The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (60 page)

We lost our ‘help', because of ill health, that we had had for about eight years, last autumn. If ever you pray for temporal blessings for us, my dear, ask for the near-miracle of finding some help. Oxford is probably one of the hardest places even in this England, to find such a thing.

The book of poems is going along. Pauline Baynes has accepted the contract and is now beginning on the illustration. The publishers certainly intend it for Christmas. I have done my part.

At the moment I am engaged on putting into order, with notes and
brief preface, my translation of
Sir Gawain
and of
Pearl
, before returning to my major work the
Silmarillion. The Pearl
is another poem in the same MS as
Sir Gawain
. Neither has any author's name attached; but I believe (as do most others) that they are by the same person.
The Pearl
is much the more difficult to translate, largely for metrical reasons; but being attracted by apparently insoluble metrical problems, I started to render it years ago. Some stanzas were actually broadcast, in the late 1920s.
²
I finished it, more or less, before the war; and it disappeared under the weight of the War, and of
The Lord of the Rings
. The poem is very well-known to mediævalists; but I never agreed to the view of scholars that the metrical form was almost impossibly difficult to write in, and quite impossible to render in modern English. NO scholars (or, nowadays, poets) have any experience in composing themselves in exacting metres. I made up a few stanzas in the metre to show that composition in it was not at any rate ‘impossible' (though the result might today be thought bad).
³
The original
Pearl
was more difficult: a translator is not free, and this text is very hard in itself, often obscure, partly from the thought and style, and partly from the corruptions of the only surviving MS.

As these things interest you, I send you the original stanzas of my own – related inevitably as everything was at one time with my own mythology. I will send you a copy of the
Pearl
, as soon as I can get a carbon copy made. It has 101 twelve-line stanzas. It is (I think) evidently inspired by the loss in infancy of a little daughter. It is thus in a sense an elegy; but the author uses the then fashionable (it was contemporary with Chaucer) dream-framework, and uses the occasion to discuss his own theological views about salvation. Though not all acceptable to modern taste, it has moments of poignancy; and though it may in our view be absurdly complex in technical form, the poet surmounts his own obstacles on the whole with success. The stanzas have twelve lines, with only three rhymes: an octet of four couplets rhyming
a b
, and a quartet rhyming
b c
. In addition each line has internal alliteration (it occasionally but rarely fails in the original; the version is inevitably less rich). And if that is not enough, the poem is divided into fives. Within a five-stanza group the chief word of the last line must be echoed in the first line of the following stanza; the last line of the five-group is echoed at the beginning of the next; and the first line of all is to wind up echoed in the last line of all. But oddly enough there are not 100 stanzas, but 101. In group XV there are six stanzas. It has long been supposed that one of these was an uncancelled revision. But there are also 101 stanzas in
Sir Gawain
. The number was evidently aimed at, though what its significance was for the author has not been discovered. The grouping by fives also connects the poem with
Gawain
, where the poet elaborates
the significance: the Five Wounds, the Five Joys, the Five virtues, and the Five wits.

Enough of that. I hope you are not bored. I enclose on a separate sheet the opening stanza in the original, and in my version, as a specimen.

20 July 1962

If
gnomos
is used as a translation of
dwarves
, then it must
not
appear on p. 63 in
the elves that are now called Gnomes.
I need not trouble the translator, or you, with the long explanation needed to account for this aberration; but the word was used as a translation of the real name, according to my mythology, of the High-elven people of the West. Pedantically, associating it with Greek
gnome
‘thought, intelligence'. But I have abandoned it, since it is quite impossible to dissociate the name from the popular associations of the Paracelsan
gnomus
=
pygmaeus
.
¹
Since this word is used – for its aptness in preference to Sp[anish]
enano
I am not able to judge – for ‘dwarves', regrettable confusion would be caused, if it is also applied to the High Elves. I earnestly suggest that on p. 63, lines 6–7, the translator should translate
old swords of the High Elves of the West;
and on p. 173, line 14, should delete (
or Gnomes
) altogether. I think these are the only places where
Gnomes
appears in
The Hobbit
.

1 August 1962

76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dear Mrs Gasch,

I am sorry that you have been bothered by this detail. There have been a number of minor changes made at various times in the process of assimilating Tom B. to the
Lord of the Rings
world.

The peacock's feather belongs to an old draft. Being unsuitable to the L.R. this becomes in the L.R. (I p. 130)
¹
‘a long blue feather'. In the poems as now to be published Tom appears (in line 4 of the first poem) with a ‘swan-wing feather': to increase the riverishness, and to allow for the incident in the second poem, the gift of a blue feather by the king's fisher. That incident also explains the blue feather of the L.R. Poem one is evidently, as said in the introduction, a hobbit-version of things long
before the days of the L.R. But the second poem refers to the days of growing shadow, before Frodo set out (as the consultation with Maggot shows: cf. L.R. I p. 143).
²
When therefore Tom appears in the L.R. he is wearing a blue feather.

As far as you are concerned peacocks are out. A swan-feather in the first poem; and a blue one after the kingfisher incident.

Thank you for taking so much trouble. I may say that a number of changes were made in the drafts that were originally submitted to you. Only the galleys are reliable.

For instance, in the altercation with the kingfisher, I found that no variety likely to be in our parts of the world has a scarlet crest. (Scarlet
breasts
are more likely though ones I know are pinkish!) Also, more interesting, I found that the bird's name did not mean, as I had supposed, ‘a King that fishes'. It was originally
the king's fisher.
That links the swan (traditionally the property of the King) with the fisher-bird; explains both their rivalry, and their special friendship with Tom: they were creatures who looked for the return of their rightful Lord, the true King.

Do not be put off by this sort of thing unless it affects the picture! The inwardly seen picture is to me the most important. I look forward to your interpretation. The donnish detail is just a private pleasure which I do not expect anyone to notice. (E.g. the hanging up of a kingfisher to see the way of the wind, which comes from Sir T. Browne;
³
the otter's whisker sticking out of the gold, from the Norse Nibelung legends;
⁴
and the three places for gossip,
smithy, mill, and cheaping
(market), from a mediæval instructive work that I have been editing!)
⁵
With very best wishes

Yours sincerely

Ronald Tolkien.

8–9 September 1962

I was so pleased to hear from you again. I was a bit afraid that I had overstepped the mark with that lecture: much of it rather dull except to dons. It is not really ‘learned': my task was to thread together items of common (professional) knowledge in an attempt to interest English people. The only ‘original' things in it, are the autobiographical bits, and the reference to ‘beauty' in language; and the theory that one's ‘native language' is not the same as one's ‘cradle-tongue'.

I should not be surprised to hear that your postman did
not
know
bobi: caws bobi.
It seems not to be mentioned in modern dictionaries, and is probably obsolete. It means or meant ‘toasted cheese', i.e.
Welsh rabbit. pobi
is the Welsh word for ‘cook, roast, toast', and (if Andrew Boorde
¹
got it right) it has changed p- to b- because
pobi
is used as an adjective, after a noun. London was for a while very Welsh-conscious at the time (as seen in Shakespeare), and bits of Welsh crop up in plays and tales. But the notion that Welsh was the ‘language of heaven' was much older. Andrew B. was simply making fun of an often heard Welsh claim. I expect the postman will have heard of it. Postmen are on the whole a good tribe – especially the country ones who still walk. But Welsh postmen seem specially kind, and also learned. Sir John Morris Jones, a famous Welsh scholar (and author of the grammar that I bought with prize-money as related)
²
said, commenting on the work of a learned French scholar (Loth) on Welsh metres: ‘I get more learning and sense on the topic out of my postman.'

Which did not mean, of course, that Loth was as ignorant as a mere postman ‘passing the time of day'; but that the postman was better read and more learned than a French professor. It may have been true – in Welsh matters. For as a ‘poor country' even yet Wales has not learnt to associate art or knowledge solely with certain classes. But the Welsh for all their virtues are contentious and often malicious; and they do not always whet their tongues against ‘foreigners', they often turn the sharp edge upon their own kind (who do not readily forgive). All ‘scholars' are apt to be quarrelsome, but Welsh scholarship and philology are a faction-fight. My reference on p. 3 to ‘entering the litigious lists'
³
was not mere rhetoric, but a necessary disclaimer against belonging to any one of the factions.

It is said that Sir John M. J. built himself a fine house near Bangor overlooking the Menai Straits, to Mon (Anglesey). But the ‘friendly' nickname for the inhabitants of that isle is (on the mainland)
moch
‘swine'. Some gentry from Beaumaris paid him a visit, and after admiring his house, asked if he was going to give it a name. ‘Yes', said he, ‘I shall call it
Gadara View
.'. . . .

I am now sending you ‘Leaf by Niggle'. I have had a copy made specially to keep if you wish – from the
Dublin Review
in which it appeared nearly 20 years ago. It was written (I think) just before the War began, though I first read it aloud to my friends early in 1940. I recollect nothing about the writing, except that I woke one morning with it in my head, scribbled it down – and the printed form in the main hardly differs from the first hasty version at all. I find it still quite moving, when I reread it.

It is not really or properly an ‘allegory' so much as ‘mythical'. For
Niggle is meant to be a real mixed-quality
person
and not an ‘allegory' of any single vice or virtue. The name Parish proved convenient, for the Porter's joke, but it was not given with any intention of special significance. I once knew of a gardener called
Parish.
(I see there are six
Parishes
in our telephone book.) Of course some elements are explicable in biographical terms (so obsessively interesting to modern critics that they often value a piece of ‘literature' solely in so far as it reveals the author, and especially if that is in a discreditable light). There was a great tree – a huge poplar with vast limbs – visible through my window even as I lay in bed. I loved it, and was anxious about it. It had been savagely mutilated some years before, but had gallantly grown new limbs – though of course not with the unblemished grace of its former natural self; and now a foolish neighbour
⁴
was agitating to have it felled. Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. (Too often the hate is irrational, a fear of anything large and alive, and not easily tamed or destroyed, though it may clothe itself in pseudo-rational terms.) This fool
^fn90
said that it cut off the sun from her house and garden, and that she feared for her house if it should crash in a high wind. It stood due
east
of her front door, across a wide road, at a distance nearly
thrice
its total height. Thus only about the equinox would it even cast a shadow in her direction, and only in the very early morning one that reached across the road to the pavement outside her front gate. And any wind that could have uprooted it and hurled it on her house, would have demolished her and her house without any assistance from the tree. I believe it still stands where it did. Though many winds have blown since.
⁵
(The great gale in which the dreadful winter of 46–47 ended (on March 17, 1947) blew down nearly all the mighty trees of the Broadwalk in Christchurch Meadows, and devastated Magdalen deer park – but it did not lose a bough.) Also, of course, I was anxious about my own internal Tree,
The Lord of the Rings.
It was growing out of hand, and revealing endless new vistas – and I wanted to finish it, but the world was threatening. And I was
dead stuck,
somewhere about Ch. 10 (
Voice of Saruman
) in Book III – with fragments ahead some of which eventually fitted into Ch. 1 and 3 of Book V, but most of which proved wrong especially about Mordor – and I did not know how to go on. It was not until Christopher was carried off to S. Africa that I forced myself to write Book IV, which was sent out to him bit by bit. That was 1944. (I did not finish the first rough writing till 1949, when I remember blotting the pages (which now represent the welcome of Frodo and Sam on the Field of Cormallen) with tears as I wrote. I then myself typed the
whole
of that work all VI books out, and then
once again
in revision (in places many times), mostly on my bed in the attic of the tiny terrace-house to which war had
exiled us from the house in which my family had grown up.) But none of that really illuminates ‘Leaf by Niggle' much, does it? If it has any virtues, they remain as such, whether you know all this or do not. I hope you think it has some virtue. (But for quite different reasons, I think you may like the personal details. That is because you are a dear, and take an interest in other people, especially as rightly your kin.)