The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  194 To Terence Tiller

  6 November 1956

  76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

  Dear Tiller,

  Lord of the Rings

  I have not had time for more than two rapid readings of the 3 episodes that you sent me; but I suppose it is ‘now or never’, if any comment is to be of practical use.

  I am not offering any criticism of detail. The objects you had in making this version seem fairly clear, and (granted their value or legitimacy) I do not think that they could have been much better achieved. I wish your efforts all success.

  But, as a private conversation between you and me, I could wish you had perhaps time to spare to tell me why this sort of treatment is accorded to the book, and what value it has – on Third. For myself, I do not believe that many, if any, listeners who do not know the book will thread the plot or grasp at all what is going on. And the text is (necessarily in the space) reduced to such simple, even simple-minded, terms that I find it hard to believe it would hold the attention of the Third.

  Here is a book very unsuitable for dramatic or semi-dramatic representation. If that is attempted it needs more space, a lot of space. It is sheerly impossible to pot the two books in the allotted time – whether the object be to provide something in itself entertaining in the medium; or to indicate the nature of the original (or both). Why not then turn it down as unsuitable, if more space is not available?

  I remain, of course, flattered and pleased that my book should receive this attention; but I still cannot help wondering: why this form? Personally, I think it requires rather the older art of the reading ‘mime’, than the more nearly dramatic, which results in too great an emphasis on dialogue (mostly with its setting removed). To take two points: (1) the episode of the corpse-candles is cut down to ineffectiveness; (2) the crucial moment when Gollum nearly repents disappears in a mere ‘and so Gollum found them. . . &c.’ III/12. In this way both the ‘scenery’ and the ‘characters’ become flat: without precision and colour; and without motives or conflicts. I cannot help thinking that longer actual passages read, as a necklace upon a thread of narration (in which the narrator might occasionally venture an interpretation of more than mere plotevents) would, or might, prove both more interesting to listeners, and fairer to the author. But, as I have said, I lack experience in the medium, & this is in any case no criticism of your text, but a sighing for something quite different – a moon no doubt. Final query: can a tale not conceived dramatically but (for lack of a more precise term) epically, be dramatized – unless the dramatizer is given or takes liberties, as an independent person? I feel you have had a very hard task.

  Yours sincerely

  J. R. R. Tolkien.

  195 From a letter to Amy Ronald

  15 December 1956

  One point: Frodo’s attitude to weapons was personal. He was not in modern terms a ‘pacifist’. Of course, he was mainly horrified at the prospect of civil war among Hobbits;1 but he had (I suppose) also reached the conclusion that physical fighting is actually less ultimately effective than most (good) men think it! Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

  196 From a letter to Katherine Farrer

  21 March 1957

  [Written, though Tolkien did not know it, on the day that C. S. Lewis was married, in a Church of England ceremony at her hospital bedside, to Joy Davidman, who was believed to be dying.]

  I believe you have been much concerned with the troubles of poor Jack Lewis. Of these I know little beyond the cautious hints of the extremely discreet Havard. When I see Jack he naturally takes refuge in ‘literary’ talk (for which no domestic griefs and anxieties have yet dimmed his enthusiasm).

  197 From a letter to Rayner Unwin

  9 May 1957

  [Allen & Unwin had sent a substantial cheque for Tolkien’s earnings from The Lord of the Rings. Rayner Unwin reported excellent sales, and prophesied continuing success.]

  Your ‘bombshell’ arrived at a moment of rush. . . . . Otherwise I would have thanked you for your kind letter sooner.

  If I had had any notion of this, I should have thought seriously of retiring at the proper time (this July) and refusing the extra two years, which will not make sufficient difference to my superannuation pittance to be worth bothering about. As it is, I am merely going to be fined for going on ‘working’, about to the equivalent of my salary, unless my I[ncome] T[ax] agent is unduly gloomy about this remarkable second instalment. Also it is practically impossible to get any connected time to spend on The Silmarillion while I remain in office. I have had to lay it aside since last autumn; though I hope to resume it at the end of next month. I have not been very well lately, and am beginning to be affected by arthritis which often makes long sitting painful.

  Aggrieved as I am at being deprived of the fruits of so many years labour (which meant not only the sacrifice of leisure but also of other occupations of immediate annual profit), I must say I am very much enheartened by your sales-report and hopes for the immediate future, not only on my own account, but on yours (and A. & U.’s) too. You have been so kind and patient to me; and without your encouragement, and generous ‘adventure’, I expect the L. of the R. would still be a heap of MS. I am afraid I cannot help feeling that there is a lot to be said for ‘the grosser forms of literary success’ as a sneering critic recently called it (not mine but a ‘grosser’ case).

  198 From a letter to Rayner Unwin

  19 June 1957

  [An American film-maker had enquired about the possibility of making a cartoon film of The Lord of the Rings.]

  As far as I am concerned personally, I should welcome the idea of an animated motion picture, with all the risk of vulgarization; and that quite apart from the glint of money, though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility. I think I should find vulgarization less painful than the sillification achieved by the B.B.C.

  199 From a letter to Caroline Everett

  24 June 1957

  Though it is a great compliment, I am really rather sorry to find myself the subject of a thesis. I do not feel inclined to go into biographical detail. I doubt its relevance to criticism. Certainly in any form less than a complete biography, interior and exterior, which I alone could write, and which I do not intend to write. The chief biographical fact to me is the completion of The Lord of the Rings, which still astonishes me. A notorious beginner of enterprises and non-finisher, partly through lack of time, partly through lack of single-minded concentration, I still wonder how and why I managed to peg away at this thing year after year, often under real difficulties, and bring it to a conclusion. I suppose, because from the beginning it began to catch up in its narrative folds visions of most of the things that I have most loved or hated.

  I did not go to a ‘public’ school in the sense of a residential school; but to a great ‘grammar school’, of ultimately medieval foundation. My experience had therefore nothing whatever in common with that of Mr. Lewis. I was at the one school from 1900 to 1911, with one short interval. I was as happy or the reverse at school as anywhere else, the faults being my own. I ended up anyway as a perfectly respectable and tolerably successful senior. I did not dislike games. They were not compulsory, fortunately, as I have always found cricket a bore: chiefly, though, because I was not good at it. . . . .

  I have not published any other short story but Leaf by Niggle. They do not arise in my mind. Leaf by Niggle arose suddenly and almost complete. It was written down almost at a sitting, and very nearly in the form in which it now appears. Looking at it myself now from a distance I should say that, in addition to my tree-love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own pre-occupation with The Lord of the Rings, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty) that it woul
d be ‘not at all’. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story. . . . .

  I read the works of [E.R.] Eddison, long after they appeared; and I once met him. I heard him in Mr. Lewis’s room in Magdalen College read aloud some parts of his own works – from the Mistress of Mistresses, as far as I remember.1 He did it extremely well. I read his works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit. My opinion of them is almost the same as that expressed by Mr. Lewis on p. 104 of the Essays presented to Charles Williams.2 Except that I disliked his characters (always excepting the Lord Gro) and despised what he appeared to admire more intensely than Mr. Lewis at any rate saw fit to say of himself. Eddison thought what I admire ‘soft’ (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that, corrupted by an evil and indeed silly ‘philosophy’, he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty. Incidentally, I thought his nomenclature slipshod and often inept. In spite of all of which, I still think of him as the greatest and most convincing writer of ‘invented worlds’ that I have read. But he was certainly not an ‘influence’.

  The general idea of the Lord of the Rings was certainly in my mind from an early stage: that is from the first draft of Book I Chapter 2, written in the 1930s. From time to time I made rough sketches or synopses of what was to follow, immediately or far ahead; but these were seldom of much use: the story unfolded itself as it were. The tying-up was achieved, so far as it is achieved, by constant re-writing backwards. I had a many-columned calendar with dates and a brief statement of where all the major actors or groups were on each day and what they were doing.

  The last volume was naturally the most difficult, since by that time I had accumulated a large number of narrative debts, and set some awkward problems of presentation in drawing together the separated threads. But the problem was not so much ‘what happened?’, about which I was only occasionally in doubt – though praised for ‘invention’ I have not in fact any conscious memory of sitting down and deliberately thinking out any episode – as how to order the account of it. The solution is imperfect. Inevitably.

  Obviously the chief problem of this sort, is how to bring up Aragorn unexpectedly to the raising of the Siege, and yet inform readers of what he had been up to. Told in full in its proper place (Vol III, ch.2), though it would have been better for the episode, it would have destroyed Chapter 6. Told in full, or indeed in part, in retrospect it would be out of date and hold up the action (as it does in Chapter 9).

  The solution, imperfect, was to cut down the whole episode (which in full would belong rather to a Saga of Aragorn Arathorn’s son than to my story) and tell the ending of it briefly during the inevitable pause after the Battle of the Pelennor.

  I was in fact longest held up – by exterior circumstances as well as interior – at the point now represented by the last words of Book iii (reached about 1942 or 3). After that Chapter 1 of Book v remained very long as a mere opening (as far as the arrival in Gondor); Chapter 2 did not exist; and Chapter 3, Muster of Rohan, had got no further than the arrival at Harrowdale. Chapter 1 of Book iv had hardly got beyond Sam’s opening words (Vol II p. 209). Some parts of the adventures of Frodo and Sam on the confines of Mordor and in it had been written (but were eventually abandoned).

  200 From a letter to Major R. Bowen

  25 June 1957

  I note your remarks about Sauron. He was always de-bodied when vanquished. The theory, if one can dignify the modes of the story with such a term, is that he was a spirit, a minor one but still an ‘angelic’ spirit. According to the mythology of these things that means that, though of course a creature, he belonged to the race of intelligent beings that were made before the physical world, and were permitted to assist in their measure in the making of it. Those who became most involved in this work of Art, as it was in the first instance, became so engrossed with it, that when the Creator made it real (that is, gave it the secondary reality, subordinate to his own, which we call primary reality, and so in that hierarchy on the same plane with themselves) they desired to enter into it, from the beginning of its ‘realization’.

  They were allowed to do so, and the great among them became the equivalent of the ‘gods’ of traditional mythologies; but a condition was that they would remain ‘in it’ until the Story was finished. They were thus in the world, but not of a kind whose essential nature is to be physically incarnate. They were self-incarnated, if they wished; but their incarnate forms were more analogous to our clothes than to our bodies, except that they were more than are clothes the expression of their desires, moods, wills and functions. Knowledge of the Story as it was when composed, before realization, gave them their measure of fore-knowledge; the amount varied very much, from the fairly complete knowledge of the mind of the Creator in this matter possessed by Manwë, the ‘Elder King’, to that of lesser spirits who might have been interested only in some subsidiary matter (such as trees or birds). Some had attached themselves to such major artists and knew things chiefly indirectly through their knowledge of the minds of these masters. Sauron had been attached to the greatest, Melkor, who ultimately became the inevitable Rebel and self-worshipper of mythologies that begin with a transcendent unique Creator. Olórin (Vol II p. 279) had been attached to Manwë.1

  The Creator did not hold himself aloof. He introduced new themes into the original design, which might therefore be unforeseen by many of the spirits in realization; there were also unforeseeable events (that is happenings which not even a complete knowledge of the past could predict).

  Of the first kind and the chief was the theme of the incarnate intelligence, Elves and Men, which was not thought of nor treated by any of the Spirits. They were therefore called the Children of God. Being other than the Spirits, of less ‘stature’, and yet of the same order, they were the object of hope and desire to the greater spirits, who knew something of their form and nature and the mode and approximate time of their appearance in the realization. But they also realized that the Children of God must not be ‘dominated’, though they would be specially susceptible to it.

  It was because of this pre-occupation with the Children of God that the spirits so often took the form and likeness of the Children, especially after their appearance. It was thus that Sauron appeared in this shape. It is mythologically supposed that when this shape was ‘real’, that is a physical actuality in the physical world and not a vision transferred from mind to mind, it took some time to build up. It was then destructible like other physical organisms. But that of course did not destroy the spirit, nor dismiss it from the world to which it was bound until the end. After the battle with Gilgalad and Elendil, Sauron took a long while to re-build, longer than he had done after the Downfall of Númenor (I suppose because each building-up used up some of the inherent energy of the spirit, which might be called the ‘will’ or the effective link between the indestructible mind and being and the realization of its imagination). The impossibility of re-building after the destruction of the Ring, is sufficiently clear ‘mythologically’ in the present book.

  I am sorry if this all seems dreary and ‘pompose’. But so do all attempts to ‘explain’ the images and events of a mythology. Naturally the stories come first. But it is, I suppose, some test of the consistency of a mythology as such, if it is capable of some sort of rational or rationalized explanation.

  201 From a letter to Rayner Unwin

  7 September 1957

  [On 4 September, Tolkien was visited by representatives of the American company which was interested in making an animated film of The Lord of the Rings. He was given a copy of the synopsis of the film, which he agreed to read.]

  You will receive on Monday the copy of the ‘Story Line’ or synopsis of the proposed film version of The Lord of the Rings. I could not get it off yesterday. . . . .

  An abridgement by selection with some good picture-work would be pleasant, & perhaps worth a good deal in publicity; but the present script i
s rather a compression with resultant over-crowding and confusion, blurring of climaxes, and general degradation: a pull-back towards more conventional ‘fairy-stories’. People gallop about on Eagles at the least provocation; Lórien becomes a fairy-castle with ‘delicate minarets’, and all that sort of thing.

  But I am quite prepared to play ball, if they are open to advice – and if you decide that the thing is genuine, and worthwhile.

  202 From a letter to Christopher and Faith Tolkien

  11 September 1957

  My heart and mind is in the Silmarillion, but I have not had much time for it. . . . .

  It may amuse you to hear that (unsolicited) I suddenly found myself the winner of the International Fantasy Award, presented (as it says) ‘as a fitting climax to the Fifteenth World Science Fiction Convention’. What it boiled down to was a lunch at the Criterion yesterday with speeches, and the handing over of an absurd ‘trophy’. A massive metal ‘model’ of an upended Space-rocket (combined with a Ronson lighter). But the speeches were far more intelligent, especially that of the introducer: Clemence Dane, a massive woman of almost Sitwellian presence. Sir Stanley himself was present. Not having any immediate use for the trophy (save publicity=sales=cash) I deposited it in the window of 40 Museum Street. A back-wash from the Convention was a visit from an American film-agent (one of the adjudicating panel) who drove out all the way in a taxi from London to see me last week, filling 76 S[andfield] with strange men and stranger women – I thought the taxi would never stop disgorging. But this Mr Ackerman brought some really astonishingly good pictures (Rackham rather than Disney) and some remarkable colour photographs. They have apparently toured America shooting mountain and desert scenes that seem to fit the story. The Story Line or Scenario was, however, on a lower level. In fact bad. But it looks as if business might be done. Stanley U. & I have agreed on our policy: Art or Cash. Either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author’s veto on objectionable features or alterations.