[247] 1. This account, ‘The Quest of Erebor’, is printed in Unfinished Tales.
[248] 1. The pagination is that of Essays Presented to Charles Williams, and the passage cited is: ‘It is easy for the student to feel that with all his labour he is collecting only a few leaves, many of them now torn or decayed, from the countless foliage of the Tree of Tales, with which the Forest of Days is carpeted.’ 2. ‘The Christian. . . . may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.’
[249] 1. Sir James Murray (1837–1915) founded the Oxford English Dictionary.
[250] 1. Possibly a reference to Pius X’s recommendation of daily communion and children’s communion. 2. The Second Vatican Council (1962–6). 3. Tolkien’s guardian, Fr Francis Morgan. 4. Tolkien’s home from 1926 until 1930. 5. Latin, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ (From the Communion service.) 6. The general practitioner who attended Tolkien during his visits to (and, later, residence in) Bournemouth. 7. Tolkien’s grandson, Michael’s son, then at St Andrews University studying English. 8. See note 5 to no. 19, which gives details about this broadcast. 9. James Callaghan, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour opposition party at this time. The Labour Party came to power in 1964. 10. i.e. before 1931, implying that The Hobbit was written in this year. (But see Biography p. 177.)
[251] 1. James Dundas-Grant, one of the Inklings. 2. Lewis’s stepson. 3. Professor of English at Keele University and a former pupil of Lewis.
[252] 1. The words ‘We were separated. . . . long after the event’ are struck through in the draft. 2. See note 3 to no. 24.
[253] 1. See Tolkien’s drawing ‘The Tree of Amalion’, no. 41 in Pictures.
[254] 1. R. W. (‘Dickie’) Reynolds; see Biography p. 47. 2. Wiseman became headmaster of Queen’s College, Taunton. 3. Headmaster of King Edward’s.
[257] 1. ‘Light as Leaf on Lindentree’, The Gryphon, new series VI no. 6 (June 1925), p. 217. 2. ‘. . . . to be the bride-price of Lúthien to Thingol her father.’ (Misprinted as ‘bride-piece’ in all editions for many years, and only recently corrected.) For an account of this poem, see Inklings pp. 29–30. 3. See introductory note to no. 9. 4. In Cornwall, on the coast not far from Penzance. This holiday was in the summer of 1932. 5. Tolkien lived in Duchess Road from 1908 until 1910. 6. Brummagem is the local (and very old) form of the name of Birmingham.
[261] 1. Bailey wrote: ‘From the very first tutorial, Lewis consistently mistook me for Geoff Dutton, an Australian and an excellent student, and Dutton for me.’
[267] 1. Latin, ‘in this city the solemn light.’
[268] 1. ‘“In him one of the mighty steeds of old has returned.”’ ‘“Were the West Wind to take a body visible, even so would it appear.”’ ‘These were the mearas. . . . . Men said of them that Béma (whom the Eldar call Oromë) must have brought their sires from West over Sea.’
[269] 1. ‘“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs: it only ruined them and twisted them.”’
[270] 1. The offices of the Houghton Mifflin Co. are in Boston, Mass.
[274] 1. ‘They waded the stream, and hurried over a wide open space, rush-grown and treeless, on the further side. Beyond that they came again to a belt of trees: tall oaks, for the most part, with here and there an elm tree or an ash.’
[275] 1. Sir Cyril Norwood (1875–1956), President of St John’s College, Oxford, and author of the Norwood Report on education.
[276] 1. In fact at least three people beside C. S. Lewis had read the mythology: Christopher Tolkien, Rayner Unwin, and Lord Halsbury.
[278] 1. Tolkien’s remark is certainly enigmatic, because in Light on C. S. Lewis (Bles, 1965), Owen Barfield makes a number of comments on Lewis’s personality. Possibly Tolkien was referring to Barfield’s puzzlement about ‘the great change that took place in [Lewis] between the years 1930 and 1940 – a change that roughly coincided with his conversion … but which did not appear, and does not appear in retrospect, to be inevitably or even naturally connected with it’ (p. ix). Barfield continued: ‘Was there something, at least in his impressive, indeed splendid, literary personality, which was somehow – and with no taint of insincerity – voulu?. . . . some touch of a more than merely ad hoc pastiche?’ (p. xi). Alternatively, Tolkien may have been alluding to Barfield’s remark (p. xvi) about Lewis’s ‘distinctive combination of an almost supreme intellectual and “phantastic” maturity, laced with moral energy, on the other hand, with. . . . a certain psychic or spiritual immaturity on the other’.
[281] 1. This drawing is reproduced as no. 19 in Pictures. 2.’ “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?”’ (Gandalf to Bilbo).
[293] 1. Tolkien apparently relented, for Foster’s interview with him was published in The Scotsman on 25 March 1967.
[294] 1. W. H. Auden; see no. 284. 2. See introductory note to no. 9. 3. According to Tolkien’s friend Elaine Griffiths, the MS. was in fact lent by Tolkien to Susan Dagnall, who had heard about it from Miss Griffiths. 4. For Tolkien’s correspondence with Jane Neave, the aunt here mentioned, see nos. 231, 234, 238 and 241. 5. See no. 202. 6. By John Christopher, first published in 1956. 7. See also no. 24 for an account of this.
[295] 1. It is not known to what letter Tolkien was referring. 2. Auden had sent Tolkien a typescript of the translation he and Paul B. Taylor had made of the Völuspá or ‘Song of the Sibyl’. It was eventually published in a collection of their translations from the Edda, under the title The Elder Edda: A Selection (Faber & Faber, 1969); this book was dedicated to Tolkien. 3. A long unpublished poem entitled ‘Volsungakviða En Nyja’, probably written in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Tolkien described it, in a letter to Auden dated 29 January 1968, as ‘written in fornyrðislag 8-line stanzas in English: an attempt to organise the Edda material dealing with Sigurd and Gunnar’. Fornyrðislag is the Old Norse stanzaic metre, very closely resembling in its lines those of Old English poetry, in which most of the narrative poems of the Edda were composed.
[297] 1. This commentary was published, after Tolkien’s death, in Jared Lobdell (ed.), A Tolkien Compass (La Salle, Illinois, Open Court, 1975), pp. 153–201.
[300] 1. Nickname for C. S. Lewis. 2. F. E. Brightman (1856–1932), Fellow of Magdalen College.
[303] 1. Tolkien lived with his mother and younger brother in a cottage opposite this mill, in a hamlet outside Birmingham, during his early childhood.
[306] 1. Latin, ‘that was an omen’. 2. Officers’ Training Corps. 3. ‘ “You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”’ ‘“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set.”’ 4. Bishop J. A. T. Robinson, Author of Honest to God (1963). 5. Tolkien’s younger brother (1894–1976). 6. The lecture, delivered on 5 June 1959, was eventually published in J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller, ed. M. B. Salu & R. T. Farrell (Cornell University Press, 1979).
[307] 1. ‘Old age has stolen upon me … I am older than I was both in winters [i.e. years] and in learning [i.e. wisdom].’
[309] 1. J. B. Tolkien (1807–96) was in fact 89 when he died. 2. But see no. 334, one of many letters signed ‘Ronald’ (never ‘John’ except to his wife in the days of their courtship), and in which he asks Rayner Unwin to call him this.
[311] 1. Mrs Parke, who acted as driver and general help to the Tolkiens for several hours a week.
[312] 1. Wild Flowers of the Cape Peninsula by Mary Maytham Kidd (Oxford University Press, 1950).
[315] 1. Tolkien had made over the greater part of his literary income to his sons and daughter; if he survived for seven years after doing so, the gift would be free of death duties.
[316] 1. This letter was never received by the Dictionary D
epartment, and was probably never sent. 2. This definition was used, prefaced by the words ‘In the tales of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973)’, in the 1976 Supplement to the Dictionary. 3. See no. 25.
[318] 1. See note 3 to no. 1; also no. 308. 2. See note 4 to no. 1.
[319] 1. See no. 25. 2. Green informed Tolkien that the author was E. H. Knatchbull Hugessen and the book was Stories For My Children (1869).
[323] 1. The Morris car which the Tolkiens owned in the 1930s bore a registration plate which began with the letters JO.
[328] 1. Fellow of Balliol College.
[332] 1. Tolkien was staying with his son Christopher and family in the village near Oxford where they then lived. 2. Tolkien’s first cousin.
[336] 1. Idols in a story by Lord Dunsany; see no. 294.
[338] 1. The song of the Ent and Entwife in the chapter ‘Treebeard’. 2. German philosopher and writer on Kierkegaard; 1879–1945.
[351] 1. W. H. Lewis. 2. T. P. Dunning, C.M., of University College, Dublin; scholar in Anglo-Saxon. 3. Rosfrith Murray, daughter of Sir James Murray. See no. 249.
[354] 1. The driver of the hired car by which Tolkien travelled to Bournemouth. 2. The Bournemouth hotel where Tolkien and his wife had often stayed.
Footnotes
fn1 Is the presence of ‘conundrums’ in Alice a parallel to echoes of Northern myth in The Hobbit?
fn2 Not that ‘examining’ is very profitable. Quite small sales would surpass it. £100 requires nearly as much labour as a full-sized novel.
fn3 Not quite. I should like, if possible, to learn more about the fairy-tale collection, c. 1904.
fn4 Still there are more hobbits, far more of them and about them, in the new story. Gollum reappears, and Gandalf is to the fore: ‘dwarves’ come in; and though there is no dragon (so far) there is going to be a Giant; and the new and (very alarming) Ringwraiths are a feature. There ought to be things that people who liked the old mixture will find to have a similar taste.
fn5 It may mitigate your just wrath, if I say that since I wrote in December my wife’s health became much worse. I spent most of last term in an attic in a hotel, with my house derelict and damaged.1 I have been ill myself, and hardly able to cope with university work, which for me has trebled.
fn6 Literature has been (until the modem novel) mainly a masculine business, and in it there is a great deal about the ‘fair and false’. That is on the whole a slander. Women are humans and therefore capable of perfidy. But within the human family, as contrasted with men they are not generally or naturally the more perfidious. Very much the reverse. Except only that women are apt to break down if asked to ‘wait’ for a man, too long, and while youth (so precious and necessary to a would-be mother) is swiftly passing. They should, in fact, not be asked to wait.
fn7 Christian marriage is not a prohibition of sexual intercourse, but the correct way of sexual temperance – in fact probably the best way of getting the most satisfying sexual pleasure, as alcoholic temperance is the best way of enjoying beer and wine.
fn8 Since clifian=‘cleave, stick’, it is plain that foxes clife and clifwyrt originally = burdock. clófa is prob. an MS error for glófa through mixing the names.
fn9 Especially as I find allusions and references to it creeping into Mr Lewis’ work, such as his latest novel.4
fn10 I think ‘criticism’ – however valid or intellectually engaging – tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off). Indeed (if I dare yet venture on any criticism again) I should say that I think it gets in your way, as a writer. You read too much, and too much of that analytically. But then you are also a born critic. I am not. You are also a born reader.
fn11 Intending the word to be understood in its ancient meanings, which continued as late as Spenser – a murrain on Will Shakespeare and his damned cobwebs.
fn12 Though I have thought about them a good deal.
fn13 It is, I suppose, fundamentally concerned with the problem of the relation of Art (and Sub-creation) and Primary Reality.
fn14 Not in the Beginner of Evil: his was a sub-creative Fall, and hence the Elves (the representatives of sub-creation par excellence) were peculiarly his enemies, and the special object of his desire and hate – and open to his deceits. Their Fall is into possessiveness and (to a less degree) into perversion of their art to power.
fn15 As far as all this has symbolical or allegorical significance, Light is such a primeval symbol in the nature of the Universe, that it can hardly be analysed. The Light of Valinor (derived from light before any fall) is the light of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically (or philosophically) and imaginatively (or subcreatively) and says that they are good’ – as beautiful. The Light of Sun (or Moon) is derived from the Trees only after they were sullied by Evil.
fn16 Of course in reality this only means that my ‘elves’ are only a representation or an apprehension of a part of human nature, but that is not the legendary mode of talking.
fn17 It exists indeed as a poem of considerable length, of which the prose version in The Silmarillion is only a reduced version.1
fn18 His name is in actual origin Anglo-Saxon: earendel ‘ray of light’ applied sometimes to the morning-star, a name of ramified mythological connexions (now largely obscure). But that is a mere ‘learned note’. In fact his name is Elvish signifying the Great Mariner or Sea-lover.
fn19 A name that Lewis derives from me and cannot be restrained from using, and mis-spelling as Numinor. Númenóre means in ‘Elvish’ simply Westernesse or Land in the West, and is not related to numen numinous, or νούμєνον!2
fn20 Elrond symbolises throughout the ancient wisdom, and his House represents Lore – the preservation in reverent memory of all tradition concerning the good, wise, and beautiful. It is not a scene of action but of reflection. Thus it is a place visited on the way to all deeds, or ‘adventures’. It may prove to be on the direct road (as in The Hobbit); but it may be necessary to go from there in a totally unexpected course. So necessarily in The Lord of the Rings, having escaped to Elrond from the imminent pursuit of present evil, the hero departs in a wholly new direction: to go and face it at its source.
fn21 The view is taken (as clearly reappears later in the case of the Hobbits that have the Ring for a while) that each ‘Kind’ has a natural span, integral to its biological and spiritual nature. This cannot really be increased qualitatively or quantitatively; so that prolongation in time is like stretching a wire out ever tauter, or ‘spreading butter ever thinner’ – it becomes an intolerable torment.
fn22 It is only in the time between The Hobbit and its sequel that it is discovered that the Necromancer is Sauron Redivivus, growing swiftly to visible shape and power again. He escapes the vigilance and re-enters Mordor and the Dark Tower.
fn23 The Hobbits are, of course, really meant to be a branch of the specifically human race (not Elves or Dwarves) – hence the two kinds can dwell together (as at Bree), and are called just the Big Folk and Little Folk. They are entirely without non-human powers, but are represented as being more in touch with ‘nature’ (the soil and other living things, plants and animals), and abnormally, for humans, free from ambition or greed of wealth. They are made small (little more than half human stature, but dwindling as the years pass) partly to exhibit the pettiness of man, plain unimaginative parochial man – though not with either the smallness or the savageness of Swift, and mostly to show up, in creatures of very small physical power, the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men ‘at a pinch’.
fn24 Nowhere is the place or nature of ‘the Wizards’ made fully explicit. Their name, as related to Wise, is an Englishing of their Elvish name, and is used throughout as utterly distinct from Sorcerer or Magician. It appears finally that they were as one might say the near equivalent in the mode of these tales of Angels, guardian Angels. Their powers are d
irected primarily to the encouragement of the enemies of evil, to cause them to use their own wits and valour, to unite and endure. They appear always as old men and sages, and though (sent by the powers of the True West) in the world they suffer themselves, their age and grey hairs increase only slowly. Gandalf whose function is especially to watch human affairs (Men and Hobbits) goes on through all the tales.
fn25 The hostility of (even good) Dwarves and Elves, a motive that often appears, derives from the legends of the First Age; the Mines of Moria, the wars of Dwarves and Orcs (goblins, soldiery of the Dark Lord) refer to the Second Age and early Third.
fn26 But as each has disliked this or that, I should (if I took all the criticisms together and obeyed them) find little left, and am forced to the conclusion that so great a work (in size) cannot be perfect, nor even if perfect, be liked entirely by any one reader.
fn27 That is, I will draw it as much better as my little skill allows, in black. But it should of course properly appear in white line on a black background, since it represents a silver line in the darkness. How does that appeal to the Production Department?
fn28 N = ng as in ding.
fn29 It nearly has, even in hasty sketch!
fn30 Since ‘mortality’ is thus represented as a special gift of God to the Second Race of the Children (the Eruhini, the Children of the One God) and not a punishment for a Fall, you may call that ‘bad theology’. So it may be, in the primary world, but it is an imagination capable of elucidating truth, and a legitimate basis of legends.
fn31 Inside this mythical history (as its metaphysic is, not necessarily as a metaphysic of the real World) Creation, the act of Will of Eru the One that gives Reality to conceptions, is distinguished from Making, which is permissive.
fn32 Only the first person (of worlds or anything) can be unique. If you say he is there must be more than one, and created (sub) existence is implied. I can say ‘he is’ of Winston Churchill as well as of Tom Bombadil, surely?
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Page 63