Read The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Online
Authors: Humphrey Carpenter
I went on after return; but when I attempted to get any of this stuff published I was not successful.
The Hobbit
was originally quite unconnected, though it inevitably got drawn in to the circumference of the greater construction; and in the event modified it. It was unhappily really meant, as far as I was conscious, as a âchildren's story', and as I had not learned sense then, and my children were not quite old enough to correct me, it has some of the sillinesses of manner caught unthinkingly from the kind of stuff I had had served to me, as Chaucer may catch a minstrel tag. I deeply regret them. So do intelligent children.
All I remember about the start of
The Hobbit
is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: âIn a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror's Map. But it became
The Hobbit
in the early 1930s, and was eventually published not because of my own children's enthusiasm (though they liked it well enough
fn42
), but because I lent it to the then Rev. Mother of Cherwell Edge when she had flu, and it was seen by a former student who was at that time in the office of Allen and Unwin. It was I believe tried out on Rayner Unwin; but for whom when grown up I think I should never have got the Trilogy published.
Since
The Hobbit
was a success, a sequel was called for; and the remote Elvish Legends were turned down. A publisher's reader said they were too full of the kind of Celtic beauty that maddened Anglo-Saxons in a large dose. Very likely quite right. Anyway I myself saw the value of Hobbits, in putting earth under the feet of âromance', and in providing subjects for âennoblement' and heroes more praiseworthy than the professionals:
nolo heroizari
is of course as good a start for a hero, as
nolo episcopari
for a bishop. Not that I am a âdemocrat' in any of its current uses; except that I suppose, to speak in literary terms, we are all equal before the Great Author,
qui deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles
.
6
All the same, I was not prepared to write a âsequel', in the sense of another children's story. I had been thinking about âFairy Stories' and their relation to children â some of the results I put into a lecture at St Andrews and eventually enlarged and published in an Essay (among those listed in the O.U.P. as
Essays Presented to Charles Williams
and now most scurvily allowed to go out of print). As I had expressed the view that the connexion in the modern mind between children and âfairy stories' is false and accidental, and spoils the stories in themselves and for children, I wanted to try and write one that was not addressed to children at all (as such); also I wanted a large canvas.
A lot of labour was naturally involved, since I had to make a linkage with
The Hobbit
; but still more with the background mythology. That had to be re-written as well.
The Lord of the Rings
is only the end part of a work nearly twice as long
7
which I worked at between 1936 and 53. (I wanted to get it all published in chronological order, but that proved impossible.) And the languages had to be attended to! If I had considered my own pleasure more than the stomachs of a possible audience, there would have been a great deal more Elvish in the book. But even the snatches that there are required, if they were to have a meaning, two organized phonologies and grammars and a large number of words.
It would have been a big task without anything else; but I have been a moderately conscientious administrator and teacher, and I changed professorships in 1945 (scrapping all my old lectures). And of course during the War there was often no time for anything rational. I stuck for ages at the end of Book Three. Book Four was written as a serial and sent out to my son serving in Africa in 1944. The last two books were written between 1944 and 48. That of course does not mean that the main idea of the story was a war-product. That was arrived at in one of the earliest chapters still surviving (Book I, 2). It is really given, and present in germ, from the beginning, though I had no conscious notion of what the Necromancer stood for (except ever-recurrent evil) in
The Hobbit,
nor of his connexion with the Ring. But if you wanted to go on from the end of
The Hobbit
I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as the link. If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the Dark Lord would immediately appear. As he did, unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that point. So the essential Quest started at once. But I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlórien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horse-lords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen
adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor of the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf's failure to appear on September 22. I knew nothing of the
PalantÃri
, though the moment the Orthanc-stone was cast from the window, I recognized it, and knew the meaning of the ârhyme of lore' that had been running in my mind:
seven stars and seven stones and one white tree.
These rhymes and names will crop up; but they do not always explain themselves. I have yet to discover anything about the cats of Queen Berúthiel.
8
But I did know more or less all about Gollum and his part, and Sam, and I knew that the way was guarded by a Spider. And if that has anything to do with my being stung by a tarantula when a small child,
9
people are welcome to the notion (supposing the improbable, that any one is interested). I can only say that I remember nothing about it, should not know it if I had not been told; and I do not dislike spiders particularly, and have no urge to kill them. I usually rescue those whom I find in the bath!
Well now I am really getting garrulous. I do hope you will not be frightfully bored. I hope also to see you again some time. In which case we may perhaps talk about you and your work and not mine. Any way your interest in mine is a considerable encouragement.
With very best wishes. Yours sincerely,
J. R. R. Tolkien.
29 June 1955
I have had a very gruelling time, with far more work than I could really cope with,
plus
Vol. III. I am feeling as flat as a burst tyre; but may revive when (or if, as promised) the final proofs of Vol. III arrive tomorrow.
The booksellers â among them Mr Wilson of Bumpus â say that, having delayed so long, late in September is now the proper time for publication. . . . .
I think âA and U' may now take the âearlier history' in some form. When I was in town last Friday they seemed willing to envisage a book about as long as Vol. I.
[On 5 June 1955 in the
New York Times Book Review
, the columnist Harvey Breit devoted part of his weekly article âIn and Out of Books' to an account of Tolkien and his writings. It included this passage: âWhat, we asked Dr [sic] Tolkien, makes you tick? Dr T., who teaches at Oxford
when he isn't writing novels, has this brisk reply: “I don't tick. I am not a machine. (If I did tick, I should have no views on it, and you had better ask the winder.) My work did not âevolve' into a serious work. It started like that. The so-called âchildren's story' [
The Hobbit
] was a fragment, torn out of an already existing mythology. In so far as it was dressed up as âfor children', in style or manner, I regret it. So do the children. I am a philologist, and all my work is philological. I avoid hobbies because I am a very serious person and cannot distinguish between private amusement and duty. I am affable, but unsociable. I only work for private amusement, since I find my duties privately amusing.”'
These remarks were apparently taken from a letter written by Tolkien in answer to enquiries by a representative of the
New York Times
. On 30 June 1955, Tolkien wrote to the Houghton Mifflin Co., his American publishers: âPlease do not blame me for what Breit made of my letter!. . . . The original made sense: not a quality, however, of which Harvey B. seems perceptive. I was asked a series of questions, with a request to answer briefly, brightly, and quotably. . . . . Out of sheer pity [for another enquirer wanting information]. . . . I do enclose a few notes on points other than mere facts of my “curriculum vitae” (which can be got from reference books).' What follows is these âfew notes'. The text is taken from a typescript apparently made by the Houghton Mifflin Co. from Tolkien's original; this typescript was sent to a number of enquirers at different times, some of whom quoted from it in articles about Tolkien. Tolkien himself was given a copy of the typescript, and he made a number of annotations and corrections to it, which are incorporated into the text which is here printed.]
My name is TOLKIEN (
not -kein
). It is a German name (from Saxony), an anglicization of
Tollkiehn,
i.e.
tollkühn.
But, except as a guide to spelling, this fact is as fallacious as all facts in the raw. For I am neither âfoolhardy'
1
nor German, whatever some remote ancestors may have been. They migrated to England more than 200 years ago, and became quickly intensely English (not British), though remaining musical â a talent that unfortunately did not descend to me.
fn43
I am in fact far more of a Suffield
2
(a family deriving from Evesham in Worcestershire), and it is to my mother who taught me (until I obtained a scholarship at the ancient Grammar School in Birmingham) that I owe my tastes for philology, especially of Germanic languages, and for romance. I am indeed in English terms a West-midlander at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches; and it is, I believe, as much due to descent as to opportunity that Anglo-Saxon and Western Middle English and alliterative verse have been both a childhood attraction and my main professional sphere. (I also find the Welsh language specially attractive.
fn44
) I write alliterative verse with pleasure, though I have published little beyond the fragments in
The Lord of the Rings
, except âThe Homecoming of Beorhtnoth' (in
Essays and Studies of the English Association,
1953, London, John Murray) recently twice broadcast by the BBC: a dramatic dialogue on the nature of the âheroic' and the âchivalrous'. I still hope to finish a long poem on
The Fall of Arthur
in the same measure.
3
All the same, I was born in Bloemfontein, Orange River Free State â another fallacious fact (though my earliest memories are of a hot country) since I was shipped home in 1895, and have spent most of 60 years since in Birmingham and Oxford, except for 5 or 6 years in Leeds: my first post after the 1914â18 War was in the university there. I am very untravelled, though I know Wales, and have often been in Scotland (never north of the Tay), and know something of France, Belgium, and Ireland. I have spent a good deal of time in Ireland, and am since last July actually a D. Litt. of University College Dublin; but be it noted I first set foot in âEire' in 1949 after
The Lord of the Rings
was finished, and find both Gaelic and the air of Ireland wholly alien â though the latter (not the language) is attractive.
I might add that in October I received a degree (Doct. en Lettres et Phil.) at Liège (Belgium) â if only to record the fact that it astonished me to be welcomed in French as âle createur de M. Bilbo Baggins' and still more to be told in explanation of applause that I was a âset book' ?????? Alas!
If I might elucidate what H. Breit has left of my letter: the remark about âphilology' was intended to allude to what is I think a primary âfact' about my work, that it is all of a piece,
and fundamentally linguistic
in inspiration. The authorities of the university might well consider it an aberration of an elderly professor of philology to write and publish fairy stories and romances, and call it a âhobby', pardonable because it has been (surprisingly to me as much as to anyone) successful. But it is not a âhobby', in the sense of something quite different from one's work, taken up as a relief-outlet. The invention of languages is the foundation. The âstories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.
fn45
I should have preferred to write in âElvish'. But, of course, such a work as
The Lord of the Rings
has been edited and only as much âlanguage' has been left in as
I thought would be stomached by readers. (I now find that many would have liked more.) But there is a great deal of linguistic matter (other than actually âelvish' names and words) included or mythologically expressed in the book. It is to me, anyway, largely an essay in âlinguistic aesthetic', as I sometimes say to people who ask me âwhat is it all about?'
It is not âabout' anything but itself. Certainly it has
no
allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious, or political. The only criticism that annoyed me was one that it âcontained no religion' (and âno Women', but that does not matter, and is not true anyway). It is a monotheistic world of ânatural theology'. The odd fact that there are no churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies, is simply part of the historical climate depicted. It will be sufficiently explained, if (as now seems likely) the
Silmarillion
and other legends of the First and Second Ages are published. I am in any case myself a Christian; but the âThird Age' was not a Christian world.