The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (71 page)

Auden has asserted that for me ‘the North is a sacred direction'. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man's home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not ‘sacred', nor does it exhaust my affections. I have, for instance, a particular love for the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish. That it is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil. The progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome than anything that would be devised by a ‘Nordic'.

[Of C. S. Lewis's comments on
The Lord of the Rings
:] ‘
When he would say, “You can do better than that. Better, Tolkien, please!” I would try. I'd sit down and write the section over and over. That happened with the scene I think is the best in the book, the confrontation between Gandalf and his rival wizard, Saruman, in the ravaged city of Isengard.'

I do not think the Saruman passage ‘the best in the book'. It is much better than the first draft, that is all. I mentioned the passage because it is in fact one of the very few places where in the event I found L's detailed criticisms useful and just. I cut out some passages of light-hearted hobbit conversation which he found tiresome, thinking that if he did most other readers (if any) would feel the same. I do not think the event has proved him right. To tell the truth he never really liked hobbits very much, least of all Merry and Pippin. But a great number of readers do, and would like more than they have got. (If it is of interest, the passages that now move me most – written so long ago that I read them now as if they had been written by someone else – are the end of the chapter Lothlórien (I 365–7), and the horns of the Rohirrim at cockcrow.)

His taste for Nordic languages stems from the fact that he had German ancestors who migrated to England two centuries ago.

This is the reverse of the truth. Not Nordic: this is not a linguistic
term. Germanic is the received term for what appears to be meant. But my taste for Germanic languages has no traceable connexion with the history of my surname. After 150 years (now 200) my father and his immediate kin were extremely ‘British'. Neither among them nor others of the name whom I have since met have I found any who showed any linguistic interests, or any knowledge of even modern German. My interest in languages was derived solely from my mother, a Suffield (a family coming from Evesham in Worcestershire). She knew German, and gave me my first lessons in it. She was also interested in etymology, and aroused my interest in this; and also in alphabets and handwriting. My father died in South Africa in 1896. She died in 1904. Two years before her death I had with her sole tuition
^fn109
gained a scholarship to King Edward VI School in Birmingham.

Dante. . . . ‘doesn't attract me. He's full of spite and malice. I don't care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities.'

My reference to Dante was outrageous. I do not seriously dream of being measured against Dante, a supreme poet. At one time Lewis and I used to read him to one another. I was for a while a member of the Oxford Dante Society (I think at the proposal of Lewis, who overestimated greatly my scholarship in Dante or Italian generally). It remains true that I found the ‘pettiness' that I spoke of a sad blemish in places.

‘I don't read much now, except for fairy-stories.'

For ‘except' read ‘not even'. I read quite a lot – or more truly, try to read many books (notably so-called Science Fiction and Fantasy). But I seldom find any modern books that hold my attention.
^fn110
I suppose because I am under ‘inner' pressure to complete my own work – and because of the reason stated [in the interview]: ‘I am looking for something I can't find.'

‘I'm always looking for something I can't find. . . . . Something like what I wrote myself. There's nothing like being vain, is there?'

An apology for seeming to speak out of vanity. Actually this arose in humility, my own and Lewis's. The humility of amateurs in a world of great writers. L. said to me one day: ‘Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.' We agreed that he should try ‘space-travel', and I should try ‘time-travel'. His result is well known. My effort, after a few promising chapters, ran dry: it was too long a way round to what I really wanted to make, a new version of the Atlantis legend. The final scene survives as
The Downfall of Númenor
.
⁷
This attracted Lewis greatly (as
heard
read), and reference to it occurs in several places in his works: e.g. ‘The Last of the Wine', in his poems (
Poems
, 1964, p. 40). We neither of us expected much success as amateurs, and actually Lewis had some difficulty in getting
Out of the Silent Planet
published. And after all that has happened since, the most lasting pleasure and reward for both of us has been that we provided one another with stories to hear or read that we really liked – in
large
parts. Naturally neither of us liked all that we found in the other's fiction.

Tolkien. . . . is among the ‘principal collaborators' of the newly-translated
Jerusalem Bible.

Naming me among the ‘principal collaborators' was an undeserved courtesy on the part of the editor of the
Jerusalem Bible
. I was consulted on one or two points of style, and criticized some contributions of others. I was originally assigned a large amount of text to translate, but after doing some necessary preliminary work I was obliged to resign owing to pressure of other work, and only completed ‘Jonah', one of the shortest books.

29 March 1967

76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dear Wystan,

I was equally delighted by your letter. It arrived very quickly (on Good Friday) and it did much to restore my spirits, as by the same post I
received a very distressing letter.
¹
I was greatly cheered not only by your pleasure in having an Old English poem (I thought this would be appropriate) but also by your praise of
Frodo's Dreme.
That really made me wag my tail. I hope we can meet again soon.

Yours ever,

[signature not on carbon]

P.S. Thank you for your wonderful effort in translating and reorganising
The Song of the Sibyl
.
²
In return again I hope to send you, if I can lay my hands on it (I hope it isn't lost), a thing I did many years ago when trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry: an attempt to unify the lays about the Völsungs from the Elder Edda, written in the old eight-line fornyrðislag stanza.
³

21 July 1967

Hotel Miramar, Bournemouth

My dear Rayner,

I feel deeply grateful for your kindness to me on Wednesday, and all the trouble you took in looking after me and my affairs. I thought you looked very tired (and no wonder) before we parted. I am singularly fortunate in having such a friend. I feel, if I may say so, that our relations are like that of Rohan and Gondor, and (as you know) for my part the oath of Eorl will never be broken, and I shall continue to rely on and be grateful for the wisdom and courtesy of Minas Tirith. Thank you very much indeed. . . . .

Yours ever

Ronald Tolkien.

I am honoured by the interest that many readers have taken in the nomenclature of
The Lord of the Rings
; and pleased by it, in so far as it shows that this construction, the product of very considerable thought and labour, has achieved (as I hoped) a verisimilitude, which assists probably in the ‘literary belief' in the story as historical. But I remain puzzled, and indeed sometimes irritated, by many of the guesses at the ‘sources' of the nomenclature, and theories or fancies concerning hidden meanings. These seem to me no more than private amusements, and as
such I have no right or power to object to them, though they are, I think, valueless for the elucidation or interpretation of my fiction. If published,
^fn111
I do object to them, when (as they usually do) they appear to be unauthentic embroideries on my work, throwing light only on the state of mind of their contrivers, not on me or on my actual intention and procedure. Many of them seem to show ignorance or disregard of the clues and information which are provided in notes, renderings, and in the Appendices. Also since linguistic invention is, as an art (or pastime) comparatively rare, it is perhaps not surprising that they show little understanding of the process of how a philologist would go about it.

It must be emphasized that this process of invention was/is a private enterprise undertaken to give pleasure to myself by giving expression to my personal linguistic ‘æsthetic' or taste and its fluctuations. It was largely antecedent to the composing of legends and ‘histories' in which these languages could be ‘realized'; and the bulk of the nomenclature is constructed from these pre-existing languages, and where the resulting names have analysable meanings (as is usual) these are relevant solely to the fiction with which they are integrated. The ‘source', if any, provided solely the sound-sequence (or suggestions for its stimulus) and its purport
in the source
is totally irrelevant except in case of Earendil; see below.

Investigators seem commonly to neglect this fundamental point, although sufficient evidence of ‘linguistic construction' is provided in the book and in the appendices. It should be obvious that if it is possible to compose fragments of verse in
Quenya
and
Sindarin,
those languages (
and
their relations one to another) must have reached a fairly high degree of organization – though of course, far from completeness, either in vocabulary, or in idiom. It is therefore idle to compare chance-similarities between names made from ‘Elvish tongues' and words in exterior ‘real' languages, especially if this is supposed to have any bearing on the meaning or ideas in my story. To take a frequent case: there is no linguistic connexion, and therefore no connexion in significance, between
Sauron
a contemporary form of an older
^*
θaurond
-derivative of an adjectival
^*
θaurā
(from a base √THAW ‘detestable', and the Greek σαύρα ‘a lizard'.

Investigators, indeed, seem mostly confused in mind between (a) the meaning of names
within
, and appropriate to, my story and belonging to a fictional ‘historic' construction, and (b) the origins or sources in my mind,
exterior
to the story, of the forms of these names. As to (a) they are of course given sufficient information, though they often neglect what is provided. I regret it, but there is no substitute for me, while I am alive. I have composed a commentary on the nomenclature for the use of
translators;
¹
but this is directed primarily to indicating what words and names can and should be translated into L(anguage) of T(ranslation) which takes over the function from English of representing the C(ommon) S(peech) of the period, it being understood that names not in or derived from mod. English should be retained without change in translation, since they are alien both to the original C.S. and to the L.T. Desirable would be an
onomasticon
giving the meaning and derivation of all names and indicating the languages that they belong to. Also of interest to some, and agreeable to me, would be an historical grammar of
Quenya
and
Sindarin
and a fairly extensive etymological vocabulary of these languages of course far from ‘complete', but not limited to words found in the tales. But I do not intend to engage in these projects, until my mythology and legends are completed. Meanwhile dealing piecemeal with guesses and interpretations only postpones and interferes with this work. . . . .

In illustration of my strictures, I will offer some comments on your specific queries and guesses.
Theoden
and
Gimli.
The reason for using ‘Anglo-Saxon' in the nomenclature and occasional glimpses of the language of the
Eorlingas
– as a device of ‘translation' – is given in Appendix F. From which it follows that ‘Anglo-Saxon' is not only a ‘fertile field', but the sole
^fn112
field in which to look for the origin and meaning of words or names belonging to the speech of the Mark; and also that A-S will
not
be the source of words and names in any other language
^fn113
– except for a few (all of which are explained) survivals in Hobbit-dialect derived from the region (The Vale of Anduin to the immediate north of Lórien) where that dialect of the Northmen developed its particular character. To which may be added
Déagol
and
Sméagol;
and the local names
Gladden River,
and
the Gladden Fields
, which contains A.S.
glcedene
‘iris', in my book supposed to refer to the ‘yellow flag' growing in streams and marshes: sc.
iris pseudacorus,
and not
iris foetidissima
to which in mod. E. the name
gladdon
(sic) is usually given, at any rate by botanists. Outside this restricted field reference to A-S is entirely delusory.
^fn114