The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  I am so glad you felt that ‘the Ring’ is keeping up its standard, and (it seems) achieving that difficult thing in a long tale: maintaining a difference of quality and atmosphere in events that might easily become ‘samey’. For myself, I was prob. most moved by Sam’s disquisition on the seamless web of story, and by the scene when Frodo goes to sleep on his breast, and the tragedy of Gollum who at that moment came within a hair of repentance – but for one rough word from Sam. But the ‘moving’ quality of that is on a different plane to Celebrimbor etc. There are two quit diff. emotions: one that moves me supremely and I find small difficulty in evoking: the heart-racking sense of the vanished past (best expressed by Gandalf’s words about the Palantir); and the other the more ‘ordinary’ emotion, triumph, pathos, tragedy of the characters. That I am learning to do, as I get to know my people, but it is not really so near my heart, and is forced on me by the fundamental literary dilemma. A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant trees (like Niggle’s) never to be approached – or if so only to become ‘near trees’ (unless in Paradise or N’s Parish).

  Well my space will soon run out, and also it is 9 p.m., and I have some letters of necessity to write, and 2 lectures tomorrow, so I must be thinking of closing down soon. I read eagerly all details of your life, and the things you see and do – and suffer, Jive and Boogie-Woogie among them. You will have no heart-tug at losing that (for it is essentially vulgar, music corrupted by the mechanism, echoing in dreary unnourished heads), but you’ll remember the other things, even the storms and the dry veld and even the smells of camp, when you return to this other land. I can see clearly now in my mind’s eye the old trenches and the squalid houses and the long roads of Artois, and I would visit them again if I could. . . . .

  I have just heard the news. . . . . Russians 60 miles from Berlin. It does look as if something decisive might happen soon. The appalling destruction and misery of this war mount hourly: destruction of what should be (indeed is) the common wealth of Europe, and the world, if mankind were not so besotted, wealth the loss of which will affect us all, victors or not. Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children pouring West, dying on the way. There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted. The destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of the most appalling world-catastrophes. Well, well – you and I can do nothing about it. And that shd. be a measure of the amount of guilt that can justly be assumed to attach to any member of a country who is not a member of its actual Govemment. Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter – leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What’s their next move?. . . . All the love of your own father.

  97 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  11 February 1945 (FS 80)

  I’ve wasted some precious time this week-end writing a letter to the Catholic Herald. One of their sentimentalist correspondents wrote about the etymology of the name Coventry, and seemed to think that unless you said it came from Convent, the answer was not ‘in keeping with Catholic tradition’. ‘I gather the convent of St Osburg was of no consequence,’ said he: boob. As convent did not enter English till after 1200 A.D. (and meant an ‘assembly’ at that) and the meaning ‘nunnery’ is not recorded before 1795, I felt annoyed. So I have asked whether he would like to change the name of Oxford to Doncaster; but he’s probably too stupid to see even that mild quip.

  98 To Stanley Unwin

  [Unwin’s elder son David – the children’s writer ‘David Severn’ – had read Tolkien’s story ‘Leaf by Niggle’ in the Dublin Review, where it was published in January 1945. He commended it to his father, calling it an ‘exquisite piece of work’, and suggested that it be published in a volume along with other short stories by Tolkien. Stanley Unwin passed this suggestion to Tolkien.]

  [Undated; circa 18 March 1945]

  20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

  Dear Unwin,

  I have written several imaginary letters to you, and half an actual one, in the past few months, before I got your note of 24 February. Especially I have meant to enquire after Rayner. I hope you have good news of him. The R.A.F. cadets of his course seem all to have had a wretched time since, but the Navy is rather less irrational and wasteful; so he may have been spared some of the worse squalors and frustrations now inflicted (too often quite unnecessarily) on young men.

  Also my third son, Christopher, has been for a long time at Standerton in the Transvaal, and there one of his great friends has been Chris Unwin.1. . . . My boy, I hear today, is ‘In Transit’ for England, after a year and a quarter away, so I hope Unwin is too. Certainly they were still together on March 3rd. But already one of the group has been killed, in his first flight in a Hurricane, my boy’s stable-companion, and the one who came out top of the Course. And there you have one of the explanations of my unproductiveness and (seeming) neglect. My heart is gnawed out with anxiety. And anyway my Christopher was my real primary audience, who has read, vetted, and typed all of the new Hobbit, or The Ring, that has been completed. He was dragged off in the middle of making maps. I have squandered almost the only time I have had to spare for writing in continuing our interrupted conversations by epistle: he occupied the multiple position of audience, critic, son, student in my department, and my tutorial pupil!2 But he has received copies of all the chapters I wrote in a spurt last year. Since when I have been more than ever burdened, or the ratio between duty and weariness has been more unfavourable. . . . .

  Since you have seen ‘Leaf by Niggle’ – I was going to advert to it myself, as part apologia, part confession – I need say no more. Except that that story was the only thing I have ever done which cost me absolutely no pains at all. Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting. I woke up one morning (more than 2 years ago) with that odd thing virtually complete in my head. It took only a few hours to get down, and then copy out. I am not aware of ever ‘thinking’ of the story or composing it in the ordinary sense. All the same I do not feel so detached as not to be cheered, indeed rather bowled over, by your son’s comment. The only notice of, or observation on, the ‘Leaf’ that I have had at all, outside my own circle.

  Well! ‘Niggle’ is so unlike any other short story that I have ever written, or begun, that I wonder if it would consort with them. Two others, of that tone and style, remain mere budding leaves like so many of silly Niggle’s.3 Would it be of any use, if I put together in a bundle what I can find, and let you say whether with re-writing of this, omission of that, or addition of the other, they have any chance of making a volume? There are one or two short verse narratives (some have already appeared in print in the Oxford Magazine) which might pass, tactfully sandwiched in. Were you considering ‘Farmer Giles’ as a possibility? It is rather a long short. The corrected and properly typed copy is ‘out’, on its usual travels, at the moment; but I’ve a tolerable home-made copy which I am sending for ‘David Severn’s’ perusal. (The sequel is plotted but unwritten, and likely to remain so. The heart has gone out of the Little Kingdom, and the woods and plains are aerodromes and bomb-practice targets). But another comic fairy story of a similar genre, ‘The King of the Green Dozen’, is half-written, and could be finished without much pain, if ‘Farmer Gi
les’ is approved.

  As for larger work. Of course, my only real desire is to publish ‘The Silmarillion’:fn9 which your reader, you may possibly remember, allowed to have a certain beauty, but of a ‘Celtic’ kind irritating to Anglo-Saxons. Still there is the great ‘Hobbit’ sequel – I use ‘great’, I fear, only in quantitative sense. It is much too ‘great’ for the present situation, in that sense. But it cannot be docked or abbreviated. I cannot do better than I have done in this, unless (as is possible enough) I am no judge. But it is not finished. I made an effort last year to finish it and failed. Three weeks with nothing else to do – and a little rest and sleep first – would probably be sufficient. But I don’t see any hope of getting them; and it simply is not the kind of stuff for odd moments. Like Niggle I want a ‘public pension’, and am equally unlikely to get one! You shall, of course, have it for consideration the moment it is done, if it ever is. I did say, I believe, that I would let you have a part of it, to judge of. But it is so closely knit, and under a process of growth in all its parts, that I find I have to have all the chapters by me – I am always, you see, hoping to get at it. And anyway only one copy (home-typed or written by various filial hands and my own), that is legible by others, exists, and I’ve feared to let go of it; and I’ve shirked the expense of professional typing in these hard days, at any rate until the end, and the whole is corrected. But would you now really wish to see some of it? It is divided into Five Parts, of 10–12 chapters each (!). Four are completed, and the last begun. I could send it to you, Part by Part, with all its present imperfections on it – riders, alternatives, variable proper names – until you cry ‘halt! This is enough! It must go the way of “The Silmarillion” into the Limbo of the great unpublishables!’

  I must stop, or you will be feeling the time and paper could be better spent on writing not talking about it. I have ‘special exams’ until Easter, and some trouble with the University of Wales. Also all the trouble caused by the death of my colleague, H. C. K. Wyld, to find whose successor will chiefly devolve on me this vacation. I am in trouble with Blackwell who has set up my translation of Pearl, and needs corrections and an introduction. I am in trouble with the widow of Professor E. V. Gordon of Manchester, whose posthumous work on Pearl I undertook, as a duty to a dead friend and pupil, to put in order; and have failed to do my duty. But I suppose I may get a few weeks in the year to myself. Though I’m also in serious trouble with the Clarendon Press; and with my lost friend Mile. Simonne d’Ardenne, who has suddenly reappeared, having miraculously survived the German occupation, and the Rundstedt offensive (which rolled over her) waving the MSS. of a large work we began together and promised to the Early English Text Soc.5 Which has not forgotten it – nor my own book on The Ancrene Riwle,6 which is all typed out. If instead of B.D.S.T.7 you could invent a scheme for doubling the day (and relieve me of house-boy’s duties), I’d drown you in stuff, like Tom, Dick, and Harry. But I do remain very deeply grateful for your kindness and concern.

  Yours sincerely,

  J. R. R. Tolkien.

  99 To ‘Michal’ Williams, widow of Charles Williams

  [Written on the day that Williams died, following an operation.]

  15 May 1945

  20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

  Dear Mrs Williams,

  My heart goes out to you in sympathy, and I can say no more. I share a little in your loss, for in the (far too brief) years since I first met him I had grown to admire and love your husband deeply, and I am more grieved than I can express.

  Later, if you find that there is anything in which I might be of service to you and your son, please tell me. Fr. Gervase Mathew is saying Mass at Blackfriars on Saturday at 8 a.m., and I shall serve him; but of course I shall have you all in my prayers immediately and continually: for such as they are worth. Forgive this halting note.

  Yours very sincerely,

  J. R. R. Tolkien.

  100 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  29 May 1945

  [After returning from South Africa, Christopher was stationed with the R.A.F. in Shropshire. He was hoping to arrange a transfer to the Fleet Air Arm.]

  It would be at least some comfort to me if you escaped from the R.A.F. And I hope, if the transfer goes through, it will mean a real transfer, and a re-commission. It would not be easy for me to express to you the measure of my loathing for the Third Service – which can be nonetheless, and is for me, combined with admiration, gratitude, and above all pity, for the young men caught in it. But it is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain. And nothing can really amend my grief that you, my best beloved, have any connexion with it. My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some Hobbits learning to ride Nazgûl-birds, ‘for the liberation of the Shire’. Though in this case, as I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust, I am afraid I am not even supported by a glimmer of patriotism in this remaining war. I would not subscribe a penny to it, let alone a son, were I a free man. It can only benefit America or Russia: prob. the latter. But at least the Americo-Russian War won’t break out for a year yet.

  101 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  3 June 1945

  There is a stand-down parade of Civil Defence in the Parks in the afternoon, to which I shall prob. have to drag myself. But I am afraid it all seems rather a mockery to me, for the War is not over (and the one that is, or the part of it, has largely been lost). But it is of course wrong to fall into such a mood, for Wars are always lost, and The War always goes on; and it is no good growing faint!

  102 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  9 August 1945

  The news today about ‘Atomic bombs’ is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men’s hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope ‘this will ensure peace’. But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we’re in God’s hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.

  103 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  11 October 1945

  [Following his election to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, Tolkien left Pembroke College and became a Professorial Fellow of Merton College. This letter describes his first impressions of Merton.]

  I was duly admitted yesterday at 10 a.m. and then had to endure the most formidable College Meeting I have ever seen – went on till 1.30 p.m. without cessation and then broke up in disorder. The Warden talked almost unceasingly. I lunched in Merton and made a few arrangements, putting my name down at the Estates Bursary on the housing list;1 and getting a Master Key to all gates and doors. It is incredible belonging to a real college (and a very large and wealthy one). I am looking forward to showing you round. I walked round this afternoon with Dyson2 who was duly elected yesterday, and is now ensconced in the rooms I hoped for, looking out over the meadows! I am going to the Inklings tonight. We shall think of you.

  104 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

  22 October 1945

  I dined for the first time at Merton high table on Thursday, and found it very agreeable; though odd. For fuel-economy the common room is not heated, and the dons meet and chat amiably on the dais, until someone thinks there are enough there for grace to be said. After that they sit and dine, and have their port, and coffee, and smoke and evening newspapers all at high table in a manner that if agreeably informal is rather shocking to one trained in the severer ceremonies and strict precedence of mediæval Pembroke. At about 8.45 Dyson and I strolled through ‘our grounds’ to Magdalen and visited Warnie and Havard – Jack was away. We broke up about 10.30.

  105 To Sir Stanley Unwin

  [Unwin, w
ho had been knighted, wrote to enquire about the progress of The Lord of the Rings.]

  21 July 1946

  20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

  Dear Sir Stanley,

  I have treated you very badly. I think you would be disposed to forgive me, if you knew the true tale of my troubles, domestic and academic. But I will spare you that, and attempt to do better.