The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (70 page)

Quite rightly. For there is a climacteric, at any rate in people of our N.W. race, occurring somewhere in the mid-twenties, before which knowledge acquired is retained (and digested); after which it becomes rapidly and increasingly evanescent. I should think seriously about the change to a B. Phil. if it contains subjects suitable to yourself. (It was established after my time, so, though I advocated something of its kind, I do not know how it's now arranged. After 40 years as both a slave and a deviser of them I cannot now look at University statutes or syllabuses without a sick-feeling.)

I did not warn you of my talk on Wednesday night. I thought you would be too busy. I did not give a talk in fact, but read a short story recently written and yet unpublished; and that you can read when you have time:
Smith of Wootton Major:
if I have not already inflicted on you. Though the title is intended to suggest an early Woodhouse
[sic]
or story in the B[oys'] O[wn] P[aper], it is of course nothing of the kind.

The event astonished me altogether, and also the promoters of the series: the Prior of Blackfriars and the Master of Pusey House. It was a nasty wet evening. But such a concourse poured into Blackfriars that the Refectory (a long hall as long as a church) had to be cleared and could not contain it. Arrangements for relay to passages outside had to be
hastily made. I am told that more than 800 people gained admittance. It became very hot, and I think you were better away.

22 November 1966

76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

My dear Hooper,

Thank you very much for the copy of
Of Other Worlds.
I read it with great interest, particularly those things I hadn't seen before.

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

J. R. R. Tolkien.

Too brief. But I am snowed up. I noticed, for the first time consciously, how dualistic Lewis' mind and imagination [were], though as a philosopher his reason entirely rejected this. So the pun Hierarchy/Lowerarchy. And of course the ‘Miserific Vision' is rationally nonsense, not to say theologically blasphemous.

12 December 1966

76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dear Miss Hill,

I send you the enclosed impertinent contribution to my troubles. I do not know what the legal position is, I suppose that since one cannot claim property in inventing proper names, that there is no legal obstacle to this young ass publishing his sequel, if he could find any publisher, either respectable or disreputable, who would accept such tripe.

I have merely informed him that I have forwarded his letter and samples to you. I think that a suitable letter from Allen & Unwin might be more effective than one from me. I once had a similar proposal, couched in the most obsequious terms, from a young woman, and when I replied in the negative, I received a most vituperative letter.

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

J. R. R. Tolkien.

29 December 1966

Thank you for your interest in me. I have, however, had a surfeit of visits and interviews during the present year. I have found none of them pleasant, nearly all of them a complete waste of time, even from the point of view of sales. But your request is, I admit, probably worth taking note of.
The Scotsman
is a highly reputable paper and you are, I am sure, better equipped than some of the interviewers let loose on me by the London Press. I am, however, now desperately in need of time, and I have with the assent of my publishers decided in no circumstances to give any more interviews until I have brought out another book.
¹

8 February 1967

76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dear Mr and Mrs Plimmer,

Thank you for your courtesy in sending me a copy of the preliminary draft of your article. It is evident that I presented some difficulties to you during the interview: by my swift speech (which is congenital and incurable), my discourtesy in walking about, and my use of a pipe. No discourtesy was intended. I suffer from arthritis and my knees give me pain if I sit for long. It is one alleviation of being interviewed if I can stand. I should forgo smoking on these occasions, but I have found being interviewed increasingly distasteful and distracting, and need some sedative.

The copy came to this address the day before I returned hoping to get on with my proper work; I have now found time to consider it. There are one or two points which I should prefer to see altered, and some inaccuracies and misunderstandings that have, no doubt partly by my own fault, crept into the text. Among my characteristics that you have not mentioned is the fact that I am a pedant devoted to accuracy, even in what may appear to others unimportant matters. I have not had time to state these points clearly and legibly, and I hope that the revision and cutting of your article can still wait a day or two. I will try to send them off to reach you by Friday.

In one point I fear that I shall disappoint you. I am informed that the
Weekend Telegraph
wishes to have your article illustrated by a series of pictures taken of me at work and at home. In no circumstances will I agree to being photographed again for such a purpose. I regard all such
intrusions into my privacy as an impertinence, and I can no longer afford the time for it. The irritation it causes me spreads its influence over a far greater time than the actual intrusion occupies. My work needs concentration and peace of mind.

Yours sincerely

J. R. R. Tolkien.

the cramped garage that he uses as a study

May I say that it is not a ‘study', except in domestic slang: in happier days I had one. It was a hastily contrived necessity, when I was obliged to relinquish my room in college and provide a store for what I could preserve of my library. Most of the books of value have since been removed, and the most important contents are the rows of orderly files kept by my part-time secretary. She is the only regular user of the room. I have never written any literary matter in it. . . . .

My present house and its location were forced on me by necessity; few even of its furnishings afford me any pleasure. I am caught here in acute discomfort; but the dislocation of a removal and the rearrangement of my effects cannot be contemplated, until I have completed my contracted work. When and if I do so, if I am still in health, I hope to go far away to an address that will appear in no directory or reference book.

If you wonder why I received you, two courteous and charming people, in such a hole, may I say that my house has no reception room but my wife's sitting-room, filled with her personal belongings. This was contemptuously described in the
New Yorker
(by a visitor),
¹
and we both suffered ridicule (and worse: commiseration) when this was quoted in the London papers. Since then she has refused to admit anybody but personal friends to the room. I myself do not intend to admit anyone (certainly no photographer) to the ‘bedsitter' where, in the company of the books that I really use and the files of unpublished material, I spend most of my days at home, and do such writing as I am allowed time for.

Tolkien, tall and strongly built

I am not in fact tall, or strongly built. I now measure 5 ft 8½, and am very slightly built, with notably small hands. For most of my life I have been very thin and underweight. Since my early sixties I have become ‘tubby'. Not unusual in men who took their exercise in games and swimming, when the opportunities for these things cease.

Tolkien let a few of his Oxford friends read
The Hobbit.
One, the Mother Superior of a girls' hostel, lent it to a student, Susan Dagnall
. . . .

The Rev. Mother was superior of a convent (of the order of the Holy Child) at Cherwell Edge, which among other functions kept a hostel for women undergraduates. But as I know it the story runs so: Miss M. E. Griffiths (now one of the senior members of the English Faculty) was beginning her work as a tutor in English Language; she had been a pupil of mine, and was a friend of my family. I lent her the typescript of
The Hobbit.
She lent it to Susan Dagnall, a pupil of hers, who lived in the hostel.
²
Susan lent it to the Rev. Mother to amuse her during convalescence from influenza. Whether it amused her or not, I never heard, so she is a side-track in the journey of the MS. Neither of the loans, to Susan or to the Rev. Mother, were authorized by me
³
– I did not think the MS. important – but they proved the foundation of my good fortune in connecting me with Allen and Unwin. I have always been undeservedly lucky at major points. It is sad that Miss Dagnall, to whom in the event I owe so much, was, I believe, killed in a car-accident not long after her marriage.

[The Silmarillion]
was turned down [by Allen & Unwin] as being too dark and Celtic.

A & U's readers were quite right in turning it down; not (I hope) because it was, as they said ‘too dark and Celtic for modern Anglo-Saxons', since it retains the character thus misdescribed, as does much of
The Lord of the Rings;
but because it needed re-writing and more thought. Most of it was very early work, going back to 1916 and in inception earlier.

Middle-earth grew out of Tolkien's predilection for creating languages. . . .

This reference to ‘invention of Language' has become, I think, confused. My fault, in introducing too casually complex matters and personal theories, better not touched on unless at greater length than would be suitable (or interesting) in such an article. For the matter is not really pertinent: the amusement of making up languages is very common among children (I once wrote a paper on it, called
A Secret Vice
), so that I am not peculiar in that respect. The process sometimes continues into adult life, but then is usually kept a secret; though I have heard of cases where a language of this sort
^fn107
has been used by a group (e.g. in a pseudo-religious ritual).

In your paragraph there is a missing link, more important (I think) for
the purpose than what I said, or should have said, about ‘invention'. Namely: how did linguistic invention lead to imaginary history? So that I think the passage would be more intelligible if it ran more or less so: ‘The imaginary histories grew out of Tolkien's predilection for inventing languages. He discovered, as others have who carry out such inventions to any degree of completion, that a language requires a suitable habitation, and a history in which it can develop.'

‘When you invent a language,' he said, ‘you more or less catch it out of the air. You say boo-hoo and that means something.'

I have of course no precise memory of just what I said, but what is here written seems to me odd, since I think it unlikely that I should intentionally have said things contrary to my considered opinions. I do
not
think that an inventor catches noises out of the air. If said it was a conversational bit of ‘short-talk', possibly intelligible at the moment, but not in cold print – meaning that he utters an articulate sound-group
at random
(so far as he is aware); but it comes of course out of his linguistic equipment and has innumerable threads of connexion with other similar-sounding ‘words' in his own language and any others that he may know. Even so, if he said
boo-hoo
it would not mean anything. No vocal noises mean anything in themselves. Meaning has to be attributed to them by a human mind.
^fn108
This may be done casually, often by accidental (non-linguistic) associations; or because of a feeling for ‘phonetic fitness' and/or because of preferences in the individual for certain phonetic elements or combinations. The latter is naturally most evident in private invented languages, since it is one of their main objects, recognized or unconscious, to give effect to these likings. It is these preferences, reflecting an individual's innate linguistic taste, that I called his ‘native language'; though ‘native linguistic potential' would have been more accurate, since it seldom comes to effect, even in modifying his ‘first-learnt' language, that of his parents and country.

Middle-earth. . . . corresponds spiritually to Nordic Europe.

Not
Nordic
, please! A word I personally dislike; it is associated, though of French origin, with racialist theories. Geographically
Northern
is usually better. But examination will show that even this is inapplicable (geographically or spiritually) to ‘Middle-earth'. This is an
old word, not invented by me, as reference to a dictionary such as the Shorter Oxford will show. It meant the habitable lands of our world, set amid the surrounding Ocean. The action of the story takes place in the North-west of ‘Middle-earth', equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean. But this is not a purely ‘Nordic' area in any sense. If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.