The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  Or p. 127, as an example of ‘archaism’ that cannot be defended as ‘dramatic’, since it is not in dialogue, but the author’s description of the arming of the guests – which seemed specially to upset you. But such ‘heroic’ scenes do not occur in a modern setting to which a modern idiom belongs. ‘Why deliberately ignore, refuse to use the wealth of English which leaves us a choice of styles – without any possibility of unintelligibility.

  I can see no more reason for not using the much terser and more vivid ancient style, than for changing the obsolete weapons, helms, shields, hauberks into modern uniforms.

  ‘Helms too they chose’ is archaic. Some (wrongly) class it as an ‘inversion’, since normal order is ‘They also chose helmets’ or ‘they chose helmets too’. (Real mod. E. ‘They also picked out some helmets and round shields’.) But this is not normal order, and if mod. E. has lost the trick of putting a word desired to emphasize (for pictorial, emotional or logical reasons) into prominent first place, without addition of a lot of little ‘empty’ words (as the Chinese say), so much the worse for it. And so much the better for it the sooner it learns the trick again. And some one must begin the teaching, by example.

  I am sorry to find you affected by the extraordinary 20th.C. delusion that its usages per se and simply as ‘contemporary’ – irrespective of whether they are terser, more vivid (or even nobler!) – have some peculiar validity, above those of all other times, so that not to use them (even when quite unsuitable in tone) is a solecism, a gaffe, a thing at which one’s friends shudder or feel hot in the collar. Shake yourself out of this parochialism of time! Also (not to be too donnish) learn to discriminate between the bogus and genuine antique – as you would if you hoped not to be cheated by a dealer!

  [The draft ends here.]

  172 From a letter to Allen & Unwin

  12 October 1955

  [Allen & Unwin proposed to publish The Return of the King on 20 October 1955.]

  Don’t fail of 20 October! The last possible day. On the 21st. I have to give the first ‘O’Donnell Lecture’ (overdue), & I must hope that a large part of my audience will be so bemused by sitting up late the night before that they will not so closely observe my grave lack of equipment as a lecturer on a Celtic subject.1 Anyway, I want to tactfully allude to the book, since a part of what I wish to say is about ‘Celticness’ and in what that consists as a linguistic pattern.

  173 From a letter to Katherine Farrer

  24 October 1955

  [The Return of the King was duly published on 20 October.]

  Since (in spite of being laid up with a throat that made lecturing impossible until last Friday) I have actually managed to deliver the O’Donnell Lecture on English and Welsh (Friday), and am no longer a college official, and the Book is complete – except for an errata slip for the reprint already required for Vol. III, to cover the important errors of the whole: I shall be a great deal freer after this week. . . . .

  I am indeed surprised at the reception of the ‘Ring’, and immensely pleased. But I don’t think I have started any tide. I don’t think such a small hobbitlike creature, or even a Man of any size, does that. If there is a tide (I think there is) then I am just lucky enough to have caught it, being just a bit of it. . . . .

  I still feel the picture incomplete without something on Samwise and Elanor, but I could not devise anything that would not have destroyed the ending, more than the hints (possibly sufficient) in the appendices.

  174 To Lord Halsbury

  [Lord Halsbury, at that time Managing Director of the National Research Development Corporation, wrote to suggest that The Silmarillion might might be published by subscription, if Allen & Unwin were unwilling to undertake it on a commercial basis.]

  10 November 1955

  Merton College, Oxford

  Dear Lord Halsbury,

  It was kind of you to write, & I was pleased to have your approval and interest. I was also grateful for your suggestion of an edition by subscription.

  However, the surprising welcome given to The Lord of the Rings will probably make this procedure unnecessary; and has justified the publishers’ firm resolve to issue the present work first; though I wanted to present the matter in ‘chronological order’. For one thing, it would have lightened and quickened the narrative of the Third Age!

  I do not think that anything is referred to in The L. of the R. which does not actually exist in legends written before it was begun, or at least belonging to an earlier period – except only the ‘cats of Queen Berúthiel’.1 But I am afraid that all the matter of the First and Second Ages is very ‘high-mythical’ or Elvish and heroic, and there is no ‘hobbitry’ at all: an ingredient that seems to have made the present mixture more generally palatable.

  Since the publishers are now pressing for the Silmarillion &c. (which was long ago turned down), I do intend as soon as I can find time to try to set the material in order for publication. Though I am rather tired, and no longer young enough to pillage the night to make up for the deficit of hours in the day. . . .

  It might conceivably interest you to see some of this [The Silmarillion] before it is properly shaped or revised, bearing in mind that it is likely to be much altered in detail & presentation – and certainly in style.

  Thanking you again for your encouragement.

  Yours sincerely

  J. R. R. Tolkien.

  175 From a letter to Mrs Molly Waldron

  30 November 1955

  [The Lord of the Rings was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme during 1955 and 1956. Among the large cast, the parts of Gandalf and Tom Bombadil were played by the actor Norman Shelley.]

  I think the book quite unsuitable for ‘dramatization’, and have not enjoyed the broadcasts – though they have improved. I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful – but worse still was the announcer’s preliminary remarks that Goldberry was his daughter (!), and that Willowman was an ally of Mordor (!!). Cannot people imagine things hostile to men and hobbits who prey on them without being in league with the Devil!

  176 From a letter to Naomi Mitchison

  8 December 1955

  I had to deliver the opening lecture of the newly-founded O’Donnell Lectures in Celtic Studies – already overdue: and I composed it with ‘all the woe in the world’, as the Gawain-poet says of the wretched fox with the hounds on his tail. All the more woe, since I am the merest amateur in such matters, and Celtic scholars are critical and litigious; and more woe since I was smitten with laryngitis.

  I think poorly of the broadcast adaptations. Except for a few details I think they are not well done, even granted the script and the legitimacy of the enterprise (which I do not grant). But they took some trouble with the names. I thought that the Dwarf (Glóin not Gimli, but I suppose Gimli will look like his father – apparently someone’s idea of a German) was not too bad, if a bit exaggerated. I do think of the ‘Dwarves’ like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue. . . . .

  I have now got a pestilent doctorate thesis to explore, when I would rather be doing something less useful. . . . .

  I am sorry about my childish amusement with arithmetic; but there it is: the Númenórean calendar was just a bit better than the Gregorian: the latter being on average 26 secs fast p. a., and the N[úmenórean] 17.2 secs slow.

  177 From a letter to Rayner Unwin

  8 December 1955

  [The radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was discussed on the BBC programme ‘The Critics’; and on 16 November, W. H. Auden gave a radio talk about the book in which he said: ‘If someone dislikes it, I shall never trust their literary judgement about anything again.’ Meanwhile Edwin Muir, reviewing The Return of the King in the Observer on 27 November, wrote: ‘All the characters are boys masquerading as adult heroes. . . . and will never come to puberty. . . . . Hardly one of them knows anything about women.’]

  I agreed with the ‘critics’ vie
w of the radio adaptation; but I was annoyed that after confessing that none of them had read the book they should turn their attention to it and me – including surmises on my religion. I also thought Auden rather bad – he cannot at any rate read verse, having a poor rhythmical sense; and deplored his making the book ‘a test of literary taste’. You cannot do that with any work – and if you could you only infuriate. I was fully prepared for Robert Robinson’s rejoinder ‘fair-ground barker’. But I suppose all this is good for sales. My correspondence is now increased by letters of fury against the critics and the broadcast. One elderly lady – in part the model for ‘Lobelia’ indeed, though she does not suspect it – would I think certainly have set about Auden (and others) had they been in range of her umbrella. . . . .

  I hope in this vacation to begin surveying the Silmarillion; though evil fate has plumped a doctorate thesis on me. . . . .

  Blast Edwin Muir and his delayed adolescence. He is old enough to know better. It might do him good to hear what women think of his ‘knowing about women’, especially as a test of being mentally adult. If he had an M. A. I should nominate him for the professorship of poetry1 – a sweet revenge.

  178 From a letter to Allen & Unwin

  12 December 1955

  [Containing a reference to Sarehole, the hamlet where Tolkien spent part of his childhood.]

  By the way, there is no need to alter ‘Mr’ to Professor. In proper Oxford tradition professor is not a title of address – or was not, though the habit has drifted in from places where ‘professors’ are powerful little domestic potentates. I am sure that without ‘professor’ I should have heard less about my donnishness, and no one would have said ‘The Shire is not far from North Oxford’. It is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee – that is as far away as the Third Age from that depressing and perfectly characterless straggle of houses north of old Oxford, which has not even a postal existence.

  179 From a letter to Hugh Brogan

  14 December 1955

  [Brogan wrote on 4 December to say that he had ‘recurrent nightmares’ that he might have been stupid or tactless, or given a wrong impression of ‘my real admiration for your great book’.]

  Dismiss the nightmare! I can stand criticism – not being unduly puffed up by the success (v. unexpected) of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ – even when stupid, or unfair, or even (as I occasionally suspect) a little malicious. Otherwise I should be in a fine taking, what with ‘emasculate’ and other kind adjectives. But you are welcome to let your pen run as it will (it is horrible writing letters to people with whom you have to be ‘careful’), since you give me such close attention, and sensitive perception.

  180 To ‘Mr Thompson’ [draft]

  [A letter to an unidentified reader.]

  14 January 1956

  Merton College, Oxford

  Dear Mr Thompson,

  Thank you very much for your kind and encouraging letter. Having set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own: it is a wonderful thing to be told that I have succeeded, at least with those who have still the undarkened heart and mind.

  It has been a considerable labour, beginning really as soon as I was able to begin anything, but effectively beginning when I was an undergraduate and began to explore my own linguistic aesthetic in language-composition. It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And vice versa. Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial,1 &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.) So though being a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing ‘legends’ of the same ‘taste’. The early work was mostly done in camps and hospitals between 1915 and 1918 – when time allowed. But I think a lot of this kind of work goes on at other (to say lower, deeper, or higher introduces a false gradation) levels, when one is saying how-do-you-do, or even ‘sleeping’. I have long ceased to invent (though even patronizing or sneering critics on the side praise my ‘invention’): I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself. Thus, though I knew for years that Frodo would run into a tree-adventure somewhere far down the Great River, I have no recollection of inventing Ents. I came at last to the point, and wrote the ‘Treebeard’ chapter without any recollection of any previous thought: just as it now is. And then I saw that, of course, it had not happened to Frodo at all.

  All this is boring, I am sure, because it is apparently self-centred; but I am old enough (alas!) to take a dispassionate and scientific, properly so-called, interest in these matters, and cite myself simply because I am interested in mythological ‘invention’, and the mystery of literary creation (or sub-creation as I have elsewhere called it) and I am the most readily available corpus vile for experiment or observation.

  My chief reason for talking so, is to say that, of course, all these things are more or less written. There is hardly any reference in The Lord of the Rings to things that do not actually existfn46 on its own plane (of secondary or sub-creational reality): sc. have been written. The Silmarillion was offered for publication years ago, and turned down. Good may come of such blows. The Lord of the Rings was the result. The hobbits had been welcomed. I loved them myself, since I love the vulgar and simple as dearly as the noble, and nothing moves my heart (beyond all the passions and heartbreaks of the world) so much as ‘ennoblement’ (from the Ugly Duckling to Frodo). I would build on the hobbits. And I saw that I was meant to do it (as Gandalffn47 would say), since without thought, in a ‘blurb’ I wrote for The Hobbit, I spoke of the time between the Elder Days and the Dominion of Men. Out of that came the ‘missing link’: the ‘Downfall of Númenor’, releasing some hidden ‘complex’. For when Faramir speaks of his private vision of the Great Wave, he speaks for me. That vision and dream has been ever with me – and has been inherited (as I only discovered recently) by one of my children.3

  However, such has been the success – not financial: costs were enormous, and nobody nowadays buys a book that they can borrow: I have not yet received a farthing – of The Lord of the Rings that the ugly duckling has become a publisher’s swan, and I am being positively bullied to put The Silmarillion into form, and anything else!

  [The draft is incomplete.]

  181 To Michael Straight [drafts]

  [Before writing a review of The Lord of the Rings, Michael Straight, the editor of New Republic, wrote to Tolkien asking a number of questions: first, whether there was a ‘meaning’ in Gollum’s rôle in the story and in Frodo’s moral failure at the climax; second, whether the ‘Scouring of the Shire’ chapter was directed especially to contemporary England; and third, why the other voyagers should depart from the Grey Havens with Frodo at the end of the book – ‘Is it for the same reason that there are those who gain in the victory but cannot enjoy it?’]

  [Not dated; probably January or February 1956.]

  Dear Mr Straight,

  Thank you for your letter. I hope that you have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings? Enjoyed is the key-word. For it was written to amuse (in the highest sense): to be readable. There is no ‘allegory’, moral, political, or contemporary in the work at all.

  It is a ‘fairy-story’, but one written – according to the belief I once expressed in an extended essay ‘On Fairy-stories’ that they are the proper audience – for adults. Because I think that fairy story has its own mode of reflecting ‘truth’, diff
erent from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or ‘realism’, and in some ways more powerful. But first of all it must succeed just as a tale, excite, please, and even on occasion move, and within its own imagined world be accorded (literary) belief. To succeed in that was my primary object.

  But, of course, if one sets out to address ‘adults’ (mentally adult people anyway), they will not be pleased, excited, or moved unless the whole, or the incidents, seem to be about something worth considering, more e.g. than mere danger and escape: there must be some relevance to the ‘human situation’ (of all periods). So something of the teller’s own reflections and ‘values’ will inevitably get worked in. This is not the same as allegory. We all, in groups or as individuals, exemplify general principles; but we do not represent them. The Hobbits are no more an ‘allegory’ than are (say) the pygmies of the African forest. Gollum is to me just a ‘character’ – an imagined person – who granted the situation acted so and so under opposing strains, as it appears to be probable that he would (there is always an incalculable element in any individual real or imagined: otherwise he/she would not be an individual but a ‘type’.)