The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  I do not really myself mind at all, and leave it to you.

  148 From a letter to Katherine Farrer

  7 August 1954

  [The first volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published on 29 July 1954.]

  I am afraid there are still a number of ‘misprints’ in Vol. I! Including the one on p. 166. But nasturtians is deliberate, and represents a final triumph over the high-handed printers. Jarrold’s appear to have a highly educated pedant as a chief proof-reader, and they started correcting my English without reference to me: elfin for elven; farther for further; try to say for try and say and so on. I was put to the trouble of proving to him his own ignorance, as well as rebuking his impertinence. So, though I do not much care, I dug my toes in about nasturtians. I have always said this. It seems to be a natural anglicization that started soon after the ‘Indian Cress’ was naturalized (from Peru, I think) in the 18th century; but it remains a minority usage. I prefer it because nasturtium is, as it were, bogusly botanical, and falsely learned.

  I consulted the college gardener to this effect: ‘What do you call these things, gardener?’

  ‘I calls them tropaeolum, sir.’

  ‘But, when you’re just talking to dons?’

  ‘I says nasturtians, sir.’

  ‘Not nasturtium?’

  ‘No, sir; that’s watercress.’

  And that seems to be the fact of botanical nomenclature. . . . .

  It has been (and continues to be) a crushingly laborious year! So many things at once, each needing exclusive attention. They are clamouring for Gawain.1 (It is being repeated next month.) And I am struggling to select from all the mass of private stuff about the languages, scripts, calendars and history of the Third Age, what may prove interesting to those who like that sort of thing, and will go into the space (about 40 pages). Time runs on; for I have to go to Ireland again about mid-Sept. and then on to Belgium, and then it will be term. . . . .

  149 From a letter to Rayner Unwin

  9 September 1954

  [Reviews of The Fellowship of the Ring began to appear during August.]

  As for the reviews they were a great deal better than I feared, and I think might have been better still, if we had not quoted the Ariosto remark, or indeed got involved at all with the extraordinary animosity that C.S.L. seems to excite in certain quarters. He warned me long ago that his support might do me as much harm as good. I did not take it seriously, though in any case I should not have wished other than to be associated with him – since only by his support and friendship did I ever struggle to the end of the labour. All the same many commentators seem to have preferred lampooning his remarks or his review to reading the book.

  The (unavoidable) disadvantage of issuing in three parts has been shown in the ‘shapelessness’ that several readers have found, since that is true if one volume is supposed to stand alone. ‘Trilogy’, which is not really accurate, is partly to blame. There is too much ‘hobbitry’ in Vol. I taken by itself; and several critics have obviously not got far beyond Chapter I.

  I must say that I was unfortunate in coming into the hands of the D. Telegraph, during the absence of Betjeman. My work is not in his line, but he at any rate is neither ignorant nor a gutter-boy. Peter Green seems to be both. I do not know him or of him, but he is so rude as to make one suspect malice.1 Though actually I think ‘the cold in his head’ made it more convenient for him to use Edwin Muir in the Observer2 and Lambert in the S. Times,3 with a slight hotting up of the above.

  I am most puzzled by the remarks on the style. I do not expect, and did not expect, many to be amused by hobbits, or interested in the general story and its modes, but the discrepancy in the judgements on the style (which one would have thought referable to standards independent of personal liking) are very odd – from laudatory quotation to ‘Boys Own Paper’ (which has no one style)!

  I gather that you are not wholly dissatisfied. But there have been some very appreciative notices apart from C.S.L. (who had the advantage of knowing the whole), though not usually in the high places. Cherryman in Truth4 and Howard Spring in C. Life5 were pleasing to one’s vanity, and also Cherryman’s ending: that he would turn eagerly to the second and third volumes! May others feel the same!

  Fawcett in the M. Guardian6 was complimentary in brief; and I was specially interested by a long notice in the Oxford Times (by the editor himself)7 in being by one quite outside the ring, and he seemed to have enjoyed himself. He sent an interviewer up, but what he will churn out for the O. Mail this week I do not know. . . . .

  Well, this letter is already inordinately long. In the midst of it Professor d’Ardenne of Liège has arrived to harass me with philological work on which we are supposed to be engaged.

  150 From a letter to Allen & Unwin

  18 September 1954

  I regret that I have not yet any copy to send in for the Appendices. All I can say is that I will do my best to produce this before the end of the month. My trouble is indecision (and conflicting advice) in selection from the too abundant matter. I have spent much ineffectual time on the attempt to satisfy the unfortunate promises of Vol. I p. 8.1

  The Index has proceeded in rough form as far as the middle of Vol. II.

  The ‘alphabets’ reduced to simplest form will need blocks. . . . .

  A map of the Gondor area is perhaps the most urgent. I am hoping to get my son Christopher to produce one from my drafts, as soon as possible.

  151 From a letter to Hugh Brogan

  18 September 1954

  If you want my opinion, a part of the ‘fascination’ [of The Lord of the Rings]consists in the vistas of yet more legend and history, to which this work does not contain a full clue. For the present we had better leave it at that. If there is a fault in the work which I myself clearly perceive, it is that I have perhaps overweighted Part I too much with attempts to depict the setting and historical background in the course of the narrative. Of course, in actual fact, this background already ‘exists’, that is, is written, and was written first. But I could not get it published, in chronological order, until and unless a public could be found for the mixture of Elvish and Númenórean legend with the Hobbits. . . . .

  Your preference of goblins to orcs involves a large question and a matter of taste, and perhaps historical pedantry on my part. Personally I prefer Orcs (since these creatures are not ‘goblins’, not even the goblins of George MacDonald, which they do to some extent resemble). Also I now deeply regret having used Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitable enough. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome. I hope in the Appendices to Vol. III to be able to include a note ‘On translation’ in which the matter of equivalences and my uses may be made clearly. My difficulty has been that, since I have tried to present a kind of legendary and history of a ‘forgotten epoch’, all the specific terms were in a foreign language, and no precise equivalents exist in English. . . . .

  I am more than grateful to you for one thing: apart from one line in the Manchester Guardian no one else has yet even referred to the fact that there are any verses in the book – or I think not. . . . .

  Frodo is not intended to be another Bilbo. Though his opening style is not wholly un-kin. But he is rather a study of a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror – broken down, and in the end made into something quite different. None of the hobbits come out of it in pure Shire-fashion. They wouldn’t. But you have got Samwise Gamwichy (or Gamgee).

  Middle-earth is just archaic English for , the inhabited world of men. It lay then as it does. In fact just as it does, round and inescapable. That is partly the point. The new situation, established at the beginning of the Third Age, leads on eventually and inevitably to ordinary History, and we here see the process culminating. If you or I or any of the mortal men (or hobbits) of Frodo’s day had set out ov
er sea, west, we should, as now, eventually have come back (as now) to our starting point. Gone was the ‘mythological’ time when Valinor (or Valimar), the Land of the Valar (gods if you will) existed physically in the Uttermost West, or the Eldaic (Elvish) immortal Isle of Eressëa; or the Great Isle of Westernesse (Númenor-Atlantis). After the Downfall of Númenor, and its destruction, all this was removed from the ‘physical’ world, and not reachable by material means. Only the Eldar (or High-Elves) could still sail thither, forsaking time and mortality, but never returning.

  Very many thanks for remembering the ageing Professor, and bracing him up with your letter. I know 21/– is a frightful price, but don’t forget that I have to sell an awful lot before the ghastly expenses are paid off. The fact that I get not a halfpenny until that is done, does not matter so much, as this: if enough are sold I may be able to publish more. So add to your great kindness in inducing such as you can to beg borrow or steal a guinea rather than a copy!

  Pictures are far too expensive, even if I had sufficent skill to do them and cut out artist’s fees. I tried, but alas! can only draw v. imperfectly what I can, and not what I see. The wrapper is all that survived of three separate designs I made, one for each part. Part I was to have been all black with red and gold letters, and the three opposing rings: Narya (red), Vilya (blue), Nenya (white). . . . . 1 But it was reduced; and the lovely (I thought) facsimiles of the 3 burned pages of the Book of Mazarbul also vanished – so that folk could have the thing at the trifling cost of 21/–!

  152 From a letter to Rayner Heppenstall, BBC

  22 September 1954

  [Tolkien’s dramatic dialogue, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 3 December 1954. Rayner Heppenstall, the producer, had asked Tolkien what ‘dialect’ the speakers should adopt.]

  As for the English dialogue no ‘dialect’ tone or rural quality is required at all. There is not intended to be what we should call a difference of social standing between the two speakers. One requires a younger lighter voice, and the other an older and deeper. The difference between them is rather one of temper, and matter, than ‘class’. The young minstrel bursts into formal verse, and so uses an archaic style – as anyone would capable of verse at the time, and as Tidwald himself does when he mocks Torhthelm.

  It is not indicated what part of the country either came from. Torhthelm is in fact much more likely to have come from the West Midlands, as did many who fell at Maldon. But in a period when ‘dialect’ merely marked place and not rank or function, and at any rate details of grammar and vowels had no social implications, it would be best to avoid any modern rusticity. In any case any modern East Anglian characteristics would be anachronistic, since they did not then exist – the fusion of the Danish and English elements that eventually produced them was not yet accomplished. And Essex of the East Saxons was (and is) a very different affair from the Northfolk and Southfolk.

  153 To Peter Hastings (draft)

  [Peter Hastings, manager of the Newman Bookshop (a Catholic bookshop in Oxford), wrote expressing enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings, but asked if Tolkien had not ‘over-stepped the mark in metaphysical matters’. He gave several examples: first, ‘Treebeard’s statement that the Dark Lord created the Trolls and the Ores’. Hastings suggested that evil was incapable of creating anything, and argued that even if it could create, its creatures ‘could not have a tendency to good, even a very small one’; whereas, he argued, one of the Trolls in The Hobbit, William, does have a feeling of pity for Bilbo. He also cited the description of Bombadil by Goldberry: ‘He is.’ Hastings said that this seemed to imply that Bombadil was God. Hastings was most of all concerned with the reincarnation of the Elves, which Tolkien had mentioned to him in a conversation. He wrote of this: ‘God has not used that device in any of the creations of which we have knowledge, and it seems to me to be stepping beyond the position of a sub-creator to produce it as an actual working thing, because a sub-creator, when dealing with the relations between creator and created, should use those channels which he knows the creator to have used already. . . . . “The Ring” is so good that it is a pity to deprive it of its reality by over-stepping the bounds of a writer’s job.’ He also asked if the reincarnation of the Elves did not produce practical problems: ‘What happens to the descendants of a human and an elf who marry?’ And, on another matter, he asked how Sauron, given his extreme evil, could ‘keep the co-operation of the elves’ until the time when the Rings of Power were forged.]

  September 1954

  Dear Mr Hastings,

  Thank you very much for your long letter. I am sorry that I have not the time to answer it, as fully as it deserves. You have at any rate paid me the compliment of taking me seriously; though I cannot avoid wondering whether it is not ‘too seriously’, or in the wrong directions. The tale is after all in the ultimate analysis a tale, a piece of literature, intended to have literary effect, and not real history. That the device adopted, that of giving its setting an historical air or feeling, and (an illusion of ?) three dimensions, is successful, seems shown by the fact that several correspondents have treated it in the same way – according to their different points of interest or knowledge: i.e. as if it were a report of ‘real’ times and places, which my ignorance or carelessness had misrepresented in places or failed to describe properly in others. Its economics, science, artefacts, religion, and philosophy are defective, or at least sketchy.

  I have, of course, already considered all the points that you raise. But to present my reflexions to you (in other form) would take a book,fn29 and any kind of real answer to your more profound queries must at least wait till you have more in hand: Vol. III, for instance, not to mention the more mythical histories of the Cosmogony, First, and Second Ages. Since the whole matter from beginning to end is mainly concerned with the relation of Creation to making and sub-creation (and subsidiarily with the related matter of ‘mortality’), it must be clear that references to these things are not casual, but fundamental: they may well be fundamentally ‘wrong’ from the point of view of Reality (external reality). But they cannot be wrong inside this imaginary world, since that is how it is made.

  We differ entirely about the nature of the relation of sub-creation to Creation. I should have said that liberation ‘from the channels the creator is known to have used already’ is the fundamental function of ‘sub-creation’, a tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the ways in which indeed it is exhibited, as indeed I said in the Essay. I am not a metaphysician; but I should have thought it a curious metaphysic – there is not one but many, indeed potentially innumerable ones – that declared the channels known (in such a finite corner as we have any inkling of) to have been used, are the only possible ones, or efficacious, or possibly acceptable to and by Him!

  ‘Reincarnation’ may be bad theology (that surely, rather than metaphysics) as applied to Humanity; and my legendarium, especially the ‘Downfall of Númenor’ which lies immediately behind The Lord of the Rings, is based on my view: that Men are essentially mortal and must not try to become ‘immortal’ in the flesh.fn30 But I do not see how even in the Primary World any theologian or philosopher, unless very much better informed about the relation of spirit and body than I believe anyone to be, could deny the possibility of re-incarnation as a mode of existence, prescribed for certain kinds of rational incarnate creatures.

  I suppose that actually the chief difficulties I have involved myself in are scientific and biological – which worry me just as much as the theological and metaphysical (though you do not seem to mind them so much). Elves and Men are evidently in biological terms one race, or they could not breed and produce fertile offspring – even as a rare event: there are 2 cases only in my legends of such unions, and they are merged in the descendants of Eärendil.1 But since some have held that the rate of longevity is a biological characteristic, within limits of variation, you could not have Elves in a sense ‘immortal’ – not eternal, but not dyin
g by ‘old age’ – and Men mortal, more or less as they now seem to be in the Primary World – and yet sufficiently akin. I might answer that this ‘biology’ is only a theory, that modern ‘gerontology’, or whatever they call it, finds ‘ageing’ rather more mysterious, and less clearly inevitable in bodies of human structure. But I should actually answer: I do not care. This is a biological dictum in my imaginary world. It is only (as yet) an incompletely imagined world, a rudimentary ‘secondary’; but if it pleased the Creator to give it (in a corrected form) Reality on any plane, then you would just have to enter it and begin studying its different biology, that is all.

  But as it is – though it seems to have grown out of hand, so that parts seem (to me) rather revealed through me than by me – its purpose is still largely literary (and, if you don’t boggle at the term, didactic). Elves and Men are represented as biologically akin in this ‘history’, because Elves are certain aspects of Men and their talents and desires, incarnated in my little world. They have certain freedoms and powers we should like to have, and the beauty and peril and sorrow of the possession of these things is exhibited in them. . . . .

  Sauron was of course not ‘evil’ in origin. He was a ‘spirit’ corrupted by the Prime Dark Lord (the Prime sub-creative Rebel) Morgoth. He was given an opportunity of repentance, when Morgoth was overcome, but could not face the humiliation of recantation, and suing for pardon; and so his temporary turn to good and ‘benevolence’ ended in a greater relapse, until he became the main representative of Evil of later ages. But at the beginning of the Second Age he was still beautiful to look at, or could still assume a beautiful visible shape – and was not indeed wholly evil, not unless all ‘reformers’ who want to hurry up with ‘reconstruction’ and ‘reorganization’ are wholly evil, even before pride and the lust to exert their will eat them up. The particular branch of the High-Elves concerned, the Noldor or Loremasters, were always on the side of ‘science and technology’, as we should call it: they wanted to have the knowledge that Sauron genuinely had, and those of Eregion refused the warnings of Gilgalad and Elrond. The particular ‘desire’ of the Eregion Elves – an ‘allegory’ if you like of a love of machinery, and technical devices – is also symbolised by their special friendship with the Dwarves of Moria.