The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (66 page)

Well, there you are. I hope it does not bore you. . . . .

[Of his use of the name ‘Gamgee':] It started with a holiday about 30 years ago at Lamorna Cove
⁴
(then wild and fairly inaccessible). There
was a curious local character, an old man who used to go about swapping gossip and weather-wisdom and such like. To amuse my boys I named him Gaffer Gamgee, and the name became part of family lore to fix on old chaps of the kind. At that time I was beginning on
The Hobbit.
The choice of Gamgee was primarily directed by alliteration; but I did not invent it. It was caught out of childhood memory, as a comic word or name. It was in fact the name when I was small (in Birmingham) for ‘cotton-wool'. (Hence the association of the Gamgees with the Cottons.) I knew nothing of its origin. . . . .

I hope you are not appalled by these fragments of ‘research', or ‘auto-research'. It is a terrible temptation, especially to a pedant like myself. I am afraid I have indulged in it almost entirely for private pleasure – in a blessed cessation of letters. (I hasten to say, not of your sort: of them I have too few), which I should have employed in getting on with
Sir Gawain
.

I lived for a while in a rather decayed road (aptly called Duchess) in Edgbaston,
⁵
; B'ham; it ran into a more decayed road called Beaufort. I mention this only because in Beaufort road was a house, occupied in its palmier days, by Mr Shorthouse, a manufacturer of acids, of (I believe) Quaker connexions. He, a mere amateur (like myself) with no status in the literary world, suddenly produced a long book, which was queer, exciting, and debatable – or seemed so then, few now find it possible to read. It slowly took on, and eventually became a best-seller, and the subject of public discussion from the Prime Minister downwards. This was
John Inglesant.
Mr Shorthouse became very queer, and very UnBrummagem
⁶
not to say UnEnglish. He seemed to fancy himself as a reincarnation of some renaissance Italian, and dressed the part. Also his religious opinions, while never leading him to the final lunacy of Romanism, took on a Catholic tincture. I think he never wrote any more, but wasted the rest of his time trying to explain what he had and what he had not meant in
John Inglesant.
(What happened to the carboys of acid I do not know.) I have always tried to take him as a melancholy warning, and still try to attend to my technical carboys, and to writing some more. But as you see I occasionally fall from wisdom. But not from the sober thought (which this tale of Shorthouse also illustrates) of the fickleness of the Public. It is strange that Sir Stanley, whose
Truth about Publishing
you cite, should be the one most often to make me apprehensive. I am delighted with his approbation
^fn103
; but I take it as a bit of sunshine on my little hayfield, a special favour and very seasonable; but I follow Gandalf rather, saying: ‘we cannot master, nor
foretell, all the tides of the world. What weather is to come we cannot rule or know.'

Yes C.S.L. was my closest friend from about 1927 to 1940, and remained very dear to me. His death was a grievous blow. But in fact we saw less and less of one another after he came under the dominant influence of Charles Williams, and still less after his very strange marriage. . . . . I read
The Pilgrim's Regress
in MS. I have never been able to enjoy
Pickwick.
I now find
The Lord of the Rings
‘good in parts'. I must now end with deep apologies for my garrulity: I hope however that it is interesting ‘in parts'.

Yours sincerely

Ronald Tolkien.

2 August 1964

I wish that ‘Copyright' could protect
names,
as well as extracts. It is a form of invention that I take a great deal of trouble over, and pleasure in; and really it is quite as difficult (often more so) as, say, lines of verse. I must say I was piqued by the ‘christening' of that monstrous ‘hydrofoil'
Shadowfax
– without so much as ‘by your leave' – to which several correspondents drew my attention (some with indignation). I am getting used to
Rivendells, Lóriens, Imladris
etc. as house-names – though maybe they are more frequent than the letters which say ‘by your leave'.

7 August 1964

I am a man of limited sympathies (but well aware of it), and [Charles] Williams lies almost completely outside them. I came into fairly close contact with him from the end of 1939 to his death – I was in fact a sort of assistant mid-wife at the birth of
All Hallows Eve,
read aloud to us as it was composed, but the very great changes made in it were I think mainly due to C.S.L. – and much enjoyed his company; but our minds remained poles apart. I actively disliked his Arthurian-Byzantine mythology; and still think that it spoiled the trilogy of C.S.L. (a very impressionable, too impressionable, man) in the last part.

In the matter of the proposed blurb to
Tree and Leaf
. . . . I am afraid that difficulty really arises from the juxtaposition of two things that only
in fact touch at a corner, so to speak. I do not think I was responsible for the proposed association, and anyway it came up at a time of great troubles and distractions for me. Myself, I had for some time vaguely thought of the reprint together of three things that to my mind really do flow together:
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics;
the essay
On Fairy-stories;
and
The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.
The first deals with the contact of the ‘heroic' with fairy-story; the second primarily with fairy-story; and the last with ‘heroism and chivalry'.

16 August 1964

You certainly have my permission to compose any work that you wished based on
The Hobbit
. . . . . As an author I am honoured to hear that I have inspired a composer. I have long hoped to do so, and hoped also that I might perhaps find the result intelligible to me, or feel that it was akin to my own inspiration – as much as are, say, some (but not all) of Pauline Baynes' illustrations. . . . .

I have little musical knowledge. Though I come of a musical family, owing to defects of education and opportunity as an orphan, such music as was in me was submerged (until I married a musician), or transformed into linguistic terms. Music gives me great pleasure and sometimes inspiration, but I remain in the position in reverse of one who likes to read or hear poetry but knows little of its technique or tradition, or of linguistic structure.

30 August 1964

C.S.L. of course had some oddities and could sometimes be irritating. He was after all and remained an Irishman of Ulster. But he did nothing for effect; he was not a professional clown, but a natural one, when a clown at all. He was generous-minded, on guard against all prejudices, though a few were too deep-rooted in his native background to be observed by him. That his literary opinions were ever dictated by envy (as in the case of T. S. Eliot) is a grotesque calumny. After all it is possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity even if one has no aspirations to poetic laurels oneself.

Well of course I could say more, but I must draw the line. Still I wish it could be forbidden that after a great man is dead, little men should
scribble over him, who have not and must know they have not sufficient knowledge of his life and character to give them any key to the truth. Lewis was not ‘cut to the quick' by his defeat in the election to the professorship of poetry: he knew quite well the cause. I remember that we had assembled soon after in our accustomed tavern and found C.S.L. sitting there, looking (and since he was no actor at all probably feeling) much at ease. ‘Fill up!' he said, ‘and stop looking so glum. The only distressing thing about this affair is that my friends seem to be upset.' And he did not ‘readily accept' the chair in Cambridge. It was advertised, and he did not apply. Cambridge of course wanted him, but it took a lot of diplomacy before they got him. His friends thought it would be good for him: he was mortally tired, after nearly 30 years, of the Baileys of this world and even of the Duttons.
¹
It proved a good move, and until his health began too soon to fail it gave him a great deal of happiness.

7 September 1964

76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dear Mr di Capua,

I should like to write a short preface to a separate edition of
The Golden Key.
I am not as warm an admirer of George MacDonald as C. S. Lewis was; but I do think well of this story of his. I mentioned it in my essay
On Fairy-stories
. . . . .

I am not at all confident that I can produce anything worthy of the honorarium that you offer. I am not naturally attracted (in fact much the reverse) by allegory, mystical or moral. But I will do my best, if there is time. In any case I am grateful to you for your consideration.

Yours sincerely,

J. R. R. Tolkien.

10 September 1964

I should like to offer criticism on one point, though I do not suppose that it is expected, or will be welcomed. I find the block on p. iii [of
Tree and Leaf
] very distasteful, and wonder if it could not perhaps be
reconsidered, or omitted. The lettering is, to my taste, of a bad kind and ill-executed, and though no doubt this is deliberate, I do not like it any the better for that. The fat and apparently pollarded trunk, with no roots, and feeble branches, seems to me quite unfitting as a symbol of Tale-telling, or as a suggestion of anything that Niggle could possibly have drawn! My taste may be at fault. So may the views and sentiments expressed in the text. But if these are thought worthy of reproduction – and I am deeply gratified to find that they are – then I could wish that some design showing more sympathy with them might be produced.

11 September 1964

As you no doubt know, Houghton Mifflin are now busy re-setting
Tree and Leaf
. On Sept. 8 I received a large parcel containing proofs for my attention. No doubt this was a courtesy; but since it cost me £1. 7. 6 to return in time for their deadline, I am afraid a certain acerbity crept into my comment on the block designed for their p. iii: a ghastly thing, like a cross between a fat sea-anemone and a pollarded spanish chestnut, plastered with lettering of indecent ugliness.

11 November 1964

It is sad that ‘Narnia' and all that part of C.S.L.'s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy, as much of my work was outside his. Also, I personally found
Letters to Malcolm
a distressing and in parts horrifying work. I began a commentary on it, but if finished it would not be publishable.

6 January 1965

I am sorry my
Gawain
and
Pearl
will not be in time to assist you (if indeed they would): largely owing, in addition to the natural difficulty of rendering verse into verse, to my discovering many minor points about words, in the course of my work, which lead me off.
Pearl
is, of course, about as difficult a task as any translator could be set. It is impossible to make a version in the same metre close enough to serve as a ‘crib'. But I think anyone who reads my version, however learned a Middle English scholar, will get a more direct impression of the poem's impact (on one who knew the language). But truthfully it is I suppose just a private amusement.

9–10 January 1965

My dear old protector, backer, and friend Dr C. T. Onions died on Friday at 91⅓ years. I had not seen him for a long while. He was the last of the people who
were
‘English' at Oxford and at large when I entered the profession. Well not quite: Kenneth Sisam (once my tutor) survives in the Scilly Isles, a mere 76. Incidentally, while on this melancholy subject, T. S. Eliot has gone. But if you want a perfect specimen of bad verse, a ludicrous ‘all-time low', about [on the level] of the ‘stuffed owl' revived, I could [not] find you a better than poor old John Masefield's 8 lines on Eliot in
The Times
of Friday Jan. 8: ‘East Coker'. Almost down/up to Wordsworth's zero-standard. . . . .

I am neither disturbed (nor surprised) at the limitations of my ‘fame'. There are lots of people in
Oxford
who have never heard of me, let alone of my books. But I can repay many of them with equal ignorance: neither wilful nor contemptuous, simply accidental. An amusing incident occurred in November, when I went as a courtesy to hear the last lecture of this series of his given by the Professor of Poetry: Robert Graves. (A remarkable creature, entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of wild bees, half-German, half-Irish, very tall, must have looked like Siegfried/Sigurd in his youth,
but
an Ass.) It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard. After it he introduced me to a pleasant young woman who had attended it: well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well. But Graves started to laugh; and he said: ‘it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before'. Quite true. And I had not supposed that the lady would ever have heard of me. Her name was Ava Gardner, but it still meant nothing, till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude, and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her. . . . .