The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (11 page)

As for my side: the foundations were already securely laid for me, and the lines of development marked out. But, subject always to his unobtrusive control, I had a ‘free hand'. Every encouragement was given to development on the mediæval and linguistic side; and a friendly rivalry grew up between two, nearly equal, divisions. Each had its own ‘seminars'; and there were sometimes combined meetings. Quite the happiest and most balanced ‘School' I have seen. I think it might be called a ‘School'. Gordon found ‘English' in Leeds a departmental subject (I rather fancy you could not get a degree in it alone) and left it a school of studies (in bud). When he arrived he shared a box of glazed bricks, mainly furnished with hot water pipes, with the Professor of French, as their private room. Mere assistants possibly had a hat-peg somewhere. When he left we had ‘English House', where every member had a separate room (not to mention a bathroom!) and a common room for students: and with this centre the growing body of students became a cohesive unit, and derived some of the benefits (or distant reflections of them) that we associate with a university rather than a municipal college. It would not have been difficult to build on this foundation. But I fancy that, after he left, the thing just ‘ran on', and did not fall into hands of the same quality. In any case numbers fell and finances changed. And
Vice-Chancellors. Sir Michael Sadler I imagine was a helpful superior; and he left about the same time.

7 December 1942

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Mr Unwin,

Thank you for your note, containing two items of hope. I have for some time intended to write and enquire whether in the present situation it was of any use, other than private and family amusement, to endeavour to complete the sequel to
The Hobbit.
I have worked on it at intervals since 1938, all such intervals in fact as trebled official work, quadrupled domestic work, and ‘Civil Defence'
¹
have left. It is now approaching completion. I hope to get a little free time this vacation, and might hope to finish it off early next year. My heart rather misgives me, all the same. I ought to warn you that it is very long, in places more alarming than ‘The Hobbit', and in fact not really a ‘juvenile' at all. It has reached Chapter XXXI
²
and will require at least six more to finish (these are already sketched); and the chapters are as a rule longer than the chapters of
The Hobbit.
Is such an ‘epic' possible to consider in the present circumstances? Would you like to wait, until it is really finished; or would you care to see a considerable portion of it now? It is in type-script (of various amateur hands) up to about Ch. xxiii. I don't think you will be disappointed with the quality of it. It has had the approval of the original Hobbit audience (my sons and Mr C. S. Lewis), who have read or heard it many times. But it is a question of paper, bulk, and market! It would require two maps.

The burning of
The Hobbit
was a blow. I am to blame in not writing (as I intended) and expressing to you my sympathy with the grievous damage you must have sustained, of which I shared only a very small part. Is any ‘compensation' eventually recoverable?. . . .

Would you also consider a volume, containing three or four shorter ‘Fairy' stories and some verses? ‘Farmer Giles', which I once submitted to you, has pleased a large number of children and grown-ups. If too short, I could add to it one or two similar tales, and include some verse on similar topics, including ‘Tom Bombadil'. . . .

Yours sincerely,

J. R. R. Tolkien.

20 April 1943

[20 Northmoor Road, Oxford]

My dear Jack,

V: sorry to hear you are laid low – and with no U.Q. to suggest that it may be your last illness! You must be v: disconsolate. I begin to think that for us to meet on Wednesdays is a duty: there seem to be so many obstacles and fiendish devices to prevent it.

I hope to have a good report of you soon. But do not trouble yourself. Ridley was so astounded at the ignorance of all 22 cadets, revealed in his first class, that he has leaped at the chance of another hour, esp. since otherwise there was no ‘Use of E[nglish]' class next week at all. You can (if you wish) shove in ‘Arthur'
¹
on some other date, when you are recovered fully. The tutorials do not matter.

I fear you are attempting too much. For even if you have merely got ‘flu', you are prob. tiring yourself into an easy victim. As a mere ‘director', I shall hope v. much to persuade you to ease off in travel (if poss.), and put some weight into this cadet stuff. I am a bit alarmed by it. My lone machine-gun since it started seems to me to have missed the target, and it needs at least one more gun – to depend on – other than the valuable Ridley.

I lunched at the Air Squadron to-day & got a brief whiff of an atmosphere now all too familiar to you, I expect.

Yours affectionately

T
²

PS. Ridley's first question in the test-paper was a group of words to define – apposite, reverend, venal, choric, secular and a few others.
Not one
cadet got
any
of the words right.

My dear L.,

I have been reading your booklet ‘Christian Behaviour'.
¹
I have never felt happy about your view of Christian ‘policy' with regard to
divorce
. I could not before say why – because on the surface your policy seems to be reasonable; and it is at any rate the system under which Roman Catholics already live. For the moment I will not argue whether your policy is in fact right (for today), even an inevitable situation. But I should like to point out that your opinion is in your booklet based on an argument that shows a confusion of thought discoverable from that booklet itself.

p. 34. ‘I'd be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.' Justly so. Let us consider this point alone, at first. Why? Well, if we try to ascend straightaway to a rational plane, and leave behind mere anger with anyone who interferes with our habits (good or bad), the answer is: because the Mohammedans would be guilty of injustice. They would be injuring us by depriving us of our share in a
universal human right
, the temperate use of wine, against our will. You made that quite clear in your remarks about
Temperance
, p. 13.

But look now at pp. 26, 30, 31. There you will observe that you are really committed (with the Christian Church as a whole) to the view that
Christian marriage
– monogamous, permanent,But look now at pp. 26, 30, 31. There you will observe that you are really committed (with the Christian Church as a whole) to the view that
Christian marriage
– monogamous, permanent,
²
rigidly ‘faithful' – is in fact the truth about sexual behaviour for
all humanity
: this is the only road of total health
³
(including
⁴
sex in its proper place) for all
⁵
men and women. That it is dissonant with men's present sex-psychology does not disprove this, as you see: ‘I think it is the instinct that has gone wrong,' you say. Indeed if this were not so, it would be an intolerable injustice to impose permanent
⁶
monogamy even on Christians. If Christian marriage were in the last analysis ‘unnatural' (of the same type as say the prohibition of flesh-meat in certain monastic rules) it could only be imposed on a special ‘chastity-order' of the Church, not on the universal Church. No item of compulsory Christian morals is valid only for Christians. (See II Social Morality at the beginning.)
⁷
Do I not then say truly that your bringing in of Mohammedans on p. 34 is a most stinking red-herring? I do not think you can possibly support your ‘policy', by this argument, for by it you are giving away the very foundation of Christian marriage. The foundation is that this is the correct way of ‘running the human machine'. Your argument reduces it merely to a way of (perhaps?) getting an extra mileage out of a few selected machines.
^fn7

The horror of the Christians with whom you disagree (the great
majority of all practising Christians) at legal divorce is in the ultimate analysis precisely that: horror at seeing good machines ruined by misuse. I could hope that, if you ever get a chance of alterations, you would make the point clear. Toleration of divorce – if a Christian does tolerate it – is toleration of a human abuse, which it requires special local and temporary circumstances to justify (as does the toleration of usury) – if indeed either divorce or genuine usury should be tolerated at all, as a matter merely of expedient policy.

Under your limitations of space you have not, of course, had opportunity to elaborate
⁸
your ‘policy' – toleration of abuse. But I must suppose you have considered it, as a practical policy in the present world. You do not speak of your two-marriage system as a merely expedient policy, but as if it was somehow related to the Christian virtue of charity. Still I think you can only defend it as an expedient; as a surgeon who, knowing that an operation is necessary for a patient's health, does not operate because he can't (the patient and the patient's foolish advisers won't allow him); or does not even advocate the operation, because the Anti-Surgical League is so powerful and vocal that he is afraid of being beaten up. A Christian of your view is, as we have seen, committed to the belief that all people who practise ‘divorce' – certainly divorce as it is now legalized – are misusing the human machine (whatever philosophical defence they may put up), as certainly as men who get drunk (doubtless with a philosophic defence also). They are injuring themselves, other people, and society, by their behaviour. And wrong behaviour (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always: it never stops at being ‘not very good', ‘second best' – it either reforms, or goes on to third-rate, bad, abominable. In no department is that truer than in sex – as you yourself vividly exhibit, in the comparison between a dish of bacon and strip-tease.
⁹
You show too that you yourself suspect that the break-down of sex-reticence in our time has not made matters better but worse. Anyone in any case can see that the enormous extension and facilitation of ‘divorce' in our days, since those of (say) Trollopean society, has done great social harm. It is a slippery slope – leading quickly to Reno,
¹⁰
and beyond: in fact already to a promiscuity barely restrained by legalities: for a pair can now divorce one another, have an interlude with new partners, and then ‘re-marry'. A situation is being, has been, produced in which ordinary unphilosophical and irreligious folk are not only
not
restrained by law from inconstancy, but are actually by law and social custom encouraged to inconstancy. I need hardly add that a situation is thus being produced in which it is intolerably hard to bring up Christian youth in Christian sexual morals (which are ex hypothesi correct morals for all, and which will be lost but which depend upon Christian youth for their maintenance).

On what grounds then do you part company with those Christians who resist, step by step, attempts to extend and make divorce easier? (On one point only would I agree. I do
not
view extension of the provisions of the law to all classes (irrespective of rank and money) as an extension of divorce – it is rather justice: if you can have real justice in evil. I think in so desperate a battle (about so fundamental and vital a matter) that resistance even of ‘cheapening' of divorce may be defended – why not save the poor by their poverty?; but I admit that as an expedient policy it may be given an ugly twist by the enemy.)

I should like to know on what grounds you base your ‘two-marriage' system! From the biological-sociological point of view I gather (from Huxley and others) that monogamy is probably highly beneficial to a community. On that plane, permanence and rigid fidelity would not appear at first sight to be essential. All that the ‘social director' requires would seem to be a high degree of sexual continence. But has this ever been, and can it ever be in fact achieved without ‘sanctions' or religiolegal ordinance that invests the marriage contract with ‘awe'? It does not look like it. The battle may be a losing one, but I cannot help suspecting that those who fight against the
divorce
in this case of law and religion are in the right. Sentire cum ecclesia:
¹¹
how often one finds that this is a true guide. I say this all the more cheerfully, because on this point I myself
dissented
in feeling (not expressly because I am under saving obedience). But I was then still under the delusion that Christian marriage was just a bit of special behaviour of my ‘sect or order'.