had one of those sudden clarities which sometimes come in dreams (even anaesthetic-produced ones). I remember saying aloud with absolute conviction: ‘But of course! Of course that’s how things really do work’. But I could not reproduce any argument that had led to this, though the sensation was the same as having been convinced by reason (if without reasoning). And I have since thought that one of the reasons why one can’t recapture the wonderful argument or secret when one wakes up is simply because there was not one: but there was (often maybe) a direct appreciation by the mind (sc. reason) but without the chain of argument we know in our time-serial life. However that’s as may be. To descend to lesser things: I knew I had written a story of worth in ‘The Hobbit’ when reading it (after it was old enough to be detached from me) I had suddenly in a fairly strong measure the ‘eucatastrophic’ emotion at Bilbo’s exclamation: ‘The Eagles! The Eagles are coming!’. . . . And in the last chapter of The Ring that I have yet written I hope you’ll note, when you receive it (it’ll soon be on its way) that Frodo’s face goes livid and convinces Sam that he’s dead, just when Sam gives up hope.

  And while we are still, as it were, on the porch of St Gregory’s on Sunday 5 Nov. I saw the most touching sight there. Leaning against the wall as we came out of church was an old tramp in rags, something like sandals tied on his feet with string, an old tin can on one wrist, and in his other hand a rough staff. He had a brown beard, and a curiously ‘clean’ face, with blue eyes, and he was gazing into the distance in some rapt thought not heeding any of the people, cert. not begging. I could not resist the impulse of offering him a small alms, and he took it with grave kindliness, and thanked me courteously, and then went back to his contemplation. Just for once I rather took Fr. C. aback by saying to him that I thought the old man looked a great deal more like St Joseph than the statue in the church – at any rate St Joseph on the way to Egypt. He seems to be (and what a happy thought in these shabby days, where poverty seems only to bring sin and misery) a holy tramp! I could have sworn it anyway, but P. says Betty3 told her that he had been at the early mass, and had been to communion, and his devotion was plain to see, so plain that many were edified. I do not know just why, but I find that immensely comforting and pleasing. Fr. C says he turns up about once a year.

  This is becoming a very peculiar letter! I hope it does not seem all very incomprehensible; for events have directed me to topics that are not really treatable without erasions and re-writings, impossible in air letters!. . . . Let us finish the diary. . . . . On Monday (I think) a hen died – one of the bantam twins; cert. it was buried that day. Also I saw C.S.L. and C.W. from about 10.40 to 12.50, but can recollect little of the feast of reason and flow of soul, partly because we all agree so. It was a bright morning, and the mulberry tree in the grove just outside C.S.L.’s window shone like fallow gold against colbalt blue sky. But the weather worsened again, and in the afternoon I did one of the foulest jobs. I grease-banded all the trees (apple) tying 16 filthy little pantelettes on. It took 2 hours, and nearly as long to get the damned stuff off hands and implements. I neglected it last year, and so lost ½ a glorious crop to ‘moth’. It will be like this ‘cacocatastrophic’ fallen world, if next year there ain’t no blossom. Tuesday: lectures and a brief glimpse, at ‘The Bird’, of the Lewis Bros. and Williams. The Bird is now gloriously empty, with improved beer, and a landlord wreathed in welcoming smiles! He lights a special fire for us!. . . .

  A propos of yr. reminder about ‘Lord Nelson’ – it was in the preliminary meeting to form a United Christian Council – he’s always about. I forgot to tell you that at Gielgud’s ‘Hamlet’ he seized on a quiet moment to yell from the Dress Circle ‘A very fine performance, and I’m enjoying it very much, but cut out the swear-words!’ He did the same at the Playhouse. He was nearly lynched in the New Theatre. But he goes on his odd way. . . . .

  Your own Father.

  90 To Christopher Tolkien

  24 November 1944 (FS 64)

  20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

  My dearest, there has been a splendid flow of letters from you, since I last wrote. . . . . We were most amused by your account of the Wings ceremony. I wonder how the ‘native band’ enjoyed being whizzed through the air! I also wondered how you came to have seen and to have remembered the quotation from the Exeter Book Gnomics – which (though I had not thought of it before) does cert. provide a most admirable plea in defence of singing in one’s bath. It cheered me a lot to see a bit of Anglo-Saxon, and I hope indeed that you’ll soon be able to return and perfect your study of that noble idiom. As the father said to his son: ‘Is nu fela folca þætte fyrngewntu healdan wille, ac him hyge brosnað.’ Which might be a comment on the crowding of universities and the decline of wit. ‘There is now a crowd of folks that want to get hold of the old documents, but their wits are decaying!’ I have to teach or talk about Old English to such a lot of young persons who simply are not equipped by talent or character to grasp it or profit by it. . . . . Yesterday 2 lectures, re-drafting findings of Committee on Emergency Exams. . . . and then a great event: an evening Inklings. I reached the Mitre at 8 where I was joined by C.W. and the Red Admiral (Havard), resolved to take fuel on board before joining the well-oiled diners in Magdalen (C.S.L. and Owen Barfield). C.S.L.
was highly flown, but we were also in good fettle; while O.B. is the only man who can tackle C.S.L. making him define everything and interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s. The result was a most amusing and highly contentious evening, on which (had an outsider eavesdropped) he would have thought it a meeting of fell enemies hurling deadly insults before drawing their guns. Warnie was in excellent majoral form. On one occasion when the audience had flatly refused to hear Jack discourse on and define ‘Chance’, Jack said: ‘Very well, some other time, but if you die tonight you’ll be cut off knowing a great deal less about Chance than you might have.’ Warnie: ‘That only illustrates what I’ve always said: every cloud has a silver lining.’ But there was some quite interesting stuff. A short play on Jason and Medea by Barfield, 2 excellent sonnets sent by a young poet to C.S.L.; and some illuminating discussion of ‘ghosts’, and of the special nature of Hymns (CSL has been on the Committee revising Ancient and Modern). I did not leave till 12.30, and reached my bed about 1 a.m. this morn. . . . .