The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (46 page)

In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. I do not think that at any rate any ‘rational being' is wholly evil. Satan fell. In my myth Morgoth fell before Creation of the physical world. In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible. He had gone the way of all tyrants: beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth. But he went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination, being in origin an immortal (angelic) spirit.
^fn54
In
The Lord of the Rings
the conflict is not basically about 'freedom', though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honour. The Eldar and the Numenoreans believed in The One, the true God, and held worship of any other person an abomination. Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants
^fn55
if he had been
victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world. So even if in desperation ‘the West' had bred or hired hordes of orcs and had cruelly ravaged the lands of other Men as allies of Sauron, or merely to prevent them from aiding him, their Cause would have remained indefeasibly right. As does the Cause of those who oppose now the State-God and Marshal This or That as its High Priest, even if it is true (as it unfortunately is) that many of their deeds are wrong, even if it were true (as it is not) that the inhabitants of ‘The West', except for a minority of wealthy bosses, live in fear and squalor, while the worshippers of the State-God live in peace and abundance and in mutual esteem and trust.

So I feel that the fiddle-faddle in reviews, and correspondence about them, as to whether my ‘good people' were kind and merciful and gave quarter (in fact they do), or not, is quite beside the point. Some critics seem determined to represent me as a simple-minded adolescent, inspired with, say, a With-the-flag-to-Pretoria spirit, and wilfully distort what is said in my tale. I have not that spirit, and it does not appear in the story. The figure of Denethor alone is enough to show this; but I have not made any of the peoples on the ‘right' side, Hobbits, Rohirrim, Men of Dale or of Gondor, any better than men have been or are, or can be. Mine is not an ‘imaginary' world, but an imaginary historical moment on ‘Middle-earth' – which is our habitation.

18 March 1956 As from 76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dear Mr Gamgee,

It was very kind of you to write. You can imagine my astonishment, when I saw your signature! I can only say, for your comfort I hope, that the ‘Sam Gamgee' of my story is a most heroic character, now widely beloved by many readers, even though his origins are rustic. So that perhaps you will not be displeased by the coincidence of the name of this imaginary character (of supposedly many centuries ago) being the same
as yours. The reason of my use of the name is this. I lived near Birmingham as a child, and we used ‘gamgee' as a word for ‘cotton-wool'; so in my story the families of Cotton and Gamgee are connected. I did not know as a child, though I know now, that ‘Gamgee' was shortened from ‘gamgee-tissue', and that [it was] named after its inventor (a surgeon I think) who lived between 1828 and 1886. It was probably (I think) his son who died this year, on 1 March, aged 88, after being for many years Professor of Surgery at Birmingham University. Evidently ‘Sam' or something like it,
^fn56
is associated with the family – though I never knew this until a few days ago, when I saw Professor Gamgee's obituary notice, and saw that he was son of
Sampson Gamgee
– and looked in a dictionary and found that the inventor was
S. Gamgee
(1828–86), &
probably the same.

Have you any tradition as to the real origin of your distinguished and rare name? Having a rare name myself (often troublesome) I am specially interested.

The ‘etymology' given in my book is of course quite fictitious, and made up simply for the purposes of my story. I do not suppose you could be bothered to
read
so long and fantastic a work, especially if you do not care for stories about a mythical world, but if you could be bothered, I know that the work (which has been astonishingly successful) is in most public libraries. It is alas! very expensive to buy – £3/3/0. But if you or any of your family try it, and find it interesting enough, I can only say that I shall be happy and proud to send you a signed copy of all 3 vols. as a tribute from the author to the distinguished family of Gamgee.

Yrs sincerely

J. R. R. Tolkien.

19 March 1956

I have had a letter from a real
Sam Gamgee
, from Tooting! He could not have chosen a more Hobbit-
sounding
place, could he? – though un-hirelike, I fear, in reality.

Also A. & Unwin send extremely good news or prophecies of probable financial results to come later.

[Not dated; April 1956]

Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of
Power
(exerted for Domination). Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose. But they need not be. They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false. The greatest examples of the action of the spirit and of reason are in
abnegation.
When you say A[tomic] P[ower] is ‘here to stay' you remind me that Chesterton said that whenever he heard that, he knew that whatever it referred to would soon be replaced, and thought pitifully shabby and old-fashioned. So-called ‘atomic' power is rather bigger than anything he was thinking of (I have heard it of trams, gas-light, steam-trains). But it surely is clear that there will have to be some ‘abnegation' in its use, a deliberate refusal to do some of the things it is possible to do with it, or nothing will stay! However, that is simple stuff, a contemporary & possibly passing and ephemeral problem. I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real centre of my story. It provides the theme of a War, about something dark and threatening enough to seem at that time of supreme importance, but that is mainly ‘a setting' for characters to show themselves. The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race ‘doomed' to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race ‘doomed' not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete. But if you have now read Vol. III and the story of Aragorn, you will have perceived that. (This story is placed in an appendix, because I have told the whole tale more or less through ‘hobbits'; and that is because another main point in the story for me is the remark of Elrond in Vol. I: ‘Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.' Though equally important is Merry's remark (Vol. III p. 146): ‘the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace, but for them.') I am
not
a ‘democrat' only because ‘humility' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power – and then we get and are getting slavery. But all that is rather ‘after-thought'. The story is really a story of what happened in B.C. year X, and it just happened to people who were like that!. . . .

I hope you have now ‘come by' Vol. III! I am afraid I am always rather pleased when I hear of somebody being obliged to
buy
the book! An author cannot live on library-subscriptions.

I received a letter the other day from a well known, and certainly not impoverished, man, who informed me as a high compliment that he had become so enthralled that he got out the book several times, and paid heavy fines for keeping it out too long. Words failed me in reply. The
L of the R
cost some £4000 to produce to begin with, after it left my hands. Before that apart from any other labour I typed it out twice (in places several times). A professional would have charged about £200. There is a laborious practical side even to high Romance – not that hobbits ever forget that.

As ‘research students' always discover, however long they are allowed, and careful their work and notes, there is always a rush at the end, when the last date suddenly approaches on which their thesis must be presented. So it was with this book, and the maps. I had to call in the help of my son – the C.T. or C.J.R.T. of the modest initials on the maps – an accredited student of hobbit-lore. And neither of us had an entirely free hand. I remember that when it became apparent that the ‘general map' would not suffice for the final Book, or sufficiently reveal the courses of Frodo, the Rohirrim, and Aragorn, I had to devote many days, the last three virtually without food or bed, to drawing re-scaling and adjusting a large map, at which he then worked for 24 hours (6 a.m. to 6 a.m. without bed) in re-drawing just in time. Inconsistencies of spelling are due to me. It was only in the last stages that (in spite of my son's protests: he still holds that no one will ever pronounce
Cirith
right, it appears as
Kirith
in his map, as formerly also in the text) I decided to be ‘consistent' and spell Elvish names and words throughout without
k.
There are no doubt other variations. . . . .

I am, however, primarily a philologist and to some extent a calligrapher (though this letter may make that difficult to believe). And my son after me. To us far and away the most absorbing interest is the Elvish tongues, and the nomenclature based on them; and the alphabets. My plans for the ‘specialist volume' were largely linguistic. An index of names was to be produced, which by etymological interpretation would also provide quite a large Elvish vocabulary; this is of course a first requirement. I worked at it for months, and indexed the first two vols.
(it was the chief cause of the delay of Vol iii) until it became clear that size and cost were ruinous. Reluctantly also I had to abandon, under pressure from the ‘production department', the ‘facsimiles' of the three pages of the
Book of Mazarbul,
burned tattered and blood-stained, which I had spent much time on producing or forging. Without them the opening of Book Two, ch. 5 (which was meant to have the facsimiles and a transcript alongside) is defective, and the Runes of the Appendices unnecessary.

But the problems (delightful if I had time) which the extra volume will set, will seem clear if I tell you that while many like you demand
maps
, others wish for
geological
^fn57
indications rather than places; many want Elvish grammars, phonologies, and specimens; some want metrics and prosodies – not only of the brief Elvish specimens, but of the ‘translated' verses in less familiar modes, such as those written in the strictest form of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (e.g. the fragment at the end of the
Battle of the Pelennor,
V vi 124). Musicians want tunes, and musical notation; archaeologists want ceramics and metallurgy. Botanists want a more accurate description of the
mallorn
, of
elanor, niphredil, alfirin, mallos,
and
symbelmynë;
and historians want more details about the social and political structure of Gondor; general enquirers want information about the Wainriders, the Harad, Dwarvish origins, the Dead Men, the Beornings, and the missing two wizards (out of five). It will be a big volume, even if I attend only to the things revealed to my limited understanding!