The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (43 page)

However, the surprising welcome given to
The Lord of the Rings
will probably make this procedure unnecessary; and has justified the publishers' firm resolve to issue the present work first; though I wanted to present the matter in ‘chronological order'. For one thing, it would have lightened and quickened the narrative of the Third Age!

I do not think that anything is referred to in
The L. of the R.
which does not actually exist in legends written before it was begun, or at least belonging to an earlier period – except only the ‘cats of Queen Berúthiel'.
¹
But I am afraid that all the matter of the First and Second Ages is very ‘high-mythical' or Elvish and heroic, and there is no ‘hobbitry' at all: an ingredient that seems to have made the present mixture more generally palatable.

Since the publishers are now pressing for the
Silmarillion
&c. (which was long ago turned down), I do intend as soon as I can find time to try to set the material in order for publication. Though I am rather tired, and no longer young enough to pillage the night to make up for the deficit of hours in the day. . . .

It might conceivably interest you to see some of this [
The Silmarillion
] before it is properly shaped or revised, bearing in mind that it is likely to be much altered in detail & presentation – and certainly in style.

Thanking you again for your encouragement.

Yours sincerely

J. R. R. Tolkien.

30 November 1955

I think the book quite unsuitable for ‘dramatization', and have not enjoyed the broadcasts – though they have improved. I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful – but worse still was the announcer's preliminary remarks that Goldberry was his daughter (!), and that Willowman was an ally of Mordor (!!). Cannot people imagine things hostile to men and hobbits who prey on them without being in league with the Devil!

8 December 1955

I had to deliver the opening lecture of the newly-founded O'Donnell Lectures in Celtic Studies – already overdue: and I composed it with ‘all the woe in the world', as the Gawain-poet says of the wretched fox with the hounds on his tail. All the more woe, since I am the merest amateur
in such matters, and Celtic scholars are critical and litigious; and more woe since I was smitten with laryngitis.

I think poorly of the broadcast adaptations. Except for a few details I think they are not well done, even granted the script and the legitimacy of the enterprise (which I do not grant). But they took some trouble with the names. I thought that the Dwarf (Glóin not Gimli, but I suppose Gimli will look like his father – apparently someone's idea of a German) was not too bad, if a bit exaggerated. I do think of the ‘Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue. . . . .

I have now got a pestilent doctorate thesis to explore, when I would rather be doing something less useful. . . . .

I am sorry about my childish amusement with arithmetic; but there it is: the Númenórean calendar was just a bit better than the Gregorian: the latter being on average 26 secs fast p. a., and the N[úmenórean] 17.2 secs slow.

8 December 1955

I agreed with the ‘critics' view of the radio adaptation; but I was annoyed that after confessing that none of them had read the book they should turn their attention to it and me – including surmises on my religion. I also thought Auden rather bad – he cannot at any rate read verse, having a poor rhythmical sense; and deplored his making the book ‘a test of literary taste'. You cannot do that with any work – and if you could you only infuriate. I was fully prepared for Robert Robinson's rejoinder ‘fair-ground barker'. But I suppose all this is good for sales. My correspondence is now increased by letters of fury against the critics and the broadcast. One elderly lady – in part the model for ‘Lobelia' indeed, though she does not suspect it – would I think certainly have set about Auden (and others) had they been in range of her umbrella. . . . .

I hope in this vacation to begin surveying the
Silmarillion
; though evil fate has plumped a doctorate thesis on me. . . . .

Blast Edwin Muir and his delayed adolescence. He is old enough to know better. It might do him good to hear what women think of his ‘knowing about women', especially as a test of being mentally adult. If he had an M. A. I should nominate him for the professorship of poetry
¹
– a sweet revenge.

12 December 1955

By the way, there is no need to alter ‘Mr' to Professor. In proper Oxford tradition professor is not a title of address – or was not, though the habit has drifted in from places where ‘professors' are powerful little domestic potentates. I am sure that without ‘professor' I should have heard less about my donnishness, and no one would have said ‘The Shire is not far from North Oxford'. It is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee – that is as far away as the Third Age from that depressing and perfectly characterless straggle of houses north of old Oxford, which has not even a postal existence.

14 December 1955

Dismiss the nightmare! I can stand criticism – not being unduly puffed up by the success (v. unexpected) of ‘The Lord of the Rings' – even when stupid, or unfair, or even (as I occasionally suspect) a little malicious. Otherwise I should be in a fine taking, what with ‘emasculate' and other kind adjectives. But you are welcome to let your pen run as it will (it is horrible writing letters to people with whom you have to be ‘careful'), since you give me such close attention, and sensitive perception.

[A letter to an unidentified reader.]

14 January 1956

Merton College, Oxford

Dear Mr Thompson,

Thank you very much for your kind and encouraging letter. Having set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled
at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own: it is a wonderful thing to be told that I have succeeded, at least with those who have still the undarkened heart and mind.

It has been a considerable labour, beginning really as soon as I was able to begin anything, but effectively beginning when I was an undergraduate and began to explore my own linguistic aesthetic in language-composition. It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that ‘legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ‘legends' which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And
vice versa
. Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial,
¹
&c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.) So though being a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing ‘legends' of the same ‘taste'. The early work was mostly done in camps and hospitals between 1915 and 1918 – when time allowed. But I think a lot of this kind of work goes on at other (to say lower, deeper, or higher introduces a false gradation) levels, when one is saying how-do-you-do, or even ‘sleeping'. I have long ceased to
invent
(though even patronizing or sneering critics on the side praise my ‘invention'): I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself. Thus, though I knew for years that Frodo would run into a tree-adventure somewhere far down the Great River, I have no recollection of inventing Ents. I came at last to the point, and wrote the ‘Treebeard' chapter without any recollection of any previous thought: just as it now is. And then I saw that, of course, it had not happened to Frodo at all.

All this is boring, I am sure, because it is apparently self-centred; but I am old enough (alas!) to take a dispassionate and scientific, properly so-called, interest in these matters, and cite myself simply because I am interested in mythological ‘invention', and the mystery of literary creation (or sub-creation as I have elsewhere called it) and I am the most readily available
corpus vile
for experiment or observation.

My chief reason for talking so, is to say that, of course, all these things are more or less written. There is hardly any reference in
The Lord of the Rings
to things that do not actually
exist
^fn46
on its own plane (of secondary or sub-creational reality): sc. have been written.
The Silmarillion
was offered for publication years ago, and turned down. Good may come of such blows.
The Lord of the Rings
was the result. The hobbits had been welcomed. I loved them myself, since I love the vulgar and simple as dearly as the noble, and nothing moves my heart (beyond all the passions and heartbreaks of the world) so much as ‘ennoblement' (from the Ugly Duckling to Frodo). I would build on the hobbits. And I saw that I was
meant
to do it (as Gandalf
^fn47
would say), since without thought, in a ‘blurb' I wrote for
The Hobbit,
I spoke of the time between the Elder Days and the Dominion of Men. Out of that came the ‘missing link': the ‘Downfall of Númenor', releasing some hidden ‘complex'. For when Faramir speaks of his private vision of the Great Wave, he speaks for me. That vision and dream has been ever with me – and has been inherited (as I only discovered recently) by one of my children.
³

However, such has been the success – not financial: costs were enormous, and nobody nowadays buys a book that they can borrow: I have not yet received a farthing – of
The Lord of the Rings
that the ugly duckling has become a publisher's swan, and I am being positively
bullied
to put
The Silmarillion
into form, and anything else!

[Not dated; probably January or February 1956.]

Dear Mr Straight,

Thank you for your letter. I hope that you have
enjoyed The Lord of the Rings? Enjoyed
is the key-word. For it was written to
amuse
(in the highest sense): to be readable. There is
no
‘allegory', moral, political, or contemporary in the work at all.

It is a ‘fairy-story', but one written – according to the belief I once expressed in an extended essay ‘On Fairy-stories' that they are the
proper audience – for adults. Because I think that fairy story has its own mode of reflecting ‘truth', different from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or ‘realism', and in some ways more powerful. But first of all it must succeed just as a tale, excite, please, and even on occasion move, and within its own imagined world be accorded (literary) belief. To succeed in that was my primary object.

But, of course, if one sets out to address ‘adults' (mentally adult people anyway), they will not be pleased, excited, or moved unless the whole, or the incidents, seem to be about something worth considering, more e.g. than mere danger and escape: there must be some relevance to the ‘human situation' (of all periods). So something of the teller's own reflections and ‘values' will inevitably get worked in. This is not the same as allegory. We all, in groups or as individuals,
exemplify
general principles; but we do not
represent
them. The Hobbits are no more an ‘allegory' than are (say) the pygmies of the African forest. Gollum is to me just a ‘character' – an imagined person – who granted the situation acted so and so under opposing strains, as it appears to be
probable
that he would (there is always an incalculable element in any individual real or imagined: otherwise he/she would not be an individual but a ‘type'.)