The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  My dearest love to you.

  Daddy.

  It is stuffy, sticky, and rainy here at present – but forecasts are more favourable.

  Notes

  [1] 1. A Shakespeare and L. L. H. Thompson of Exeter College. 2. Father Francis Morgan (1857–1934) of the Birmingham Oratory, the Catholic priest who became Tolkien’s guardian after the death of his mother in 1904. 3. L. R. Farnell, Rector (i.e. head) of Exeter College, 1913–28. 4. Kenneth Sisam (1887–1971), who in 1914 was a research student and assistant to Professor A. S. Napier. He acted as Tolkien’s tutor; see no. 318. 5. Thomas Wade Earp, then an undergraduate at Exeter College; he later became known as a writer on modern painters. See no. 83 for Tolkien’s reference to him as ‘T. W. Earp, the original twerp’; since Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang records the first use of ‘twerp’ as circa 1910, it is possible that Earp’s name and initials may have given rise to the word. Earp was one of the editors of Oxford Poetry 1915, in which one of Tolkien’s first published poems, ‘Goblin Feet’, was printed. 6. Tolkien’s reworking of one of the Kalevala stories, ‘The Story of Kullervo’, was never finished, but proved to be the germ of the story of Turin Turambar in The Silmarillion. For Tolkien’s account of this, see no. 163. 7. Tolkien usually signed his letters to Edith Bratt ‘Ronald’ or ‘R.’, though he sometimes used his first Christian name, John.

  [2] 1. Tolkien wrote a poem entitled ‘The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star’ in September 1914 The first stanza is quoted in Biography p. 71.

  [4] 1. Apparently a reference to an early form of the Elvish language Quenya, first invented by Tolkien probably during undergraduate days. For an example of a stanza written in it, and dated ‘November 1915, March 1916’, see Biography p. 76.

  [7] 1. Henry Bradley (1845–1923) was in charge of the Oxford Dictionary while Tolkien worked on the staff.

  [10] 1. Tolkien was at this time the holder of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. 2. A black and white illustration included in the first British and American editions of The Hobbit as an illustration to Chapter 8, but not used in subsequent printings. It is reproduced alongside the note to no. 37 in Pictures. 3. As well as the maps, Tolkien had initially offered only the two illustrations mentioned earlier in this letter, both of which were in black and white. The six more now submitted were presumably most of the remaining monochrome drawings which were used in the first edition.

  [13] 1. This was the painting entitled ‘Beleg finds Gwindor in Taur-nu-Fuin’, reproduced as no. 37 in Pictures, where a note gives its history.

  [14] 1. C. S. Lewis, Fellow of Magdalen College, and a friend of Tolkien since 1926. 2. Russell Meiggs, Fellow of Keble College and later of Balliol, who at this time edited the Oxford Magazine, in which Tolkien’s poems ‘The Dragon’s Visit’ and ‘lumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden (The Hoard)’ were published in February and March 1937. 3. One of these pictures was ‘Beleg finds Gwindor in Taur-nu-Fuin’, q.v. in note 1 to no. 13 above. Tolkien refers to it later in this letter as ‘The Mirkwood picture. . . . [which] illustrates a different adventure’, i.e. an episode in The Silmarillion. The other paintings were probably ‘Glórund sets forth to seek Turin’ and ‘Mount Everwhite’, which were the only other substantial and finished paintings relating to Middle-earth in existence at this time; they are reproduced as nos 38 and 31 in Pictures. As Tolkien pointed out, the three Silmarillion illustrations were not intended for publication in The Hobbit, and were sent merely as samples of his work.

  [15]1. The publishers wrote in the blurb on the dust-jacket of The Hobbit: ‘Professor Tolkien – but not his publishers – still remains to be convinced that anybody will want to read his most delightful history of a Hobbit’s journey.’ 2. George Gordon, formerly Professor of English Literature at Leeds (see no. 46) and then holder of the same chair at Oxford. By 1937 he was President of Magdalen College. 3. R. W. Chambers (1874–1942), Professor of English at London University.

  Commentary on jacket-flap: 1. Elaine Griffiths of St Anne’s College, Oxford, who worked with Tolkien as a research student during the 1930s. For her part in the publication of The Hobbit see no. 294. 2. ‘To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.’ (The Hobbit, Chapter 12.) 3. Owen Barfield, friend of C. S. Lewis and author of Poetic Diction (1928), an account of the development of language from its early roots in mythology. 4. Sir Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at Oxford, 1904–22. 5. A viva voce is the oral part of Oxford University examinations.

  [16] 1. At the Oratory School the equivalent of ‘studies’ at other public schools were known as ‘flats’. 2. Tolkien’s eight-year-old daughter Priscilla, and John Binney, a family friend.

  [17] 1. C. S. Lewis reviewed The Hobbit in The Times on 8 October 1937 and in the Times Literary Supplement on 2 October 1937. Both reviews were unsigned. 2. Gnome was a term used at this period by Tolkien for the Noldorin Elves; see no. 239. 3. Latin, ‘thus it is hobbited to the stars’: an allusion to Aeneid IX. 641, ‘sic itur ad astra’. 4. R. M. Dawkins, who was a member of Tolkien’s informal Icelandic reading club, the Coalbiters (see Inklings p. 27). 5. Parker’s bookshop in Broad Street, Oxford.

  [19] 1. ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’, first published in the Oxford Magazine in 1934. 2. i.e. in the reprint of The Hobbit. 3. On 1 January 1938 Tolkien lectured on ‘Dragons’ as part of a series of lectures for children at the University Museum, Oxford. 4. Unwin had told Tolkien he was going abroad. 5. Tolkien gave a talk on ‘Anglo-Saxon Verse’ on the BBC on 14 January 1938. The duration was 13 minutes, and the talk was part of the series ‘Studies in National Inspiration and Characteristic Forms’.

  [20] 1. For an account of the first draft of the opening chapter of The Lord of the Rings, see Biography p. 185. 2. Arthur Ransome, whose books were much admired by Tolkien’s children, wrote to Tolkien, describing himself as ‘a humble hobbit fancier’, and complaining about Gandalf’s use of the term ‘excitable little man’ as a description of Bilbo. He cited other, similar uses of ‘man’ or ‘men’ to describe dwarves and goblins.

  [22] 1. Christopher Tolkien was confined to bed with irregularities of the heart, a condition which caused him to be a total invalid for several years.

  [23] 1. The Long Vacation is the summer vacation at Oxford. Tolkien’s research fellowship ended in September 1938.

  [24] 1. This indicates that in the original draft of Out of the Silent Planet the hero was named Unwin; in the published book his name is Ransom. 2. For another account of this, see no. 294. 3. Tolkien’s unfinished story of time-travel, ‘The Lost Road’, was shown to Allen & Unwin in November 1937, and was returned by them with the comment that it did not seem likely, even if it was finished, to be a commercial success. For a description of the story, see no. 257, and Biography pp. 170–1.

  [26] 1. Possibly no. 24, which may have been sent as an enclosure with this letter. 2. Land Under England by Joseph O’Neill (1935). 3. A phrase used in the reader’s report. 4. Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920).

  [28] 1. Besides his duties at Oxford, Tolkien often acted as an external examiner for other universities, and marked Higher Certificate papers, as he was in need of the extra income. 2. It is not clear precisely to which works Tolkien was referring. Possibly he had in mind the Middle English Ancrene Wisse and Pearl, the former of which he was editing for the Early English Text Society, and the latter of which he was working on with E. V. Gordon – though in fact neither of these projects was near completion. The work in Old English was probably the revision of Clark Hall’s translation of Beowulf, of which Tolkien was reading the proofs, and to which he was supposed to be contributing an introduction; see no. 37. The work in Old Norse to which he refers was probably an edition of Víga-Glúms Saga, edited by G. Turville-Petre (Oxford University Press, 1940); this was one of the Oxford English Monographs, of which Tolkien was joint
editor with C. S. Lewis and D. Nichol Smith. 3. Fox was Dean of Divinity of Magdalen College and an early member of the Inklings.

  [29] 1. German, ‘confirmation’.

  [30] 1. German, ‘descent, genealogy’.

  [31] 1. A society at Worcester College, Oxford.

  [33] 1. For an account of this sequel, see no. 36, and Biography p. 166. 2. ‘The King of the Green Dozen’ is the story of the King of Iwerddon, whose hair and the hair of his descendant’s twelve sons is coloured green. The story, which is set in Wales, parodies the ‘high’ style of narrative. Tolkien never completed it.

  [34] 1. E. V. Gordon, Tolkien’s collaborator on the edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

  [35] 1. In January 1939 Tolkien was asked whether in the event of a national emergency (i.e. war) he would be prepared to work in the cryptographical department of the Foreign Office. He agreed, and apparently attended a four-day course of instruction at the Foreign Office beginning on 27 March. But in October 1939 he was informed that his services would not be required for the present, and in the event he never worked as a cryptographer.

  [37] 1. Tolkien injured himself while gardening. 2. John Tolkien was studying for the Catholic priesthood at the English College in Rome. 3. H. S. Bennett (1889–1972) of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, medievalist and literary historian.

  [38] 1. 20 Northmoor Road was damaged by burst water-pipes during the winter of 1939–40. 2. i.e. the revised edition of Clark Hall contained (at this stage) no introductory material apart from an ‘argument’ or summary of the story of Beowulf, and ten lines of information about the manuscript. 3. The section of Tolkien’s introduction entitled ‘On Metre’.

  [42] 1. R. E. Havard (a general medical practitioner). 2. C. S. Lewis and his brother Major W. H. Lewis. 3. (Sir) Basil Blackwell, bookseller and publisher. 4. H. V. D. (‘Hugo’) Dyson, friend of Lewis and Tolkien, at this time a lecturer at Reading University. 5. On 10 January 1941 Germany signed a new treaty with Russia as an indication of the mutual understanding that supposedly existed between them at this time. 6. The daily newspaper of the British Communist Party.

  [43] 1. Tolkien’s guardian, Father Francis Morgan, disapproved of his clandestine love-affair with Edith Bratt. 2. Tolkien was excited during schooldays to discover the existence of the Gothic language; see no. 272. 3. Classical Honour Moderations, in which Tolkien was awarded a Second Class. 4. The actual date of Tolkien’s Channel crossing with his battalion was 6 June 1916. The poem he refers to, dated ‘Étaples, Pas de Calais, June 1916’, is entitled ‘The Lonely Isle’, and is subtitled ‘For England’, though it also relates to the mythology of The Silmarillion. The poem was published in Leeds University Verse 1914–1924 (Leeds, at the Swan Press, 1924), p. 57. 5. Tolkien inherited a small income from his parents, derived from shares in South African mines.

  [44] 1. Tolkien’s mother died of diabetes; Tolkien believed her condition had been made worse by his relatives’ intolerance of her conversion to Catholicism. 2. Tolkien’s mother had rented rooms for a summer holiday in a cottage occupied by a postman and his wife.

  [45] 1. The final examination taken by undergraduates at Oxford. 2. During the war, Tolkien organised a syllabus for naval cadets reading English at Oxford. 3. A. H. Maxwell was Tobacco Controller for the British Government during the war.

  [46] 1. During 1926, Tolkien continued to lecture at Leeds while already holding the chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. 2. Lascelles Abercrombie became Professor of English Literature at Leeds in 1922, after Gordon’s return to Oxford. 3. Gordon was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1907 to 1913. 4. F. W. Moorman, Professor of English Language at Leeds, died in the summer of 1919; after his death, the post was reduced to the status of a Readership. 5. The salary appears to have been £500 per annum. 6. Probably not true; Gordon makes no mention of Kenneth Sisam in his (published) letters discussing the appointment, but writes to R. W. Chapman on 26 June 1920: ‘I may take Tolkien from you; but only, I hope, to give him the leisure to do texts.’ (Tolkien was at that time working in the Dictionary department of the Oxford University Press.) 7. See note 4 to no. 15 (commentary on jacket-flap).

  [47] 1. During 1942 Tolkien began to serve as an Air Raid Warden. 2. In the first draft of The Lord of the Rings the chapters were numbered continuously. XXXI was ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’, which became Book III, Chapter 9.

  [48] 1. Presumably a lecture on the Arthurian matter. 2. This initial is meant to stand for ‘Tollers’, Lewis’s usual name for Tolkien.

  [49] 1. The text of Christian Behaviour was later incorporated into Lewis’s book Mere Christianity. 2. Over permanent is written lifelong. This and subsequent alterations are in pencil; the text of the letter is in ink. 3. Altered to read total human health. 4. Altered to with. 5. all is underlined in pencil. 6. permanent is again altered to lifelong. 7. ‘Social Morality’ was the title of an earlier chapter in the book. 8. elaborate is replaced by defend. 9. Lewis suggested that if an audience were to watch not a striptease, but a cover being slowly lifted off a dish of bacon, then one would conclude that ‘something had gone wrong with the appetite for food’. 10. Reno, Nevada, famed for its instant divorces. 11. Latin, ‘To hold an opinion with the Church.’

  [50] 1. An office manned by Air Raid Wardens for the North Oxford area.

  [52] 1. Latin, ‘I do not wish to be made a bishop.’ 2. Two lines from Tolkien’s unpublished poem ‘Mythopoeia’, written for C. S. Lewis.

  [53] 1. Charles Williams, who was now living in Oxford. 2. The Teheran Conference, held in November 1943, was attended by the British, American and Russian leaders. 3. i.e. Winston Spencer Churchill. 4. ‘Collie’ Knox, a writer and popular journalist. 5. The dash is in the original letter; no name is given.

  [54] 1. Anglo-Saxon, ‘[The] father’s counsel [to] his son.’

  [55] 1. Anglo-Saxon, ‘[The] father [to] his third son.’ 2. Reader in Old Icelandic at Oxford. 3. The Air Raid post mentioned in no. 50. 4. Reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford. 5. i.e. from the fishmonger. 6. A pub in Broad Street. 7. The Tolkiens were now keeping hens, and this is a pun on ‘fowls’. 8. Latin, ‘[The] Father in his Son[,] Born the youngest (but not at all in other respects [the least]).’ 9. Anglo-Saxon, ‘[The] Father to his own son, the youngest [but] by no means the least loved.’ 10. A Polish officer who had consulted Tolkien a few weeks earlier.

  [56] 1. Tolkien spent the first three years of his life in South Africa, where his father was a bank manager in Bloemfontein. See also no. 163.

  [58] 1. A method of sending letters to servicemen overseas. The text was photographed by the postal authorities, and was delivered to the addressee in the form of a small bromide print which could then be read with the aid of a magnifying glass.

  [60] 1. Dutch, ‘Opened by the Censor.’ 2. i.e. ‘Mummy and Priscilla’. 3. C. S. Lewis’s brother Warren H. Lewis. 4. Lord David Cecil, Fellow of New College and an occasional attender at the Inklings. 5. Sarah Connaughton, a family friend. 6. David Nichol Smith was Professor of English Literature at Oxford, 1929–46. 7. Elaine Griffiths; q.v. in note 1 to no. 15 (commentary to jacket-flap). 8. i.e. proofs of University of Wales examination papers.

  [61] 1. Christopher Tolkien sailed to South Africa on the S.S. Cameronia. Conditions on board were so unpleasant that he and his companions nicknamed it the Altrsaark, after the German prison-ship of that name. 2. Heaton Park Camp, Manchester, where Christopher Tolkien had been stationed. 3. Beowulf 1395–6: ‘For this day have thou patience in every woe, even as I know thou wilt.’ 4. Beowulf 1386–8: ‘To each one of us shall come in time the end of life in this world; let him who may earn glory ere his death.’ (This and the above are taken from Tolkien’s translation of the poem.) 5. Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford, was Tutor in Politics at Christ Church, 1934–46. 6. Mary Salu, a graduate pupil of Tolkien’s, who later published a translation of the Ancrene Riwle with a preface by Tolkien. 7. Latin, ‘Keep a calm mind, restrain the tongue.’

  [63] 1. i.e. the air-raid siren. 2.
The Mitre Hotel in Turl Street. 3. Tolkien was an executor of the will of Joseph Wright, who died in 1930. 4. ‘fellow-Christians’. 5. Anglo-Saxon, ‘God alone knows.’ 6. Mabel Tolkien was on ‘home leave’ in England when her husband died, and was not able to return to Bloemfontein for the funeral.

  [64] 1. An early title for The Silmarillion was ‘The History of the Gnomes’ – i.e. of the Noldorin elves. See no. 239.

  [66] 1. A priest at the Birmingham Oratory. 2. Alexander Buchan (1829–1907), a meteorologist who foretold certain periods of cold weather as being of annual occurrence, and gave his name to the cold spell of May 9–14, which is known as ‘Buchan’s winter’.

  [67] 1. Leonard Rice-Oxley, Fellow of Keble College. 2. R. B. McCallum, Fellow of Pembroke College, who at this time was tutoring Michael Tolkien, who had returned to Oxford to read History.

  [69] 1. Father Douglas Carter, parish priest of St Gregory’s Catholic Church in Oxford. 2. ‘Who Goes Home’ was later re-titled The Great Divorce. 3. i.e. of Tolkien’s story ‘Leaf by Niggle’, first published in the Dublin Review, January 1945.

  [71] 1. Anglo-Saxon, ‘on earth and in heaven’. 2. Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers (1935).

  [72] 1. H. L. Drake, Walter Ramsden and L. E. Salt, Fellows of Pembroke College, where Tolkien held a Professorial Fellowship. 2. i.e. Hugo Dyson. 3. Examination papers for the naval cadets reading English at Oxford. 4. Proprietor of a bicycle repair shop. 5. Latin, ‘Ah! triumph’. 6. An annexe to Lincoln College built in Turl Street. 7. Censor (i.e. head) of St Catherine’s Society, Oxford. 8. H. G. Hanbury, Fellow of Lincoln College and Lecturer in Law.