The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (34 page)

I must say that I was unfortunate in coming into the hands of the D. Telegraph, during the absence of Betjeman. My work is not in his line, but he at any rate is neither ignorant nor a gutter-boy. Peter Green seems to be both. I do not know him or of him, but he is so rude as to make one suspect malice.
¹
Though actually I think ‘the cold in his head' made it more convenient for him to use Edwin Muir in the Observer
²
and Lambert in the S. Times,
³
with a slight hotting up of the above.

I am most puzzled by the remarks on the style. I do not expect, and did not expect, many to be amused by hobbits, or interested in the general story and its modes, but the discrepancy in the judgements on the style (which one would have thought referable to standards independent of personal liking) are very odd – from laudatory quotation to ‘Boys Own Paper' (which has no one style)!

I gather that you are not wholly dissatisfied. But there have been some very appreciative notices apart from C.S.L. (who had the advantage of knowing the whole), though not usually in the high places. Cherryman in
Truth
⁴
and Howard Spring in C.
Life
⁵
were pleasing to one's vanity, and also Cherryman's ending: that he would turn eagerly to the second and third volumes! May others feel the same!

Fawcett in the
M. Guardian
⁶
was complimentary in brief; and I was
specially interested by a long notice in the
Oxford Times
(by the editor himself)
⁷
in being by one quite outside the ring, and he seemed to have enjoyed himself. He sent an interviewer up, but what he will churn out for the O. Mail this week I do not know. . . . .

Well, this letter is already inordinately long. In the midst of it Professor d'Ardenne of Liège has arrived to harass me with philological work on which we are supposed to be engaged.

18 September 1954

I regret that I have not yet any copy to send in for the Appendices. All I can say is that I will do my best to produce this before the end of the month. My trouble is indecision (and conflicting advice) in selection from the too abundant matter. I have spent much ineffectual time on the attempt to satisfy the unfortunate promises of Vol. I p. 8.
¹

The Index has proceeded in rough form as far as the middle of Vol. II.

The ‘alphabets' reduced to simplest form will need blocks. . . . .

A map of the Gondor area is perhaps the most urgent. I am hoping to get my son Christopher to produce one from my drafts, as soon as possible.

18 September 1954

If you want my opinion, a part of the ‘fascination' [of
The Lord of the Rings
]consists in the vistas of yet more legend and history, to which this work does not contain a full clue. For the present we had better leave it at that. If there is a fault in the work which I myself clearly perceive, it is that I have perhaps overweighted Part I too much with attempts to depict the setting and historical background in the course of the narrative. Of course, in actual fact, this background already ‘exists', that is, is written, and was written first. But I could not get it published, in chronological order, until and unless a public could be found for the mixture of Elvish and Númenórean legend with the Hobbits. . . . .

Your preference of
goblins
to
orcs
involves a large question and a matter of taste, and perhaps historical pedantry on my part. Personally I prefer Orcs (since these creatures are not ‘goblins', not even the goblins of George MacDonald, which they do to some extent resemble). Also I now deeply regret having used Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitable enough. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome. I hope in the Appendices to Vol. III to be able to include a note ‘On translation' in which the matter of equivalences and my uses may be
made clearly. My difficulty has been that, since I have tried to present a kind of legendary and history of a ‘forgotten epoch', all the specific terms were in a foreign language, and no
precise
equivalents exist in English. . . . .

I am more than grateful to you for one thing: apart from one line in the Manchester Guardian no one else has yet even referred to the fact that there are any
verses
in the book – or I think not. . . . .

Frodo is not intended to be another Bilbo. Though his opening style is not wholly un-kin. But he is rather a study of a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror – broken down, and in the end made into something quite different. None of the hobbits come out of it in pure Shire-fashion. They wouldn't. But you have got Samwise Gamwichy (or Gamgee).

Middle-earth is just archaic English for
, the inhabited world of men. It lay then as it does. In fact just as it does, round and inescapable. That is partly the point. The new situation, established at the beginning of the Third Age, leads on eventually and inevitably to ordinary History, and we here see the process culminating. If you or I or any of the mortal men (or hobbits) of Frodo's day had set out over sea, west, we should, as now, eventually have come back (as now) to our starting point. Gone was the ‘mythological' time when Valinor (or Valimar), the Land of the Valar (gods if you will) existed physically in the Uttermost West, or the Eldaic (Elvish) immortal Isle of Eressëa; or the Great Isle of Westernesse (Númenor-Atlantis). After the Downfall of Númenor, and its destruction, all this was removed from the ‘physical' world, and not reachable by material means. Only the Eldar (or High-Elves) could still sail thither, forsaking time and mortality, but never returning.

Very many thanks for remembering the ageing Professor, and bracing him up with your letter. I know 21/– is a frightful price, but don't forget that I have to sell an awful lot before the ghastly expenses are paid off. The fact that I get not a halfpenny until that is done, does not matter so much, as this: if enough are sold I may be able to
publish more.
So add to your great kindness in inducing such as you can to beg borrow or steal a guinea rather than a copy!

Pictures are far too expensive, even if I had sufficent skill to do them and cut out artist's fees. I tried, but alas! can only draw v. imperfectly what I can, and not what I see. The wrapper is all that survived of three separate designs I made, one for each part. Part I was to have been all black with red and gold letters, and the three opposing rings: Narya (red), Vilya (blue), Nenya (white). . . . .
¹
But it was reduced; and the lovely (I thought) facsimiles of the 3 burned pages of the Book of Mazarbul also vanished – so that folk could have the thing at the trifling cost of 21/–!

22 September 1954

As for the English dialogue no ‘dialect' tone or rural quality is required at all. There is not intended to be what we should call a difference of social standing between the two speakers. One requires a younger lighter voice, and the other an older and deeper. The difference between them is rather one of temper, and matter, than ‘class'. The young minstrel bursts into formal verse, and so uses an archaic style – as anyone would capable of verse at the time, and as Tidwald himself does when he mocks Torhthelm.

It is not indicated what part of the country either came from. Torhthelm is in fact much more likely to have come from the West Midlands, as did many who fell at Maldon. But in a period when ‘dialect' merely marked place and not rank or function, and at any rate details of grammar and vowels had no social implications, it would be best to avoid any modern rusticity. In any case any modern East Anglian characteristics would be anachronistic, since they did not then exist – the fusion of the Danish and English elements that eventually produced them was not yet accomplished. And Essex of the East Saxons was (and is) a very different affair from the Northfolk and Southfolk.

September 1954

Dear Mr Hastings,

Thank you very much for your long letter. I am sorry that I have not the time to answer it, as fully as it deserves. You have at any rate paid me the compliment of taking me seriously; though I cannot avoid wondering whether it is not ‘too seriously', or in the wrong directions. The tale is after all in the ultimate analysis a tale, a piece of literature, intended to have literary effect, and not real history. That the device adopted, that of giving its setting an historical air or feeling, and (an illusion of ?) three dimensions, is successful, seems shown by the fact that several correspondents have treated it in the same way – according to their different points of interest or knowledge: i.e. as if it were a report of ‘real' times and places, which my ignorance or carelessness had misrepresented in places or failed to describe properly in others. Its economics, science, artefacts, religion, and philosophy are defective, or at least sketchy.

I have, of course, already considered all the points that you raise. But to present my reflexions to you (in other form) would take a book,
^fn29
and any kind of real answer to your more profound queries must at least wait till you have more in hand: Vol. III, for instance, not to mention the more mythical histories of the Cosmogony, First, and Second Ages. Since the whole matter from beginning to end is mainly concerned with the relation of Creation to making and sub-creation (and subsidiarily with the related matter of ‘mortality'), it must be clear that references to these things are not casual, but fundamental: they may well be fundamentally ‘wrong' from the point of view of Reality (external reality). But they cannot be wrong inside this imaginary world, since that is how it is made.

We differ entirely about the nature of the relation of sub-creation to Creation. I should have said that liberation ‘from the channels the creator is known to have used already' is the fundamental function of ‘sub-creation', a tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the ways in which indeed it is exhibited, as indeed I said in the Essay. I am not a metaphysician; but I should have thought it a curious metaphysic – there is not one but many, indeed potentially innumerable ones
– that declared the channels known (in such a finite corner as we have any inkling of) to have been used, are the only possible ones, or efficacious, or possibly acceptable to and by Him!

‘Reincarnation' may be bad
theology
(that surely, rather than metaphysics) as applied to Humanity; and my
legendarium
, especially the ‘Downfall of Númenor' which lies immediately behind
The Lord of the Rings
, is based on my view: that Men are essentially mortal and must not try to become ‘immortal' in the flesh.
^fn30
But I do not see how even in the Primary World any theologian or philosopher, unless very much better informed about the relation of spirit and body than I believe anyone to be, could deny the
possibility
of re-incarnation as a mode of existence, prescribed for certain kinds of rational incarnate creatures.